The band R.E.M. were a highly successful and respected indie act that went on to became one of the biggest bands of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But they started out as just another local group in the Athens, Georgia music scene—though they immediately stood out. An upcoming book examines their formative period, and Dangerous Minds has an exclusive excerpt. We also have some vintage live R.E.M. audio and video to share with you.
Begin the Begin: R.E.M.‘s Early Years will be published soon by Verse Chorus Press, and author Robert Dean Lurie has provided us with a preview. The passage focuses on R.E.M.‘s early shows, which thrilled audiences in and around Athens.
R.E.M. began their live career with an advantage few bands are granted: their first performance at their friend Kathleen O’Brien’s massive birthday party in April 1980 had gone over so well that practically overnight they became one of the most popular bands in Athens, Georgia. So R.E.M. never belonged to the art scene, even if their immediate circle of friends hailed from that group. They didn’t go through an incubation period of playing the kind of intimate Athens house parties where men walked around in dresses and women wore outrageous wigs. Quite the contrary: they were, in the words of Party Out of Bounds author Rodger Lyle Brown, “dude rock.” And though Michael Stipe would later come to be known for his oblique lyrics and distinctive voice, his most notable contribution to R.E.M.’s early success was visual.
How to describe the 1980-1982 Stipe stage persona? Let’s try it from several angles. Imagine a malfunctioning robot trained as a whirling dervish. Or Elvis attempting to do his swivel-hipped dance while being assaulted by a gang of poltergeists. Or James Brown having an epileptic fit. Stipe would careen around the stage wildly, with apparently no self-awareness, narrowly avoiding collisions with his bandmates. He was in a constant state of frenetic motion, and, no matter how strange his movements, he remained locked into the beat. This might be hard to fathom for people who are only familiar with the “Losing My Religion” video, but the guy was a hell of a dancer. And when you saw him onstage going crazy to that music, you couldn’t help but start moving yourself. Dancing was absolutely intrinsic to the vibe and the success of early R.E.M. The mystique and the thoughtfulness would come later. R.E.M. were, first and foremost, the premier party band in town.
The band’s local shows alternated between Tyrone’s O.C. and a new club called the 40 Watt. The former served as R.E.M.’s home base for about the first two years of their existence. The latter, which had been founded by Curtis Crowe of Pylon and his friend Paul Scales, went through a number of locations and eventually became Athens’s signature club. The Side Effects, who had made their debut alongside R.E.M. at the party, played the Watt’s inaugural show, Pylon was a mainstay, and R.E.M. became regulars as well. They would do spur-of-the-moment surprise gigs there to test-run new material long after they hit the big time—a practice that continued into the early 1990s.
R.E.M. at Tyrone’s O.C., 1981.
As for Tyrone’s O.C. (which stood for “Old Chameleon”—a nod to the club’s former name), it had begun hosting a New Wave Night right around the time of Kathleen’s party. R.E.M. came to quickly dominate this slot and were the club’s most popular weekend draw. Tyrone’s could only legally hold six hundred people, but it was not unusual for R.E.M., once they hit their stride, to draw a thousand. In an attempt to accommodate everyone, the club’s owners would remove any piece of furniture that was not nailed to the floor. “The way we figured out that R.E.M. was the biggest band in town,” says Billy Holmes, a local musician who went on to play in Vigilantes of Love and a mid-2000s iteration of Love Tractor, “was that the rest of us were charging $1.00 and $1.50 cover at Tyrone’s. They were charging $2 and the place would be packed. It was like, ‘Wow…R.E.M. charges fifty cents more a head than we do. They must be very big.’
“I did see the very first R.E.M. show at the 40 Watt, and there were three things that stuck in my mind. One was: Boy, these guys are really bad! Number two, the chemistry between them was just amazing. It was a powerful thing—you could feel it. And three, the place was packed wall-to-wall. I went up to Pete Buck afterward and I said, ‘Hey, you guys don’t need to add a keyboard player, do you?’ And Peter said, ‘Are you kidding? We can’t get it together with bass, drums, and guitar. How are we going to get it together with a keyboard player?’”
Peter Buck at Legion Field, University of Georgia, 1985 (photo by Joanna Schwartz).
Paul Butchart of the Side Effects was also at that 40 Watt performance. “This is hard to describe,” he says, “but I remember the crowd was dancing so much that the floor was moving up and down and the windows were pumping in and out like an accordion. It was just too crowded up there for me. The windows were sweating and all that stuff. If one of those windows had popped or somebody had opened the door downstairs, the floor would have collapsed—because it was like a big air chamber.”
Things were definitely moving for R.E.M., and these hometown gigs functioned as a means of fortifying morale as the group began to strike out across the Southeast and beyond, into places where they were most certainly not the biggest band in town. There are many good-quality live recordings from all phases of the band’s history in circulation, but an argument can be made that none touch the mad energy of the shows they played at Tyrone’s between July and September 1981, which were captured for posterity on Pat “The Wiz” Biddle’s soundboard tapes. This was not R.E.M.’s best period as songwriters or musicians, but to this writer’s ears they never sounded better as a live unit, and I’m guessing that few of the attendees of these shows would disagree. Pat says that the September 22 and 23 shows were “two of the most exciting nights I ever worked in my career. The crowds were electric and so was the band. Their performance left an indelible mark on my memory.”
Mike Mills and Peter Buck, early 1980s (photo by Joanna Schwartz).
And what made the crowds so electric? R.E.M. were not riding the wave of an album release (though the “Radio Free Europe” single had just come out). Nor were they the beneficiaries of any coordinated PR campaign. The energy of the audience on these two nights derived from a confluence of two factors: the strong word of mouth that had developed around R.E.M.’s live shows and the sudden surge in Athens’ population of 18-to-22-year-olds due to the start of a new academic year at the University of Georgia. “It’s fall quarter!” Stipe declared at the September 22 gig. “A show of hands for first-quarter freshmen!”
Freshmen—apparently a not-insignificant portion of the audience—brought with them the twin exhilarations of being away from home for the first time and finding themselves surrounded by hundreds of similarly unsupervised peers. They may have also felt some of the trepidation that usually accompanies newfound freedom. The returning students were likely feeling a mix of excitement at seeing their friends again after the summer break and just a bit of sadness at the passing of summer itself. New classes meant new routines, new ideas, a new start, but also long hours spent hunched over books. All of these factors contributed to an irresistible urge on the part of many to get blotto and dance the night away. And with cheap beer serving as the fuel, R.E.M. were the vehicle that would get them to that destination.
To hear these recordings is to catch a sonic glimpse of that energy. It’s not a patch on being there, but Biddle’s carefully preserved tapes have ensured that the listener can hear R.E.M. at least as clearly as the audience did that night, if not more so. The band’s playing is not perfect—Peter Buck, in particular, fumbles his way through certain passages—but the synergy of the four musicians working toward a shared goal makes this perhaps their finest hour (onstage, at least). And all this before they ever signed a record deal. Rarely have I heard Stipe so locked-in vocally, and never before or since have I heard Bill Berry play so enthusiastically. This snapshot of a small-town band playing to a “perfect circle of acquaintances and friends” captures R.E.M. at the tail end of their apprenticeship phase. As a live unit they had fully arrived; as a songwriting entity, they were just getting started.
Pre-order Begin the Begin: R.E.M.‘s Early Years via Amazon.
The legendary R.E.M. performances recorded at Tyrone’s O.C. on September 22 and 23, 1981, are on YouTube. The September 22 show was uploaded just this week.
The below live footage was captured at the 688 Club in Atlanta on February 20, 1981. The video begins with the band in the midst of “Rave on,” which was made famous by Buddy Holly. The first sign of Stipe cutting a rug occurs at the :48 mark.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Teenage Michael Stipe attends ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ in Frank-N-Furter drag, late 1970s