7/30/2019 Lifes Rich Pageant Liner

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Should we talk about the weather?

Believe it or not, this is a fitting place to begin a dis-

cussion of Lifes Rich Pageant the fo urt h full-

length album by R.E.M. as weather is one of the

reasons it marked such a departure from its dark and

moody predecessor, Fables of the Reconstruction.

Fableshad been recorded overseas by an ex-

hausted, out-of-sorts R.E.M. in a cold, gray and unfa-miliar land. (Not to denigrate Fables, a deeply

mysterious and intoxicating album.) By c ontrast, how-

ever, Pageantgot made by a rested, rejuvenated band

during a warm, sunny season in the welcoming Mid -

west. Both meteorology and mental health were in

brighter, better places during the 1986 sessions for

Lifes Rich Pageant.

One thing I really remember about this record was

that the weather was so good, says Mike Mills. It

was sunshiny, and honestly we felt great about com-

ing into the studio and making noise. We had gotten a

chance to recuperate and regenerate, and we were al -

most a different band than we were when we

recorded Fables. Its the sound of the band in a good

place.

On Lifes Rich Pageant, they worked with Don

Gehman, renowned for producing a string of punchy,

soulful heartland-rock albums by John Mellencamp.

Gehman was a solid commercial craftsman with a fo-

cused, straightforward approach to record-making.

As a result, Lifes Rich Pageantwas the album on

which the fog lifted and the world got a clearer look at

R.E.M. as an honest-to-God American rock band.

We were ready to challenge ourselves, Mills notes,

so we brought in Don Gehman. We didnt care about

hits, but he did. He was trying to take this band that

had made a murky, emotionally down kind of recordand shine some light on it, brighten it up. And we

were okay with that. We thought maybe now was the

time to make a rock record and Gehman was the guy

to take us there.

Vocalist Michael Stipe brought more lyrical directness

and enunciated clarity to Lifes Rich Pageantthan on

any prior R.E.M. record. This, too, stemmed from

Gehman, who pushed Stipe on a matter he was

ready and willing to address.

As Mills recalls, He really challenged Michael by

asking, What do you have to say? Do you really

have things you want to say? If you do, lets hear

them in the literal sense of the word. He wanted the

vocals to be very clear and upfront, and by this point

we were ready to try that.

Michael had been evolving as a singer and lyricist ,

and he was ready to put his lyrics a little more front

and center, Mills adds. So this was a difficult but

logical next step.

Lifes Rich Pageant is a solid album with moods

and tempos that range from unrelentingly driven

(Hyena) to folkish and pensive (The Flowers of

Guatemala). The album contains at least four

bonafide R.E.M. classics Begin the Begin, Fall on

Me, Cuyahoga and These Days which boast an

indelible mix of melody and message. There are even

a few whimsical changes of pace the demented,

vaguely Greek-sounding Underneath the Bunker and

R.E.M.s cover of a tuneful Sixties obscurity, Super-

man (originally by the Clique) to lighten the albums

otherwise dominant mood of committed resistance.

Begin the Begin and These Days are brash, hard-

hitting tracks that moved the group one confident step

closer to the rock mainstream without sacrificing their

enigmaticessence. Both were calls to arms issued

during a period of conservative insurgency. Lifes Rich

Pageantwas written and recordedmidway throughRonald Reagans second term. During this prolonged

swing to the right, R.E.M. challenged its youthful con-

stituency by issuing a virtual call to arms. Both directly

and obliquely, Stipes lyrics expressed concern in mat-

ters related to the ailing environment and what he per-

ceived as Americas reckless, bullying foreign policy.

Fall On Me and Cuyahoga, on the other hand, are

among R.E.M.s loveliest and most elegiac songs,

representing an artful approach to the folk-protest

idiom. Cuyahoga is heartbreakingly sad and lovely,

from Mike Mills burbling bass lines (which open the

song) to the euphonious harmony between Stipes

keening vocal and Peter Bucks strummy guitar.Stipes painterly lyrics on Fall On Me are subtle

enough to allow for interpretation, be it lamenting

acid rain or resisting political oppression.

Among the lyrics were these poignant images: Buy

the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell

the sky. Personally, I believe Stipe, in a subtle and

nonscientific way, prophesied a radical thesis that

environmental writer Bill McKibben would advance in

his 1989 opus The End of Nature. To wit, that by

polluting the atmospher e on a grand scale, hu-

mankind had gone beyond localized consequences to

actually altering the global climate, leaving us with a

world that was, sadly and even apocalyptically, nolonger natural.

On Lifes Rich Pageant, however, anger and despair

is mingled with hope and determination. In Begin the

Begin, driven by Bucks ferocious, flinty guitar riffs,

Stipe thunders, Lets begin again. In These Days

he sings of and to the young, We are concern/ We

are hope despite the times. In Cuyahoga he

urges, Lets put our heads together and start a new

country up. There are indeed glimmers of hope in

these rallying cries.

In It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M Companion,

biographer Marcus Gray argued that Lifes Rich Pag-

eantand Fables of the Reconstructionshared an un-

derlying preoccupation, despite their dissimilarities.

The concept behind the album as a whole is not a

million miles away from that behind Fables, he

wrote. On the 1985 album, Michael makes his

Utopia from an idealized dream of the past; on the

1986 release, the only real difference is that Utopia

is presented as a future possibility, a goal to strive

toward. Its a fairly compelling difference, but the

point is well-taken.

This much is certain: Lifes Rich Pageantwas literallya hard-hitting album, due in large part to Bill Berrys

noticeably larger drum sound. Bill was very happy

to talk drum-miking and mike placement with Don,

who got a crackling drum sound, Mills recalls. The

drums really drive the record in a lot of ways. Bill

was thrilled to be doing it, and that energy trans-

ferred to all of us.

All of this still didnt give R.E.M. a hit single, though it

absolutely should have. Fall On Me stalled

just insi de B ill board s H ot 1 00 a t #9 6. T he

album itself fared much better, becoming

R.E.M.s first gold album.

Given all the strides the band made wit h Gehman

on Lifes Rich Pageant, it might seem somewhat

surprising that they didnt work wi th him again. They

would have had him back, says Mills, but it just didnt

work out at the time. For their next album, 1987s

Document, they tapped Scott Litt as their co-pro-

ducer, and this evolved into the groups most long-

lived relationship with a recordist.

Documentwas an even bigger seller that netted the

group its breakthrough single, The One I Love,

which made the Top Ten. But Lifes Rich Pageantwas

the album on which R.E.M. k icked open the door to amore extroverted future.

As Anthony DeCurtis noted in his lead review in

Rolling Stone:

Lifes Rich Pageant is the most outward-looking

record R.E.M. has made, a worthy companion to the

groups bracing live shows and its earned status as a

do-it-yourself and do-it-your-way model for young Amer-

ican bands....For R.E.M, the underground ends here.

There was a certain amount of confidence in R.E.M.

when we joined up with Don to make Lifes Rich

Pageant, Mills acknowledges. We had three al-

bums under our belt. We felt good about who we

were, and we felt optimistic about what we were ca-

pable of. We knew we had a bunch of songs we re-

ally liked, and we were happy to take it to

another level.

By Parke PuterbaughApril, 2011