It’s been a couple weeks since R.E.M. announced their break-up, so obviously I’m a bit late to the party on that. And really, I don’t have much to say about it that hasn’t been said by others. Though I have a long history with the band (a pretty big fan in high school and college, and a resurgent interest the past few years), they were never a change-your-life type band for me, the way they seemed to be for others (now, the Replacements, they changed my life!). So I’m just going to throw up this link, to Rolling Stone’s 1987 cover story about the band, which they kindly put online last week.
I actually read this article back when I was 15 or so, and it served as my introduction to the band’s story and mythology, though I couldn’t tell you whether I read this before or after I had actually started listening to the band (which happened when my older brother went off to college and I pilfered his cassette copies of Life’s Rich Pageant and Fables).
To my surprise, I actually remember a lot of stuff from the article — the description of Peter Buck on stage “cutting a Keith Richards-esque figure”, Buck’s comment about how he thought the band had “one of those Top Twenty all-time rock & roll great records” in them — so it must have made a real impression on my young mind. I guess rock music in general had a mystique to teenaged me that’s hard for today’s me to grasp.
Anyway, thanks for the music, guys.
