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Femme FataleRadio Free EuropeGardening at Night

9-9Windout

Letter Never SentSitting Still

Driver 8So. Central Rain7 Chinese Bros.

HarborcoatHyena

Pretty PersuasionLittle America

Second Guessing(Don't Go Back To) Rockville

Conventional wisdom has it that second albums pose a problem,

especially for those acts whose debut releases have enjoyed unanticipatedsuccess. But R.E.M. were never much concerned with following conven-tion, and Reckoning, their 1984 follow-up to Murmur, served both to rein-force that record's remarkable sense of promise and to confound expecta-tions. For where Murmur had downplayed itself with acoustic instrumenta-tion and purposefully complex arrangements, Reckoning revealed itselfinstead, for the most part, as a gloriously rambunctious representation of thelive set at a time that the group could be found playing, on average, everyother night. At the same time, by including the group's first true ballads,Reckoning captured a deeply expressive melancholia that hinted at theact's artistic depth. Its variety but one of its many virtues, Reckoning washailed upon release as another - but markedly different - instantclassic, and confirmed R.E.M. as the most exciting new band of theirAmerican generation.

Certainly, had they stopped long enough to think about it, the stakes werehigh for Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe as theyapproached their second album in late 1983. Only thirty months had passedsince the quartet had gathered in the back of a small, dilapidated church intheir college hometown of Athens, Georgia, to play a set of assorted coverversions and derivative “originals” before a crowd of equally drunken friendsfor a birthday party. Something had clicked that night - not just somethingmusical, but a fortuitous balancing of personalities, an equal distribution ofdistinct talents - and it propelled R.E.M. to overnight status as the biggestband in a musically thriving town. From there, thanks to the committedefforts of a loose network of college radio stations, print fanzines, and a slewof self-sufficient groups who saw poverty-stricken backwoods touring not asa duty but a privilege, R.E.M. had enjoyed rapid recording progress, from theindependent single “Radio Free Europe,” to a deal with I.R.S. and the ChronicTown EP of 1982. The following spring delivered Murmur, a debut of almostunconditional beauty, and one that, to the profound surprise of the groupitself, sold in the six figures on its way to the Top 40 of the American albumcharts.

The stakes would have been higher still had R.E.M. waited until the New Yearto start work on Reckoning, for in the interim, the American music mediahailed Murmur as the best, or damn-near-to-it, album of 1983. Rightly so,one could argue (especially from the benefit of 25 years' hindsight), but acrown laced with potential thorns nonetheless. Fortunately for all concerned,by the time such honors were bestowed, R.E.M. had Reckoning all but mixedand mastered. “We were writing tons of songs,” said Peter Buck, lookingback on this period of excessive activity just a few years later and lookingforward, unwittingly perhaps, as he acknowledged that “everyone I know,the longer they write, the less songs they write.” In other words, the R.E.M.of 1983 barely gave expectations a second thought. “I knew when wewalked in on the first day,” said Bill Berry, “that the songs were better thanthe ones on the first album, so I wasn't worried at all.”

That R.E.M. were spoiled for choice was evident by the demos recorded inearly November in San Francisco with Neil Young's producer Elliot Mazer:twenty-four songs - a double album's worth - in just one day. A week laterthey were in Europe for the first time, where British audiences, generallycynical at the time about American “new wave” acts of the era, werequickly set straight by a live TV appearance and two London club shows ofunbridled energy, not to mention rare length (by British club band stan-dards) and the inclusion of five as yet-unrecorded songs.

Despite the session with Mazer, there was rarely any doubt that R.E.M. wouldreturn to the source of Murmur's success when it came time to committhose songs to vinyl. And so, in early December, they drove the two hundredmiles up Route 85 to Charlotte, North Carolina, where co-producers MitchEaster and Don Dixon were waiting for them at Reflection Sound Studio.Much of Murmur's famed murkiness had been the result of that duo'spainstakingly deliberate studio techniques, but Reckoning was intended allalong as something of an antithesis, a chance to turn up the volume, tear upthe rule book, and capture instead R.E.M.'s on-stage mojo as instinctivelydeveloped over the course of so much touring.

The process proved almost embarrassingly painless. Basic tracks wererecorded during a week's worth of on-off work prior to Christmas, overdubsand mixing completed during another week in early January. The band tooktime out to play a farewell show in neighboring Greensboro at Friday's, oneof the ad-hoc venues (in this case, a pizza bar) at which they'd built their rep-utation; spent a day in the studio filming the video for “So. Central Rain,”Michael Stipe singing live to tape in (short-lived) protest at the MTV-driventrend for lip-synching; and devoted a full evening and night-time to therecording of various covers and novelties direct to two-track, many of whichwould show up on subsequent b-sides and compilations. As Mitch Easterlater observed, it was much like he imagined the Rolling Stones maderecords in the early days; you either got it right or you didn't.

R.E.M. got it right. Mike Mills' and Bill Berry's rhythm parts typicallymade it onto tape in just two or three takes, a result of the former marchingband partners' increasingly innate understanding of each other. PeterBuck's Rickenbacker guitar overdubs - and there were usually several ofthem - followed with equal ease, his arpeggiated riffs weaving aroundMills' contrapuntal melodies in a manner that soon became an R.E.M.trademark (and later, something of a burden). The comfortably loose livefeel could be heard in such diverse tracks as the off-kilter opener“Harborcoat,” the enervating three-year old rocker “Pretty Persuasion,”and the cautiously melodic “Letter Never Sent.” At a time when clicktracks, gated drums and booming snares were the norm, it was especial-ly refreshing to hear every component of Berry's acoustic kit being playedin unison.

As for Michael Stipe, Reckoning found him not only trying to balance his“extreme shyness” with the glare of public recognition, but simultaneouslyforced to defend his reputation for vocal obfuscation. Pop lyrics, declared thesame conventional wisdom that expected R.E.M. to falter in the studio sec-ond album around, should be clearly enunciated, and preferably to referencefamiliar, obvious subject matter. Stipe, whose distinctly yearning delivery -and the initial mystery of his mumbles - had contributed so much to R.E.M.'spopularity, felt otherwise. “You write words to a song unlike you would speaka sentence and unlike you would speak a sentence off a page,” he told oneinterviewer at the time.

Ironically, if there was a single theme running through Reckoning, it was thatof communication. The title to “So. Central Rain” was taken from a headlineon television: the group had been in California earlier in 1983 when parts ofGeorgia became flooded, bringing down phone lines and preventing mem-bers from checking in on their families. And the finale “Little America” waswhat Buck called their “year in review,” a look at their world from the van-tage point of the road - replete with close-ups of generic “Magic Marts,”wide-angle references to the country's “empty wagon,” and the immediate-ly infamous shout-out to then manager, “Jefferson, I think we're lost.”

But then with “Camera,” Reckoning's stand-out ballad, the lyrics were morea matter of metaphor: the group had recently lost a close friend, their pho-tographer Carol Levy, in a car crash, and the pain showed - even if the detailsremained hidden - in Stipe's evocative imagery. Elsewhere, “Harborcoat,”“Pretty Persuasion” and “Time After Time (Annelise)” would forever beshrouded in mystery, and that was fine by the vocalist. “To give away every-thing is never good, at any time,” he said at the time of Reckoning's release.

Like his playing partners, Stipe captured several of his vocal performancesclose to the first take, but on both “Camera” and “7 Chinese Bros.,” heengaged in some light combat with the producers. Perhaps recognizing theintimacy of the former song, Easter and Dixon kept pushing for a definitivedelivery, until Stipe pushed back and insisted that they had it already.(“That's the one you hear,” said Easter, “and I think it's the best one too.”) Thelatter song's vocal only came together after Dixon handed Stipe a gospelalbum off the shelf, and suggested he loosen up by reading the sleeve notes;a recording of that unlikely take, “Voice of Harold,” later showed up on thecompilation Dead Letter Office.

Against all this, one song stood out as an anomaly. “(Don't Go Back To)Rockville” had first appeared in the live set in 1980 as something of a pop-punk thrash, but had subsequently been dropped and never seen the insideof a studio. This may have been because the words - written by Mike Mills(who also composed the melody) as a straight-faced plea to Athens friendIngrid Schorr not to return to her Maryland hometown - jarred alongside singerStipe's increasing poeticism. Yet when the group slowed it down to a countrypace at Reflection, as a favor for their legal advisor (and later manager) BertisDowns, they inadvertently created an anthem. It mattered not that the“Rockville” in question was a specific place, or that the song's subject was aparticular person; listeners took the generic town name to signify Anyplace,U.S.A., and frequently saw a part of themselves in the lyrics. The title itselfcould even be read as a musical metaphor, and as a result of all these inter-pretations, along with its easy melody, rousing chorus, and heartfelt arrange-ment - never, despite some naïve media accusations, a parody - “(Don't GoBack To) Rockville” became a rallying call for the new, fiercely independentAmerican music scene.

R.E.M.'s refusal to be sucked in by the mainstream at this time revealed itselfin several other ways, not least the album artwork. In America at least,Reckoning eschewed use of that title on the sleeve and placed as muchimportance on the spinal note “File Under Water,” a wry reference both to theband's lack of easy categorization as well as one of the album's recurringlyrical themes. LP sides were labeled “L” and “R” rather than “1” and “2,”and the back cover featured black and white photos of the band members,placed askew as if laid out for a fanzine, not a potential chart album. Thefront cover itself was a distinct (and distinctly non-commercial) painting byGeorgia folk artist Howard Finster of a two-headed serpent engrained withthe song titles. In a further commitment to local artists, R.E.M. then recruit-ed Athens painter James Herbert to film them walking through the nearbywhirly-gig gardens of sculptor Bill Miller, to which Herbert then applied his“rephotography” method for the unlikely, twenty-minute promo clip entitledLeft of Reckoning. Given all this, it was impossible for reviewers not to focustheir own word cameras on R.E.M.'s southern accent - but then groupsalways should evoke a sense of place, of coming from somewhere other thanjust a recording studio. R.E.M. were from Athens, Georgia, and proud of it.

Not that they saw much of their home town in 1984, instead spending almostthe entire year traversing the States (twice), Europe (twice), Mexico andJapan. On July 7, the “Little America” tour stopped in at Chicago's AragonBallroom, for a concert broadcast at the time by WXRT Radio and includedhere as a bonus disc that shows the depth and breadth of a live set thatchanged, literally, every night. The group not only touted its two hit albumsbut included songs that had yet to make it into the studio (“Hyena” would notshow up on record until 1986). But that was the nature of a group determinedto rewrite America's rock rule book. Not only did R.E.M. hand-pick its sup-port acts, but the sets sometimes featured songs by contemporaries TheReplacements and Jason and the Scorchers. “We like to think of ourselvesas the tip of the iceberg,” Buck told European journalists initially bemused bynews of a burgeoning American scene, before going a step further and pen-ning articles for leading music magazines on the subject while simultane-ously decrying what, on an MTV special painfully entitled The Cutting Edge,he famously described as the “cheese whiz” that passed for typical videofodder at the time.

All of which resonated with the group's increasingly committed following.Released in April 1984 to unanimously glowing reviews, Reckoning quicklymade the American Top 30, on its way to highly impressive Stateside salesof a quarter-million. It has remained a fans' favorite ever since, capturing formany the moment when R.E.M. rode highest their youthful crest of self-con-fidence. Reckoning can be viewed, in the big picture, as but the second of sixannual album releases, a remarkably prolific period of musical and commer-cial growth that would continue all the way through to 1988's Green. But itcan also be seen, in close-up, as a freeze-frame of a year otherwise spent inconstant motion, best summed up in the simple but stridently self-assuredchorus line to the exuberant “Second Guessing”: “Here we are.” And emphat-ically so.

-- Tony FletcherTony Fletcher is the author of Remarks Remade:

The Story Of R.E.M. and All Hopped Up and ReadyTo Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77.

He has also written biographies on Keith Moon,and Echo & The Bunnymen. British born, he now

lives in New York's Catskill Mountains.

femme fatale

radio free europe

gardening at night

9-9

windout

letter never sent

sitting still

driver 8

so. central rain

7 chinese bros.

harborcoat

hyena

pretty persuasion

little america

second guessing

(don't go back to) rockville

all songs by berry/buck/mills/stipe except “femme fatale” by lou reed, Oakfield Avenue Music (BMI)

recorded by timothy powellcourtesy of 93.1 fm wxrt / chicago

harborcoat

7 chinese bros.

so. central rain

pretty persuasion

time after time (annelise)

second guessing

letter never sent

camera

(don't go back to) rockville

little america

R LIVE AT THE ARAGON BALLROOMCHICAGO, IL, JULY 7, 1984 PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASEDBROADCAST ON WXRT-FM, CHICAGO

L THE ALBUMI.R.S. SP-70044 RELEASED APRIL 14, 1984

© 2009 I.R.S. Inc. Manufactured by A&M Records.

B0013032-02

Deluxe Edition Supervised by Dana G. SmartDeluxe Edition Compiled by Sig Sigworth

Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, New YorkArchive engineer: Pete Doell at Universal Mastering Studios West

Project Assistance: Michael Plen, Norm Winer & Barry Korkin

Design: Chris Bilheimer & Michael StipeBand Photos: Ed Colver

Coordinated for release by Monique McGuffin Newman

UMe thanks Bertis Downs, Kevin O'Neil, Randy Aronson, BethLopez-Barron, Kristen Bensch, Andy Skurow, Bill Waddell, and thestaffs of the Universal Music Tape Library and Universal Mastering Studios.