REM frontman Michael Stipe’s dislike of clarity seems to grow with age. NEILSPENCER looks at his career
FOR a man who has just carved himself a substantial slice of the biggest business deal in pop history, Michael Stipe sounds mightily disgruntled on his newly released album, New Adventures In Hi-Fi, and the bile flows from the speakers like blood from a freshly opened vein. “This show doesn’t matter,” Stipe sings on one song. “I don’t know what I want any more,” he moans on another. “I’m drowning. I’m defeated,” he chokes. What is his problem?
Even before the 36-year-old singer and the other three members of REM picked up $80 million for re-signing with their label, Warners, Stipe was a fabulously wealthy man and an acclaimed artist. The deal confirmed REM’s status as one of the biggest acts of the Nineties; perhaps even, to summon the threadbare phrase, the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. As frontman and lyricist, Stipe has basked not only in the adulation of millions of fans, but in an unprecedented mixture of critical praise and peer-group respect. Not even journalists, it seems, have a bad word to say about him.
It’s tempting to treat Stipe’s litany of complaint as the latest example of the superstar whinge, in which the rich and famous invite the rest of us to commiserate over the burdens of fame while they cry loudly en route to the bank. It’s not a charge without substance.
When not on the road REM are likely to be secreted away in recording studios, assiduously avoiding the attention of gauche fans and prying hacks, beyond the fading recollections of their youthful obscurity.
The inhabitants of Michael Stipe’s songs have never been so easily pinned down, however. >From REM’s birth, his lyrics have been notoriously opaque, mysteries he has rarely felt inclined to unravel in his increasingly infrequent interviews. “Sometimes they’re about me, sometimes someone else, sometimes they’re totally fabricated,” says Stipe of his creations.
His dislike of clarity seems to be growing with age. He sang one song, Belong (from Out of Time) into a Walkman to muffle its sentiments. Frequently on this new album, his voice scarcely surfaces from the depths of a murky mix that is at odds with the glossy sound delivered by most acts in the REM league. He’s applied much the same attitude to his public persona, which remains resolutely out of focus.
If Stipe is now one of rock’s most towering icons, he is also one of its oddest and most contradictory. Even before he lost his hair and shaved his head, his wiry frame and gaunt looks were scarcely pin-up material. His rise to fame has been protracted and almost sneaky. Even now, with each REM album notching up sales of up to 10 million, Stipe’s is not a name that summons the instant recognition of a Jagger or a Jackson. When Labour’s Tony Blair told the media his favourite band was REM, the response from the press was: Who he?
Stipe’s refusal to conform to the stereotypes of rock stardom has a long history. For the first years of REM’s life, his stage act was deliberately undynamic; he wouldn’t spread his feet more than shoulder-width apart in case he be mistaken for another airhead crotch-rocker. Despite his love of film, the band were distrustful of the new medium of promo videos; not until the Nineties, with the evocative video for Losing My Religion, the group’s breakthrough single, did they truly embrace the MTV generation.
Stipe’s evasiveness has applied particularly to his sexual orientation, still the source of much speculation. Rumoured to be having affairs with various friends including singer Natalie Merchant and actor Stephen Dorff, he responds to questions about his private life with polite circumvention. In song and on stage (where, for a spell, he was wont to show up wearing a dress along with a suit), his line has been that he is playing around with gender.
A long-standing vegetarian and moderate drinker, his only known vices are a chronic nicotine habit, for which he is prone to apologise, and an insistence on doing his own laundry. On tour, his hotel rooms stay unnervingly intact. Off the road, he shuns the expensive restaurants and clubs of the glitterati in favour of a drink with old friends at a music bar.
What REM have always been about is authenticity. As the corporatisation of pop becomes ever more brazen, the four nouveau musicians stand splendidly aloof. Unlike the Rolling Stones, you won’t find a Volkswagen logo stamped on their tours, and the only REM song used in a TV advert was Everybody Hurts for the Samaritans. Whatever their preference in the meaningless choice between Pepsi and Coke, unlike Madonna and Michael Jackson, they aren’t telling.
Integrity has been stamped on REM’s calling card from the band’s formation in 1980. Like Stipe, bassist Mike Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and drummer Bill Berry were all Southerners drawn to the bohemian haven of the small college town of Athens – though as the son of a US army helicopter pilot, the singer had had a more nomadic upbringing than his fellows.
Stipe’s parents tried hard to shield their three children from the rootlessness of army life by staying put while father went away. He describes his childhood as idyllic, and remains close to his parents. Nevertheless, the sensitive boyhood psyche of Michael Philip Stipe cannot have been left unscarred by the experience of watching TV at home with mom, searching for a glimpse of his absent father amid the bloody dispatches from the Vietnam war.
By adolescence, Stipe had become, by his own admission, “an outsider”, a high-school extrovert with a fondness for cross-dressing. Art school, where he studied art and photography, was a natural move. Dropping out to form REM followed easily enough, the group’s name (the initials for rapid eye movement, which arrives with the sleep of dreams) plucked at random from a dictionary. So, at least, fable has it.
With a sound built around the melodic Sixties jangle of the Byrds, and an attitude inspired by the punk insurrection of the Seventies, the band offered a markedly different agenda to the airhead thunder of the arena bands that dominated the Reagan era; the likes of Van Halen, Def Leppard and Foreigner. For Stipe, New York heroine Patti Smith was a particularly potent source of inspiration; appropriately, she has a cameo role on the bands current hit, E Bow The Letter.
Signed to the indie label IRS, the group built a fan base through constant touring and the support of the college radio network. “We swam against the tide,” said Stipe, “We didn’t get into music to make money or be famous. We wanted to travel around like Kerouac; see the country”.
Early albums, such as Fables of the Reconstruction and Life’s Rich Pageant, tapped cleverly into the myths of Americana, and of the South in particular. Their growing success, culminating in half a million sales for 1987’s Document, led to their being signed by Warners, for whom 1989’s Green became a million-seller.
Following Green’s success it would have been easy to lapse into formula. Instead, the group responded to their newly won fame with their best work to date, 1991’s Out of Time, whose snappy but haunting singles Shiny Happy People and Losing My Religion spearheaded their thrust into mega-stardom. The following year, Automatic for the People delivered a further surprise, trading the band’s rock edge for slow, semi-acoustic melancholia. By contrast, 1994’s Monster was a noisy, if not fully realised, attempt to embrace the post- grunge sound of Nineties bands such as Soundgarden and Pearl Jam; bands who had used REM as their template. For non-believers, Stipe’s downbeat take on the REM sound – “a bunch of minor chords with a lot of nonsense thrown on top” – continues to fit the frame.
Assembled from a mixture of live shows, soundcheck run-throughs and live studio tracks, their new album is another laudable attempt to tear up the script that dictates that big acts recycle the style that first bought them success to ever-decreasing artistic returns. The critical consensus – that it’s a masterpiece – seems premature, but the album keeps alive REM’s reputation as a band willing to do the unexpected.
That the band is still together was by no means certain after the travails of last year’s aptly named Monster tour, during which Berry nearly died from an aneurysm and both Stipe and Buck underwent surgery. The tour was proof that the pressures of stardom, of which Stipe complained forcefully on Monster, are no chimera.
Not that the singer needed any such reminder. The deaths of two close friends, Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, had a predictably jarring effect, and Stipe’s distaste for fame was further intensified by the tabloid rumour that he was dying of Aids.
The deal with Warners signals a break as much as a continuation for REM. They’ve parted with their manager of 15 years and are talking of a future in which touring scarcely figures. The ending which the other members of the band have written is that the group break up on New Year’s Eve, 1999. What will Stipe do the day after? “Wake up, eat breakfast and take the dogs for a run in the fields.”