Salon.com > R.E.M.

Game Theory: “Pure pop for nerd people,” the greatest unknown ’80s band

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

1. Silent Football

The term “gifted children” dates back to the 1920s, to the unsavory, sometimes racist world of early IQ tests, but it took fifty years to find its niche: “gifted and talented” summer camps became widespread and self-sustaining during the 1970s. The Center for Talented Youth (CTY), sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, opened its doors in 1979: about 9,000 students, aged twelve to sixteen, now attend CTY on six campuses each summer. According to its official website, those students discover “challenging educational opportunities,” in Latin, mathematics, neuroscience, and so on. According to realcty.org, maintained by alumni, they learn an argot (“flying squirrel,” “CTY-S”) and a set of diversions found nowhere else, such as “Silent Football,” “a complex game involving an invisible football, hallucinations, and tattling.… One CTY-er solved a Rubik’s Cube on stage while reciting the first 200 digits of pi.”

Joe Boyd: “Nobody knew who the hell Nick Drake was”

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:22:00 +0000

Producer Joe Boyd has led an unpredictable and wide-ranging life in music: He toured Europe with Coleman Hawkins and Muddy Waters, served as stage manager for the notorious Newport Festival ’65 (where Dylan earned boos for performing with a rock band), and went to London, where he produced Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, Vashti Bunyan, Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson and the Incredible String Band. His pioneering of folk-rock led to a revival in the ‘80s, as he became sought after as a producer by alt-rock figures like 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg and R.E.M. for "Fables of the Reconstruction."

Boyd wrote about the British ‘60s in the beautifully crafted memoir "White Bicycles," which Brian Eno calls "a gripping piece of social history and the best book about music I've read in years."

But for many music fans, Boyd will remain the guy who discovered Nick Drake -- the depressive English genius who recorded three heavenly folk records in obscurity before dying of an overdose in 1974, at the age of 26.

“Hooray, we’re done”: The inside story behind R.E.M.’s disbandment

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:30:00 +0000

R.E.M.’s stature in modern music was celebrated on March 11, 2009, with a tribute concert in New York. There had been similar such events over the years, of course, including the one in 2006 in Athens where the trio had reunited with Bill Berry, but nothing on the level of this, at Carnegie Hall. With Calexico taking the reins as house band, the benefit concert (for children’s music education charities) featured a veritable who’s who of R.E.M.’s 1980s independent peers (the dB’s, Feelies, Throwing Muses), a healthy smattering of acclaimed newer acts (Kimya Dawson, Keren Ann, Guster), a couple of their Athens compatriots (Apples In Stereo, Vic Chestnut); it was closed out by their leading light, Patti Smith. Each act got to perform just the one song, and they ran the range of R.E.M.’s catalog, from ‘Sitting Still’ (Bob Mould) to ‘Supernatural Superserious’ (Marshall Crenshaw). After Patti Smith sang ‘New Test Leper,' Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe came out to join her for a finale of ‘E-Bow The Letter.' This was to be the last time that the three remaining founding members of R.E.M. performed together in public.

Early R.E.M. set surfaces

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:43:00 +0000

Calling all R.E.M. nerds: The ever-obsessive Slicing Up Eyeballs site, which lovingly chronicles the heyday of college radio, has posted amazing footage from one of the band's very first shows, at the 688 club in Atlanta.

This dates back to February 1981 -- the exact day is uncertain -- which puts the show some 18 months before the release of the debut EP "Chronic Town," and a full two years before "Murmur."

It's a classic, 40-minute early set, including lots of frenetic covers, Stipe dance moves, and early versions of "Radio Free Europe" and "Gardening at Night." It's part of a series of early R.E.M. videos being posted by Wuxtry Records, the famed Athens record store where clerk Peter Buck met Stipe.

The music business is banking on your nostalgia

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:05:00 +0000

Right now, somewhere in North America, the Canadian band Sum 41 is preparing a tour to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its 2002 release, “Does This Look Infected?” Don’t worry if you don’t know it. The album was a minor entry in the 2000s pop-punk canon, with songs that Entertainment Weekly described as “antiseptic” (if catchy). In fact, the band is probably known more for its singer having once been married to Avril Lavigne than for its music.

Why, then, are we marking the tenth anniversary of “Does This Look Infected?”

Because that’s what we do now. Anniversaries are a big business in pop music, where celebrating nice round numbers means the possibility of cashing checks full of them. From mediocre pop-punk to legendary rock ’n’ roll, seemingly no anniversary goes unremarked — or unmarketed — anymore.