Catch Stipe, Mills, and Buck in a video interview in Issue No. 24 of the LAUNCH CD-ROM. That disc contains a live performance of "Suspicion," taped at the Tibetan Freedom Concert. The full Q&A between LAUNCH and the band follows here.
LAUNCH:
Let's start with the obvious question. How did Bill Berry's absence impact the production of Up?
STIPE:
By [drummer Berry's] absence, he was really present on this one. We got together in March '97 in Hawaii and put down about 40 songs on tape, all using drum machines and most written without guitar. So we'd already embarked on what would be a very experimental record. Seven months later we got back together in the studio, and he said he was ready to retire and didn't want to do it anymore. It was as if someone pulled the floor out from under us. But we didn't want to hire a fake Bill. So basically we took everything we had that was familiar to us in the studio--the different things you do over the course of 10 records--we threw those out the window and started on a really grand experiment that was not altogether easy. In fact, I would suppose it was the most difficult record we ever made. It took too long.
LAUNCH:
I can see how it must have been a completely new thing after 18 years together.
BUCK:
Yeah, especially since when we worked with Bill in the past he was always really punctual, and I'm really punctual. Bill and I would arrive at 1 p.m. and get to work and the other guys would just sort of wander in. The first thing that went out the window was starting work on time. I get a lot of reading done now.
MILLS:
Bill's quitting led to the freedom to go in all these weird directions we would never go otherwise, but that we wanted to go in anyway, from the machine-driven sounds of "Hope" to the Beach Boys sounds of "My Most Beautiful." Every door was opened so we tried to go through as many of them as we could.
LAUNCH:
So, change is good?
BUCK:
I think a lot of what people consider to be hallmarks of R.E.M.--the jangly guitar, the chord changes--are not all that interesting to us. I love jangly guitar, but don't think it's integral to what we do. With so many things changing, we just stepped to the side. I play bass on this record, Mike is doing keyboard. I'm a different bass player than Mike. Much worse. Things change and that's the way it works.
LAUNCH:
Michael, you said this was the most difficult record you'd made. How did you get through it?
STIPE:
Our secret weapon was Pat McCarthy. He'd engineered two records for us before. He'd just come off a Madonna record; he had a lot of ideas and they were really meshing well or interfering with the ideas we had in a really interesting way. He was really the mortar that kept us this really skewered unit, moving forward through the record-making process. Every record is challenging and hard to write; I always get writer's block, and that's that. I expect it. I know how to get over it. How long it will take, what I have to do. If it happens once or twice on the usual record, it happened four or five times on this album. I wasn't an easy person to be around.
LAUNCH:
This record sounds so different from the material you first recorded nearly two decades ago. Let's say it's the early '80s and I have a song from Up that you absolutely would not believe you'd be recording someday. What song would that be?
STIPE:
If I were to project one of these songs backwards to 1983 when we were recording our first record, the first song I just couldn't fathom that we'd ever put down on tape would be "Hope." That being said, a lot of what influenced Murmur was the first Suicide album--the one Peter and I thought was just remarkable. "Hope," to me, many years later, reflects that.
LAUNCH:
Why Suicide?
STIPE:
I just remember when I first went to NYC and rode the subway, I finally understood Suicide, the band. The sound of the subway was exactly the sound of their music, and it made such sense. Not having ridden a subway before, I hadn't had that experience. I could only imagine through movies what it was like. But it's an all-encompassing feeling to be sitting on that thing with all that sound, chugging along.
MILLS:
Yeah, I think "Hope" is the song that would have surprised me most 18 years ago. It's the most machine-driven song on the record and it's so far removed from what we were doing then that we would be shocked. Future-shock.
BUCK:
If somebody played me anything on this record 18 years ago, I would have thought, "Jeez, I'm gonna go insane when I get older! Because this is really nutty!!!" So much of the vocabulary of this record is so far away from what we were doing 15 years ago that I doubt very much I would recognize it.
LAUNCH:
Can you cite a particular mood or feeling that the music of Up evokes in you?
STIPE:
I couldn't say this record has one particular mood. To me, it's kind of calming. Somebody said early on that it's the kind of record you could put on "repeat" and it just could play all day long while you're doing all your stuff. There's no big shocking rock number that comes roaring out. It feels like a complete kind of journey. That's totally by mistake. The songs don't correlate one to the other. It's no attempt at rock opera or anything like that. But they do have a similar type of feeling.
BUCK:
I feel the mood is kind of psychedelic. It's weird because we use all this '90s technology, all these drum loops, and sampling things, sampling ourselves, and somehow we managed to push it back to 1967 in a weird way. It doesn't sound like anything specific, but it's got that '67 summer "anything goes" feel.
MILLS:
Yeah, the "anything goes" feel ties it together in some strange way. It's our oyster, this record.
LAUNCH:
Did you have a particular goal, other than just getting through it, when you set about recording Up?
STIPE:
The one thing I really wanted from this record was that the feeling be real. What I get from our early work like Murmur, Reckoning, is that, although there might not have been words or there might have been words that were utter nonsense, you get a feeling from those records that is very, very, real. I get that same feeling from the records that I consider are the best in my record collection. Marquee Moon by Television...I can't tell you 20 years later what those songs are about, but I can sing every word and I know what they feel like. And they just feel really real. The content of my lyrics is a little more thought-out now than it was in 1983 when I was 23 years old. I have learned over the years how to write a pop lyric. I'm not afraid to stretch myself or push myself to make that something that's really unexpected.
LAUNCH:
Let's talk about the live thing. Our camera crew came to the Tibetan Freedom Concert and saw your performance. Was that scary to get onstage without Bill for the first time?
STIPE:
It was weird getting up there without Bill. He called us right before we went on, wished us the best of luck, and asked us to tell Joey [Waronker, R.E.M.'s touring drummer] not to play too well and make him look bad. We'd rehearsed and everything. I guess in retrospect, though, we didn't do what was expected of us. We opened with "Airport Man," which is a slow, quiet song even though everyone was in rah-rah mode. We walked out and did what we do. It's not the Beastie Boys.
BUCK:
The Tibetan thing was wild and chaotic--we went out in front of 60,000 or 70,000 young people and played really slow songs that no one's ever heard. We got a whole lot of real confusion from the audience. Which I think is great. We've been around so long that if we can still confuse our fans, that's great. Starting off with a five-minute one-chord drone improv thing probably wasn't the best way to start a stadium show, but I feel really good about it.
MILLS:
I was more or less terrified. At least they applauded, even if they didn't know why.
LAUNCH:
I'm just curious, why didn't you perform more of the hits?
STIPE:
We were really excited about the new material and we wanted to perform it. The last thing we want is to be one of those bands that just brings out all the hits, all the crowd-pleasers. That would be the easy route, but it's unsatisfying, certainly for us, and for a large part of the audience.
LAUNCH:
You guys have been around such a long time; have probably seen and done it all. In all your experience, have you found that the press still is confused by you? Misinterprets you? Misunderstands you in some way?
STIPE:
Probably the greatest misconception is that all the songs, or many of the songs, despite my denials, are autobiographical. I've laid the sidewalks to say that's not the case. I couldn't possibly be all the characters I've written songs about. I'd be utterly schizophrenic and a lot more interesting than I am. But I do think about things, and I guess I've developed the ability to put that into a character or into the mood of a song and try to raise a question or comment on something. I'm really proud of that, you know? Given a list of R.E.M. songs from the last two or three records, I could count on one hand which songs I consider apply to my life. It's a lot more what I think about. I'm a really observant guy. I pay attention. I listen, I look. I soak stuff in, and then I spit it back out in the form of pop music.
LAUNCH:
How about you guys? Anything you'd like to clear up at this time?
BUCK:
I've noticed that people who don't know us always write about how serious we are. I'm serious about the records, but some of the stuff on the records is goofy and we're not some zenned-out intellectuals or anything. It's a rock 'n' roll process. Come in the studio with us, have a glass of wine, climb in the piano, and hammer on it. It's not a rigorously thought-out thing. We don't know what we're doing!
MILLS:
I get asked, "Will there be any secret numbers on this record? Like the number seven shows up on the liner notes..." Someone came up to me and said, "You know, I understand the message." There's no message! Just lyrics and scribbles on the artwork. People think we have this odd, focused mindset. Part of it is that we never smile in photographs, but that's just out of fear of looking silly.
LAUNCH:
Looking back on your career, can you cite any mistakes, missteps that you wish you could revise?
STIPE:
Major missteps? Mistakes that we've made? No. I have no regrets. One thing I'm real proud of is that if we make mistakes, we can't blame anyone else. We've always spearheaded our own destiny. We've never taken advice from anybody very seriously--certainly not over our own. We have an internal barometer that instinctually leads us the way we should go. We've also been profoundly lucky, and we're mildly talented. That combination has put us where we are and we're really happy to be here.
LAUNCH:
Tell me about how you guys relate to each other. It's incredible how long you've stuck together.
STIPE:
Mike and Peter are really solid people, supportive of my flights off...I'm nowhere near enigmatic as people think I am. I think I got tagged that in 1984 on Letterman, when I sat down instead of shaking his hand. From then on, I was an "enigma." I'm not as enigmatic or mysterious as people make me out to be. That said, I do go off sometimes, and that's essential to my contribution to what we do. Those guys are always there to pull me back in--on top of being, in my opinion, profoundly talented musicians, and just miles above most of what I hear and see. The stuff they throw at me is challenging not only for me and them, but for the people out there. Peter already gave me five new songs, and he warned me about the first one. He said, "If you can put a vocal and a melody on this song, I'll give you a bowling trophy the size of the Leaning Tower Of Pisa because it's the most out-there thing I've ever heard!" So that's my challenge. I have a little time to work on it. It's a wild piece of music.
LAUNCH:
Peter? Any thoughts on the secrets to your success?
BUCK:
I don't think we're that predictable as people. One of the reasons we're still together is we tend to surprise one another. Bill was the most unpredictable of all of us. You could tell he'd be on time, but you had no idea what else would happen. Especially on this record, everything went out the window. Everyone's personality totally changed because it was such a weird and stressful situation. We had no rules and everything we learned in the past was out the window. But that's good, it's nice to be confused, especially after all this time.
LAUNCH:
This last couple of years must have really put your relationships to the test. There were illnesses other than Bill's. There seemed to be a lot of behind-the-scenes turmoil that you couldn't control.
MILLS:
It's interesting that we've all had to grow a lot in the last couple years. Several things have happened to us as a band and as people, especially with Bill's departure. It forced us to draw on some inner strength whether we knew we had it or not. It's good to be here looking good, feeling good. It's interesting what adversity brings out in people.
LAUNCH:
Well, what's up next for you guys? Is there something in the works that you've dreamed of doing but have yet to accomplish?
STIPE:
We don't think in terms of, "Oh here's something we haven't done yet, so let's move in that direction." I'm the most present-tense person I know. For me, it's all about the task at hand: this is the work I have to do on this particular project, and I'm very focused on that. The stuff can turn out very weird and wild--within what R.E.M. do it can be really a stretch. I don't expect we'll ever go into free jazz or a rock opera. Those are things I'm not too concerned about.
BUCK:
On any given day, I can think of 10 different things I think would be fun. Is it something I want to do seriously? That's another question. We've never done one of those Frank Sinatra records where you get 20 people in a room and just play the songs once. Get a symphony or horn section. But then, I'd also like to do a traditional folk record, maybe put out a record under a different name that's less song-oriented. I have lots of doodles and fragments that I really like, but which aren't really songs. I'd like to do something with them.
LAUNCH:
Tell me the one band you feel should have been huge and never got the respect or recognition it deserved.
STIPE:
Well, there was no way the Fall or Pere Ubu were ever going to be the biggest band in the world. But I could see the Cramps being the biggest band in the world and I think Lux and Terry still believe it will happen. I heard "Human Fly" in this bar with a really good jukebox. It's the freshest thing in the world all these years later.
BUCK:
I was just playing a Laura Nyro record; she's a great songwriter.
MILLS:
I always think about the bands that were coming out when we did that--but through bad luck or whatever--never made it. The dB's, Jason & the Scorchers. There were all these nifty bands that fell by the wayside.
LAUNCH:
What do you think you would be doing for a living if R.E.M. had fallen by the wayside?
STIPE:
If I hadn't naively and boldly decided at the age of 16 to be a singer in a rock band? What would I do? I'd probably take photographs for a daily newspaper or something.
BUCK:
Right when the band started I was back in night school studying to teach high school English. I'm not saying I could've stood it--I'd probably have killed a few students. I'd probably be teaching in Crawfordville or something.
MILLS:
If I weren't doing the band thing, I like to kid myself and think I'd be playing Triple-A baseball, but what I'd probably be doing is being a reporter on a newspaper. Of all the things I did before this, that's what appealed to me most, and I know I could do it.
LAUNCH:
Your talent and fame lends you access to all kinds of artists. Who are some of the people you admire in this industry?
STIPE:
One of the best things about being in the position I'm in from the success we've attained is that I'm able to be surrounded by people I find to be creative and artistic who make me think and who challenge me in what I've been calling a sweetly competitive way. Courtney Love and Hole put out a record with all these great songs. They piss me off they're so good. And I'll call and go, "Goddamn you for writing that. I'll see you one and raise you one!" There are all these people who are making music: Radiohead, Patti Smith, U2, Bjork, Polly Harvey, Grant Lee Buffalo, Hole. They inspire and challenge me and make me want to write better. I feel so lucky that I know these people, that I get to talk to them, be angry at them, tell them when they do something I think is really great. I get to tell them my opinion. It inspires me to do better work.
LAUNCH:
Is there any moment in your career that you can cite where you just thought, "Man, this is it--I have arrived"?
BUCK:
A lot of people would say getting a Grammy or playing some big place. For me, I've played with Roger McGuinn, and I can't help but a get a real thrill playing "Rock 'N' Roll Star" and see Roger McGuinn singing it.
MILLS:
We got to be in a band with Warren Zevon for a while. We got to sing with
Robbie Robertson on his record. Meeting and singing and playing with people you admire is an amazing feeling.
BUCK:
When I was 17, I would have given 10 years off my life to play with Patti Smith. A summer ago, I got onstage and played with her. I can die now and be happy.
LAUNCH:
Michael, you and Patti Smith have become good friends, right?
STIPE:
There are people in my life who are people that are role models to me--my parents, my family--but creatively, Patti Smith had a profound influence on this band, and me in particular. First as a performer and finally--if it could be better than being a fan of hers--being a friend of hers is just incredible. She is fearless about herself and is so connected to something that it's way beyond her and way beyond music and way beyond the written word. Energy. She continues to shock and inspire and challenge me as a friend, as a musician, as someone trying to push creative boundaries.
LAUNCH:
Who else do you guys admire?
BUCK:
I look at Chris Hillman, the guy's made consistently good music and written great songs for the past 30 years even though he's not selling tons of records. I admire the Guy Clarkes, Townes Van Zandts. Music is their life, and they're not going to give up no matter what their record sales are.
MILLS:
When I think of people I admire in terms of their career, I think of Neil Young. He's made music that changed the world, changed people's lives. He's never compromised an inch on anything. You have to respect that. I hope at the end of our turn, you'll be able to look back and say the same thing.
