David Buckley - R.E.M. Fiction: An Alternative Biography

CONTENTS

About the Book

R.E.M.s public image has always been tightly controlled. Icons of anti-celebrity rock, who became huge celebrity rock stars, they were, according to the story, the first U.S. post new-wave band who were both commercially successful and cool. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Mike Mills, Peter Buck and other members of R.E.M.s nuclear family, Fiction re-evaluates the music and career of a group who sold almost no records for the first half of their existence, then became the biggest rock group in the world in the second half.

For Louise and Elsa

INTRODUCTION: THE ENIGMA CODE

David Buckley: How do you feel about the whole process of people writing biographies about you? Thereve been quite a few now, most of them written by Brits.

Mike Mills: You always were the literary ones, werent you? [laughs] Well, I have a certain level of discomfort with it, but I would rather give you factual information than have you speculate. I certainly dont plan to reveal deep dark secrets there are things that no one needs to know. But at the same time, on a factual level, Id rather you know certain things than to try and guess them. Its just a question of how much. Its fascinating for me as a rocknroll fan to read biographies, but, as a person, it just feels very strange that anyone would give a damn.

Fiction has no claims to be complete. In fact, its one of the inspirations behind this book that no objective truth can ever really be decided upon, for when we try and reconstruct the past all were often left with are competing, though equally valid, versions of personal truths. Of course, we can try to verify that certain things did happen, such as the fact that Peter Bucks underpants were refrigerated in the early hours of 6 April, 1980 in Athens, Georgia (for more, do read on!). But ultimately the best a writer can do is to judiciously weigh up the competing oral testimonies of the key players. In the final analysis, there are silences and contradictions; the best one can hope for is to present one version of what happened, rather than the version. With R.E.M. some, but not all, of the leading figures refused to discuss crucial elements of the story on anything other than frustratingly superficial terms.

This book can therefore make no claim to be the sort of biography which trumpets the candid testimony that some rock biographies can mobilise (that would not, indeed, be R.E.M.s style at all). Nor is Fiction interested in the multifarious side projects the band have been involved with for over twenty years (other books give in-depth coverage of these extra-curricular excursions). So, Peter Bucks astonishing capacity to play on what seems like everyone elses records, and Michael Stipes excursions into art, photography and filmmaking, are largely absent from the text, at least for now. Instead, Fiction charts the bands history. It has had more co-operation from key figures than any previous work on R.E.M. But the gaps and silences remain, to be filled, perhaps, on another day, in another book, written after the group has ceased operations and is freer to discuss the past. In any case, Ive always liked a sense of incompleteness. It seems so much more alluring to have things to wish for and wonder at, to provoke and to charm, rather than having life and culture spelt out and spoon-fed. And Michael Stipe knows all about that.

Michael Stipe is arguably the biggest rock icon of the last twenty years, an assertion perhaps only Bono could fairly challenge. The press-constructed version of him is a man whose eccentricities make him different from the rest of the population. To appropriate Winston Churchills tart assessment of Communist Russia, Stipes public know him as a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma. And while it is undeniable that Stipe has had an aura of personal mystique created for him, and has at times himself sought to pull the enigmatic wool over his publics eyes, he is ultimately only flesh and blood. Fiction portrays Stipe as a highly creative, sensitive, private man, but also, to some extent, a perfect pop mythologist.

I have no desire to preach to the R.E.M. converted. Enough of that goes on in the press already. Nor do I particularly care about the minutiae of what songs were played when, or what format which single was released in, or other nuggets of information which set some record collectors swooning. By this, I dont mean to be disrespectful to those who are interested in such things (although probably I just have been). Its simply that Fiction does not cater for this part of the (male?) psyche. Indeed, when I interviewed Mike Mills at length for this book, I was amused to find that the co-writer of some of the best rock songs of the late twentieth century misplaces songs in his own oeuvre with refreshing regularity, placing Its The End Of The World As We Know It on Green, and regularly seeking assurance as to which track was on what album. I found this charming, and it made me like Mills even more than I already did from reading his quotes and anecdotes in the press. The reality is that rock stars are not that different from the rest of us; they get muddled, they seek reassurance, they make mistakes. In fact, the disinterring of every shard of fact, every minute of their lives, every place accounted for, may to them feel more like surveillance than analysis. I was a fan of The Beatles more than anyone when I was younger, and I still have problems trying to remember which songs are on Revolver and which ones are on Rubber Soul, admits Peter Buck. Especially with our stuff. Ill listen to a record and never listen to it again. Sometimes I can figure it out, sometimes not. I only ever go back and listen to stuff when I have to learn the song and remember what the chords are. The fans are more obsessive. I get fans asking me about things that I dont remember doing, and I have a very good memory.

Fiction takes its title from an interview Michael Stipe gave in 1991, in which he mentioned that this had been one of the original titles for the bands global breakthrough album, Out Of Time. He wanted to make it plain, in artistic terms, that the songs of love (and love lost) on the album were in fact fictions, and not his own emotional map redrawn for public scrutiny. Stipe may, of course, have simply been lying for effect, which would have been more than fitting. When naughty Tom Junod admitted that the piece he wrote on Stipe for Esquire in 2001 was 50 per cent made up, and when Peter Buck waggishly commented to that they should hire a fiction writer to make up their story, this simply confirmed the choice of title. The pre-fame Peter Buck even spoke on how to misinform the public, through making up parts of the story. Peter Buck told me, I havent constructed a great myth for myself, but Im a good storyteller. I try to do my best to try and tell the truth, but I never let that get in the way of livening up a good story! And as rock writer and former editor of Record Collector Peter Doggett wrote in 2001: The art of the biographer and, for that matter, the autobiographer as well is to deliver a fictional re-enactment of real life that has the taste and smell of truth. And the limit of biography is that fiction, no matter how intelligent or well researched, is perhaps all it can ever hope to deliver.

R.E.M. dont feel as if their career should be treated as history, at least not yet. Biographies have a habit of hammering nails into coffins or proffering definitive stories of bands not yet ready to be definitive themselves.