Wall of Sound's Gary Graff

Moving forward on three legs following the departure of drummer Bill Berry, R.E.M. was forced not just into a new adventure, but a whole new way of being.

Settling into a couch and putting his feet up on the table at the plush Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, Peter Buck offers the following assessment on the current state of R.E.M. and the new album Up.

"I feel like it's the first of the new band," he says. "We're pretty much called R.E.M. because that's who signed the contract. But it's a different band now, with just the three of us."

It wasn't too much more than a year ago that R.E.M. was the same quartet—Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry—that charged out of Athens, Ga., 18 years ago and redefined what was considered "modern" and "alternative" rock in the United States. The group had overcome the health maladies of its 1995 Monster world tour, including the double brain aneurysm that nearly killed Berry, proudly released an album of new songs recorded during that tour (New Adventures in Hi-Fi), shuffled its management team, and signed a lucrative new deal with Warner Bros. Life was good.

Then life got screwy.

In October 1997, following a demo session for new material at Buck's house in Hawaii, Berry announced he was leaving the band. Besides being the first personnel change in R.E.M.'s history, Berry's departure also detonated the well-honed chemistry that allowed the foursome to be a consistently daring and adventurous band, both in the recording studio and on stage. It was the end of the world as they knew it.

But now they feel fine.

After slowly and arduously picking up the pieces, R.E.M. has released Up, its 13th album and first as a trio. None of the members are shy about describing how difficult making the album—and reinventing the band—was. At the same time, they seem both relieved and proud of their efforts. And Up is, in fact, a markedly different R.E.M. album, one that eschews many of the band's trademarks—particularly Buck's guitar—in favor of more lushly orchestrated, textured, and ambient songs.

R.E.M.—and, presumably, Warner Bros., which has a hefty financial stake in the band—wants you to hear this, but not via the conventional touring route. Rather, the group is launching a six-week promotional tour similar to the one it mounted for 1991's Out of Time; that may not be a bad strategy, since that album was a chart-topping, multimillion seller. "And after this is over," Buck says, "we're going to go on the corner and shake people's hands and tell them to buy our record."

Well, before they strap on the sandwich boards…

How different was it recording Up as a trio?

Michael Stipe: It was real different. We were really in shock after Bill's

announcement—happy for him, but it left us in a lurch and not certain what we were going to do. We had all this material we were really excited about.

Mike Mills: I'd say it was about 180 degrees different than it could have been. We were going to learn all the songs, learn to play them as a band. And without a drummer, all that was moot. We couldn't rehearse the songs. We couldn't really sit down and learn them together.

Peter Buck: It shook up enough stuff to make us have to reexamine everything, like how we communicate, how we work together, how we write songs. We ended up finishing the record under a lot of stress, then sat down and talked about the experience—what was bad about it, what was good, who was the biggest asshole, that kind of thing. And having done all that we just realized, you know, we made a great record, we're still good friends. We kind of walked through the fire on this one.

Stipe: Bill leaving R.E.M. is…different from a drummer leaving a regular band, not only in terms of we had been a four-man unit for 17 years—which, in the world of rock music, is almost unheard of—but that each member had so much to do with the music that we made and how we presented ourselves in everything. It was really a blow.

How surprising was Bill's decision?

Mills: I kind of saw this coming, because I was a friend of Bill's for a long time and still see him on a social level, and I knew he wasn't happy. We all knew he wasn't happy. But I knew that he was really unhappy and wanting to get out. I didn't know when he would do it or if he would do it. But to Peter and Michael, it was just a huge shock.

Buck: See, he told me that "I can't see doing this a whole lot longer, probably three more records." That was two weeks before he quit.

Stipe: When we were in Hawaii, Bill spent a lot of time walking up and down the beach. He was still very much a part of the band, but I think without knowing it, he was already kind of removing himself a little bit. Only in retrospect did I kind of think, "That's right, he really wasn't that present."

Buck: The great thing was he quit, and he didn't want us to feel bad, so he would drop by rehearsal each day just to say, "Hey." So he comes in one day, and I'm standing there, I've demoed acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, and I'm putting maracas and tambourines on it—there was a drum machine on it, and I was just shaking it. And Bill walks through and goes, "Wow, that's a good song." And then he walks out of the room. And it was like, "What the f--k is going on here?! This is just too confusing."

How far along was the album at the point he quit?

Mills: It was 80 to 85 percent written, and we used a little bit of it that had been recorded at that point. But lyrically, Michael was only a quarter of the way through, if that. When Bill withdrew, basically we just kind of went into this funk. We didn't know what to do. We spent that time trying to do useful things, but there wasn't that much to do. And Michael hit a total writer's block for awhile.

Stipe: There were a few things that Bill was involved in that, by natural course, fell to the wayside. For the most part, it was Peter and Mike's music that I had been singing along to.

Was there a point where you considered disbanding?

Buck: We're really stubborn. We went right ahead with our goal, our schedule, which is "Hey, we're gonna go and do this record, full speed ahead, nothing's going to stop us. [laughs] It wasn't until we were a third of the way through the record that we realized this is almost unworkable.

Stipe: After Bill walked out of the room for the last time, the three of us sat there going, "What the f--k? Now what? Should we continue?" We talked about it, but it took about five minutes. We all felt like the material we had, we were all really excited about it. This is my life. Peter and Michael say the same thing—this is what we do. This is what I'm the most proud of. It's our life's work. So, no…

Having kind of brazenly decided we'd continue, we had two options, or so it seemed at the time. One was to hire someone to be a fake Bill Berry and act like nothing had changed. The other would be to just try to embrace the change and see where it took us. And it was really liberating to have things shook up that much and have it be circumstantial and not be calculated. We're not a very calculating band to begin with. We took every process and every way that we've ever had of recording and just chucked it out the window and started with a completely blank slate—the sky's the limit, we can do anything, we can go anywhere with this. Let's embrace it. And we did—not to say that was easy or fun, because it wasn't.

Mills: It was interesting that in a period where normally a band would be rethinking its future and what they were going to do and how they were going to go about it, without any pressure of working, we did all that rethinking while we were making a record. Fortunately for us we ended up channeling our energy in the right direction and made what we all think is a great record. But it could have easily gone the other way.

Stipe: Records are hard to make; this one was very f--king difficult. There was nothing easy about it, musically as a group and also as individuals. There were times when I thought that making the record would break us up.

What was the greatest change for you?

Buck: You know, we communicated, I think, pretty well without talking for a long time. We didn't have to. On musical terms, aside from any of the personal communication, we could sit in a room, and I could look at Bill and dip my head a quarter of an inch and he'd play a fill. And we'd improvise a song and we wouldn't have a bridge, and we'd all kind of find a bridge, maybe in one pass, and it would be the right one. Without all of that structure, with Bill gone, not sitting there cueing each other, nodding at each other, it was kind of like Alice in Wonderland. And then we didn't talk about it—like "Is this difficult? Is this hard? Is this the right thing to do?" We just did it.

Mills: We didn't know how much Bill's leaving would change things. We had to discover that as we went along. And as we discovered the changes that were there between us, we dealt with them as they came up. We just had to go in there and discover the new way. [laughs] I don't want to sound too mystical about it, but literally, it was "How do you go in there and record this record?" We just stumbled through it and came out the other end, I think, certainly better and closer than we were for years and years.

Buck: If we were a new band and this is our first album and the drummer had quit, you know, two months before the record, we wouldn't have had the financial wherewithal and the stubbornness to go ahead and do it. We would have rented a rehearsal hall, hired a drummer, worked for three months, talked about it, rejiggered the songs, and gone in and recorded it. Instead we went in with this nebulous plan, you know, "We'll put up some drum machines, it'll be fine." And it is fine. It's just totally different. Then we had a lot of tracks with drum machines, then we would overdub drums, then Mike and I were playing drums on tracks. In its own way it was pretty great; it was also pretty nuts.

You more or less redefined the way you used drums, period.

Mills: Yeah—we just got rid of most of them; "Bill's not here, let's not use drums!" [laughs] We took a lot of the demos and just broke them down to the rhythm machine or the drum machine or just the guitar line and sort of built on them from there.

Buck: I always loved the '60s, like the Hal Blaine sessions where there would be a percussionist doing bongos and sleigh bells and then ol' Hal would roll in with a fill or a beat during the chorus, but not a huge amount during the verse. But [if] you have a drummer, he does play all the way through the songs.

Mills: What else is he going to do? But there are only two songs on this record where the drums play all the way through, from beginning to end. Basically we just used the drums the way we used every other instrument on this record—as color, as a texture.

It's also intriguing that you switched around instruments so much. And Mike barely plays bass, right?

Mills: Right. That's good. I like sharing. Sharing the bass is good. It frees me up to have fun on other things.

Buck: I love playing bass. And I don't get much chance to [because] Mike's a great bass player; it's not like I'm going to take over his spot or anything. Then when he switches over to a keyboard, I immediately just walk over to the bass…

Mills: And he's welcome to it! [laughs]

R.E.M. has modified its sound, at least a little bit, on each album you've done. Did Bill's leaving give you license to make an even more dramatic kind of change?

Buck: Our records have all changed incrementally record by record. We've taken some left turns. But this one just doesn't sound like anything else we've ever done. And I don't know how we got there, and I don't know how it would have been if Bill was still here. And that's great, because now we really haven't defined what we are. This is our first record. Who knows what we're going to do next.

Stipe: Sonically I think a lot of it was inspired by the fact Mike, Peter, and I all feel like New Adventures in Hi-Fi was as close to a perfect record as we've ever made; that record, if anything, was a rock band playing together live. So, from the get-go, the material they were writing was in a way the polar opposite of that. Eight months before Bill left the band, we got together and put down 40-odd songs in Peter's living room in Hawaii. There was no guitar to be found anywhere, and it was all with drum machines. From the start it was going to be an experimental record. It became much more so than any of us anticipated. And what I like about it was it was not a calculated thing; it was not something we sat around a table and said, "OK, this is our new direction. It was very much forced upon us and circumstantial. And for that, it became the record that it is."

Were you disappointed that New Adventures in Hi-Fi did not fare well commercially, then?

Stipe: Yeah, but I'm more proud of the record than I am disappointed by its sales. I can't make people buy the records; what I can do is work as hard as I can to make the music as good or as great as it can be. I think people will at some point come around to it.

How about this record, then? Do you feel great commercial pressure, especially since it's the first one under a big new contract with Warner Bros.?

Mills: Well, that's OK. We feel good about the record. We've done everything we can to make a good record. They're cool about it. Basically, we make our records and that's it. We make them by ourselves and we make the decisions on all that stuff.

Buck: From the very first contract we had with IRS, we have complete creative control, which basically means no one hears the record until we deliver it. I mean, we might invite people from the record company as friends, but we deliver a finished record, and they put it out. And that's the only way I'm willing to work.

Mills: That was the most important thing for every contract we signed. You have to know that when you sign us, you get what you get.

Can you illustrate how the songs changed when you went back at the album as a trio?

Mills: Well, "Falls To Climb" was completely different—

Buck: That was a folk song with mandolin—

Mills: Now it's a floaty atmosphere piece.

Buck: I wrote the music to that, but I didn't particularly like it. I said "Guys, this is boring music," and Michael had this great idea for a melody, and I said, "The music's just f--king dull. Haven't we done this mandolin thing before?" [laughs] We recorded it three or four times, then they sat down and did that weird synth thing, which for me saved the song.

Mills: I took it into a little New York studio one afternoon and played with keyboards. Basically what I was trying to do was just make it completely opposite what it was originally, and we did. And now it's a beautiful piece and it's a good record-ender.

Why the decision not to tour on this album?

Stipe: We were just exhausted. None of us wanted to be scheduled for the next year, and that's what embarking on a tour would have entailed. It was just a really exhausting record to make. So instead we're doing a lot of promotional stuff and trying to get on TV so our fans won't be disappointed. I think, ultimately, if we toured it would be the most disappointing thing of all because our hearts would not have been 100 percent into it. We may tour before the next record. We'll probably do stuff between now and then, little things, like what we're doing here at the Bridge.

Mills: When we say everything changed when Bill left, we mean everything. The feasibility or the wisdom of taking this show out on an eight-month pressure cooker, it just didn't seem to be there. So we felt it would better serve us and the band in the long term by not going on the road. It just wouldn't do us any good.

Was there a sense, also, that because this is kind of a "new" band, you wanted time to grow your repertoire rather than tailoring old songs to a different format?

Buck: Yes. One of the things I wasn't looking forward to was sitting in a room with at least two guys I've never played with who are friends of mine and then teaching them stuff from six years ago. That would be like being a cover band. I think we'll do some things a little more impromptu in the coming year. And we may never again do an eight-month tour. We might do a month in Europe in the summer and then do some spot shows in America and then do some acoustic benefit shows and do it that way instead of going out like the road warriors and doing a thousand shows a year or whatever it is we used to do, 130.

Will the band's current situation allow you to be more spontaneous in your shows?

Buck: Well, sure. Just this one six-week little jaunt we're doing…we're not sticking to even one [set list]. We've learned a bunch of songs. Everything's going to be different every night. There's a world of things we can do. I'm at the age where I've gotten everything I can out of the world tours—the tour tours. I love to play. I want to continue to play, and I want to make ourselves available for people to see us. I just don't necessarily want us to do 130 shows. It's more important that we write songs and get on to the next project. We've got some creative things coming in the future, the near future, that should be interesting—possibly soundtrack work.

This is the first time you've allowed the lyrics to be printed in the album package. Why now?

Stipe: I'm proud of them, but I've been proud of my lyrics for the last several records, and spottily before that. I post them on a wall in the studio; it makes me feel confident about what I've done, and it pushed me towards getting the next song written and the next one and the next one. And one night Mike was reading them and said, "These are great. We should include them in the CD," and I was like, "Sure." And Peter was like, "Yeah, why not?" So we did. After 17 years, something we had always avoided just kind of got turned around in the course of 20 seconds.

Your lyrics tend to be so open-ended and open to listeners projecting their own meaning onto them. At this juncture do you have more confidence that people will take them the "right" way?

Stipe: Yeah, I really do. I never liked the way lyrics read; great lyrics to a great song sound great and move you, [but] look really flat on a page. I mean, that's the greatest compliment you can pay a songwriter is to say an individual listener can put themselves into it, because for me that's the essence of music. That's why music is such a powerful medium, one's ability to project oneself into something, regardless of its intent by the writer. That's why music is music.

"Daysleeper" has a real workingman's kind of perspective that one would think you'd be a bit removed from by now.

Stipe: I saw a sign on somebody's door in an apartment building, a tenement building in New York. I was stomping down the stairs; there wasn't an elevator in the building. I stomped a little softer when I saw the sign. One thing led to another, and there was a lyric and a character built around it. I like the idea of someone who's just lost in the mechanism of a job, probably a very thankless job, not heroic, particularly, who's struggling to find the balance between working to live and the life that they're living. It's that balance; there's something particular about working the night shift and how much that throws you off what we all think of as our natural kind of rising and sleeping times. And having worked a night shift before, I know how discombobulating that can be.

Did you bring to it a perspective as someone who is working a rewarding and even heroic job?

Stipe: I don't think so. I really like to separate my own situation, because it's an extraordinary and very fortunate one. I like to be able to separate it from what I write about. I think the stuff I'm hitting, thematically and lyrically, is universal, whatever your position or whatever your standing. Mine is exalted and a very admired, looked-up to; I'm a really, really lucky guy. I would like to think that, in that way, doesn't affect my work.

So who's the "Sad Professor"?

Stipe: Nobody in particular. That kind of came out of nowhere. I like the idea…I feel the record has, from song to song, from character to character, from story to story, epiphanal moments, defining moments or moments of clarity whereby people were literally lifting out of themselves in a lot of the songs. In "Sad Professor," the guy is looking down on himself, passed out on the floor, 67 years old, a drunk, boring professor that nobody's listened to for 20 years, just working out his tenure. And for the first time in his life, he sees himself for what he is. I left it open-ended to what he does about that and if he does anything. The moment itself is as significant, whatever the outcome.

There does seem to be a spirit in these songs of people escaping themselves or coming to some sort of self-realization.

Stipe: I don't know what self-realization really means. It might be one of those therapy-speak kind of words. It's funny; in two of the songs in particular I really wanted to use that language. In "The Apologist" I wanted to use the language of therapy-speak and detox and 12-step to kind of highlight that guy's particular malady, which is that he is, as part of his therapy, going back to the people in his before-life to apologize. In doing so, as the song goes on, you realize whatever he was, whatever monkey was on his back before, it's nothing compared to the monster that he's become because the way that he treats these people is horrific and completely, like, brainwashed and removed from himself. I tried so hard to get the word issues into that song, and it just didn't fly. I just loved the idea of "issues"—"We have dark issues to talk about." It's like, "Shut the f--k up; can we just talk? Get over it!"

How did Up become the album title?

Stipe: Mike took it off the cover of a cardboard box, this side up, those little symbols. As always, we were desperate for a title; it was the very last minute we could submit a title to the record company. It was better than Alone in My Urine—that was one of the album titles at one point. We always make a list of really silly potential album titles.

How dramatically did the songs change from those Hawaii sessions to the final recordings?

Stipe: Really, all of them changed. The two that I'm thinking of that didn't dramatically change are "Diminished" and "You're in the Air." Those sonically were pretty much apply vocal and stir, because they were really complete orchestral pieces from the first demo tape. But everything else went through major transformation. It was just a matter of the usual R.E.M. technique of waiting for Michael to write the lyric, of putting layer upon layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of s--t onto the song and then sorting it out and figuring out what works and doesn't work; figuring out how to arrange everything, what should be left and what shouldn't. It was incredibly frustrating, but it was really fun this time. We didn't have the drum kit or the guitar; those elements were not at all there, with the odd guitar solo here and there, "Suspicion" or "Lotus."

And then there's your solo on "Why Not Smile."

Stipe: [laughs] I drank way too much wine one night and plugged

into…Oliver Ray, the guitar player for Patti Smith's band, had given me this little cigarette pack guitar amplifier, and I plugged a guitar into it and hit a D minor or something. I don't know what it was. It was my little homage to "Radio Ethiopia." Someone asked me how that song correlates to "Radio Ethiopia"; I was like "What? Where did you read that?" Then I realized "Oh yeah, the guitar solo was like that, and then I realized the amp I played it through was given to me by one of the guitar players in Patti Smith's band.

During the past few years you seem to have gotten quite a bit—artistically as well as personally—out of your friendship with Patti Smith.

Stipe: I would agree. The clearest thing and really specific to this record was…I talked to a lot of people. I have a great, wonderful support system of friends and family and peers, people who do the same thing I do who are incredibly supportive, especially in times like making a record when it's really hard. Among others, Patti was talking to me throughout this record and just being supportive, like friends are. At one point she put forth that I should just be fearless and not afraid of my abilities as a songwriter, as a pop songwriter, and I should be unafraid. I should go into this project unafraid. That became, for me, the key word to the entire project, and I wrote it into the song "Walk Unafraid" as an homage to that.

Is R.E.M. still a fulfilling vehicle for you?

Stipe: There seems to be a lot of question in the world at large about my interest in the band as opposed to all the other things that I've very publicly got going on. My only counter to that is I've been making films since I was 21. I've had a film company for the past 11 years. And I've been taking photographs since I was 15. I'm actually more enthused now, I think, than I would have been two years ago about what's ahead for us. I think some of our best work is still ahead of us. I'm really proud of this record; I mean, to make a record as good as New Adventures in Hi-Fi and then to even surpass that in terms of my contribution to it and the thing overall…I could go on vacation on an island now for about eight months. I feel very accomplished.

Buck: It's hard. It's easy to be a band when you're 20, when you're first starting out, because you're all just full of energy. This was like, we're 40—some of us are 38 or whatever—and getting together and inventing something, and compromising something, which is what we're doing, is not as easy because we're adults. We've done this for a million years, and we think we know what we're doing.

10/31/98