Merlin Mann has posted video of an early R.E.M. appearance that happens to also be the first time I saw them. It’s from a Nickelodeon “teen talk show” called Livewire in 1983.

I remember watching this on a big console TV sitting in front of the couch at the house I grew up in, mesmerized, but didn’t have the presence of mind to write down the band name. It wouldn’t have mattered; the cultural backwater that was pre-Internet south Mississippi didn’t have any shops that would have stocked Chronic Town anyway.

Three years later, I found Fables of the Reconstruction, though, and that was that.