Crib Notes

The Free Song of the Day at Amazon.com for Oct. 15 is an MP3 of “These Days” by REM. Originally recorded on Lifes Rich Pageant, this is a live version from the Athens, Ga. band’s new album, Live at the Olympia, recorded in 2007 and due for release on Oct. 27.

Speaking of free downloads of new live recordings, Tom Waits is offering an eight-song preview of his new live album, Glitter and Doom, including versions of the pirate-y “Singapore” from Rain Dogs and the concussive “Goin’ Out West” (which one may recall from the Fight Club soundtrack). The tunes date to the Glitter and Doom tour of 2008.

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According to REMhq.com, REM will release

On October 26th, R.E.M. will release Live at the Olympia, a two-CD set of 39 songs from the group’s ‘working rehearsals’ in Dublin, Ireland,” produced by Dubliner Jacknife Lee who co-produced their album Accelerate.

“Live At The Olympia” ventures back to the first week in July 2007, when R.E.M. set up camp at the venerable Olympia Theatre in Ireland’s capital city and tested new material over five nights before fired-up, capacity crowds comprised of fan club members, friends, family, and fans from all over the world who were party to R.E.M.’s so-called ‘experiment in terror.’ ‘We were just trying to do something we hadn’t done before,’ said guitarist Peter Buck, ‘which meant there was no relaxing during the set. Every second we were playing something we didn’t know all that well. Which was kind of good… there were all kinds of terror elements going on during that show.’

…A special edition 2 CD & DVD set will contain a film of the Dublin shows by Vincent Moon and Jeremiah, who previously worked with R.E.M. on “Ninetynights,” “Six Days,” and the video for “Supernatural Superserious.”

Stream “Driver 8″ live.

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In 1983, Murmur underscored the Deep South isolation responsible for R.E.M.’s moody interpretation of that era’s post-punk, folk and new wave sounds. In turn, the ‘84 follow-up Reckoning shows the effects of fresh, world-weary exposure on the group. From the opening drum salvo, sweet vocal melodies and jangling guitar lines of “Harborcoat,” Reckoning is a clean, clear-eyed next step that refines the group’s pedigree of dark, accomplished pop songwriting. “7 Chinese Bros.,” “Pretty Persuasion,” “Camera” and “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” are an undulating but direct sonic panorama of baroque atmospherics summoned by minimal rock ‘n’ roll arrangements. A bonus live disc captures the raw energy of the group’s shows at the time, adding new dimensions to the studio recording and further highlighting the band’s timeless qualities 25 years down the road. (IRS) 5 stars out of 5

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The AJC reports that around 7 o’clock this morning the Georgia Theatre in downtown Athens was engulfed in flames.

“The Georgia Theatre, a converted cinema, has served as a music venue for many well known Athens bands, including REM and the B-52s.

Doc Eldridge, a former Athens mayor who is currently president of the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce, said he saw a huge plume of black smoke when he arrived at his nearby office at 7:10 a.m.

The theater was “fully engulfed, with flames coming out above the building,” Eldridge said.”

Continue Reading Georgia Theatre Fire in Athens.

(Photo by Todd Stephenson)

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Andy

If you missed the opening reception for Thomas Dozol’s photo show, “I’ll Be Your mirror” last night at Opal Gallery in L5P, you still have plenty of time to go check it out. The show runs through Sat., Jan. 10, 2009.

It all started with the landscape of the flushed skin, the blood rushing to the surface, creating patterns both involuntary and singular. I wanted to capture people raw and unguarded: looking in the mirror at the red triangles marking my cheeks after a long shower, I knew I had found my direction. By allowing me into the intimacy of their bathroom, my subjects have already let their guard down. I then tried to disappear as much as possible, to let rituals unfold undirected and find those fleeting moments of purity when one still feels washed anew.

–Thomas Roman Dozol, October 2008

Dozol ’s portrait series “I’ll Be Your Mirror” reveals the human body right after a shower. Each portrait examines a unique moment of contemplation and self-reflection and explores boundaries between intimacy and familiarity. By disappearing as much as possible into the intimate surroundings of each subject, Dozol allows rituals to unfold undirected and captures an authentic and unguarded moment.

Caroline

Dozol was born in Martinique. His photographs have been in numerous international publications such as, Interview, Paper, Vogue Paris and LID. After a few years working as a stage actor in Paris, he moved to New York in 2002 where he participated in the formation of the cabaret act, The Citizens Band by documenting their first show at Deitch projects. His curatorial projects include the founding of the One Wall gallery, an itenerent and ephemeral gallery project that started with Paysages Intimes; a photography installation by Julien Magre. His most recent, Still/Life photos by Helena Christensen, took place at the Colette Gallery in Paris, France. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Dozol is also known to denizens of the Athens/Atlanta music scene as R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe’s partner. Many of the subjects of Dozol’s portraits in “I’ll Be Your Mirror” are musicians as well.

(Photos by Thomas Dozol)

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Title: Up
Released on: Oct. 26, 1998
Favorite track: “Hope”

If the first track on an album sets the scene or makes a declaration of principles, what is “Airportman,” the introductory album of Up, trying to say? Some of my favorite REM songs start off their respective albums with considerable bangs, like “Radio Free Europe,” “Begin the Begin,” “Finest Worksong” and “Radio Song.”

“Airportman,” by contrast, is an odd, muted, haunting little ditty, almost inaudibly sung-whispered by Michael Stipe. It has 14 lines, most of which have only a few words. The haiku-like lyrics evoke a jet-lagged traveler who seems to be trying to register corporate/transportation slogans like “The people mover.” After September 11, one can’t read the lyrics “He moves efficiently / Beyond security / Great opportunity awaits” in quite the same way that they were originally written. Plus, the song’s emphasis on the drum machine and electronic music almost sounds like a subconscious rebuke to former drummer Bill Berry, as if the remaining members are saying, “Sure, we’re sorry Bill’s gone. But we’ve got this great software…”

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Even people who cannot stand R.E.M. (for the most part) will admit that Murmur was and still is a great album. Twenty five years after its release the album is arguably R.E.M.’s finest hour…

A quarter century after its initial release in April of 1983 the album is a cultural icon that forever changed the evolution of new wave, alternative and indie rock for generations.

To celebrate the album’s impact, Murmur is receiving the deluxe, remaster/reissue treatment via I.R.S./UMe and is due out Nov. 25th.

In addition to the remastered album, the 2xCD set includes a previously unreleased live show recorded at Larry’s Hideaway in Toronto just three months after Murmur first dropped.

The live show spans the group’s brightest moments at the time, including songs from the Chronic Town EP and 1984’s Reckoning. The live show also includes a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” which was later recorded in the studio for the b-side of R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe” single.

The reissued Murmur also includes liner notes and essays penned by producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, and several others insiders and record execs who witnessed the album’s creation.

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Title: New Adventures in Hi-Fi
Released on: Sept. 9, 1996
Favorite tracks: “The Wake-Up Bomb,” “Undertow,” “E-Bow the Letter,” “Leave”

In 1997, about a year after New Adventures in Hi-Fi came out, my wife and I bought the house in which we still live. For the previous five years, we’d lived in a place with a dishwasher but no washer/dryer. Our new house had a washer/dryer, but no dishwasher — which, as far as I’m concerned, counts as an upgrade. For a couple of years we washed dishes by hand. I’d usually do it after dark while playing CDs, preferably ones with good “night music,” like Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, Stay Sick! by The Cramps, Kiko by Los Lobos and especially New Adventures in Hi-Fi by R.E.M. (Incidentally, I think Automatic for the People is also very much a “night music” album.)

Something about the repetitive action of scrubbing and drying the dishes and listening to the rolling, cascading melodies of the album – most especially three-song sequence of “Undertow,” “E-Bow The Letter” and “Leave” – would put me in something close to a trance-state. Many of the songs on New Adventures have striking powers of accumulation: they build and build and CREST, and then build and build and build and CREST HIGHER. I find myself more prone to “get lost” in New Adventures than any other REM album. I can’t say whether it’s “better” than Murmur or Document, but it’s the one that interests me the most. You can keep diving into it without striking bottom.

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Title: Monster
Released on: Sept. 26, 1994
Favorite tracks: “King of Comedy,” “Star 69”

After the relatively low-key, mellow tones of Automatic for the People, REM clearly wanted to turn the amplifiers up to 11 and rock out again with Monster. In one interview, guitarist Peter Buck described Monster as “a ‘rock’ record, with the rock in quotation marks.” He explained, “That’s not what we started out to make, but that’s certainly how it turned out to be… Like, it’s a rock record, but is it really?” (Answer: Yes! It really is a rock record.)

Monster marks a different kind of directional change in REM’s refinement of its sound. You could say that REM had always gone forward in its musical development. The path would probably look more like a sine wave than a straight line, but the band always followed along a continuum in, for instance, increasing the clarity of Michael Stipe’s vocals and lyrical thrust. Monster strikes me as REM’s first serious attempt to reverse course, to retrace its steps and recapture some of the virtues they’d put aside over time. And, true to form, they want to backtrack while dabbling in musical idioms that hadn’t touched on much before.

Monster strikes me as an brash, exciting experiment with results that aren’t 100% successful – as compared to Automatic for the People, which is an extremely successful experiment whose parameters don’t really interest me in particular. Monster holds up better than I was expecting.

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Title: Automatic for the People
Released on: Oct. 5, 1992
Favorite tracks: [None]

If the REMtrospective’s have so far seemed like an aging fan’s on-line admiration society (“See you next tour!”), well, now we come to Automatic For the People. Huge hit. Three top 40 hits in the U.S. and U.K., 75 weeks on the album charts in the U.S., 179 in the U.K. Source of song that became a youth anthem (“Everybody Hurts”) and another that provided the title for a movie (“Man in the Moon.”)

And I don’t like it. A couple of songs I actively loathe. The only reason I won’t call it my least favorite REM album is that I just haven’t listened to Up, Reveal or Around the Sun enough to know how they’d stack up. I know some people adore it and I get the impression that a whole new generation and fan base discovered REM through Automatic for the People — which, for me, is part of the problem.

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According to REMHQ.com Peter Buck’s “signature Rickenbacker guitar was stolen from the stage immediately” after R.E.M.’s show in Helsinki, Finland last night.

The guitar in question has been a part of the band since they recorded Chronic Town way back in ‘82, so there’s a certain sentimental attachment to it and they want it back.

If you have any information, send an e-mail to fanclub@remtour.com or phone (001) 706 353-6689.

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Title: Out of Time
Released on: March 11, 1991
Favorite tracks: “Radio Song,” “Losing My Religion,” “Low,” “Country Feedback”

Out of Time represents a peak for REM. It’s one of their most commercially successful of their albums, with “Losing My Religion” being their biggest hit single and possibly their “most famous” song. It turned the band from a popular college/alternative act to a popular mainstream band.

And Out of Time took REM to the big-time without compromising their artistic integrity, unless you count the ever-increasing intelligibility of Stipe’s singing to be a compromise. It’s like the listening audience finally “got” REM – or maybe REM and the audience met each other halfway. Because the band’s sound definitely changed. Looking back at Chronic Town, Murmur and Reckoning, it’s amazing how different the band sounds. The philosophy of songwriting, the prominence of the vocals, Buck’s once-trademark guitar style – all have gone through a transition. But it’s a “the same, only different” kind of transformation: I recognize the songs as “REM songs” (which is not something I’d say for Automatic for the People).

It’s interesting to compare them in this regard to U2, college-rock contemporaries turned arena rock acts. U2’s sound has evolved too, and they’ve dabbled in different directions, but they’ve remained in a narrower continuum than REM ever did.

Does “Losing My Religion” qualify as one of the most unlikely hit singles of all time? The Wikipedia entry has this quote: “According to Peter Buck, when Warner Bros. heard the album that was to take them to the top, they were dumbfounded: “You think the one with the lead mandolin should be the first single?!””

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Title: Orange Green

Released on: Nov. 7, 1988

Favorite tracks: “Turn You Inside-Out,” “Orange Crush,” “You Are the Everything”

I really enjoy REM’s first album for Warner Bros., Orange Green. Given that it features the hit song “Orange Crush” and has that distinctive orange-colored album cover, Orange Green is just the perfect name for the album. I think that whenever I hear the songs, I think of the color orange, and when I see that shade of orange elsewhere, I think of that name, Orange Green.

Then again, a friend of mine passed along a rumor that they called it Green in honor of the payday they received from signing with Warner Brothers. I’m not sure I believe it, but it has a logic.

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Title: Document
Released on: Sept. 1, 1987
Favorite tracks: “Finest Worksong,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” “King of Birds”

A thumbnail sketch. A jeweler’s stone. A mean idea to call my own.

Document could be my favorite R.E.M. album. Of course, I have a lot of favorites, including Murmur and New Adventures in Hi-Fi, but Document is my favorite favorite. It may have the “biggest” and “tallest” sound of any of their albums. Certain “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” has their “fastest sound,” although some tracks on Accelerate give the song a run for its money.

Document is the last R.E.M. album I bought on vinyl — Green and all the subsequent ones, I bought on CD. That’s no doubt part of the reason why I associate the two sides of Document with having distinct identities. Side A seems to be about political action, and Side B seems to be more about disengagement, introspection and even immolation.

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Title: Dead Letter Office
Released on: April 28, 1987
Favorite tracks: “Voice of Harold”

My “REMtrospective” project, a chronological, album-by-album review of the work of R.E.M. from the band’s first EP Chronic Town through its latest release Accelerate, seems to have experienced a “Can’t Get There From Here” episode. Despite having been derailed in late May (thanks in part to a couple of family vacations), it’s ready to start up again, bearing in mind that I’m more of an interested amateur than a pro rock critic or musicologist. If you missed them the first time, here are the entries for Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction and Lifes Rich Pageant. As Stipe sings on the latter, “Let’s begin again.”

The evolution of R.E.M.’s sound from murmured jangle to hammering clarity was well underway with 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant. Dead Letter Office, a collection of rarities and B-sides, nevertheless serves as a fitting transitional album, winding up REM’s early period. (The timing seems particularly appropriate to me personally, since I got my undergrad diploma a few weeks after Dead Letter Office came out.)

For me, most odds-and-sods song collections serve as appendices or supplements to a musical artist’s work, but they don’t stand on their own as well; I’m thinking of XTC’s Rag and Bone Buffet and Bruce Springsteen’s 18 Tracks, which have some songs I like and a lot of songs I can’t remember. Dead Letter Office is much the same. For many of these albums, it’s kind of interesting to hear them cover artists they clearly admire, or chew on a musical idea that came to fruition more successfully elsewhere. A lot of times “rarities” tracks remind me of deleted scenes from DVDs: there’s a reason why they didn’t make the final cut. But there are exceptions.

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R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills gave his honest assessment on Michael Stipe’s lyrics, and also talked about the band’s well-reviewed recent tour during a conversation with CL contributor, Ben Westhoff.

You’ve said before that you generally don’t ask Stipe about his lyrics. Do you sometimes feel like you don’t know exactly what he’s talking about?

There are occasions what I’m not exactly sure what he was thinking when he wrote the lyrics, but that doesn’t matter. The only important thing is that the songs give you a sense of passion, or some sort of image within your own mind. What Michael’s thinking is not always that important. And that’s not to diminish what his intent is with the lyrics in any way, I’m just saying that it’s the listener’s perception that’s most important.

THREE-HEADED MONSTER: Peter Buck (left to right), Michael Stipe and Mike Mills. R.E.M. performs w/Modest Mouse and the National this Sat., June 21. $35-$75. 6:30 p.m. Lakewood Amphitheatre, 2002 Lakewood Way. 404-443-5000. www.livenation.com.

Many songs on Accelerate seem fairly political. Does that make them easier to understand?

You know, I generally know what he’s talking about on almost every song. There may be one song per record where I don’t know where he’s coming from. But again it doesn’t matter, because as long as I get some sort of mental picture, it doesn’t have to be the same one he has. And, really, there’s only been one or two songs in the history of R.E.M. where I’ve ever actually felt like I needed to ask him what he was thinking. Usually I just take my own interpretation of it and I’m happy with that.

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To help raise funds to for AthFest’s “educational efforts,” the Savannah-based Gretsch Guitars is donating a new hollow body Brian Setzer model Gretsch Nashville guitar to be put up for auction on eBay.

A guitar such as this would normally retail for about $3,150.00. But what makes it a target for collectors, and/or wealthy philanthropists is that it has been signed by all four original members of R.E.M. …and yes, for those who are doing the math, it means that even retired drummer Bill Berry gave his John Hancock for the benefit of AthFest.

The auction will begin on Wed., June 18 and ends Friday on June 27.

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Title: Lifes Rich Pageant
Released on: July 28, 1986
Favorite tracks: “These Days,” “Begin the Begin,” “Swan Swan H”

“Let’s begin again,” Michael Stipe sings in “Begin the Begin,” the first song on Lifes Rich Pageant. When the members of R.E.M. start their fourth full-length album with an anthemic message to start anew, it’s almost like they’re presenting Pageant as a “do-over” album compared to Fables. Not that I think that Fables would necessitate a do-over, but if Wikipedia is to be believed, the band had ambivalent feelings about Fables and didn’t enjoy the process of recording it.

Signals aside, there’s a marked difference between the albums. In my memory, R.E.M. made a gradual, step-by-step transition from the jangly, oblique, murmury quality of its early albums to the brighter, soaring, more articulate sound that followed — and coincided with the band’s increasing commercial popularity. It was like a dance of the seven veils, with Pageant less muffled than Fables, Document more “unwrapped” than Pageant, etc.

Instead, rediscovering Pageant reveals a sharp, almost immediate transition, like day for night. If their charging rave-ups had a “train engine” sound before, they traded them for jet engines here, as attested immediately by the low rumble, like a distant sonic bomb, underneath “Begin the Begin.” The hammering drums of “These Days” and the whoops of the equally rapid “Just a Touch” almost sound like punk songs.

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Title: Fables of the Reconstruction
Released on: June 10, 1985
Favorite tracks: “Feeling Gravitys Pull,” “Old Man Kensey,” “Can’t Get There From Here”

Supposedly Fables of the Reconstruction (or would that be Reconstruction of the Fables?) is about the American South. The term “Reconstruction” harks back to Dixie following the Civil War, and there are little references to Southern geography in the songs. Rumor has it that “Maps and Legends” is allegedly dedicated to outsider artist Howard Finster of Summerville, Ga., who did the Reckoning cover. Stipe’s lyrics always pepper in bits of Southern vernacular, although I’m not sure that “Can’t Get There From Here” counts as a “Southern” expression. The song does refer to Philomath, Georgia, though. And the soft banjo in the album-closing “Wendell Gee” delicately evokes bluegrass.

I have a hard time interpreting Fables as some kind of alt-rock equivalent to a William Faulkner novel, though. (“Swan Swan H” on R.E.M.’s subsequent album, Lifes Rich Pageant, does have more of a Southern “literary” theme, however.) To me, its “Southern” mostly in the ways that Chronic Town feels Southern, and generally seems like a continuation of some of Chronic Town’s ideas. Someone could probably make a case that R.E.M., who helped turn Athens, Ga., into an alt-rock mecca, influenced Southern rock and roll more than Southern music influenced it.

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Title: Reckoning
Released on: April 10, 1984 (U.S.)
Favorite tracks: “Little America,” “Time After Time (annElise)”

Back when we were college students following R.E.M.’s new releases, a friend of mine once told me that he heard of a rock band that, after their Acclaimed Breakthrough First Album, wanted to call their next album Disappointing Follow-Up. (I don’t recall which band it was.) Reckoning, released 364 days after Murmur, shows no trace of the sophomore slump. In many ways, it’s a step forward: the songs are brighter, tighter and peppier, and the music draws on some surprising genres and cultural influences. It’s a good album.

So why do I like Murmur so much more than Reckoning? There’s nothing wrong with Reckoning, but it’s not even a close rival with its predecessor. I think it has something to do with the way that certain albums can be more than the sum of their songs.

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