8/4/2019 Talk About the Passion

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Talk About the PassionSept 24, 2011 

On a rainy October night I stood with maybe four hundred, if that, other students ina mostly empty cavernous gymnasium; I wasn‟t there of my own accord, I wasthere with a girlfriend who wanted to go, and even at nineteen I was smart enoughto know you did things that girls wanted to that you maybe didn‟t because it wouldmake them happy, and if you made them happy enough they associated you withhappiness, which was sort of the whole point. I didn‟t know any of the songs, Ihadn‟t even really heard of the band before – at that stage I was heavy, heavy intoThe Police – but the show was ok, not great but not bad; there‟s only so wrappedup you can get in a performance by any band where you don‟t know any of thesongs, but one of them stayed with me, so I borrowed the album from Tomdownstairs, some goofy looking cover with scribbles and odd colors, and listened toit, and this vast vista opened up before me, music of a type I‟d never really heardbefore. I held onto Tom‟s copy until I bought my own, about two weeks later, of 

Reckoning, the second album by R.E.M., still to my mind and possibly forever (atleast for me), one of their best albums.

It‟s hard for me to overstate the esteem I held R.E.M. in during college; theyessentially provided the soundtrack to the years I loitered in Charlottesvillestudying English and History. It helps that I attended during their best years – afterReckoning followed Fables of the Reconstruction (of the Fables), a darker albumthat I always liked far more than the band professed to. 1986‟s Life’s Rich Pageant  was everywhere, everyone listened to it, you heard it in every dorm, every record

store, ubiquitously filling the air. The band seemed to dip a little bit after I leftcollege – or maybe it was me changing, the powerful associations music holds for

us with particular times and places forever and necessarily severed by myunfortunate graduation – and a show I saw in 1989 -- supporting Green, amediocre effort with a few gems – was about as different from the informal andsparsely-attended Memorial Gym show from a half-decade before as I couldimagine, with twenty-eight thousand screaming young girls shrieking “Michael!Michael!” (talk about barking up the wrong tree) and a band that I had tended tothink of as mine, or at least my little secret, was obviously by that time neither.

R.E.M. peaked creatively with 1992‟s  Automatic for the People, a brilliantmasterpiece that everything previous to it had, in the clarity of retrospection, beenleading up to. I recall at that time being a little surprised they had it in them to stillcreate such a powerful album, and sadly, except for a few pieces here and there

(Leaving New York  foremost among them), the band seemed to fade, at least forme, still releasing albums, which, for a spell, I bought out of inertia, but they neveragain ascended to the heights of  Automatic , and on the occasions now when I doselect them on the iPod, it‟s invariably to my college years or Automatic that I turn.One could argue that‟s their best period, but what‟s important (to me) is that‟s themusic of theirs that I connect with most strongly, and now, it seems, I always will.

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R.E.M. announced their breakup this week, a sort of non-event, honestly, becausethey had long ago stopped being a pop cultural force (and longer ago ceased havingmuch influence over me); for me, in some ways, the R.E.M. I loved broke up overfifteen years ago with the release of the disappointing Monster, in which, to myears, they took everything that was special about them and tossed it out thewindow (reference also anything by U2 after  Joshua Tree) and established a sonicpattern that they would, to my dismay, more or less follow for the rest of theircareers. I was still a little saddened to read that they were disbanding, though;even though I didn‟t connect with their music any more, it‟s always an unhappymoment when some piece of your youth vanishes forever.

While not every song on every album of theirs from the mid-80s evokes a specificmemory for me, some still do; it‟ s rare that I can hear Camera and not pictureLaura (said girl who dragged me to that initial concert and in so doing gave me agift that lasted far longer than her favors) laying on the puke-green carpet in herapartment, listening to the song with rapt attention; and it almost takes an effort tohear I am Superman and not think of Paul, who played the song so often during

the ‟86-‟87 school year that he almost drove his apartment-mates insane (I was afrequent recipient of verbal abuse for having made him a copy of the album). Manyof the other songs on the first several albums will summon up unspecific memoriesof the University Grounds in the winter, or Pete Redford‟s always-cold porch in thehouse he lived in our last year, or any one of a number of places around theUniversity that thanks to generous alumni and constant construction(Reconstruction of the Fables indeed) most likely no longer even exist. I can vividlyrecall having to feverishly re-edit my personal „greatest hits‟ tape every year toinclude tracks from the new release, adhering to painstakingly complex rules of 

which songs could go where on the tape, and re-shuffling it to find the optimumarrangement, so that my choice of highlights from half a decade itself blended

together like an album and flowed as smoothly as I perceived the real albums to(how impossibly easy this would be to do now, but I invested a significant amountof time and effort on the process back then). And then as time marched forward Inoticed fewer and fewer revisions to the tape, until at one point it became relativelysafe from any further attempts by new releases to horn in on that obsessivelyrefined ninety minutes of music. I may not have been terribly moved, or honestlyeven much emotionally affected by the break-up announcement this week, but thiswas a band I absolutely worshipped in college, and I will always be grateful to Buck,Stipe, Mills, and Berry for providing the soundtrack for most of a decade of my life.They gave me a gift that will last me the rest of my life, and really, it doesn‟t getmuch better than that.