REM never put out a proper live album during the 1980’s or
1990’s, so while their deluxe album reissues of the past several years have
been transparent cash-grabs with a marketing bullseye fixed squarely on
forty-something white people, they have nevertheless filled the one obvious gap
in the band’s catalog by usually including an entire archival live show with
each album.
The new Monster
re-release truly activates my nostalgia receptors, though, because the attached
25-song live disc was recorded a whopping six days after the one and only time
that I ever saw REM.
In late May of 1995, I was a couple weeks out of high
school. I remember it as an almost ludicrously idyllic summer, in spite of the
fact that I got mono at the end of it. I worked a couple shit jobs
(telemarketer; McDonald’s) but those were just way stations before I headed to college
in August. I was an REM fanboy dating a Cocteau Twins fangirl. I hung out with
a group of friends I’d mostly known since forever—the friend I met right after
the eighth grade was still “the new guy.” We played a lot of pool; we ate a lot
of junk food; we jostled for control of the stereo. We bantered and hoped that
any girls present would laugh. We developed a fascination with stealing traffic
cones. It still sticks in my head that all summer long, whenever I headed home
at some late warm quiet hour, if I happened to look up I would see Jupiter prominent
in the southern sky, silently watching as time flew off its spindle.
But for me, in 1995, the only pantheon that mattered was
Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe. REM simultaneously exploded and turtled in the
early 90’s, as they did not tour to support either of what turned out to be
their two biggest albums. My wife, who is a handful of years older than I am
(and who furthermore was a hip city girl rather than a lumbering hill person),
saw multiple REM shows while she was in high school in the late 80’s, but for
the 90’s kids who got roped in by “Losing My Religion,” there was some serious
pent-up demand for an REM tour. So my friends bought a bunch of tickets and we
plotted a road trip to Kansas City.
I know that the idea of car full of teenagers road-tripping
to a rock concert conjures images out of Dazed
and Confused, but that, I must report, was not us. Outside of some
low-grade vandalism, none of us ever got up to much in the way of hijinks. We
were excited to see opening act Sonic Youth, the band that played “Teenage
Riot,” but that was the extent of our interest in rioting. The only one of us
who hadn’t been on the debate team all the way through high school had played
Horace Vandergelder in the drama club’s production of Hello Dolly. We wouldn’t get deep into our particular token vices
(weed, whiskey, Criterion DVD’s, etc) until we got a bit older. And yes, we
were a pack of 18-year-old boys convinced of our own cleverness, so I’m sure we
were more than a little annoying—hell, we’re still pretty annoying—but we were
not exactly the “holy shit hide your daughters” brigade.
When I first gave it a listen a few weeks ago, I was not
quite prepared for how much the live disc on the Monster reissue would take me back to that night 24 years ago. I’m
also a bit surprised how well I remember the show (apparently my memory was
better before I started drinking). The show on the reissue is from Chicago, and
its setlist is pretty similar to the Kansas City show: the songs from Monster and the radio hits are all the
same, and then there’s some difference in the assortment of older non-singles.
“Try Not to Breathe” is what I remember as the
highlight of the KC show, stripped of its Automatic for the People stateliness in favor of Monster-era sturm-und-drang, so I was
bummed that it’s not on the Chicago set. But every other song I specifically
recall is here. Both sets opened with “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth,” because
once you’ve written the riff to “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” why would you
open a show with anything else?
The disc on the reissue opens with three straight songs from
Monster, and you can tell that the
band is laser-focused on whatever glammed-out post-grunge demon-muse they were
chasing circa 1994. “Circus Envy”, which
I would not normally list as a favorite REM song, sounds absolutely amazing in
this live version. I’m not any kind of guitar gear nerd, so I have no idea what
Peter Buck is actually doing, but whatever it is, his guitar variously roars
and spits and sizzles while Michael Stipe growls and Mike Mills is, as he
always was, nothing less than one of the best harmony singers of the rock era.
The best stuff is by and large the deep cuts—certainly the
band seems more excited about playing them. “Country Feedback” is positioned
right after “Man on the Moon” to be the bathroom break dirge for all the
non-true-believers, but that doesn’t change the fact that it rules. It’s
followed by another excellent deep cut in “Monty Got a Raw Deal”, a song I
loved for years before I had any idea who Monty was or why he got a raw deal
(fwiw: Montgomery Clift; persecuted for his sexual orientation). When you’re a
teenager, though, you don’t really need to know why someone got a raw deal to
be able to dig a pissed-off rock song about it.
Also memorable is the version of “Orange Crush” included
here, which kicks all the ass on Earth. I need to check with Nick, but I
believe that is the correct musicological terminology.
Anyway, I remember that night in KC being a whale of a good
time. Sonic Youth opened and freaked out anyone who bought tickets because
they’d heard REM on the station that played Hootie. My friends and I bought
t-shirts in various shades of hideous early-90’s green that would soon be discontinued
as part of the Contract with America. We were well-centered in the
amphitheater, so the sound was good. I’d seen other shows before—Smashing
Pumpkins a year before was a notable highlight—but that was in Springfield
rather than KC, at a venue I associated primarily with the Sertoma Chili
Cook-Off, and Smashing Pumpkins weren’t REM. REM was the first time I’d seen a
concert with that many people, with that many lights, with that level of audio
equipment, and while it’s easy to dismiss all the trappings of a huge concert
as kinda hokey, there’s a reason people keep going. A few of my friends sat
down to protest the very existence of “Everybody Hurts,” and while I strongly
sympathize with that point of view, I couldn’t bring myself to openly
disrespect the band. They closed with “It’s the End of the World As We Know
It,” because once you’ve written the coda to that song why would you close a
show with anything else? We ate at Waffle House on the way home, as was the
custom at the time.
You know, of course, what happens next. My high school
friends and I all headed off to our various futures: new jobs, new schools, new
cities, new friends. We kept in touch, we fell out of touch, we got back in
touch, we meet up from time to time. REM, too, reached an ending that was also
a beginning—one more album with the original lineup, then Bill Berry left the
band, and their albums were never quite great anymore. At the same time, the
popular market for rock music turned to Limp Bizkit and Nickleback, the trends
in critic-approved music became less pastoral and rock-centric, and REM never
again mattered as much as they used to, to me or to the world. September, as
some old pop crooner once sang, was coming soon.
