Quick. In less then 10 seconds, come up with a list of the five most important American rock bands of the past 25 years. Come on, no delaying just do it. Ok, good. Now let me guess.
Nirvana is obviously sitting in the top spot, junk addled and passed out. Let's see, who else? Pearl Jam? That would make sense, Nirvana and them often come bundled together in an unfathomable two-for-one package. I suppose it'd be wishful thinking to hope that someone like Pavement made the list? Probably.
R.E.M. Is it on your list? It should be. Despite repeated attempts at career suicide and its hate crime of a song "Everybody Hurts," R.E.M. is a band that, though recently maligned and mocked, nonetheless holds an incredible amount of influence over American rock music, independent or otherwise.
Beginning in 1980 in Athens, Ga., R.E.M. essentially put the "college" prefix into rock with their literate, often willfully obscure jangle pop. Like its contemporaries in bands like Sonic Youth and the Replacements, R.E.M. didn't go too mainstream. Instead, the band toured relentlessly, often playing hole-in-the-wall venues and tiny dorm living rooms, slowly letting the mainstream come to them.
And yet, by the end of the '80s, Rolling Stone hailed the band as "America's Best Rock 'n' Roll Band" - a formidable challenger to the U2 hegemony that had swept the Earth in the wake of Joshua Tree.
But R.E.M. post-1989 doesn't really interest me. Aside from releasing two great albums (Out of Time and Automatic for the People) and one solid one (New Adventures in Hi-Fi), the band has essentially become a sad shadow of it's former self, rewriting "Man on the Moon" over and over again for aging VH1 employees.
On its first single, "Radio Free Europe/Sitting Still," the band strips punk rock of its overly masculine aggression, matches it with chiming chords that were equally indebted to the Byrds and Television, and thrusts it forward on Bill Berry's tight syncopations. Chronic Town, an EP released in early 1982, is an impressive listen. Rather than allowing its garage rock tendencies to overtake them, the band allow its influences, as disparate as the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith to Sonny and Cher and the Beach Boys, to come to fore. As was lead singer Michael Stipe's practice in these early days, the vocals are mumbled - rather than sing, he would allow the words to drip, in a way. With the absence of a lyric sheet until 1989's Green, no one was really sure what the band was saying.
The two albums that followed this, Murmur (1983) and Reckoning (1984), are widely held as some of the best albums from this early period. Murmur, unlike the band's early single and EP, is a pencil rubbing of its signature sound, at once distant and evocative. Michael Stipe's lyrics, when they are audible, are obscure and foreboding.
The guitars don't jangle so much as they linger. As a result, the album is at once contemporary and yet ancient. Much like the kudzu plant which graces its cover, it is thick and requires several listens just to grasp it. In contrast, Reckoning is a return to the jangle-garage pop sound of their first work. "Harborcoat" kicks things off at a fast clip, with Peter Buck's chiming chords and Mike Mills' pitch perfect backing vocals. Reckoning is also the album that gave us two of the bands most enduring songs, "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" and "So. Central Rain." While the former is a piano based alt-country jaunt, "So. Central Rain" is easily the group's first great ballad. On top of Buck's chiming guitar playing and a distant piano, Stipe sketches out a tale of regret with his reedy, phonetic vocals.
What makes early R.E.M. so great is the fact that one can hear all the influences gelling together. The band was just as influenced by American pop as it was by a band like Joy Division. Much like that band's lead singer Ian Curtis, Michael Stipe was a riveting performer, somehow insulating himself in the words and sound of the song like a safety blanket while on stage.
R.E.M. went on to have a fruitful career. And while its albums that appeared at the end of the '80s and early '90s would be consistently great, these early records would become massively influential on bands from Nirvana to Pavement. So go back to that list, and maybe see if there aren't a few who might need to be reconsidered.
Nicholas Feeley is a staff columnist for The Heights. He welcomes comments at feeley@bcheights.com.
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