Strictly speaking, “best of” compilations, not being real albums, don’t count. But as all children of the lost AOR-era know-an era as gone with the wind as any plantation-that leaves out the bulk of the material, and often the best and most interesting songs. CDs that I had were some good British or indie compilations of their earlier and later periods. collection on CD (and yes, I still listen to CDs, no downloaded or streamed music for me, thanks). In other words, I had never replaced my R.E.M. Just prior to this drive between Sewanee and Charlottesville, I realized that while I still had most of these albums on LPs, I had not listened to them in years, no longer having a record player to go with the records. ‘It captured that kind of whole aesthetic.’ ” ‘Abandoned relics, decrepitude,’ he says. Brown, author of Party Out of Bounds, a history of the Athens music scene. It “captured Athens’ unique culture as a strange mix of decaying South, hip art, small town and cosmopolitan sensibility, says Rodger L. The famous train-trestle photograph on the back cover of Murmur, taken by Sandra-Lee Phipps, eventually inspired pilgrimages and preservation efforts. A Romantic post-bellum South with a buried past, secret stories, and poignant memories a semi-lost civilization, the only guide to which were faded “Maps and Legends” ( Fables). conjured up a dreamy, swampy, melancholy, Spanish moss-and-kudzu-covered South with ruined buildings, rural landscapes, and eccentric characters. As the striking front and back cover images of Murmur made so evocatively clear, both musically and visually R.E.M. R.E.M.’s South, however, was not the populist South of Southern rock, but rather the more patrician South of Southern Gothic. And although they were based in Athens, Georgia, that was still just close enough to make them count as a “local band.” Thus, instead of imaginary or alien locations like New York City or Los Angeles, R.E.M.’s first three albums were recorded in my very own state, in Winston-Salem. was defiantly regional: it evoked a definite sense of place, and with that place a community, a history, and a culture. That is, unlike the soulless, placeless, meaningless, prefabricated music endlessly streaming from the radio, the music of R.E.M. Although they always came just barely second in my loyalty to U2, they were not only one of the very few American bands to whom I deigned to listen, they were also distinctively Southern. nevertheless instantly gained a special place in my pantheon. A devout Anglophile inexplicably living in rural northeastern North Carolina, R.E.M. then parted company with I.R.S., and I parted company with R.E.M.ġ982–1987: for adolescent lovers of alternative music, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive”! These were the early years of U2, the only years of the Smiths, the best years of Simple Minds, and so forth and so on. These albums deeply shaped my developing aesthetic and moral imagination. Although I did not encounter R.E.M.’s murky and magical world until I was fifteen, with Fables of the Reconstruction (1985)-or Reconstruction of the Fables (they remain coy about the actual title)-I then eagerly worked my way more or less backward through Reckoning (1984), Murmur (1983), and Chronic Town (1982), and stayed with them through Lifes Rich Pageant (1986), Dead Letter Office (1987), and Document (also 1987).
To be more precise, I decided to revisit their years with the independent music label I.R.S. On a recent road trip between Sewanee, Tennessee, and Charlottesville, Virginia, I decided to take R.E.M.
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