1984 Music: R.E.M., Reckoning

Release date: 9 April

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes, from about 1987.

Below, quotations from group members and some background information are taken from Craig Rosen, R.E.M. Inside Out: The Stories Behind Every Song.

R.E.M. were probably my favourite band for a few years in the late 80s. I liked their 1986 release Lifes Rich Pageant best, both then and now, but I bought or taped all of their albums until Monster, and went to see them twice on the Green world tour in 1989. Reckoning, their second album, is (together with its immediate follow-up Fables of the Reconstruction) probably their folkiest collection of songs, and it is certainly their simplest. It was recorded quickly in a break between touring (exactly how quickly is disputed, but certainly less than a month’s total studio time). Most songs were recorded in a few takes, with the backing tracks played close to live in the studio, and there are no guest musicians and few overdubs other than piano (by bass player Mike Mills) and some doubletracking of the lead instruments and (perhaps) Stipe’s voice. The sound is therefore close to their live act of the time.

It has to be said that a few of the songs betray this quickness of execution: ‘Second Guessing’ could have done with a little more of the titular quality it decries; ditto ‘Letter Never Sent’, which, according to guitarist Peter Buck, ‘took about as long to write as it did to play’.

The album originally had the mysterious subtitle or alternate title of ‘File Under Water’, and there are indeed a lot of aqueous references in the lyrics, from ‘So. Central Rain’ to ‘Seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean’ to the ‘water tower’ in ‘Time After Time’ to ‘The water’s receiving me now’ in ‘Letter Never Sent’.

Onstage, Stipe was still shy, and Berry was hidden behind the drums, but Buck and Mills bounced around energetically, as in the band’s first appearance on US network television for David Letterman, where it’s notable that Stipe fades into the background for the requisite chat with the host, leaving this task to the more extrovert Buck and Mills. This contrast was even more marked in the studio, where Stipe recorded his vocals separately, and in a corridor outside the main studio room.

R.E.M.’s first album, Murmur, had been a big critical hit and a decent seller on both sides of the Atlantic, and Reckoning got the same reaction. Mat Snow in the NME on 21 April:

When I hear the word ‘plangent’ I reach for my applause button. Which is why ‘Reckoning’ and its predecessor, last year’s ‘Murmur’, confirm R.E.M. as one of the most beautifully exciting groups on the planet.

It would be naïve to deny that enjoyment of these vinyl cathedrals is untouched by love of the tradition from which they spring – the soaring trajectory from The Beatles’ ‘Hard Day’s Night’, through the Searchers to America’s electric Dylan and reaching an apogee in West Coast laureates The Byrds. Jingle-jangle merchants have followed – British pub-rock, the likes of Dwight Twilley, Orange Juice at times, and a whole new generation of 12-string choristers. But none have devoted themselves with such inspiration to the driving, towering purity to be found in the fullness of what is demeaningly called space-folk guitar music. When I get to heaven, the angels will be playing not harps but Rickenbackers. And they will be playing songs by R.E.M.

Drugs don’t come into it: there’s no need for a head full of snow or funny pills to groove into the spirit of R.E.M. It’s to do with America, the journey west to the Promised Land with nothing but a shimmering horizon ahead and a blazing, deep blue sky above. And although R.E.M. address themselves particularly to America the country, they resonate beyond that to signify America the state of mind, a Garden of Eden before its loss of innocence, its fall from grace.

It seems no coincidence that R.E.M. hail from Georgia in the New South, the paradise to be regained after California was lost. Wheel me out frothing if you like, but R.E.M. sing wistfully of a Golden Age that never was. Though even the most part-time romantic wishes it had been and hopes, in some tiny moment of nirvana, it will come again.

To particulars. With ‘Reckoning’, R.E.M. have dispensed with the discreet strings and profusely interlocking layers of instrumentation and vocal harmonies that characterised ‘Murmur’ and returned to the terser sound of first EP ‘Chronic Town’ which was displayed live earlier this year with such breathtaking brilliance. But Spartan it isn’t. No modern axe-hero, yet Peter Buck shows why he is perhaps today’s greatest rock guitarist: both economically precise and rich in timbre and immaculate in timing and dynamics, his guitar sings.

Also at the top end of the mix, Michael Stipe on vox emerges a little further from his shell of ‘Murmur’’s gnomic utterance and occasional fragments of chorus keening with bright-eyed rapture. Yet so much more is conveyed in the interplay of aching, troubled voice, soaring harmonies and ringing guitars than in literal pronouncement, however assiduously Dylanologist you may be in its unpicking. …

So full circle. The Byrds best albums – ‘Fifth Dimension’ and ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ – were of their era yet still exhilarate today. R.E.M.’s two LPs are more consistently brilliant still, and, by picking up where McGuinn and co. left off, R.E.M. somehow transcend period fetishism to make music similarly in tune with the times. In short, another classic.

Ian Pye in Melody Maker on 14 April was similarly impressed:

Somewhere in mythical America lies Rockville, the eternal small town full of well worn people where the state of the art hasn’t changed and maybe never will. Red dust blows down the main drag, cowboys and factory drones drink beer in run-down bars, and the steel guitars whine on into the sunset. It’s a kind of dream really.

REM warn us not to go there, yet strangely they can’t resist making the trip themselves. Whereas their captivating debut, “Murmur”, looked to the brash energy of punk and the classic heritage of the guitar-song group, “Reckoning” shifts the formal axis towards Americana and the down-home truths this culture would rather forget.

Which is not to suggest that REM are going backwards – their widely anticipated second shot is easily the equal of its predecessor, a more even record with less obvious highs and less obvious lows – but that Athens’ finest have simply come to terms with their catalystic love-hate affair. In doing so they manage to celebrate everything great about white American pop in the last 20 years while turning their backs on America, the movie. … the post-punk thrash is gone and in its place the always present Byrds references are many and unashamed; luxurious swathes of gleaming guitars chime loudly as the finest chrome work. …

Retaining the same production team of Mitch Easter and Don Dixon has ensured that REM’s air of brooding introspection and undefinable mystery continues, yet once again the clarity of Michael’ Stipe’s powerful lyrics are frequently obscured. This is certainly intentional, but it’s debatable whether this tantalising effect balances out the sheer frustration of trying to make out what the hell each song is about. …

REM have used the great American myths to enhance the depth and roots of their music while exposing the empty vessel at the end of Disneyland’s rainbow. This is an album made by Americans, but Americans who are unsure about America – it’s fascinating.

Both these reviews are at pains to situate the music within a tradition: that of ‘Americana’ (I didn’t know this word was already a critical term in 1984), with particular reference to The Byrds (a comparison that eventually began to irritate Buck). For UK music critics, the group were therefore a means to think about America itself in more authentic terms than that provided by Lloyd Cole’s pastiche references. However, it’s interesting that there are no comparisons here to the Paisley Underground bands, who shared several of the same reference points.

In 2005, Mike Mills put together a compilation for Uncut magazine. Stipe and Buck did their own compilations too, but Mills’s is more consciously historical. Like the contemporary reviews above, his choices situate R.E.M.’s music within a tradition of Americana, but with different emphases to the NME and Melody Maker. In particular, this compilation has no less than three tracks by Paisley Underground bands: Green on Red, The Dream Syndicate and The Long Ryders. But also selections from a broader scene of early 80s new-wave (to use the preferred US term), including fellow bands from Athens (Pylon, Love Tractor – the latter had Berry on drums for a while), but also The Embarrassment and cow-punks Jason & the Scorchers. The more distant past is here only represented directly by Big Star (and indirectly by the Dylan song performed by Jason & the Scorchers). There are no UK bands.

The reviews above focus almost exclusively on Buck’s guitar and Stipe’s vocals and lyrics, but in the early days of R.E.M. Mills and Berry were the more accomplished musicians, and the group’s sound reflects this in important ways. Buck rarely takes solos, for instance, and Stipe is relatively low in the mix, (deliberately) exacerbating the inaudibility of his lyrics. The bass playing, by contrast, is very lively, and moves around and counterpoints the vocal melody in a way that complements Mills’s (always pointed and effective) backing vocals. The drums entirely lack the big ‘thwack’ sound of gated reverb. Again, I’m no musicologist, so I’m really going on feel and impression here, but they seem more trebly, less reliant on the overbearing pulse of the bass drum, and with the sound of the sticks more prominent, along with the cymbals.

Stipe is obviously a large part of R.E.M.’s allure, precisely because it’s difficult to know what he’s singing about most of the time. Part of this was undoubtedly a self-protection strategy to work round his shyness and prevent him from feeling too exposed. In some ways, his approach recalls that of Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile. Stipe: ‘I approach my lyrics from the third person instead of the first person, which gives it a slight detachment. … It’s kind of a protection – I would no more care to cut my gut open and display it to the 200,000 people who are going to buy the record’. 

But whereas Mark E. Smith of The Fall – another singer prone to lyrical obscurity – often seems to be dropping breadcrumbs that invite interpretation (and attract it, viz. The Annotated Fall website), Stipe doesn’t seem to provoke quite the same level of obsessive engagement, if only because listeners just admit defeat more quickly. He often alluded to hidden meanings in interviews, but these hints sometimes just feel like trolling. For instance, his claim that ‘Harborcoat’ was a ‘rewriting of the Anne Frank diaries’. Really? Perhaps more revealing is the idea that this and ‘Laughing’ off Murmur are ‘violent and brutal … but they’re both so internal and folded in on themselves that no one would ever pick up on that except as a general gut feeling’.

The title of ‘Letter Never Sent’ is interesting in this context: a letter marks an absence, an interruption in face-to-face communication. A letter never sent doubly so: a negated act of communication; a withdrawal.

It’s perhaps better to approach the lyrics as sound poetry, as one element of the music, in which isolated images sometimes emerge, but not necessarily as part of larger thesis statements. A characteristic effect of early R.E.M. is for a clear phrase or emotionally direct statement to emerge out of the surrounding murk like the sun bursting through clouds. The effect is often electrifying: on Reckoning the clearest example is the chorus of ‘So. Central Rain’ (the second song in the Letterman clip above), in which Stipe breaks cover to declare ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again. In fact, this song has a relatively clear origin. It describes – or rather, it uses as its point of departure – Buck’s attempts to call home on tour when a storm was ravaging Georgia (‘Did you never call? I waited for your call … The lines are down …’). But this is only clear if you're already aware of the background.

Similarly, and contra Stipe’s statements about ‘Haborcoat’ above, the ‘meaning’ of that song seems to emerge most clearly from the phrase ‘a handshake is worthy if it’s all that you’ve got’: the language of gesture more straightforward here than the treachery of words.

Having said that, there are two songs on Reckoning with relatively clear lyrics. ‘Camera’ was a sort of memorial to a friend of the band: Carol Levy, a photographer, who had been killed in a car crash a couple of years earlier. If you know this, it reads like a song about absence and grief – but then again, if you don’t, it might seem like a more general meditation on depression and social isolation. ‘Will you be remembered?’ is a straightforward enquiry in the first reading; a self-addressed question to a narrator erasing himself in the second.

The most straightforward song of R.E.M.’s career thus far was however the country pastiche ‘(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville’ about the relative attractions and dangers of the small hometown and the big city.