Trust me when I say I know the pathway to your heart

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R.E.M. have called it a day after 31 years, 15 albums (and “Chronic Town”!), and uncountable influence on popular music.

This makes us at Heathen HQ a little sad, but only in a nostalgic way. R.E.M. for ME is the sound of my teen years, rich with twang and jangle and pop, and full of joy, starting the moment I popped a cassette of Lifes Rich Pageant into a boom box in 1986. Twenty-five years later, I’m playing that album in my office as I write this, and some part of my soul is still 16.

While for most of my life, I wouldn’t have hesitated to list the Athens band as one of my all time favorites, in truth my devoted fandom extends only to the mid-90s; Monster is the last record I really and truly enjoyed, and it’s only the first five records that still have a hold on my heart. (I could, for example, never hear “Shining Happy People” again and be perfectly content.)

Consequently, Bill Berry‘s retirement in 1997 was sad to me, but also mostly irrelevant — I bought a couple of the post-Berry “R.E.M. as a trio” records, but never really connected with them in the way I did with other, earlier records.

Here’s five R.E.M. memories, in no particular order, from my own 25 years of fandom:

  1. In late 1986, the aforementioned copy of “Pageant,” my Walkman, and the discovery of something I’d keep for a long, long time.

  2. A fall afternoon in Houston in the late 90s, picking up longtime Heathen and un-indicted co-conspirator Eric from Pizzeria Uno on Kirby; as he gets in the car, the first bars of Murmur bubble out of the CD changer, and he comments that it’s like cool water. That’s still true.

  3. January, 2009, I run into Mike Mills at Washington National Airport as we’re returning home from the Inauguration. Erin says I shouldn’t, but I approach him anyway to quietly thank him for making the music that’s been such a big part of my life. He doesn’t seem to mind.

  4. September 15, 1995, at the Woodlands; Eric and I and many others we know see the band on the Monster tour. It is insanely hot and muggy and miserable, but somehow they transcend it and play a great show (the opener was a little band called Radiohead. Then we all pile back into our cars to catch a now-defunct act at a now-defunct bar. Ah, being 25.

  5. Back when MTV used to play music videos, they’d sometimes hype a premier. On a fall afternoon in 1987, Eric and I rushed back to his parents’ house to catch the first showing of the clip for The One I Love, the first single from Document. Hilariously, I notice now that the director of photography was a pre-culinary-obsession Alton Brown, which makes geographic sense.

Good thing I work at home. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a loud, jangly, Athensy afternoon here at Heathen HQ. If’n you’d like some video nostalgia of your own, I note that the R.E.M. site has a full video catalog.

For more see the AV Club’s coverage. I love that there’s already a Thank You R.E.M. tumblr. There is of course a long and rewarding thread at MeFi.

4 thoughts on “Trust me when I say I know the pathway to your heart”

  1. I really have started to think there might be something to the idea that we all kind of latch onto the music we heard in our late teens to mid twenties, and that we’ll never feel that kind of passion for music again. I wonder about that theory, which I’ve heard parroted several times; I’ve discovered many albums in the years since that time which I enjoy and maybe even love and will push on anyone who will listen, but then something I first discovered and loved during that earlier time period will come on, and I feel transported. I wonder sometimes if it’s less that the bands we love get less awesome as time goes by (though certainly they do), and more that we simply grow out of that fallow period when music is something we obsess about.

  2. Thanks for the info Chet, I pretty much count on you for all relevant music info these days. I agree with you, Monster was really the last REM album that was an REM album. I bought Collapse, and thought it had some flashes, and made me a little optimistic that the future of the band might be a little more solid, but alas, not to be….

  3. Truly one of my favorite bands as well. I have, however always felt that Chronic Town was their best album and it was all downhill after that. That didn’t stop me from buying their whole catalog along the way. I didn’t stop at Monster and it was well worth it. New Adventures in Hi-Fi was a wonderful treat and harkened back to their old sound. I admit that was the last one that I bought, but am thinking about fixing that. This band came to my attention in college. One of my regrets was passing up a chance to see them in Galveston in 1986. But, it turns out that Stipe was apparently so loaded that he couldn’t even sing, so it turned out ok. I did manage to catch them in concert on a number of other tours and always came away from that experience joyful.

  4. Great post, Chet.

    Charlie – Maybe it’s both. We’ve grown older and so have they. Perhaps our passion for certain bands softens at the same rate that the passion in their music does — not just as a result of the quality of the music, but also due to factors of our own maturity. I’m thinking of the bands I obsessed over back in the day: Elvis Costello and REM as two particular examples.

    I’ll also add that nothing brings back those days like introducing a favorite band to my 7 year-old…