‘The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.’ reclaims group’s pop artistry

What was R.E.M.? It depends on who you are.

Outside of U2, the Athens, Ga., quartet was the biggest rock band on the planet in the 1990s. But for those who followed its early career as America’s most popular indie-rock band in the ’80s, R.E.M.’s popularity came as something of a culture shock, with their cult heroes now being piped into suburban malls and playing in rotation on classic rock radio stations. In the prestreaming age, when the music landscape was dominated by major record labels and a rear-guard of small labels scattered around the country, R.E.M.’s move from indie I.R.S. to Warner Bros. Records was seen as a betrayal by many who had regarded the quartet as music industry outliers.

Peter Ames Carlin, author of the new biography “The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.,” is having none of that.

“More than any other band, R.E.M. symbolized that moment at which college radio morphed into this more label-driven thing, and I understand that fans felt betrayed,” says Carlin from the Seattle home he shares with his partner, writer Claire Dederer. “But for any artist to achieve personal progress, you’ve got to grow and change, and that’s what R.E.M. did.”

“The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.” carefully tracks the band’s remarkable trajectory from kegger parties in the college town of Athens during the early ’80s to global ubiquity and its slow burn into dissolution in 2011. The story neatly cleaves into two distinct eras. The four band members found each other fortuitously in the late ’70s: Guitarist Peter Buck met art student and singer Michael Stipe in a local record store where Buck worked, bonding over their love of the Monkees. Bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry grew up together in Macon, Ga., where they played Southern boogie rock, and moved to Athens to attend college at the University of Georgia. Once they all connected, a scene began to coalesce around an abandoned church in Athens where the band was living on the cheap.

“A lot of my friends that I hung out with at the time had some connection to R.E.M. going back to the ’80s,” says Carlin. “You would see them play in pizza parlors in Portland. They would hang out with fans after the show; they were very approachable.”

Original material began to emerge — songs that were melodic and oblique in equal measure, with arpeggiated guitar hooks and Stipe’s lyrics drifting in and out of focus. When the band’s 1981 single “Radio Free Europe” became a regional hit, Berry reached out to Ian Copeland, a concert promoter with whom he had worked, who in turn contacted his brother Miles, the owner of upstart label I.R.S., who signed the band.

During the next five years, R.E.M. created and defined American indie rock. The band followed their debut EP with “Murmur,” a 1983 album of melancholy mystery that had no precedent, and became a template for the generation of guitar bands that followed. R.E.M. was now a critics’ darling; “Murmur” was embraced by college radio, becoming the most played album on stations left of the radio dial and winning virtually every critics poll for best album of the year. Each subsequent record was more successful than the last, while the band ceaselessly crisscrossed the country for gigs. Its fifth album, “Document,” sold more than a million copies and featured R.E.M.’s first mainstream hit, “The One I Love.” R.E.M. no longer belonged to the cultists; it was everyone’s band now, even more so when it signed to Warner Bros. in 1988.

At a time when capitulating to the mainstream was regarded as selling out, R.E.M.’s move to a major label stung, as if the band had sloughed off its loyalists for the teeming masses. But as Carlin points out in his book, band members never sacrificed their creative autonomy for profit, never conceded quality control to move units. Even as a young band, R.E.M. refused label advances and shared music publishing equally among the four members.

“I understand why someone who discovered the band early on saw them in little bars, and heard ‘Murmur,’ and internalized those early albums as the apex of their sound,” says Carlin. “It was as if they were artistically speaking to you. But you can’t expect any artist to stay in one place forever, lest they limit themselves as artists.”

R.E.M.’s sound changed. Stipe now enunciated his lyrics, which shaded into social commentary, while the arrangements drew from a palette that included string sections, mandolins and an increasing reliance on Mills’ textured keyboard parts. The band also graduated from clubs into sports arenas. Its music videos, which had heretofore been so art-school obscure that MTV barely played them, were now high-budget fantasias with Stipe front and center, undulating like a Robert Longo painting come to life. R.E.M. bandmates became ubiquitous MTV stars at a time when the music channel was a pop kingmaker.

As ’90s albums such as “Out of Time” and “Automatic for the People” sold millions of copies, the band was embraced by a new audience that didn’t care about the 40 Watt Club in Athens, where R.E.M. had played so many early shows, or that producer Scott Litt had produced Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” which became a commercial jingle. And yet, the “before and after” of R.E.M.’s career became for its hardcore fans a cautionary tale about a band gaining the world and losing its soul — a charge that Carlin regards as grossly unfair and misguided.

“Even when they were being covered on MTV like they were the Beatles, they were still channeling what people were feeling and thinking in this weirdly effortless way,” says the author. “There was a great deal of social change happening at that time, and their fans responded to how R.E.M. was addressing those issues in their music. In a sense, the bigger they became, the more relevant they became.”

They certainly weren’t on cruise control. A close listen to R.E.M.’s ’90s albums reveals a band committed to experimentation. “They grew up, and became better artists,” says Carlin. Granted, “Out of Time’s” earworm “Shiny Happy People” is gratingly banal, but the album also features spoken-word passages, brooding bass lines and ghostly steel-guitar drone. According to Carlin, the band had no great expectations for 1992’s “Automatic for the People,” an album of mostly quiet, mournful ballads that, along with “Out of Time,” remains its most popular album. When Berry implored the band to rock out again, the group switched gears and made 1994’s “Monster,” in which Buck ditches his arpeggios for power chords run through a distortion pedal. It, too, sold vigorously and steadily.

With success came closer scrutiny. The press hounded Stipe and the other band members about their private lives — Stipe’s sexual orientation became an obsession — which they have always resolutely kept private. When Berry suffered a brain aneurysm and left the band, burned out and artistically spent, in 1997, R.E.M. carried on as a trio, but its sales dwindled and so did its zeitgeist-y buzz. The band ended it for good in 2011, but its music retains its potency, as evidenced by the inclusion of “Oh My Heart” and “Strange Currencies” as source music for Hulu’s beloved series “The Bear.”

“R.E.M. remains influential,” says Carlin. “Not just in terms of how they structured their career but how they consistently made the art they wanted to make.”