There's only one band which can combine gazillion-selling commercial acclaim with fawning critical acclaim and that's REM - no other band have so effortlessly and languidly preserved their integrity and a sense of creative worth while at the same time selling out football stadiums and giving Mariah Carey a run for her money in the charts. The only other contenders might have been U2, but for all their multi-million selling efforts they still get kicked from one end of a music magazine to another while all the others with the right songs in place still can't manage the sheer volume of world-wide sales that has made Stipe, Buck, Mills and Berry into the first "alterno" band to go quadruple platinum (or whatever) all around the world.
For a time, though, it was a close thing between REM, The Replacements and Husker Du as to who would be the first to take on the biz and win on their own terms - and remember these were preNevermind days when the mere thought of any of these bands selling anywhere over a million copies of an album was ridiculous in the original sense of the world. In many ways, REM's story is a text-book guide of how to do it, with separate chapters on when, where and how added in for good measure. They were an organic band, and friends too, who were all college drop-outs and they had enough beautiful Byrds-influenced music running through their veins in the early days to suggest that, far from merely acknowleding their influences, they were capable of building something dynamic and original from the collision of country/folk/new wave that made up their original sound.
Unlike the plaid-shirted disaffected youth from Seattle almost a decade later, they didn't have the luxury of their second or even first album selling five million copies, with all the resultant pressures that that brings; instead they built it up slowly, developed a fan base, were always allowed to release another record and when their time came (commercially) with Out Of Time (not one of their better records, funnily enough) they were ready, and not just on a musical level. If their last two efforts, Monster (exactly the wrong sort of album to hang a stadium world tour around) and the up-and-down New Adventures In Hi-Fi aren't really the sort of stuff to make you reach for the superlatives, there is proof postive in the re-release this week, at mid-price, of three of their middle-period albums, that they remain one of the finest bands to come out of America.
If Murmur and Reckoning got them the requisite cult following, the first of the reissues Fables Of The Reconstruction (1985) saw them dent the upper reaches of the chart and become more than a fabled foreign import. Quite morose and "down" compared to what they were up to live at the time, it remains their mini-breakthrough album of sorts but later converts to the REM cause don't seem to like too much because of the absence of any big single. Both Driver 8 and Wendell Gee failed to make an impression, except on college radio (in the days when college radio really was an alternative to the format radio).
The second re-issue, Lifes Rich Pageant from 1986 (always without the apostrophe in the title, for the anoraks), saw a more "political" type of concern as the world, its economy and its environment stagnated under the Reagan/Thatcher axis. Songs like These Days and Cuyahoga provided a lyrical template for the Seattle crowd later on. Arguably their best album to date although 1992's Automatic For The People brings it down to the wire.
Completing the trilogy is Document (1987), the first to be produced by Scott Litt who is still with them to this day. Sounding like bona fide rock stars for the first time, they cranked up everything on this album and singles like The One I Love and Finest Worksong and It's The End Of The World etc; eased their passage into triple-A rotation land. The obligatory bonus tracks on the re-issues include Just A Touch, So. Central Rain and Burning Hell. All well and good but couldn't someone have asked them to include some of their immaculate cover versions instead: pick from Lou Reed's After Hours, Leonard Cohen's First We Take Manhattan, Television's See No Evil or, like Morrissey did later, Henry Mancini's Moonriver.
It remains a matter of personal choice whether you regard these three albums as their finest 180 minutes or so or if you're still a Chronic Town and Murmur person. Either way, the story from Document onwards is pretty well known; Green went top twenty, Out Of Time went to number one everywhere, as did Automatic For The People and Monster. The most recent offering, New Adventures stalled; but where the momentum might be lost, it certainly hasn't disappeared. The band are currently demo-ing their new album and, as always, we wait with wonder.
The reissued Fables, Life's Rich Pageant and Document are all on the IRS/ EMI label.
