Q&A: Author Peter Ames Carlin on THE NAME OF THIS BAND IS R.E.M.

With bonus audio for paid subscribers!

In advance of our book club Zoom on Sunday (there’s still time to sign up!), today I’m sharing my conversation with Peter Ames Carlin, author of THE NAME OF THIS BAND IS R.E.M.

I’m making the (edited) text free for everyone, but paid subscribers will get a bonus uncut 52-minute audio version at the bottom of the page.

Thanks to Peter for being so generous with his time, and thanks to you all for reading/supporting this Substack.

Me (Whitney Matheson): I feel like I've been waiting for this book for 30 years. I think a lot of fans are pumped that finally there's something that goes through R.E.M.’s entire career.

Peter Ames Carlin: It was interesting to me that the major biographies of them came out of England. The thing that I was yearning for was a book that was going to take the social backdrop into account: the kind of sociopolitical issues of being from the South and the internal currents and tensions in United States society that underscored so much of what R.E.M. was doing.

What you don't talk about, but of course I'm wondering, is your personal experience with R.E.M. When were you introduced to the band?

I came in a little on the late side. I was living in Portland and Seattle in the early ’80s, and there wasn't a major college radio scene that I was aware of. For the first half of the '80s, I was aware of who they were because I read Rolling Stone. I'm fairly confident I saw the original broadcast of the Letterman show in the fall of '83, and I can recall seeing some of those weird videos on MTV on 120 Minutes or whatever. But it wasn't until they began to get airplay on more FM and mainstream stations that their sound was sort of imprinted in my mind … “The One I Love” and probably the songs on Pageant, “End of the World” and maybe “Fall on Me.” As they hit the beginning of that real golden era from Document to Green to Out of Time, then it was like, “Oh, these guys are fucking great.”

Did you write about them when you were working as a journalist?

I never did music journalism in that way – I wrote about everything but music for the first 20 or so years of my career. Music was really important to me, but I just had the sense that I didn't want to spend a lot of time listening to and going to shows of people whose music I didn't like, you know? (Laughs)

I loved music writing, and there were a couple signpost books, like Mystery Train and a few others, where it was like, "Oh, something more important is happening here." But I just thought, "I'm going to leave that to those guys, and I'm going to do this other work." Also, music writing was so competitive and there were a lot of sharp elbows and posturing. I think I was probably afraid to do it, honestly.

When you were planning the book, you probably knew you wouldn’t get interviews with the band members, right?

Well, I knew Peter, just because in Portland we were neighbors and had a lot of friends in common. There's like a conduit between Athens and Portland: Scott McCaughey lives there. A close friend of mine had been great friends with them, and he introduced me to Bertis Downs, and Bertis and I have been really good friends since then. So virtually everyone is somewhat R.E.M.-adjacent, and I had other friends who had worked with the band. Getting into it was very friendly, and (the members) were all very open and very cool about it, telling friends and family that it was okay to talk to me. So that was kind of cool, because I've written about people who are much less excited to have me on their case.

It’s always more fun to get into a book when you have cooperation, but not having it allows you to take, in some ways, a more liberated and arguably interesting narrative tack, because you can get into your analysis and view them from another half-step away.

I like how you explore their early lives, because they never talked very much about it themselves. What was that research process like?

When I'm starting a project, I'm just trying to get into somebody's network. … I'm always interested in childhood friends and the people who played in the high school bands, because they begin to introduce you to these characters and show you who they were as kids – you can grasp so much from that. The people they've worked with and who are closest to them at a professional level are trained to not talk about this kind of stuff, because, a) it's arguably nobody's business; and b) if you wanna work with somebody, it's way better not to discuss their private lives.

One of the reasons why I found R.E.M. so interesting was how private they were and how they really separated the art from their lives. The fact that they didn't talk to me confirmed the central part of my narrative and a lot of what I admired about those guys. But it was not my goal to dig through their sock drawers. To me, what's personal and compelling (is) relevant only to the point that it informs the art. “He was with this person” or “They lived here, and then they fought over this” – that's less important to me, unless it becomes the basis for a song or something.

I also like that you include a lot of info about Bill Berry. He’s always been the quietest member, and definitely the one I've known the least about.

It’s always easy to assume that the drummer is secondary at best to not just the work, but the idea of the band. But that was never true with R.E.M. Bill was always a central figure and super-crucial in everything from composing music to being sort of the editor-in-chief of the band to understanding how they could be both artistically ambitious and focused, yet also function in a commercial space.

He understood how the industry worked, which he began to get from the year he spent as the office boy at a booking agency. When he met Ian Copeland and he began to introduce him to punk music and everything, he was also there learning: How do you book dates? If you're a band that's getting started, who do you call? He was the one who went to Mike Mills and Michael Stipe and said, "If we're gonna do this, you guys have got to drop out of college, and that's all there is to it.”

But also, Bill composed really central parts of some of their biggest songs. They all described that after he left, they were staggered, because it wasn't just having their friend back away but also having to reinvent their collaboration.

His ambivalence about wanting to be successful but then, upon arriving, realizing, This is just a huge pain in my ass. It’s de-emphasizing what I love the most, which is the music, and over-emphasizing everything I hate, which is being a personality and all the stuff that goes along with it. That was super-compelling to me.

You write a lot about touring. What’s your experience of seeing R.E.M live?

I didn't see them perform until ’95, so I was again, quite late. But on the other hand, it was jaw-dropping. They were at that point where they seemed to be channeling the culture, or certainly the youth culture or the counterculture. Their success felt so idealistic, and it certainly touched me on a level of, Oh, good things are possible. Their ascent onto the big stage happened at the same time that the Soviet Union collapsed and the apartheid government in South Africa finally dissolved. It was like, Oh my God, democracy and freedom are on the upswing.

I saw them in Portland, and they were extraordinary. Michael was such an overwhelmingly powerful performer – he was both commenting on the absurdity of arena rock while simultaneously being a fantastic arena rock performer and absolutely magnetic. They were just one of those bands that folded together in a really cool, exciting way onstage, and of course they had this huge catalog of incredible music that just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Do you have a favorite R.E.M. song?

It sort of changes on a daily basis, but I never get over “Nightswimming.” I love “Fall on Me” and certainly weird ones like “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us.” And Christ, “Country Feedback” might be my absolute favorite.

When I was writing, I spent a lot more time listening to Chronic Town than I ever had done. There’s something about Chronic Town that I just really, really love. I prefer it to Murmur in terms of their early stuff. I know Murmur is, like, the holy document for a lot of people, and it's great. But there's something that feels very light on its feet with the songs on Chronic Town.

How did you arrive at the ending of the book?

It's weird ending – it's almost like movies that show you the picture of the character and they tell you what happens after the action. But you know, I personally would love it if the guys in R.E.M. found a way back to one another. Even if they didn't do it for me per se, I find it very moving to think that there's still just four guys who really love to make music together. I mean, they could be getting together every week or every few months and just going to Bill's house and playing the songs they love to play for their own enjoyment. And to me, in some ways, that's the happiest possible ending.

When they announced the end of R.E.M., I wrote a column begging them to reconsider. I was so upset! But now I get it, and they all seem to be doing exactly what they want to be doing.

They stuck to who they were, made the art that they wanted to make, had a really good time doing it, were way more successful than they ever thought they could be, and seemed to be having a ball for most of the time. And then they got to a point where it was like, “I'm good. Are you good? Yeah.” And (now they) get to do whatever they want.

I love when Michael posts his photography and stuff on Instagram, and he gives you a little insight into where he's going and who he's hanging out with. I generally have no idea who those people are, but they all look really sweet and interesting and fun, and he looks like he's having a ball.

michaelstipe

A post shared by @michaelstipe

Peter plays around town all the time – he and Scott McCaughey work together constantly. I remember one rainy Tuesday night in this new club in Northeast Portland, and The Minus Five were playing. There were like five people on stage and maybe seven people watching them. And I was just watching Peter's face and wondering, How does it feel to be playing this room after you’ve played Rock in Rio for 150,000 people and the largest arenas around the world? And he looked fucking ecstatic. He was so into the music. I think as far as he's concerned, he's living his own dream.

With Mike, it seems he's doing the same thing. He plays golf, he hangs out with whoever he wants to hang out with, he travels around when he wants to, he does his symphonic-type classical stuff. And Bill is on his farm and making music with his friends in Athens when he feels like it.

A reader had this question for you: “You've written about Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson. Is there a trait you've noticed that they all share? What draws you to write biographies of famous rock stars?”

My family is very musical, so I always had a visceral connection to it – which was one of the reasons why I didn't want to write about music for the early part of my career. And one of the things I like is that artists are so psychologically complicated and generally (many) are doing this thing of trying to transform dark energy that's at the center of their soul – some unhappiness or some sense of being unsettled – into something that's light.

With a lot of the people that I've written about, one thing that connects them is depression or some sort of psychological/psychiatric dysfunction. With Bruce Springsteen, one of the things that we really connected on was the experience of dealing with depression. At the time, I was taking antidepressants, and they felt very transformative for me as a person. (Bruce) had talked about being in therapy, but he never talked about any kind of psychiatric intervention. We were chatting, and he sort of let that slip. I gave it some thought, then I went back and said, "Hey, do you want to talk about this?" And he did.

I'm really interested in the creation of art and how we all have a shared experience of life, but some of us are able to lift off and translate that into something. How artists write about something that feels very intimate and interior to themselves but do it in a way that is understood and touching to people all around the world – to me, that's amazing. How does it feel to sit down and write “Thunder Road” or “Losing My Religion”? A lot of these things just feel uncanny.

We were talking about “Country Feedback.” The way those guys have described it is they were jamming on this chord progression, and then Michael walked into their rehearsal space and began to improvise this lyric. The way they describe it was it came out perfectly, which I don't believe, but I'm sure it was very, very close – and that there was something about the connection of the feeling at the heart of the chords that immediately touched something in Michael, and this gave him an avenue to express it. And it came out in this way that little old me is listening to it going, "I don't know if I understand these words, but I know exactly what he's saying."

And to 14 -year-old me, too.

Yes. I was writing a few weeks ago about listening to “Thunder Road” when I was a teenager, like really depressed, where you just feel so detached and lost. And the line about, "This is a town full of losers" – (that) was kind of like a door cracking open, but what really got to me was that instrumental piece that ends the song. That feels so cinematic and affirming and just … in that moment, and I never forgot this, it just revealed something to me, and there was something so overwhelmingly powerful about it. And who knows why it touched me in the way that it did, but to me, it's really interesting to have the opportunity to talk to people who can do that and (ask), What was that like for you?

How do you think that R.E.M. may have influenced artists today, even in ways they're not aware of?

I think largely the ongoing influence is the example they set on how you can be an alternative band coming from an alternative culture and still work in a mainstream commercial system – and how do you hang on to the part of you that's most important and still find a niche in this world?

With R.E.M., one of the important things was when they finally figured out what kind of videos they could make that would both express something that felt powerful to them artistically, while at the same time becoming close enough to what MTV's aesthetic expectations were. Michael had that realization before “Losing my Religion,” where he saw Sinead O’Connor's video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” and suddenly was like, Oh, that's a whole other kind of expression. That's a whole other form of artistry. I think that is one of the things that's influential.

But I think it’s also just the fact that they spent 30 years doing whatever the hell they felt like doing, making music they wanted to make in the way they wanted to make it and being successful at it. But I mean … what we're talking about suddenly all feels like ancient history.

Join me to discuss THE NAME OF THIS BAND IS R.E.M. on Jan. 26 at 4 p.m. EST via Zoom. Listen to my Spotify playlist inspired by the book here. Paid subscribers will see uncut audio of this interview at the bottom of the page.