On repeat: R.E.M., ‘Automatic For the People’

By • Oct 26th, 2007 • Category: Columns

This month, R.E.M.’s “Automatic For the People” turned 15 years old.

There is a good reason that college dorms come with furniture – the kids shouldn’t need to worry about that stuff yet.

There’s no reason to invest in a matching couch/love seat set, or a designer coffee table and that perfect lamp, when legally buying cigarettes and voting are relatively novel concepts. People’s minds aren’t wired that way, and luckily universities have bought into rationing out life’s major choices. Making students plop down a hefty sum for proper furnishings shouldn’t be coupled with picking a major and getting accustomed to the whirlwind four-year (five-year? six-year?) parade of all-nighters and road trips.

College is a time to keep as busy as possible to figure out where you would like to be when the time does come to pony up for a new flat-screen TV and entertainment center. Because at some point, we all have to invest in our futures and decide about the direction we’re heading. Maybe it’s not with a living-room set; maybe it’s with a new car or entirely revamped wardrobe instead. Maybe it’s with a changed ZIP code and leaving some old friends behind. Whatever the change of choice, it happens. And when it does, the decisive moment isn’t gradual. It is like a switch has been flipped, like when recovering alcoholics can recall the exact date and time of their last drink. No, college is the time for slow discovery, but the shift into adulthood is marked by major events.

R.E.M. didn’t make that change until 1992′s “Automatic For the People.” It wasn’t until the band’s eighth album, more than a decade into existence, that the switch to long-term thinking turned on.

By this point, the Athens, Ga., foursome was by no means a small band. In fact, the group always has seemed like elder statesmen, regardless of the stage in their career.

From 1983-88 the band released an LP a year en route to becoming the godfathers of college radio. The rise of university airwaves owes as much to R.E.M. as R.E.M. is in debt to those ramshackle stations and small-frequency broadcasts. By the time that “Green” capped off that prolific streak of six records in six years, the band had graduated from indie imprint IRS to Warner Bros. But even before their major-label debut, Michael Stipe and crew had become one of the largest-selling bands in America. In doing so, they had lit the torch for left-of-the-dial channels that would be passed to The Replacements and then to Pavement, and also solidified themselves as the band that every upstart college act looked up to and aspired to be.

It was signing with Warner Bros. that gave R.E.M. the financial stability to take its first break since the band’s conception – a three-year hiatus that resulted in 1991′s “Out of Time.” The groundwork for what eventually would become “Automatic For the People” was being laid, and landmark songs such as the more introspective and haunting “Losing My Religion” were replacing the jangly guitar pop from those early years.

Yet, much like their days crisscrossing the U.S. in a rickety van, the band had an aura of seniority among the crop of early ’90s acts. Although the music media lumped R.E.M. in with acts such as Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins (partly because of Stipe’s budding friendships to Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain), none of these bands had spent even half as much time in the proverbial trenches as R.E.M. Already in their early 30s, the members were almost a decade older than many of the performers sharing their marquees and magazine covers. And because of this, within the circles of MTV and “alternative rock,” no band garnered as much respect among its musical peers. (Image above courtesy of Warner Bros.)

Despite being the coolest and most revered group in whatever genre it had found itself, “Automatic For the People” was the moment in which R.E.M. embraced its elder statesmanship. Although the band never had been sophomoric, it wasn’t until 1992 that its political, social and musical leanings become fully actualized.

This was the band’s long-term investment. This was determining its future. This was R.E.M.’s furniture, and it still uses it 15 years later.

It’s not that “Automatic For the People” is the cornerstone to the band’s Hall of Fame career because it is its most successful album – although it is. With six singles, the record has been certified U.S. platinum (1 million sales) four times, and certified U.K. platinum (300,000 sales) six times. It isn’t great because it spent 75 weeks on American charts, or an astonishing 179 weeks listing in the U.K.

It’s great because it was an unexpected shift. Somehow, a band that had seemed to already have matured fully became even more important, even more self-aware, even… well… better.

“Automatic” brought out the big names. Although the band had collaborated with seminal rapper KRS-One before, for this 1992 output they enlisted former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones to arrange strings. On only his second credited orchestration, the hard-rock legend compiled the dramatic and sweeping melodies that underscored the 12 songs. It was these blistering violins and swooning cellos that built songs such as “Everybody Hurts” and “Drive” to their epically cascading crescendos that rival the theatrics of Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.”

This sort of progression was not accidental, nor was the band oblivious to the change that it was making. Guitarist Peter Buck often has referenced the group’s hesitation to include the track “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” because of its similarity to earlier R.E.M. material. But the throwback serves as a moment of pause tucked between the swaying warnings of “Try Not to Breathe” and the suicide-themed “Everybody Hurts.” As does the two-minute instrumental, “New Orleans Instrumental No.1,” before the chugging “Sweetness Follows” bleeds into the tales of “Monty Got a Raw Deal” and “Ignoreland,” which kick off the LP’s second side.

If it is possible for a perfect record to be either front- or back-loaded, “Automatic For the People” is it. Capitalizing on the intense seriousness of its first half, the LP’s second six tunes show a lighter and more optimistically concerned side of R.E.M. From the consistent chiming of “Star Me Kitten” to the Andy Kaufman-themed “Man on the Moon,” the record saunters along with the cautious paces of experienced performers not able to get too excited about life’s happiest moments or too upset about its downswings. Not that the songwriters sound jaded, but rather calm, as if they have been through these societal twists before and come out on the other side – even if they hadn’t been down this music route to this extent before.

Culminating with the pensive piano ballad, “Nightswimming” and the homage to growing up, “Find the River,” we’re left with Stipe bellowing out the album’s final lyrics: “Strength and courage overrides/ The privileged and weary eyes/ Of river poet search naivete/ Pick up here and chase the ride/ The river empties to the tide/ All of this is coming your way.”

It’s as if he was letting us know that “Automatic” was the start of what was to come during the band’s second life. If its first half was a band accidentally finding itself, the past 15 years have seen R.E.M. reveling in its discovery.

And no matter how exhausting that continuous exploration and globetrotting might be, they always will have a great couch to come home to and plop down on to relax and collect their thoughts.

Northwest Herald, Oct. 26, 2007

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