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A heckler stirs up R.E.M. during fabled 1985 gig (and the band nearly fights the heckler!)
07.19.2019
10:29 am
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Can't Get There From Here
 
Earlier this year, we told you about legendary R.E.M. performances captured before they were famous. Those shows, now considered amongst the best the band ever played, took place in 1981, just as they were getting started (their first single had just come out). We’ve got another fabled R.E.M. concert to share with you, one that took place when they were considerably more well known, but had yet to break into the mainstream. This show is perhaps the most unique concert they ever played. It occurred when the group was still in its formative stage, but change was coming.

By 1985, R.E.M. was one of the most popular American rock bands not signed to a major label. Their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, made it to #28 on the Billboard charts, and their video for “Can’t Get There From Here” received MTV airplay. In August of ’85, the “Reconstruction I” tour took them to Canada, and included an August 17th stop at Barrymore’s Music Hall in Ottawa, Ontario. The first part of the gig went off without a hitch. Their main set was solid, featuring two great covers— “Pills” (Bo Diddley by way of the New York Dolls) and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” (Creedence Clearwater Revival)—as well as a brand new, yet to be released song, “Fall on Me.” But when they returned for an encore, everything changed.
 
R.E.M. 3
 
What went down was recounted in the recent (and excellent) biography, Begin the Begin: R.E.M.‘s Early Years.

After running through their regular set list, the band was heckled with cries of “Fuck off!” when they encored with “Moon River.” This almost resulted in a fight: [bassist Mike] Mills allegedly had to be restrained from attacking the heckler. A couple of songs later, [guitarist Peter] Buck couldn’t let it go. “The guy who yelled ‘Fuck you’ during ‘Moon River’: Meet me backstage, you asshole.” Further heckling ensued, but instead of storming off (which the band had sometimes done in similar situations), R.E.M. elected to play an entire second set of mostly cover songs—including punishing, shambolic versions of “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” (originally performed by Brownsville Station but mistakenly attributed by Mills to Bachman Turner Overdrive), “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “God Save the Queen,” interspersed with deranged monologues from [singer Michael] Stipe and Mills.


Author Robert Dean Lurie also notes that the Fables era marks the end of R.E.M.’s initial approach to touring, and that their subsequent outings were more professional and far less unpredictable.

The group would eventually sign with a major label, and their hugely popular albums, Out of Time (1991) and Automatic for the People (1992), resulted in success for R.E.M. on a global scale. During this period, they stopped touring entirely.
 
R.E.M. 2
 
Listen to a very listenable audience recording of the Barrymore’s gig after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Bart Bealmear
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07.19.2019
10:29 am
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Legendary R.E.M. performances captured before they were famous, 1981 (with a DM exclusive)
03.21.2019
08:43 am
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Flyer
 
The band R.E.M. were a highly successful and respected indie act that went on to became one of the biggest bands of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But they started out as just another local group in the Athens, Georgia music scene—though they immediately stood out. An upcoming book examines their formative period, and Dangerous Minds has an exclusive excerpt. We also have some vintage live R.E.M. audio and video to share with you.

Begin the Begin: R.E.M.‘s Early Years will be published soon by Verse Chorus Press, and author Robert Dean Lurie has provided us with a preview. The passage focuses on R.E.M.‘s early shows, which thrilled audiences in and around Athens. 

R.E.M. began their live career with an advantage few bands are granted: their first performance at their friend Kathleen O’Brien’s massive birthday party in April 1980 had gone over so well that practically overnight they became one of the most popular bands in Athens, Georgia. So R.E.M. never belonged to the art scene, even if their immediate circle of friends hailed from that group. They didn’t go through an incubation period of playing the kind of intimate Athens house parties where men walked around in dresses and women wore outrageous wigs. Quite the contrary: they were, in the words of Party Out of Bounds author Rodger Lyle Brown, “dude rock.” And though Michael Stipe would later come to be known for his oblique lyrics and distinctive voice, his most notable contribution to R.E.M.’s early success was visual.

How to describe the 1980-1982 Stipe stage persona? Let’s try it from several angles. Imagine a malfunctioning robot trained as a whirling dervish. Or Elvis attempting to do his swivel-hipped dance while being assaulted by a gang of poltergeists. Or James Brown having an epileptic fit. Stipe would careen around the stage wildly, with apparently no self-awareness, narrowly avoiding collisions with his bandmates. He was in a constant state of frenetic motion, and, no matter how strange his movements, he remained locked into the beat. This might be hard to fathom for people who are only familiar with the “Losing My Religion” video, but the guy was a hell of a dancer. And when you saw him onstage going crazy to that music, you couldn’t help but start moving yourself. Dancing was absolutely intrinsic to the vibe and the success of early R.E.M. The mystique and the thoughtfulness would come later. R.E.M. were, first and foremost, the premier party band in town.

 

 

The band’s local shows alternated between Tyrone’s O.C. and a new club called the 40 Watt. The former served as R.E.M.’s home base for about the first two years of their existence. The latter, which had been founded by Curtis Crowe of Pylon and his friend Paul Scales, went through a number of locations and eventually became Athens’s signature club. The Side Effects, who had made their debut alongside R.E.M. at the party, played the Watt’s inaugural show, Pylon was a mainstay, and R.E.M. became regulars as well. They would do spur-of-the-moment surprise gigs there to test-run new material long after they hit the big time—a practice that continued into the early 1990s.

 
Tyrone's
R.E.M. at Tyrone’s O.C., 1981.

As for Tyrone’s O.C. (which stood for “Old Chameleon”—a nod to the club’s former name), it had begun hosting a New Wave Night right around the time of Kathleen’s party. R.E.M. came to quickly dominate this slot and were the club’s most popular weekend draw. Tyrone’s could only legally hold six hundred people, but it was not unusual for R.E.M., once they hit their stride, to draw a thousand. In an attempt to accommodate everyone, the club’s owners would remove any piece of furniture that was not nailed to the floor. “The way we figured out that R.E.M. was the biggest band in town,” says Billy Holmes, a local musician who went on to play in Vigilantes of Love and a mid-2000s iteration of Love Tractor, “was that the rest of us were charging $1.00 and $1.50 cover at Tyrone’s. They were charging $2 and the place would be packed. It was like, ‘Wow…R.E.M. charges fifty cents more a head than we do. They must be very big.’

“I did see the very first R.E.M. show at the 40 Watt, and there were three things that stuck in my mind. One was: Boy, these guys are really bad! Number two, the chemistry between them was just amazing. It was a powerful thing—you could feel it. And three, the place was packed wall-to-wall. I went up to Pete Buck afterward and I said, ‘Hey, you guys don’t need to add a keyboard player, do you?’ And Peter said, ‘Are you kidding? We can’t get it together with bass, drums, and guitar. How are we going to get it together with a keyboard player?’”

 
Buck
Peter Buck at Legion Field, University of Georgia, 1985 (photo by Joanna Schwartz).

Paul Butchart of the Side Effects was also at that 40 Watt performance. “This is hard to describe,” he says, “but I remember the crowd was dancing so much that the floor was moving up and down and the windows were pumping in and out like an accordion. It was just too crowded up there for me. The windows were sweating and all that stuff. If one of those windows had popped or somebody had opened the door downstairs, the floor would have collapsed—because it was like a big air chamber.”

Things were definitely moving for R.E.M., and these hometown gigs functioned as a means of fortifying morale as the group began to strike out across the Southeast and beyond, into places where they were most certainly not the biggest band in town. There are many good-quality live recordings from all phases of the band’s history in circulation, but an argument can be made that none touch the mad energy of the shows they played at Tyrone’s between July and September 1981, which were captured for posterity on Pat “The Wiz” Biddle’s soundboard tapes. This was not R.E.M.’s best period as songwriters or musicians, but to this writer’s ears they never sounded better as a live unit, and I’m guessing that few of the attendees of these shows would disagree. Pat says that the September 22 and 23 shows were “two of the most exciting nights I ever worked in my career. The crowds were electric and so was the band. Their performance left an indelible mark on my memory.”

 
Mills and Buck
Mike Mills and Peter Buck, early 1980s (photo by Joanna Schwartz).

And what made the crowds so electric? R.E.M. were not riding the wave of an album release (though the “Radio Free Europe” single had just come out). Nor were they the beneficiaries of any coordinated PR campaign. The energy of the audience on these two nights derived from a confluence of two factors: the strong word of mouth that had developed around R.E.M.’s live shows and the sudden surge in Athens’ population of 18-to-22-year-olds due to the start of a new academic year at the University of Georgia. “It’s fall quarter!” Stipe declared at the September 22 gig. “A show of hands for first-quarter freshmen!”

Freshmen—apparently a not-insignificant portion of the audience—brought with them the twin exhilarations of being away from home for the first time and finding themselves surrounded by hundreds of similarly unsupervised peers. They may have also felt some of the trepidation that usually accompanies newfound freedom. The returning students were likely feeling a mix of excitement at seeing their friends again after the summer break and just a bit of sadness at the passing of summer itself. New classes meant new routines, new ideas, a new start, but also long hours spent hunched over books. All of these factors contributed to an irresistible urge on the part of many to get blotto and dance the night away. And with cheap beer serving as the fuel, R.E.M. were the vehicle that would get them to that destination.

 
Radio Free Europe
 

To hear these recordings is to catch a sonic glimpse of that energy. It’s not a patch on being there, but Biddle’s carefully preserved tapes have ensured that the listener can hear R.E.M. at least as clearly as the audience did that night, if not more so. The band’s playing is not perfect—Peter Buck, in particular, fumbles his way through certain passages—but the synergy of the four musicians working toward a shared goal makes this perhaps their finest hour (onstage, at least). And all this before they ever signed a record deal. Rarely have I heard Stipe so locked-in vocally, and never before or since have I heard Bill Berry play so enthusiastically. This snapshot of a small-town band playing to a “perfect circle of acquaintances and friends” captures R.E.M. at the tail end of their apprenticeship phase. As a live unit they had fully arrived; as a songwriting entity, they were just getting started.

 
Book cover
 
Pre-order Begin the Begin: R.E.M.‘s Early Years via Amazon.

The legendary R.E.M. performances recorded at Tyrone’s O.C. on September 22 and 23, 1981, are on YouTube. The September 22 show was uploaded just this week.
 

 

 
The below live footage was captured at the 688 Club in Atlanta on February 20, 1981. The video begins with the band in the midst of “Rave on,” which was made famous by Buddy Holly. The first sign of Stipe cutting a rug occurs at the :48 mark.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Teenage Michael Stipe attends ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ in Frank-N-Furter drag, late 1970s

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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03.21.2019
08:43 am
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Teenage Michael Stipe attends ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ in Frank-N-Furter drag, late 1970s


 
A local St. Louis news broadcast from the late 1970s about the fans of the then almost controversial horror-musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the city’s Varsity Theater.

At around the 1:25 mark, you’ll see future R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, in his best Frank-N-Furter drag, talking to the camera about the film.

“We’re all quite normal, really” sez the young Mister Stipe…

The clip is not dated, but seems likely to have been taped around the period while Stipe was living nearby with his family, across the Mississippi River in Collinsville, IL (home of the world’s largest catsup bottle) before moving to Athens, GA where he would meet the other members of what would become R.E.M. at the University of Georgia.

Win a Blu-ray of the new documentary R.E.M. by MTV from Rhino here.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.03.2015
02:25 pm
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I want my R.E.M. TV! Win a whole mess of R.E.M. stuff from Rhino
06.03.2015
12:22 pm
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In many ways, R.E.M. were always the quintessential MTV band. The group’s first single came out in July of 1981, while MTV debuted but a few weeks later, on August 1. MTV must’ve had a lot of rabid R.E.M. fans working there when they launched, because from the very beginning the band was seemingly always on the channel, a practically ubiquitous “indie” presence on programs like The Cutting Edge (which was produced by their label, I.R.S. Records), Alternative Nation, and 120 Minutes. Their career moves, tours and general gossip about them were constantly chronicled on MTV News. They were usually on the MTV awards shows getting them, presenting them and playing live. I think it’s safe to say that when MTV beckoned, R.E.M. showed up on time and did a great job and made everyone’s lives easier. That’s how a group stays on top for thirty years. To sustain that long of a ride you need to be professional, hardworking, easy to deal with, etc, etc.
 

 
As a result of their practically symbiotic relationship, MTV documented practically everything about R.E.M. right up to their decision to disband in 2011. R.E.M. BY MTV, the critically acclaimed feature-length documentary by Alexander Young, draws exclusively from archival events and traces the history of R.E.M. (and MTV itself) in a chronological manner, which makes it feel as exciting and immediate as it did when it first took place.

R.E.M. BY MTV is now available on Blu-Ray and DVD on June 2 from Rhino, and includes some rarely-seen live performances. You can win a copy of the film—and a whole lot more—by entering to win in the widget below the trailer.
 

 

Posted by Sponsored Post
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06.03.2015
12:22 pm
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R.E.M.’s Mike Mills on ‘Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee’

Mike Mills
 
This happened: while the pioneering band R.E.M. were transitioning from weird-people fame to normal-people fame, their bass player Mike Mills was booked to appear on Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee. Hosted by former Joey Bishop second-banana Regis Philbin before he morphed into his final form as the launching pad of a billion “Is that your final answer?” jokes and sidekicked by Kathie Lee Gifford, a woman so oppressively chipper she became a national punchline in her own right, Live! was a daytime talk show geared toward the dwindling sedentary-housewives-at-home-all-day demographic.

R.E.M., at the time, had leveled up from college-radio darlings to for-real arena rock stars, thanks to the albums Green and Out of Time and the improbable global success of the single “Losing My Religion.” (I worked at a record store at the time, and I once retrieved a copy of R.E.M.’s full-length debut Murmur for a yuppie who asked if we had “their first album.” He was baffled—he wanted Green, and had no idea the band had been releasing music for ten years. Among normals, he was far from alone.) But their newfound popularity aside, even in the wake of the Nevermind deluge, there was a real frisson to a band known for moody music and challenging, cerebral lyrics (snobs: feel free to nerdfight about “Shiny Happy People”) to make inroads to the gleeful wide-eyed vapidity of daytime talk.
 

 
This is messed up: I actually saw this when it was broadcast. I have no idea what I was doing at home during the day in February of 1992. I have no idea what class I was blowing off. I have no idea why the TV was even on at all, let alone why it was on the channel that broadcast Live! of all things, but there it was. Odds are good I was baked. And I when I caught the words “R.E.M.” and “Mike Mills” coming out of the mouth of Regis fucking Philbin, I was transfixed. Mills has always seemed a good-natured guy, so he responded with aw-shucks aplomb to the banal interview questions—seriously, high school newspapers ask bands how they got their names, so it’s a shame Mills couldn’t inform them that the band had previously been called “Cans of Piss.” But then, surely in defiance of some publicist’s grave warning of certain doom, Mills does a marvelous acoustic rendition of “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville,” a song from their second LP Reckoning, which was eight years old at the time. Surely a small army of American homemakers dropped their cheesecake and drove straight to the mall to buy it. Right?
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Ramones on ‘Regis and Kathie Lee’

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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03.07.2014
10:53 am
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‘Just Like a Movie’: Young Michael Stipe covers Velvet Underground in clip from R.E.M. ‘Holy Grail’
11.06.2013
04:25 pm
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Right now on YouTube you can watch a brief clip of R.E.M.‘s semi-legendary side project from 1983/4, Just Like a Movie—this was a low-budget movie shot by Laura Levine in Athens, Georgia, featuring all four members of R.E.M. as well as some members of Pylon. In the clip Michael Stipe does a rendition of “Pale Blue Eyes” by the Velvet Underground. There’s even a nice Georges Meliès effect! The movie has been described as the “Holy Grail” for R.E.M. enthusiasts—here’s writer Alan Cross on the subject:
 

One of the most rare and most collectible things an R.E.M. fan can ever hope to have is a 45 minute film called Just Like a Movie.

It’s a pretty primitive thing, shot on Super 8 film in the fall of 1983. It features all the members of R.E.M. plus people like Michael Stipe’s sister, Lynda.

There’s really not much of a plot. It’s basically just a bunch of people cavorting around Athens, Georgia—-but it does feature Michael singing the Sonny and Cher song, “I Got You Babe.”

Just Like a Movie has rarely been shown in public (just once, from what I can tell) which makes it sort of a Holy Grail among those who source out R.E.M. artifacts. I can’t even seem to find it on YouTube.

 
Here’s Levine discussing shooting the movie:
 

I made the film, Just Like A Movie, during one of my longer visits to Athens, in the fall of 1983. I’d gotten a used Super-8 camera the year before and had been shooting a lot of home movies on the road with them and some other bands, so I decided to try my hand at a more narrative film. I had just seen D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back so I used it as a jumping-off point; there are parts that are an homage to that film (for example, Michael Stipe presents the credits with cue cards a la Dylan). I was aware that R.E.M. at that time were in a similar place to where Dylan was when Pennebaker made his film; you know, just on the cusp of fame but not quite there yet, taking it all in, dealing with it. So I brought my camera, 60 minutes of black-and-white Super-8 film, and my Walkman down to Athens. The film was very much an improvisational affair – the cast came up with their own characters’ names and costumes and we pretty much improvised the scenes. The basic premise was that there were two rival musicians performing on the same night (similar to the Dylan/Donovan rivalry that existed when Dylan came to London to perform), each with their own entourage. They meet and fall in love, but evil forces keep them apart. Linda Hopper from OH-OK played the “Donovan”-inspired character, and Michael Stipe, the “Dylan”-inspired one. The other players included Lynda and Cyndy Stipe, Matthew Sweet, Jerry Ayers, plus of course all of the members of R.E.M. and Oh-OK. Members of Pylon and pretty much anyone else from the Athens scene who was in town that week also made an appearance. A few of them were in drag.

 

 
Thank you Annie Zed!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
70s Michael Stipe in drag at ‘Rocky Horror’
What? You’re the world’s biggest REM fan but you haven’t visited Michael Stipe’s awesome Tumblr yet?

Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.06.2013
04:25 pm
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Michael Stipe’s pipe!
09.21.2011
04:31 pm
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And speaking of nude rock stars...

It was announced today that R.E.M. broke up. Truth be told, I thought they broke up years ago, so that tells you what I know, but the timing was curious, coming as it did as Michael Stipe decided to post naked pictures of himself looking like a meth-head denizen of one of those sleazy motels on Sunset Blvd.

What gives? I’ve read that these shots are supposed to be some sort of “art project” but it looks more like pics from a Craig’s List ad or his Grindr profile, doesn’t it???

See much more of Stipe’s NSFW “pipe” at BuzzFeed.

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.21.2011
04:31 pm
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