A monster document

Marcus Gray's updated guide to R.E.M. is obsessive, but in a good way

by Brett Milano

IT CRAWLED FROM THE SOUTH: AN R.E.M. COMPANION (fully revised and updated), by Marcus Gray. Da Capo Press, 560 pages, $17.95 paper.

DOES ANYBODY REALLY care that R.E.M. performed a cover version of the Swinging Blue Jeans' "Hippy Hippy Shake" on October 4, 1981? Or that the band billed itself during some secret mid-'80s club gigs as "Adolf & the Casuals featuring Raoul"? Or that their 1991 album Out of Time came dangerously close to being titled Cat Butt?

The likely answer is yes, a lot of people do care; and not everyone who cares is a scary, obsessive R.E.M. cultist (just obsessive, maybe). The line between critics and fans is fuzzier than it sometimes seems, and critics sometimes must claim the right to be selectively fannish. British journalist Marcus Gray claims it in It Crawled from the South, an updated version of the book he published in 1990. The current edition is about half-old and half-new, having deleted the fluffier sections of the original and added a full appraisal of the first three R.E.M. albums released since 1990. Gray loves the band enough to find out the name of every non-original song they ever played -- along with where and when they played it, what they might have been thinking at the time, and what playing it said about their own musical development. In short, he starts with the minuscule details and works his way out, so that what might have been just a collection of obsessive fan trivia becomes the definitive biography of R.E.M. to date -- with a lot of obsessive fan trivia attached.

Gray is no stranger to enlightened fanship: his previous book, Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash (published last year by Henry Holt & Co.) was an exhaustive look at a band that kept its personal histories a secret. The book revealed that the Clash were -- horrors! -- relatively comfortable middle-class kids, which wouldn't have been an offense if they hadn't tried so hard to come across as street-level subversives. (The photograph of guitarist Mick Jones in astoundingly bad glitter-punk regalia, a mere six months before the Clash's formation, was worth the proverbial thousand words.) Gray suggested that the Clash loved rock-and-roll mythology enough to create their own -- that their revolutionary shtick was a naive, if heartfelt, pose. That they became a great rock band looked like even more of a feat once their myth was punctured and their dull backgrounds revealed.

Gray has no similar axe to grind when it comes to R.E.M., but he does look at them from every angle and call them on the occasional false move. As a music biographer, he's got his priorities straight: you won't find any new revelations about band members' personal lives (though he summarizes recent interviews that define Michael Stipe's sexuality, in case anyone's still wondering). Instead, there's a long, revealing essay on recurring themes in Stipe's lyrics that gives equal weight to the early albums, whose words have often been dismissed on the grounds that they are unintelligible. Gray suggests, for example, that the Murmur track "Sitting Still" -- with its repeated "Can you hear me?" and such lines as "We could gather, throw a fit" -- was the first in a string of Stipe lyrics about autistic children, inspired by his sister's work as a counselor. That's a lot more convincing than the last theory I heard: that the line was actually "We could gather, throw up beer."

Sections are devoted to equally thorough dissection of the band's album covers, its videos, its politics, and its hometown hangouts. (Thus, R.E.M. cultists bound for Athens now know where to find Walter's Bar-B-Q, known as the place responsible for Peter Buck's occasional weight gain.) The most obsessive part of the book is also the most musically revealing: a chapter detailing when and how each of R.E.M.'s original songs was written (beginning with the early "Louie Louie"-inspired songs that survive only on bootlegs) that makes sense of the radical changes in tone between recent albums.

The one R.E.M. myth Gray does puncture is that the band is nobly removed from commercial music business dealings. He calls them on their more opportunistic moves -- rubbing shoulders with Warner Bros. executives after signing to that label, playing "secret" acoustic gigs in 1991 that only insiders got to see, and, especially, cozying up to MTV after years of claiming not to care about video. "As the mainstream moved slowly toward an acceptance of R.E.M., it bumped into R.E.M. hurrying in the opposite direction," he notes. Still, the band emerges with its credibility largely intact. (The coverage stops after 1995's Monster tour, so the book doesn't deal with the spotty New Adventures in Hi-Fi, or the still-unexplained firing of manager Jefferson Holt.) Keeping R.E.M. honest is part of Gray's job; but fortunately, that doesn't prove too much of a challenge. n

Brett Milano is a music critic for the Boston Phoenix.