THE FINEST HOUR: R.E.M., The Mann, 6/18/08 [Photos by JONATHAN VALANIA]
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BY JONATHAN VALANIA First time I heard “Wolves, Lower” live was at the Beacon Theater in New York City, and The Dream Syndicate opened. It was 1984 and Michael Stipe had hair down to his shoulders. The second time I heard it live was last night at the Mann Music Center, and Modest Mouse and The National opened. Hate to sound like Bill Murray reviewing movies he didn’t see on SNL back in the day, but The National? Didn’t see ‘em, babe. I blame the traffic planner who thought just one or two little one-lane access roads would be more than enough for 12,000 murmuring fans and their Land Cruisers. Modest Mouse? Wish I missed ‘em. Message to Johnny Marr: Find Morrissey, make nice. Seriously. It’s time.
Really, aside from hour-long crawl from the Schuylkill exit ramp to the Mann parking lot and Modest Mouse, it was a perfect night: A crisp, autumnal evening within the warm, oaken confines of The Mann with one of the last great bands from the dawn of the alt-rock era in pinnacle form. Stipe was in fine voice, alternating between his hectoring bleat on the hard stuff and floating his pony-boy falsetto over the dreamy stuff, looking hale, healthy and dapper in a smartly-tailored pinstripe suit. Peter Buck was all blazing six-string Rickenbackers, doing his patented one-legged drunken-ballet rock moves in a black leather jacket that lasted all of three songs. Mike Mills looked like somebody covered him in honey and shot him out of a cannon thru Stevie Nicks wardrobe. Despite the turquoise, Mills nailed down the bottom end with drummer Bill Rieflin, and his gorgeous, candy-coated tenor put songs like “Fall On Me” and “Man On The Moon” over the top. In a good way.
The set list was impeccably drawn, plucking a neglected gem from nearly every album in the band’s canon (”Life And How To Live It”!), without reaching for the obvious (no “Everybody Hurts”, no “End of The World”) while making a persuasive case for the purity and power of the new material (”Man-Sized Wreath” and the ridiculously-titled “Supernatural Superserious” stomped on the terra). And there were a few pleasant surprises. “Let Me In”, the posthumous open letter to Kurt Cobain — a noisy feed-back-smeared tone poem on record — was transmuted into an acoustic hootenanny with down-from-the-mountain harmonies. As if to say: Oh brother, where art thou?
Second big surprise was Eddie Vedder appearing out of thin air for a stellar cameo on “Begin The Begin” that would have made Miles Standish proud. For better or worse, there would be no Vedder yarl if Michael Stipe never existed. So I am only half-kidding when I say that Pearl Jam and REM oughta switch singers for their next albums. Think about it guys.
I can count on two hands the number of times I have seen R.E.M. over the years, and last night was by far the best — for reasons far too innumerable to go into here, and for most to mean anything you had to be there. Sorry. You had your chance. But the one thing will I never forget is the image of the bookish, bespectacled girl next to me awkwardly dancing her little double-latte heart out — kinda looked like she was flapping her wings, to the casual observer — during “Losing My Religion.” She looked like somebody who is rarely, if ever, so physically demonstrative in public and for good reason — her semi-private choreography was straight out of the Elaine Benes Big Book Of How Not To Dance. And I thought, you go girl: This is what REM was always about — the bookish, the arty, and the awkward finally feeling like they belong and trying, in their own way, to be free.
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WORTH REPEATING: Riddle Me This
Reckoning ÷ Crooked Rain Crooked Rain = Around the Sun?
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Twenty-four years ago — let’s just pause and think about that for a sec, 24 years ago! — R.E.M. released Reckoning. It was the much-anticipated sophomore release by the underground’s then-favorite sons of the South. The album made good on the kudzu-crusted promise of the band’s bewitching and ultimately confounding debut Murmur, radiating a murky but hopeful aura to an alt-world grown weary of punk’s safety-pinned doom and goth’s spider web of gloom. “I’m the sun and you can read,” they sang, or at least that’s what it sounded like–you never knew for sure back then, and that proved to be an awful lot of their charm. And in the jingle-jangle morning of Reagan’s America, we came following them.
Reckoning was full of secret maps and sepia-tinted legends, the autumnal ring of Rickenbacker guitars and the mesmerizing moon-river moan of Michael Stipe, delivering the promised fables of classic rock’s stylistic reconstruction to a post-punk world of shattered expectations, asymmetrical haircuts and skinny black pants. Reckoning contained multitudes, alluding to the harmonic convergence of the Byrds and untold legions of nameless garage-band Velvet Undergrounds, mining the backwoods mysticism of Southern folk art and wedding it to love-beaded mid-’60s folk rock to create a new atlas of blue-highway Americana. All across the nation, red-eyed sophomores clustered Indian-style around the dim glow of dorm-room lava lamps, separating seeds from stems, trying to decipher Stipe’s cryptic utterances.
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REM: Time After Time
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Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg were two of those stoned sophomores passing the peace pipe in the warm wigwam of early-’80s college radio. A photogenic pair of smart-alecky sun-kissed California boys turned indie rock hobbyists, Malkmus and Kannberg put down the soccer ball and picked up guitars, bestowing cryptic nicknames on each other — S.M. and Spiral Stairs, respectively — and trafficking in noise and ambiguity to fill the void of melody and hooks that were still some years in the offing.Recording under the nom de rock Pavement, they released a pile of spazzy, dust-bunny-on-the-needle 7-inch singles, culminating in 1992’s Slanted and Enchanted, a bewitching but
ultimately confounding debut that resonated with lo-fi crackle, hiss and pretty pop, not to mention jigsaw-puzzle visions of summer babes, fruit-covered nails and Loretta’s scars.
Slanted and Enchanted made Pavement the toast of indieland, and the rock literati soon dubbed its boyish members — with their precisely wrinkled shirt tails, stoner smirks and deep-well knowledge of rock-snob ephemera — alt-rock’s most elegant and eligible bachelors.In 1994 — having switched coasts, trading suburban California sun for miles and miles of New York style — Pavement released Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, the much-anticipated sophomore LP by the underground’s then-favorite sons of the city.Shockingly tuneful and self- assured, Crooked Rain contained multitudes, alluding to the Fall and R.E.M., mining the majesty of rock and cutting it with irony, enigma and slacker ennui to create a new covenant for a Lollapalooza nation growing increasingly weary of the macho gigantism of grunge’s vein-popping flannel angst. “Songs mean a lot when songs are bought, and so are you,” Malkmus sang. All across the nation, red-eyed sophomores clustered Indian-style around the dim glow of dorm-room lava lamps, separating seeds from stems, trying to decipher Malkmus’ cryptic utterances.
Fast-forward to 2004. Pavement has long since disbanded into thirtysomething adulthood, elusive solo careers (or Korea, if you prefer) and horse-race handicapping. Matador has begun releasing 10th-anniversary bonus-track reissue editions of Pavement’s early canon. Following 2002’s Slanted reissue comes the snazzy Crooked Rain version 2.0, complete with all the attendant B-sides of the era and 25 unreleased tracks of beer-soaked basement jams, high-guy odes to Smile-era Beach Boys and the Jesus and Mary Chain, cool demo takes of Crooked tunes and embryonic versions of songs that would wow on Wowee Zowee, the album that came after.
PAVEMENT: Range Life
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Fourteen years later not one drop of Crooked Rain’s hook-filled charm has evaporated. The elbows thrown at Stone Temple Pilots and Smashing Pumpkins, which raised hackles back in the day when the indie-vs.-major-labels debate had the suicidal intensity of a jihad, now seem as harmless as the Pavement boys always insisted. I mean, really: Billy Corgan? Scott Weiland? Like I could really. Give a. Fuck. “Range Life,” the rollicking country rocker from which those aforementioned elbows were thrown, emerges as Pavement’s defining moment, a reminder of a time when Malkmus’ obfuscating snark and grad-student sarcasm burned off like morning fog to reveal a shining path of sincerity. That’s foxy to me — is it foxy to you? Included in those Crooked Rain bonus tracks is a B-side ode to R.E.M. called “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence,” in which Malkmus intones the names of songs from Reckoning. There is also a squint-and-you-can-recognize-it pisstake of Reckoning’s twilight mood-piece “Camera.”
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Mercifully, 25 years into a distinguished career in rock, R.E.M. doesn’t sound nearly as shambolic, but the new Around the Sun finds the band sounding a little weary from the annual chores of enchantment. With the late-20th-century departure of charter drummer Bill Berry, R.E.M. has carried on as a “three-legged dog,” as Stipe famously put it. Aside from the intriguing foray into electronic ambience and Pet Sounds exotica of 1999’s post-Berry Up, you could be forgiven for concluding, based on the albums that came after — the flat-soda pop of 2001’s Reveal 
and the unrelentingly midtempo mopery of the just-out Around the Sun — that the dog don’t hunt so good anymore. Once you get past the lovely, elegiac folk-pop of the album-opening “Leaving New York,” Sun’s first single, things bog down quickly. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Stipe, who lost his Delphic aura back in the late ’80s when he traded incantation for clarity and you could actually make out what the hell he was singing. I liked him better when he just pretended to be deep instead of actually trying to be.
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Too many songs on Sun — all tastefully colored with piano tinklings, keyboard washes and gilded folk pluck, mind you — sound like the working script to some bad Sofia Coppola movie in which the hip young protagonists languish melancholically in fading romances set against an international jet-set backdrop of high-speed trains and chic restaurants. “Your rope trick started looking stale,” sings Stipe on “Boy in the Well,” and he could well be singing to the man in the mirror. I’ve seen R.E.M.’s world up close, and it’s all five-star hotels that recycle and solar-powered limousines. And I’d never begrudge those guys the right to get stinkin’ rich from the high art they were capable of transmuting rock into when they were at the height of their powers — or even just stinkin’ drunk on airplanes. But they’re millionaires locked in a bubble of climate-controlled luxury, long removed from the heat and friction of ordinary lives that make for music worth listening to. In the end you have to choose between the mansion on the hill or the art in the streets. And the only time the twain shall meet is when art is hung over the sofa in the mansion on the hill. That’s a gross overstatement, of course, but that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that when you get to a certain tax bracket and the zip code that comes with it, you can’t go back to Rockville again.
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REVIEW: This IS Your Father’s R.E.M.
Now playing on Phawker Radio, with bonus tracks! Why? Because back in the 80’s, ‘everyone had an earring and a girlfriend who loved R.E.M.’ That’s why.
R.E.M.
Accelerate
(Warner ****)
Just when I’d concluded that R.E.M.’s three-legged dog don’t hunt no more, they turn in their most powerful and cohesive work since 1992’s Automatic for the People, a record brimming with all the things that made them great in the first place: clangy autumnal melodies, droney proto-emo vocals, trippy nuance, the haunted poetics of regret, the routine eschewing of the obvious and the familiar in pursuit of the sublime and the unexpected — and even if, 25 years on, their kudzu-covered brand of ‘the unexpected’ has become somewhat predictable, it still can be sublime. This one goes out to the long-suffering superfans, the kind of people whose faces light up when you say that the piano on “Until the Day Is Done” reminds you of the glorious sun-kissed bridge from “The Flowers of Guatemala,” or that the stunning “Sing for the Submarine” has the same Ken Burnsian antebellum feel of “Swan Swan H,” or that the whole things rocks harder than their cover of Aerosmith’s “Toys in the Attic.” Call it their post-post-rock period, but Accelerate lives up to its adrenalized title with a handful of ripping, gutbucket rock-outs (”Living Well Is the Best Revenge” and “Mansized Wreath”) to balance the epic torch-folk balladeering (”Hollow Man,” “Houston”). And unlike, say, 1994’s Monster, Accelerate is not just loud, but hard, as if these songs were actually lived-in and jammed-on, and possibly even sweated over. Like somebody might have needed a band-aid when it was all over. Hooray for everybody! — Jonathan Valania [via PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER]
REM: ROCKPALAST, GERMANY OCTOBER 2ND 1985 (COMPLETE CONCERT)