The story of R.E.M.

A record store in Athens

The story begins in January 1980, at Wuxtry Records in the college town of Athens, Georgia. Behind the counter stood a clerk called Peter Buck, a record obsessive who had grown up in California and Atlanta. One of his regulars was an art student named Michael Stipe, an army kid who had lived in West Germany, Texas, Illinois and Alabama before finishing high school near St. Louis. The two discovered they loved the same music, punk and proto punk like Patti Smith, Television and the Velvet Underground. Stipe later joked that he had been buying all the records Buck was secretly saving for himself. Buck remembered him simply as a striking looking guy who bought weird records. Through a friend named Kathleen O'Brien, they soon met two more University of Georgia students, Bill Berry and Mike Mills.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Berry and Mills already had history. Berry's family had moved around the Midwest before settling in Macon, Georgia in 1972, and he met Mills at high school there. They played in bands together, and Berry kept his drum kit in the basement of the Mills family home. Mills was the trained musician of the future group. He had played bass in the school jazz band, which by school rules also meant the classical band and the marching band. In Macon, Berry worked at a booking agency where Ian Copeland turned the pair on to punk. They sold most of their gear, moved to Athens, then bought it all back. The four new friends began rehearsing in an abandoned Episcopal church on Oconee Street. Mills recalled that on the very first night, Buck played arpeggios nobody else played, and Stipe's voice was already there.[1] [2] [3]

Their first show was on the fifth of April 1980, at Kathleen O'Brien's birthday party, held in that same old church. They played a mix of their own songs and covers from the sixties and seventies. They still had no name. Among the rejected ideas were Cans of Piss, Negro Eyes and Twisted Kites. In the end Stipe picked three letters at random from a dictionary, R.E.M., best known as the abbreviation for rapid eye movement, the dreaming stage of sleep. The band quickly took over their lives. All four dropped out of the University of Georgia in 1980, Stipe being the last to leave, and Berry giving up his pre law studies. There was never a grand plan, Stipe said later. It simply worked.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Two men who would shape R.E.M. for decades arrived almost at once. Jefferson Holt, a record store clerk in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was so impressed by a show there that he moved to Athens and became their manager. Bertis Downs, a young law graduate teaching at the university, saw them at the eleven eleven Koffee Club in April 1980 and began answering their questions about copyright and contracts as a volunteer. The crowds in Athens grew fast, which caused some grumbling in the local scene. Holt drove them around the South in an old blue van, and so could any band member except Stipe. They lived on a food allowance of two dollars a day each, playing wherever someone wanted them, from pizza joints and coffee shops to gay bars and biker bars.[1] [2] [3]

Radio Free Europe and Murmur

In April 1981, soon after opening for the Police in Atlanta, R.E.M. drove to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to record at the Drive-In Studio, which producer Mitch Easter had built in his parents' garage. Peter Holsapple of the dB's had recommended him. In a single day they cut three songs, Radio Free Europe, Sitting Still and an instrumental called White Tornado. Stipe was so shy that he sang his guide vocals tucked into a corner facing the wall, because he did not want anyone to watch him sing. The words were not finished, so he mumbled. Mills had written the verse late one night in a record shop while a party went on upstairs, and Buck added the chorus. The title, Mills insisted, had nothing to do with the famous broadcaster. They just liked how it sounded.[1] [2] [3]

A young Atlanta law student called Jonny Hibbert offered to put the song out on his new label, Hib-Tone, in return for the publishing rights. The band agreed, but Hibbert insisted on remixing the track himself, and the band hated the result. Peter Buck broke a copy of the finished single and nailed it to his wall. The first pressing in July 1981 was just one thousand copies, and around six hundred were given away to promote it. It even forgot to print the label's contact address. Still, it sold out, another six thousand were pressed, and The New York Times named it one of the ten best singles of the year. Stipe designed the sleeve himself around a deliberately blurry photo, turning down a sharper picture the photographer offered.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That October they returned to Easter to record an EP, Chronic Town. Easter loved Kraftwerk, and he threw in tape loops and backwards sounds. He recorded Stipe singing outdoors, and on one passage you can hear crickets. The plan was to release it on a tiny local label, but a demo had reached I.R.S. Records, the label run by Miles Copeland, brother of the Police drummer Stewart Copeland, and his partner Jay Boberg. R.E.M. turned down the major label RCA and signed with I.R.S. in May 1982. Chronic Town came out that August as the label's first American release, with a stone gargoyle from Notre Dame on the cover. It sold twenty thousand copies in its first year, and NME praised how unforced and cunning it sounded.[1] [2] [3]

For the first album, I.R.S. paired the band with a more polished producer, Stephen Hague. It went badly. Hague made them play the song Catapult over and over, which demoralized Bill Berry, then added keyboards without their permission. The band begged to go back to Easter, and after a tryout session on the song Pilgrimage, the label agreed. On the sixth of January 1983, R.E.M., Easter and his co-producer Don Dixon started work at Reflection Studios in Charlotte. They made the record by refusing things, no guitar solos and no fashionable synthesizers, hoping it would sound timeless. Murmur came out on the twelfth of April 1983 with a cover photo of kudzu, the vine that smothers the Southern landscape. Rolling Stone named it album of the year, ahead of Michael Jackson's Thriller.[1] [2] [3]

Murmur reached only number thirty six in America and sold about two hundred thousand copies that year, less than I.R.S. had hoped. But in October 1983 R.E.M. made their first national television appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, playing Radio Free Europe and a brand new song with no title, which became South Central Rain. Much of the early press was about Stipe's voice. Critics could not make out the words, and The Washington Post called it mumbling. Stipe said it was just the way he sang, and trying to control it would be false. Years later he even claimed there were no real words to a lot of the early songs. In fact he had written many of those lyrics with real care, using sounds and images rather than straight stories.[1] [2] [3]

Heroes of college radio

R.E.M. wrote at a furious pace, two good songs a week by Buck's count, mostly in Mike Mills's living room on Barber Street. Buck even wanted the second album to be a double. Reckoning was cut in Charlotte over the winter of 1983 into 1984, again with Easter and Dixon. Stipe was worn out from touring. On one song he sang so quietly that Dixon could not hear him, so the producer climbed a ladder, found an old gospel record and handed it over. Stipe read its liner notes aloud instead, a take later released as Voice of Harold. The album was full of water imagery, and the song Camera was about a friend from Athens who died in a car crash. The folk artist Howard Finster painted the cover from Stipe's drawing of a two headed snake.[1] [2]

Reckoning reached number twenty seven in 1984, remarkably high for a college radio band. For the third album they went somewhere completely new, London, with producer Joe Boyd, famous for his work with Nick Drake and Fairport Convention. It was a miserable winter. It rained whenever it was not snowing, they had a long commute to the studio, and they hated the food. The band came close to splitting up. Stipe, steeped in Southern folk tales, filled the songs with eccentric characters and Southern Gothic gloom. Fables of the Reconstruction came out in June 1985. Berry later said bluntly that it sucked, while Buck came to call it a personal favorite, proud of how strange it was. Boyd noticed one odd thing about R.E.M. When mixing, every member asked to be turned down.[1] [2] [3]

The strain showed. Stipe put on weight, shaved his head into a monk's tonsure, and later said he had been suffering from depression and exhaustion, close to losing his mind. On tour he bleached his hair blond. The Los Angeles punk band Minutemen opened some American dates for them, and in December 1985, soon after the tour ended, their frontman D. Boon was killed in a car crash. R.E.M. organized a benefit for his family. Meanwhile I.R.S. was growing frustrated. Rock radio still ignored the singles, and the band seemed in no hurry to chase a hit. Yet their following kept growing on college stations and in clubs across the country, show by show, a slow build that would become a model for American underground bands.[1] [2] [3]

For Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986, R.E.M. hired Don Gehman, John Mellencamp's producer, and recorded at Mellencamp's studio in Belmont, Indiana. Gehman pushed Stipe's voice to the front of the mix for the first time. He admitted he often could not understand the words either, but he wanted them heard. The songs looked outward, at the environment and politics. Cuyahoga recalled the Ohio river so polluted that it caught fire, and Fall on Me became a quiet favorite of Stipe's. The title came from a line Inspector Clouseau says in the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark. The album reached number twenty one and became R.E.M.'s first gold record. Mike Mills sang lead on a cover of Superman by the Clique, released as a single.[1] [2]

In 1987 they began a long partnership with producer Scott Litt. Document was angry about America under Ronald Reagan, in songs like Welcome to the Occupation and Exhuming McCarthy. Berry even talked Stipe out of the line hang your freedom fighters, which became hang your freedom higher. Then came the band's first American top ten hit, The One I Love. Countless listeners dedicated it on the radio to their sweethearts, but Stipe said it was really about using people over and over again. It's the End of the World as We Know It raced through a torrent of images, including a dream party full of people with the initials L.B. By early 1988 Document had sold a million copies, and Rolling Stone put R.E.M. on its cover as America's best rock and roll band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A major label and a world tour

Unhappy that I.R.S. could not get their records into shops overseas, R.E.M. left when their contract ran out and signed with Warner Bros. Other labels offered more money, but Warner promised total creative freedom. The deal was reported at between six and twelve million dollars. Some fans cried sell out, and the band grew defensive in interviews. I.R.S. answered with a compilation, Eponymous. The first Warner album, Green, was recorded in Memphis in the spring and summer of 1988 with Scott Litt. Stipe reportedly told the others to stop writing R.E.M. type songs, and they obliged with major key rock tunes and a lot of instrument swapping. Buck had bought an odd Italian mandolin in 1987, and it appeared on several tracks, a hint of what was to come.[1] [2]

Green was released in America on the eighth of November 1988, election day, and the band used the moment to criticize George H. W. Bush and back Michael Dukakis, for whom Stipe had run ads. Orange Crush took its title from Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War, and on tour Stipe opened it by singing an army recruiting slogan. It topped the American rock charts and brought R.E.M. to Top of the Pops for the first time. Stand became a top ten hit in the US. Stipe said the others had been teasing him with bubblegum tunes, so he wrote the most inane lyric he could. Buck called it without doubt the stupidest song they ever wrote, and did not mean it as an insult. It later became the theme of the sitcom Get a Life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Green World Tour lasted eleven months. It was their biggest production yet, with films projected behind the band, and Peter Holsapple joined on extra instruments. Stipe later said they went around the world three times in 1989, and that he ended it exhausted, wired and skinny as a rail. On the last night, at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, R.E.M. played Murmur from start to finish and then Green from start to finish, and the road crew played the encore. Afterwards the band quietly agreed to take a year off, the first real break of their career. In 1990 they released Tourfilm, a black and white concert film Stipe made with director Jim McKay. They would not tour again until 1995.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Losing My Religion

In 1990 Peter Buck bought a mandolin and taught himself to play it while watching television, taping everything. Listening back the next day, he heard a lot of fumbling, and in the middle of it the riff that became Losing My Religion. The band demoed it in Athens that July under the working title Sugar Cane, with Mills playing a rounded bass line in tribute to Fleetwood Mac's John McVie. The final version was made in September at Bearsville Studio in Woodstock, New York, with Holsapple on acoustic guitar, and Stipe sang it in a single take. Strings from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra were added later. The title is an old Southern saying for losing your temper. Buck suspected Stipe had made it up, until an elderly woman in New Orleans recognized the phrase from her youth.[1] [2] [3]

Stipe called it a classic obsession song, his attempt to match the Police's Every Breath You Take. He later revealed that the famous line originally ran that's me in the corner, that's me in the kitchen, the shy wallflower at a party who cannot approach the person he loves. Changing kitchen to spotlight, he said, made everyone think the song was about him, which it never was. Warner Bros. was nervous about such an odd first single, but it came out on the nineteenth of February 1991. Tarsem Singh's video, full of religious paintings brought to life, won six MTV awards, and for the first time Stipe agreed to lip sync. The song reached number four, their biggest American hit. Mills knew it was a worldwide smash when he heard it on the radio in the jungle of Paraguay.[1] [2] [3]

The album, Out of Time, arrived in March 1991 and went to number one in both America and Britain, a first for the band. It was full of surprises, from the rapper KRS-One on Radio Song to Mike Mills singing lead on Near Wild Heaven and Texarkana. Kate Pierson of the B-52's, fellow Athens natives, sang on three songs. It earned seven Grammy nominations, more than any other artist that year, and won three. Remarkably, R.E.M. did not tour. They also put politics on the packaging. In America the CD box carried a Rock the Vote petition supporting easier voter registration, and buyers mailed in so many that activists wheeled a shopping cart full of them into a Senate hearing. The Motor Voter law passed in 1993.[1] [2] [3]

The second single, Shiny Happy People, with Kate Pierson, reached number ten in America and six in Britain, their first British top ten. Stipe choreographed the dancing in the video, and a fifth grade class painted the moving backdrop. Stipe soon grew to hate its bubblegum image. He told the cartoon talk show Space Ghost Coast to Coast so in 1995, and the band left it off their greatest hits. Later he softened, saying people forget he is actually quite funny. Mills, who wrote the music, has said it began as a song for kids and that he is proud of it. The band even reworked it for Sesame Street as Furry Happy Monsters. At the 1991 MTV awards, Stipe wore half a dozen white shirts printed with slogans like handgun control now.[1] [2] [3]

Automatic for the People

In June 1991 Buck, Mills and Berry started meeting several times a week in a rehearsal room in Athens, without Stipe. They swapped instruments, Berry on bass, Mills on piano or organ, Buck on mandolin, and taped a new idea almost every session. They meant to make a loud rock record, but the music kept turning slow and sad. Buck blamed turning thirty and the feeling that their old world had vanished. Stipe received the instrumental demos at the start of 1992 and called them very mid tempo and pretty weird. The songs became meditations on death, time and family. Try Not to Breathe was about Stipe's grandmother dying. Work moved between New Orleans, Woodstock, Miami, Atlanta and Seattle, and former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones wrote the string arrangements.[1] [2]

The album title came from Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods, a soul food restaurant in Athens. Its owner, Dexter Weaver, said automatic for the people to customers instead of you're welcome. Stipe, a regular, came with Bertis Downs to ask permission. Weaver's place had been burglarized the night before, and at first he thought they were salesmen, but he broke into a smile when he heard what they wanted. The star on the cover has nothing to do with the restaurant. It was part of a motel sign in Miami near the studio, and at one stage the album was going to be called Star. Buck had also joked about calling it Unforgettable, after Natalie Cole's album beat Out of Time for album of the year at the Grammys.[1] [2] [3]

Man on the Moon started with a simple chord change from Berry, which Buck finished into a song. Stipe was stuck for words right up to the final week of recording. He even argued it should be an instrumental, but the band refused. So he walked around Seattle with his Walkman and came back with a tribute to the comedian Andy Kaufman, tangled up with Elvis, wrestling and the rumor that the moon landing was faked. The track was mixed that night and sent off the next day. All those yeah, yeah, yeahs were a friendly jab at Kurt Cobain, whom Stipe had promised to out yeah. In 1999 the song gave its title to Milos Forman's Kaufman film, and R.E.M. wrote the score. Its single, The Great Beyond, became their biggest British hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Everybody Hurts was mostly Bill Berry's song. He brought it in as a one minute country tune with no chorus, and the band slowly shaped it into something like an Otis Redding soul ballad. Ironically Berry barely plays on it, as a cheap drum machine keeps the beat. Buck said the lyric was unusually plain because it was aimed at teenagers. Its video, a vast traffic jam on a San Antonio freeway with the drivers' thoughts shown as subtitles, became one of the era's best known. In 1995 the British charity the Samaritans ran newspaper ads made of nothing but the song's lyrics and their helpline number. In 2010 it was re-recorded by an all star cast for Haiti earthquake relief, and R.E.M. waived their royalties.[1] [2]

Automatic for the People came out in October 1992, reached number two in America and number one in Britain, and has sold more than eighteen million copies. Many critics, and Buck and Mills themselves, call it the band's best. Again there was no tour, and with Stipe looking thin and the album full of mortality, a cruel rumor spread that he was dying of AIDS. Freddie Mercury had died of the disease only a year before. Mills dismissed it in blunt terms, and Buck said the whole band had been tested. Stipe chose not to deny it loudly at first, because he did not want to further stigmatize people living with AIDS. He later said that hysteria naturally fell on anyone famous, gaunt, or of unclear sexuality. The album lost the album of the year Grammy to The Bodyguard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grief, noise and a collapse on stage

In early 1993 the band met in Acapulco and planned their next moves. Berry, who was eager to tour, insisted the next album had to rock. Then tragedy struck twice. On the thirty first of October 1993, Stipe's close friend, the actor River Phoenix, died of an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Stipe said he could not write for almost five months. On the fifth of April 1994, in the middle of the sessions, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana took his own life. Stipe had tried to pull him out of his despair with a musical project. He sent Cobain a plane ticket and a car, but at the last minute Cobain called to say he could not come. Stipe wrote Let Me In for him, and the album was dedicated to River Phoenix.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sessions were tense. Berry and Mills fell ill, Stipe had an abscessed tooth, and by the time they reached Los Angeles the band members were barely in the studio at the same time. Stipe later said that in one small room none of them could speak to each other, and they effectively broke up before talking it through. The result, Monster, came out in September 1994 and sounded nothing like the last two albums, all distorted guitars and seventies glam. Stipe sang as a string of creepy characters obsessed with fame. It debuted at number one in America and Britain. Yet within a few years it became notorious as the R.E.M. record most often found in second hand bins, and in 2019 Scott Litt remixed it, admitting he had long regretted the murky original mix.[1] [2]

The first single, What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, took its title from a bizarre crime. On the fourth of October 1986, the CBS news anchor Dan Rather was punched and kicked on Park Avenue in New York by a man who kept demanding, Kenneth, what is the frequency? For years many people doubted his strange story. In 1997 the attacker was identified as William Tager, who by then was in prison for killing an NBC stagehand named Campbell Montgomery outside the Today show studio in 1994. Tager believed the networks were beaming signals into his brain. Stipe wrote the song about a man trying and failing to understand the younger generation. In 1995 Dan Rather himself sang it with R.E.M. at a soundcheck at Madison Square Garden, shown on Letterman's show.[1] [2]

In January 1995 R.E.M. went back on the road for the first time in six years, with support acts including Radiohead and Sonic Youth. On the first of March, on stage in Lausanne, Switzerland, Bill Berry collapsed. He had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. He was operated on immediately and recovered fully within a month. It was only the start. In July Mills needed abdominal surgery, and in August Stipe had emergency surgery for a hernia. Through it all the band kept writing. Borrowing an idea from Radiohead, they carried eight track recorders and taped new songs at soundchecks and shows. Mills said that surviving Berry's collapse brought them closer than ever, and that after that crisis, making a record felt easy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1996 the band parted with Jefferson Holt, their manager of fifteen years, reportedly after complaints that he had sexually harassed a member of their office staff. Both sides called it a mutual, confidential agreement, and Bertis Downs became manager. That August, Downs walked onto the stage at a Warner Music convention in Anaheim and handed the chairman a telegram. R.E.M. had re-signed for a reported eighty million dollars for five albums, then the biggest recording contract ever, and the staff gave a standing ovation. New Adventures in Hi-Fi followed in September, built on those road tapes. Its first single, E-Bow the Letter, featured Stipe's hero Patti Smith and was written about River Phoenix. Warner blamed the gloomy single for weaker sales, but Stipe still calls it the band at their peak.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A three legged dog

In the spring of 1997 the band gathered at Buck's house in Hawaii to demo new songs full of drum loops. By October, after months of thinking and talks with Downs and Mills, Bill Berry told the others he was leaving. He made one condition. He would not quit if it meant the end of R.E.M. So the other three agreed to carry on without replacing him. Berry said he had lost his enthusiasm and was ready to stop being a pop star. Stipe put it memorably. A three legged dog is still a dog, he said. It just has to learn to run differently. Berry went home to his hay farm near Athens. Decades later he admitted he did regret leaving, a little later on, and said the aneurysm had drained his old drive.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Without a drummer, the others were lost at first. As Mills put it, you cannot rehearse without one. In February 1998 they started again in San Francisco with a new producer, Pat McCarthy, plus session drummers and drum machines. Stipe was hit by writer's block, and the sessions grew so tense that the band nearly split. Downs called an emergency meeting, and after mixing they spent a week together in Idaho in what one biographer called group therapy. Stipe said it was the first time he had to imagine life without R.E.M., and it terrified him. Up came out in October 1998, electronic and fragile. For the first time the lyrics were printed in full. It sold far less than before in America, but Europe, especially Britain, embraced them.[1] [2] [3]

The trio found its feet again. The Great Beyond, from the Man on the Moon film, reached number three in Britain in 2000, their highest chart position there. Reveal, released in May 2001, was a sunny, lush summer record made in Vancouver and Ireland with touring players Scott McCaughey, Ken Stringfellow and drummer Joey Waronker. Its single Imitation of Life reached number six in Britain. Stipe was worried that one song, Disappear, borrowed from Radiohead's How to Disappear Completely, so he called Thom Yorke. Yorke told him not to worry, because lines in his own song had come from something Stipe once told him. That November R.E.M. played themselves on The Simpsons, in the episode Homer the Moe. The band asked that Bill Berry not be drawn, so the cartoon drummer resembled a session player.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 2001 Peter Buck boarded a British Airways flight from Seattle to London, where R.E.M. were to play a Freedom Day concert in Trafalgar Square. Crew and witnesses said he drank around fifteen glasses of wine, tried to push a CD into a drinks trolley, tore up a warning card in the captain's face and declared that he was R.E.M. In a struggle over a pot of yogurt, it burst over two flight attendants. He was charged with assault, being drunk on a plane and damaging crockery. At his 2002 trial, Buck said a sleeping pill had reacted with the wine and left him with no memory at all. The prosecution called that a desperate lie. Bono and Stipe spoke up for his character, and the jury cleared him on every charge.[1] [2] [3]

In 2003 Berry surprised everyone by joining the band on stage in Raleigh, North Carolina, singing on Radio Free Europe and drumming on the early song Permanent Vacation. But Around the Sun in 2004 was a low point. It was their first album since 1988 to miss the American top ten, and the band later disowned it. Buck said it sounded like people bored with their own material, and Mills called it unfocused. Around this time Bill Rieflin, a veteran of the industrial band Ministry, became their regular drummer. That year R.E.M. also joined the Vote for Change tour backing John Kerry. In 2006, rehearsing for their induction into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, all four original members recorded John Lennon's Number Nine Dream for an Amnesty International album about Darfur.[1] [2] [3]

Going out on their own terms

In March 2007 R.E.M. were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their very first year of eligibility, at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder gave the speech, and Bill Berry sat behind the drums again. They played Gardening at Night, which Stipe dedicated to his father and called the band's first real song after twenty or thirty failed efforts, plus Man on the Moon, Begin the Begin and a cover of the Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog. The failure of Around the Sun still stung. Buck recalled even Stipe saying that another bad record would finish them. So they went back to their roots, testing new songs in public for five nights at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin that summer, calling the shows working rehearsals.[1] [2] [3]

At the urging of U2's the Edge, they worked with producer Jacknife Lee and recorded fast. Accelerate came out in the spring of 2008, short, loud and guitar driven, and debuted at number two in America and number one in Britain, their eighth British chart topper. Rolling Stone called it one of the best records they had ever made. The Accelerate tour of 2008 turned out to be their last. It had one strange moment. In September, straight after a show in Helsinki, Buck's signature Rickenbacker guitar, used since Chronic Town, was stolen from the stage. An anonymous source returned it nine days later. R.E.M.'s final full concert came in Mexico City that November, although nobody announced it as a farewell.[1] [2] [3] [4]

During that 2008 tour, the three of them began talking about ending the band. They made one last album, Collapse into Now, recorded in Berlin, Nashville and New Orleans, with guests including Patti Smith and Eddie Vedder. They made a video for every song but refused to tour. Mills said the most emotional day was in a beautiful hall in Berlin called the Meistersaal, where they knew they were probably playing together as R.E.M. for the last time. The cover showed the band for the first time, with Stipe waving. It was a goodbye, Stipe said later, and nobody got it. The album came out in March 2011 and fulfilled their Warner contract. Mills said later there were see you later messages hidden in the lyrics.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty first of September 2011, R.E.M. announced on their website that they were calling it a day as a band. There were no falling outs and no lawyers, they said, just lifelong friends deciding together. Stipe quoted a wise man who said the skill in attending a party is knowing when to leave. Buck later explained that Stipe had said he needed to be away from it for a long time, and Buck replied, how about forever? Mills said they had wanted to prove they could still make great records, and then do something no band had done, shake hands and walk away as friends. A farewell compilation followed that November, named after a quip Buck made in 1988, that R.E.M. was part lies, part heart, part truth and part garbage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life after R.E.M.

The four went their own ways, but never far apart. Buck made solo albums pressed only on vinyl and played in a string of side bands like the Baseball Project and Filthy Friends. When he married in 2013, the other three original members played at the wedding. Mills toured a concerto for violin, rock band and orchestra with his childhood friend Robert McDuffie, and in 2014, while on stage with Joseph Arthur, he broke the news that David Letterman was retiring. Stipe turned to photography books, produced an album for Fischerspooner and released solo singles. And in 2022, twenty five years after leaving, Bill Berry returned to music with a new Athens band called the Bad Ends, whose debut album arrived in January 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The wider R.E.M. family suffered losses. In November 2017 Scott McCaughey, their sideman since 1994, had a stroke, and Buck, Mills and Berry played benefit concerts to help with his bills. He recovered well enough to perform again. Bill Rieflin, their drummer from 2003 to the end, went on to play with King Crimson. He had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2011, and he died on the twenty fourth of March 2020. Keyboard player Ken Stringfellow, who toured with them from 1998 to 2005, faced allegations of sexual misconduct from three former girlfriends in 2021. He denied them. Meanwhile, when Donald Trump used Everybody Hurts in a video in 2019, the band replied with the words World Leader Pretend, and the clip was removed after a copyright complaint.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band insisted there would be no reunion. They did play together privately at a party for Bertis Downs in France in 2016, but in 2021 Stipe said a comeback would be tacky and probably money grabbing. Then in June 2024 R.E.M. entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In a TV interview hours earlier, Mills joked it would take a comet to reunite them, Berry said superglue, and Buck said it would never be as good. That night, on the thirteenth of June, all four played an acoustic Losing My Religion, their first public performance together since 2007. Stipe told the room they had decided early on to own their masters and split songwriting credits and royalties equally, and that he was proud they had stayed dear friends.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In late February 2025 it happened again, at the 40 Watt Club in Athens. The actor Michael Shannon and musician Jason Narducy were playing R.E.M. songs there, and all four original members joined them for Pretty Persuasion, with Berry on tambourine. Later that year the band put out a new mix of Radio Free Europe to raise money for the real Radio Free Europe, facing funding cuts from the Trump administration. Their legacy is secure. Radio Free Europe entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2009. Kurt Cobain said they dealt with success like saints. Thom Yorke admitted Radiohead ripped them off for years. And as of 2026, Stipe has said his long awaited first solo album is on the way.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

The people around R.E.M.

Michael Stipe and Peter Buck. They met across the counter at Wuxtry Records in 1980, bonded over punk records, and founded the band together. Buck pushed R.E.M. musically, and Stipe said later there is a body of work that would not exist without that pushing. Their bond was tested after Berry left. Stipe described Buck as one of the smartest and most silent people he knew, and said the two never had the conversation that might have eased that time. At Buck's 2002 trial, Stipe called him the elder brother he never had.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mike Mills and Bill Berry. They were the band's founding rhythm section long before R.E.M., friends from high school in Macon who played in bands like Shadowfax, shared an apartment and moved to Athens together. Berry kept his drums in the Mills family basement. When Berry decided to quit in 1997, he talked it over with Mills for months before telling the others. Mills later praised Berry's overlooked gifts as a singer and melody writer.[1] [2] [3]

R.E.M. and Jefferson Holt. Holt was a record store clerk in Chapel Hill who saw them play, moved to Athens and became their manager in 1981, driving the old blue van on their first Southern tours. Band publications often listed him alongside the four musicians. The partnership ended in 1996 in a confidential split, amid reported complaints of sexual harassment toward office staff that neither side confirmed. Holt later ran a small photography book press in North Carolina.[1] [2] [3]

R.E.M. and Bertis Downs. Downs was a young law teacher who saw the band in April 1980 and started helping with contracts as an unpaid volunteer. He became their attorney and, after Holt left in 1996, their manager, describing the band as the board and himself as the chief executive. He called emergency meetings that kept them together during Up, and after 2011 he said his job was orchestrating the band's afterlife. The four played a private reunion at his party in 2016.[1] [2] [3]

R.E.M. and Mitch Easter and Don Dixon. Easter recorded Radio Free Europe in his parents' garage studio in 1981, and with Don Dixon co-produced Murmur and Reckoning. When I.R.S. tried a slicker producer, the band fought to get them back. The pair protected the band's odd sound and acted as a buffer against the label. Dixon was later helped by an R.E.M. tribute benefit after a heart attack in 2001, and Easter oversaw the 2025 Radio Free Europe reissue.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

R.E.M. and Scott Litt. Litt produced six albums with the band from Document in 1987 to New Adventures in Hi-Fi in 1996, their most successful era. He helped shape Losing My Religion, Automatic for the People and Monster. The partnership ended in 1997 as the band sought a new sound and Litt was busy starting a label. Years later he remixed Monster, saying he had long regretted burying its vocals.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain. Cobain idolized R.E.M., saying they handled their success like saints, and the two singers became close. Stipe was chosen as godfather to Cobain's daughter Frances Bean, and in 2023 he officiated at her wedding. In early 1994 Stipe tried to rescue his friend with a recording project, sending a plane ticket and a car. Cobain cancelled at the last minute and died weeks later. Stipe wrote Let Me In for him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant. The 10,000 Maniacs singer met Stipe in 1983 at an after show party that went badly, with Stipe so shy he escaped through a bathroom window. They became close friends and for a time a couple. Stipe credited her with politicizing his writing, and they made a pact to each write a song about the treatment of Native Americans, his being Green Grow the Rushes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Michael Stipe and Patti Smith. At fourteen Stipe read about Patti Smith in Creem magazine and bought her album Horses the day it came out. She became his idol, and Buck said seeing her live in 1976 changed his life. Years later she sang on E-Bow the Letter and on Blue, the closing song of their final album. In 1998 Stipe published a book about life on the road with her.[1] [2] [3]

Michael Stipe and Thom Yorke. Radiohead opened for R.E.M. in the mid nineties, and Stipe took Yorke under his wing, advising him on fame. His advice for tour stress, repeating I'm not here, this isn't happening, inspired Radiohead's How to Disappear Completely. Yorke called Stipe his favorite lyricist, joined R.E.M. on stage to sing E-Bow the Letter, and admitted Radiohead ripped off R.E.M. for years.[1] [2] [3]

Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey. They became friends when R.E.M. mixed Automatic for the People in Seattle, and McCaughey introduced Buck to his future wife, Stephanie Dorgan. Buck brought him into R.E.M. as a touring player in 1994, and he stayed until the end. Together they played in the Minus 5, Tuatara and the Baseball Project. After McCaughey's stroke in 2017, Buck helped lead benefit concerts for him.[1] [2]

R.E.M. and Warren Zevon. In 1987 Buck, Mills and Berry were the core of Zevon's band for his comeback album Sentimental Hygiene, with Stipe singing backup on one track. During those sessions the four, with Zevon singing, recorded an album as the Hindu Love Gods, one of many joke names they used around Athens. It came out in 1990, without a tour.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about R.E.M.

• Michael Stipe's first public performance was probably at a 1977 high school battle of the bands, singing covers of Gimme Shelter and Rush's Working Man. A classmate named Craig Franklin talked him into it, although Stipe insisted he did not sing. The band was simply called the Band. The story was uncovered by biographer Robert Dean Lurie.[1]
• Before settling on R.E.M., the band considered names including Cans of Piss and Twisted Kites. Another rejected option was Negro Eyes. In the end Stipe picked the three letters at random from a dictionary, or so the official story goes.[1]
• On their first tours of the South, each member lived on a food allowance of two dollars a day. Manager Jefferson Holt drove the old blue van, as could any band member except Michael Stipe. They played pizza joints, coffee shops, gay bars and biker bars.[1]
• Peter Buck hated the first pressing of Radio Free Europe so much that he broke a copy and nailed it to his wall. The label owner, Jonny Hibbert, had overruled the band and released his own remix. He later joked that he was probably the last person ever to override Peter Buck.[1] [2]
• On the Chronic Town EP, producer Mitch Easter recorded Stipe singing outdoors, and crickets can be heard in the background. Easter said there were a lot of bugs out there. The sessions were so relaxed that one night everyone sat on the roof for hours watching fireworks instead of working.[1]
• The railway trestle pictured on the back of Murmur became an Athens landmark, and fans fought for years to save it. The city voted to preserve it in 2000, but it was approved for demolition in 2019. A replacement bridge with a replica of the old wooden design opened in April 2023.[1]
• An outtake called Voice of Harold is Stipe reading the liner notes of a gospel album over an R.E.M. backing track. Producer Don Dixon handed him the record because Stipe was singing too quietly to be heard. Stipe read it aloud instead, and the take was released as a B side.[1]
• Producer Don Dixon made a fake binaural recording head out of a cardboard box with two microphones stuck in it. He used it on Reckoning to capture the band's live feel. It let Mike Mills's backing vocals sound louder without drowning out Stipe.[1]
• Don't Go Back to Rockville was given a country makeover as a tribute to the band's lawyer, Bertis Downs, a country music fan. The song had been in their live set since 1980, but for Reckoning they rearranged it with a country rock feel in his honor.[1]
• Life and How to Live It was inspired by an Athens author who split his house in two and lived in each half in turn. His name was Brivs Mekis. After he died, copies of his book about how to live were found in the house, none of them ever sold or given away.[1]
• The title Lifes Rich Pageant comes from a line spoken by Inspector Clouseau in the 1964 Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark. After falling into a fountain, Clouseau shrugs that it is all part of life's rich pageant. The band dropped the apostrophe.[1]
• Rejected titles for the album Document included Mr. Evil Breakfast and Last Train to Disneyland. Buck suggested Last Train to Disneyland, feeling that Reagan's America was starting to resemble the theme park. Two other rejected titles are printed on the sleeve.[1]
• When Rolling Stone named R.E.M. America's best band in 1987, Bill Berry said the honor really belonged to fellow Athens band Pylon. Pylon's members took it as R.E.M. being gracious to the scene they came from. R.E.M. covered Pylon's song Crazy, and Pylon later opened for them on the Green tour.[1]
• When MTV asked Stipe to censor the topless women in the Pop Song 89 video, he put black bars over his own chest too. His reasoning was that a nipple is a nipple. The uncensored version was eventually posted on the band's YouTube channel in 2011, with an age restriction.[1]
• The lyrics of Stand were partly inspired by a friend who said she was bad with directions but knew her house faced south. Her name was Georgina Falzarano, and her partner recalled the conversation about which way is north and which way is south.[1]
• Stipe recorded his vocal for the Out of Time song Belong on a borrowed Walkman in a three car garage. The studio take sounded too clean to him. He liked the garage's echo, and noted there was a large tank of unidentified gas in there with him.[1]
• The song Texarkana never mentions Texarkana at all. Stipe started a song with that working title but could not finish it. Mike Mills wrote new lyrics and sang the lead in about thirty minutes, and the band kept the name because they liked it.[1]
• In September 2020, Losing My Religion became the first R.E.M. video to reach one billion views on YouTube. The Tarsem Singh clip had already won six MTV Video Music Awards in 1991, including video of the year.[1]
• Mike Mills played the piano part of Nightswimming on the same piano used for the coda of Derek and the Dominos' Layla. It was at Criteria Studios in Miami. Mills said the piano was not in great shape, but it had the history you like in an instrument.[1] [2]
• The Automatic for the People song Star Me Kitten was renamed because of a suggestion from Meg Ryan. Its working title used a much ruder word. Ryan, filming Sleepless in Seattle nearby, warned that kids in small towns could never buy an album with that word on it.[1]
• Monty Got a Raw Deal is about the actor Montgomery Clift, not the game show host Monty Hall. Stipe was inspired after a photographer who worked on The Misfits, one of Clift's last films, visited the studio with pictures from the set.[1] [2]
• In 1995 the Samaritans ran a British ad campaign made only of the lyrics of Everybody Hurts and their helpline number. The charity was trying to reach young men, who had a high suicide rate but rarely used crisis services.[1]
• The song What's the Frequency, Kenneth? slows down at the end because Mike Mills was suffering from appendicitis during the take. Buck said Mills slowed the pace, everyone followed, and then he noticed Mills looked strange. They rushed him to hospital and never redid the track.[1]
• Monster's orange bear cover began as a green balloon, and the chosen shots were the out of focus ones. Designer Chris Bilheimer changed the color and, down to his last few frames, took photos without bothering to focus. He and Stipe liked those best.[1]
• R.E.M.'s 1996 Warner contract was announced by surprise at a company convention, and thousands of employees gave a standing ovation. Bertis Downs walked on stage mid speech and handed the chairman a telegram from the band. The deal also returned ownership of their master recordings to them.[1]
• In 2008 Peter Buck's signature Rickenbacker guitar was stolen from the stage in Helsinki and returned by an anonymous source nine days later. He had used it live and in the studio since the Chronic Town sessions in 1982.[1]
• In the late nineties Peter Buck estimated his record collection at around twenty five thousand items. By his own count that was about ten thousand vinyl singles, six thousand albums and four thousand CDs.[1]
• When R.E.M. appeared on The Simpsons in 2001, they asked that former drummer Bill Berry not be animated. The cartoon drummer was drawn to resemble one of their session drummers instead. The episode, Homer the Moe, drew fourteen and a half million viewers.[1]
• Coldplay's Chris Martin suggested the title of the R.E.M. single Supernatural Superserious. The song had debuted at the Dublin working rehearsals in 2007 under the name Disguised. It became the band's only number one single in Norway.[1]
• Bill Berry says he never actually enjoyed being a drummer. He has said drums are not the most musical instrument and he never wrote a song on them. His favorite is the acoustic guitar, which he says he plays every day.[1]
• In 2023 a species of mushroom was named after Mike Mills. It is a species of the genus Pluteus, and it was named Pluteus millsii in his honor.[1]
• Stipe has said he did not realize the bass player made the low notes until R.E.M.'s second album. He told the Guardian he was that naive about how music was made in the early days.[1]
• Andy Warhol once insisted Michael Stipe was a pop star, and Stipe kept arguing he was just the singer in a band. Stipe says Warhol won the argument. Looking back, he concluded he is a pretty good pop star but not much of a rock star.[1]
• Automatic for the People's 2017 anniversary edition was the first music release in the Dolby Atmos format. The four disc set also included live recordings and demos.[1]
• Stipe voiced a reindeer named Schnitzel in the 1999 cartoon Olive, the Other Reindeer. He also played an ice cream man called Captain Scrummy on the children's show The Adventures of Pete and Pete.[1]
• The last full R.E.M. concert took place in Mexico City in November 2008. Nobody billed it as a farewell. The band never toured their final album, Collapse into Now.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.