NY Times

"Did you see the drummer's hair?" the rock group Pavement once asked in a song, sarcastically referring to the obscurity of rock-band drummers. But after Keith Moon of the Who died in 1978, the band never regained its creative footing. And when John Bonham, Led Zeppelin's drummer, died in 1980, that band broke up, and it has refused to reunite under the name Led Zeppelin.

For a year, R.E.M. has been grappling with the loss of its drummer, Bill Berry, who suffered a brain aneurysm while on tour in 1995 and, after recovering, decided he'd rather lead a stable family life than a rock-and-roll one. In an interview at the Huntington Hotel here last week, Mr. Berry's absence was practically all the three remaining members of R.E.M. would talk about. The band was formed in Athens, Ga., in 1980 and went on to become one of the most influential rock bands of its era, without a change in its lineup until Mr. Berry's departure.

"I don't even know if we're a band anymore," the singer, Michael Stipe, said. "I almost feel like we're a musical collective at this point. I'm not really sure."

The bassist Mike Mills interrupted: "I'd call it a group. Collective sounds pretentious."

Mr. Stipe deferred, "I didn't mean it to sound like that." Peter Buck, loquacious guitarist of the group or collective or whatever, tried to solve the quandary: "We are three guys who write songs together, and then there are other guys who help record it. And we don't know who the other guys are from record to record."

Putting the final R.E.M. touch on the topic, Mr. Stipe added a statement as cryptic as his lyrics: "It's a revolving door, but the glass is on the outside."

The scene was perfect evidence of R.E.M.'s vaunted democracy, a band pact that gives all members equal songwriting credit on their albums and insists that all decisions must be unanimous. The loss of one-quarter of that democracy weighs heavy on the band's latest record, "Up" (released yesterday on Warner Brothers). To fill the hole in its rhythm section, the band used a variety of drummers, drum machines, found objects and vintage electronic instruments. Mr. Buck, the guitarist, played most of the bass parts on the record; Mr. Mills, the bassist, ended up playing chiefly keyboards and guitar, and Mr. Stipe even let loose with a guitar solo. It all makes R.E.M. seem like a string of Christmas lights: unscrew one, and they all go haywire.

"We've always felt that there aren't any rules, except that if you're a four-piece band, you work as a four-piece," Mr. Buck said. "Once that rule is gone, there aren't really any other rules."

On first listen, "Up" seems like an inferior work, especially considering the clarity, driving on-the-road rock and verbal sharpness of the group's previous album, "New Adventures in Hi-Fi," which the band considers one of its finest works despite its disappointing sales. But slowly, the keyboard-fueled "Up" -- with its stories of professors, businesswomen and pensive characters caught between religion and science who, as with the characters in James Joyce short stories, are struck by an epiphany in the middle of quotidian existence -- turns sweet, lulling and addictive. Songs like "At My Most Beautiful" are just that, with the band reaching for Beach Boys pop harmonies, while elsewhere it borrows from the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and, for a darker beauty, Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" and Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne."

"It's a very hopeful record," Mr. Stipe said. "They all are. As hard as I've tried in the past to be a nihilist, I can't. I'm an optimist, and that's that." One of the reasons the album seems so inaccessible at first is because it begins with the murky "Airportman," a slow, whispered dirge backed by a drum machine on a bossa nova setting. "It's like a signpost: 'This way lies madness,' " Mr. Mills said of the album's opening.

Mr. Stipe's repeated lyric in "Airportman," "great opportunity," doubles as the band's final statement on the loss of Bill Berry, which made recording "Up" an extremely difficult process. "Ultimately it's been incredibly liberating artistically," Mr. Stipe said. "But it did take some growing pains to get where we are now. It brought us closer together than we've ever been. But it drove us apart before that happened.

"On this record, Bill was very present by his absence. The next record will be us as a three-piece. With this record, we leaped over what would have been the next two records in succession. We were forced to. What you've got is the sound of a band mutating, much faster than it probably should."

Except for a few dates at small clubs for fans and MTV cameras, including a stop at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan last week, R.E.M. decided not to tour to support "Up," leading to rumors of a breakup that the band adamantly denied. There have been some other changes, however. For one, the band has decided to perform the song it despises most in its repertory, "Shiny Happy People," for a forthcoming episode of "Sesame Street." Second, Mr. Stipe decided to include his lyrics in the liner notes to the record, a former R.E.M. taboo.

"We're a new band," Mr. Mills said. "And this band prints their lyrics sometimes."

R.E.M. has now survived an entire cycle of popular music, beginning as a group defined by its status outside the pop world, turning into a band with No. 1 albums and arena concerts, and, although there is little doubt that "Up" will be one of the country's best-selling albums this week, a band that feels out of step with the times again.

With "New Adventures" selling less than a million copies, compared with 2.7 million for the previous record, R.E.M.'s expectations for up are self-deprecatingly low. "If anything, we pushed the record further to the left just because the last record didn't sell quite as well," Mr. Buck said. "We can't do the four-piece drums-bass-guitar-singing thing any better than that. On this album, we said, 'Let's just find out where we can take this thing.'

"It's a great journey where we're going, and I firmly believe that if we keep strong as a band, somewhere down the line we're going to sell 10 million records. I'd love to be 50 years old and have people go, 'These guys have never made a bad record.' And then all of a sudden you're legendary. We're not legendary yet. We're between being new and being legendary. We're stuck right there."

10/29/98