FEATURE:
Find the River
R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People at Thirty
__________
THE eighth studio album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
from R.E.M. was released on 5th October, 1992. Earning huge reviews upon its release, the staggering and iconic Automatic for the People has sold more than eighteen million copies worldwide. I wanted to mark the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of one of the greatest albums ever. The band from Athens, Georgia were not exactly shy when it came to putting out phenomenal albums. Fans might have their own ordering but, in general, I think the feeling is that Automatic for the People is at the top of the tree. A year after they released Out of Time, the band went in a different direction. Not as guitar-driven and with the same pace and spirit, Automatic for the People is slower, has string arrangements from John Paul Jones and focuses on themes such as mortality, loss, mourning and nostalgia. I am going to round up this feature with a couple of reviews for the stunning Automatic for the People. Before then, Classic Albums Sundays told the fascinating story of Automatic for the People. I have chosen some highlights from the feature:
“Their fifth album, 1987’s Document was a real turning point for the band as it featured their biggest mainstream hit yet, ‘The One I Love’. Like many indie rock heads, my younger self grappled with our own prejudices of the us against them nature – the non-commercial vs commercial music and radio formats. Looking back that was a bit unfair as the song is damn good and the remainder of the album included many deeply socio-political songs like ‘Welcome to the Occupation’ and ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ which made explicit parallels with then president Ronald Reagan.
And then the following year, R.E.M. did the unthinkable – they signed to a major label, Warner Brothers. I can’t even being to explain what a big deal this was indie-die-hards. Were R.E.M. selling out? Again, looking back it was unfair to think that way as now this incredible Georgian quartet had more infrastructure and money to get their music out to a wider audience. And the band remained steadfastly political, choosing the American release date to coincide with the 1988 presidential election, and using their increased profile to criticise Republican candidate George H. W. Bush. So ‘Green’ still had underground appeal with the highest accolade of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain naming it as one of his top 50 favourite albums.
Their next record didn’t feature political commentary as Michael Stipe explained to Spin Magazine, “You can only go so far writing songs like that and get away with it. I can’t do it all the time, and I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into being a political folk singer in a rock band. Every song on this record is a love song.” Out of Time became their big breakthrough and topped both the US and UK charts and garnered a worldwide hit with ‘Losing my Religion’. And it won R.E.M. seven Grammy nominations – more than any other artist that year. They eventually won three including Best Alternative Music Album.
The ‘Alternative Music’ labelling was significant. It was around this time when Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and most famously Nirvana left their independent label homes and migrated to the major labels. Simultaneously, commercial radio formats were beginning to catch up with college radio where these bands had germinated. But you couldn’t call it ‘indie’ anymore and hence, the label ‘Alternative Music’ was born.
Again, this development was mirroring my own career. My first proper job after university was as a host/programmer/writer and sound engineer for an interview-based radio show called Music View that was syndicated on over 200 college radio stations throughout the country. Once Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ broke to the mainstream, commercial radio stations began adopting the Alternative Music format and I started producing another interview-based radio show called New Music Exclusives that went out on 50 commercial radio stations who had just changed their format.
With regards to R.E.M., it was possible that the pressures of becoming an arena-playing band and the added scrutiny that comes with being in the public eye, as they decided not to tour after releasing Out of Time, their highest selling album to date. Instead, Buck, Miles and Berry headed to the studio without Stipe as they found it worked better when they presented him with more solid instrumental backing tracks before he started adding lyrics.
They enlisted Scott Litt who had been producing their albums since Document, and produced some of the new record in Athens and then in various places throughout the country and the resulting album, Automatic for the People, became a career highpoint, selling 15 million albums, topped US and UK charts and produced three hit singles: ‘Drive’, ‘Man on the Moon’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’.
Initially, the band intended to have a harder rocking sound for the album, but it turned out quite different the overall the record had a much more sombre feel. They did enlisted legendary Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, but not for his heavy rock skills – instead he was brought in for string arrangements and they are beautiful – majestic and melancholic.
The opening song Drive sets the reflective tone for the album Drive seemed to be aimed at the young telling them to take charge of their own lives.
‘Everybody Hurts’ direct lyrics were aimed for teenagers and perhaps this is why it’s one of their most popular singles. It was mostly written by drummer Bill Berry (although the band always equally split song-writing credit) and the band tried to approach it using a Stax / Otis Redding ‘Pain in My Heart ‘ vibe which you can hear if you listen closely. And you may also hear the 10cc ‘I’m Not In Love’ influence in ‘Star Me Kitten’.
‘Man on the Moon’ was about controversial comedian Andy Kaufman. In an interview with Mat Snow in Q, (accessed via Rocks Back Pages) Buck revealed, “It’s a funny little song about two people who are dead but are supposed to be alive: Elvis, and Andy Kaufman, a comic who tested the boundaries. One of his routines was to read from The Great Gatsby for 45 minutes while the audience threw things at him. A lot of people think he’s still alive.”
The song does have one stand-out rocker and the only politically driven song on the record, ‘Ignoreland’ of which Buck said, “We live in America: look around – we’re pretty much able to ignore reality. We have this great ability to pretend there’s nothing wrong, that we’re still a superpower and it doesn’t matter if we kill a couple of hundred thousand people. Oh, and Reagan lowered taxes. In fact, taxes were raised 12 times during his reign. He lowered rich people’s taxes – he and George Bush made me rich, but my mom’s taxes went up. She’s a secretary. Most people are able to ignore all that and vote overwhelmingly for these guys who just out and out lie to you.”
In retrospect, Automatic for the People was a strange album to release in 1992. R.E.M. were no longer the darlings of college radio but arguably the biggest and most important band in America, yet they still didn’t quite fit in. Here was an album that was full of introspective ruminations on mortality, an album that wore its vulnerability on its sleeve, but was also empowering – connecting with people who felt they were on the outside”.
I am excited to see how the world reacts to the thirtieth anniversary of Automatic for the People. I remember the album coming out in 1992 and, as a fan of R.E.M., I was interested to hear it. Singles like The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight and Everybody Hurts are songs that became part of the soundtrack of my life from that point. Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe created a masterpiece with Automatic for the People. In 2017, NME spoke with Mike Mills about the legacy of R.E.M.’s eighth studio album:
“To celebrate the 25th anniversary of REM‘s seminal ‘Automatic For The People’, we sat down with bassist Mike Mills to talk about the album’s legacy, politics and the chances of the band ever getting back together. Watch our full ‘In Conversation’ interview above.
Last week saw the release of the 25th anniversary edition of the art-rock veterans’ classic 1992 record – featuring the likes of ‘Man On The Moon’, ‘Drive’ ‘Everybody Hurts’, ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight’ and ‘Nightswimming’. Speaking to NME about what made the record stand out and stand the test of time, Mills said that it was created ‘in their own little space’ while ‘not trying to sell a tonne of records’. The band were uncertain as to whether anyone would even listen – let alone like it.
IN THIS PHOTO: R.E.M. at the 1992 GRAMMYs
“I think it had a consistency,” Mills told NME. “When we made records, we always saw them as a journey. You’re inviting the listener to go on a 40-45 minute trip with you. If a mood is sustained for that trip, unless you’re trying to jerk from one place to the next which is fine, but if you’re trying to achieve a flow, then this record has that – in a way that I don’t think that any of our records other than maybe ‘Murmur’ or ‘Collapse Into Now’ had.
“As someone who loves the format of an album, who loves going somewhere with an artist or musician for a length of time, then this record succeeds in that way much more so than any of our own records or anyone else’s records. You have to go to Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell – they’re just two out of a million I’m sure, but the fact that this one maintains some kind of continuity for the entire trip of the journey is really important to us.”
Speaking of the political overtones of the record, particularly on ‘Ignoreland’, Mills said that he never foresaw such themes ringing even more true today some 25 years later. However, he said that this sadly appears to be the case in the wake of the election of President Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum”.
I will round off with a couple of reviews. Pitchfork reviewed Automatic for the People in 2017 and looked at its twenty-fifth anniversary reissue. They make some really interesting observations about the direction the band took in 1992 and how Automatic for the People fitted with what else was happening around them in the music scene:
“With the release of Automatic for the People, R.E.M. firmly entered their elder-statesmen phase, just as the next wave of alternative rock was cresting. R.E.M.’s career up to that point had represented the platonic ideal of a left-of-center rock band infiltrating the mainstream—a step-by-step process that saw the band turn bolder and its audience get bigger with each album, culminating in the multi-platinum, MTV-saturating success of Out of Time. Ironically, Automatic for the People arrived in a post-Nevermind world where all that careful groundwork was being razed by overzealous major labels desperately seeking the next Nirvana. At the same time, the amped-up, aggressive nature of grunge threatened to make R.E.M.’s increasingly refined, mandolin-plucked pop seem, well, out of time.
The knee-jerk response would’ve been to let Peter Buck pounce on the distortion pedal and reassert the band’s post-punk bona fides (a back-to-basics strategy they hinted at during the Out of Time press cycle), but R.E.M. wisely opted to step aside and let the flannel-clad kids have their moment. Rather than attempt to compete in a world where teen angst was all the rage, R.E.M. set about crafting a rueful response to the onset of middle age—and remind us that life goes on even after your slam-dancing days are over. (If Kurt Cobain had survived into middle age, he probably would’ve wound up making a record that sounded like this.) The video for the album’s haunting acoustic opener, “Drive,” gamely adopts Seattle-scene aesthetics—a never-ending mosh pit rendered in flickering black-and-white—like a Charles Peterson photograph come to life. But when Stipe crowd-surfs atop a sea of hands belonging to fans several years his junior, he’s not trying to ride a trend, but starkly illustrate just far from the alt-rock zeitgeist R.E.M. had drifted in the Year of Grunge. When he sings, “Hey kids, where are you?/Nobody tells you what to do,” it’s with a combination of awe and envy.
“Drive” doesn’t just establish Automatic for the People’s patient pace and nocturnal atmosphere (spun off from Out of Time’s hazy highlight “Country Feedback”); it sets its emotional tenor as well. This is an album fixated on the past, but its nostalgia is stripped of all sentimentality. “Drive” quotes both Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and David Essex’s glam-era hit “Rock On,” but Stipe’s stern, menacing delivery seems to mock their calls for carefree kicks in a time of national turmoil. Automatic for the People came out a month before Bill Clinton won his first presidency, but it bears the weight and scars of what came before it: namely, 12 years of Republican neglect concerning AIDS, poverty, and the environment.
Automatic for the People contains only one explicitly political song—the Crazy Horse-cranked “Ignoreland,” the most seething, spiteful track R.E.M. ever produced. But the whole album feels as though it’s in recovery from, or preparing for, some great trauma: “Sweetness Follows” renders its funereal scene of family dysfunction with church-organ sounds clashing against dissonant drones; the gentle sea-shanty sway of “Try Not to Breathe” frames an ailing elderly person’s desperate pleas for a quick death. Even the album’s karaoke-ready sing-alongs cast dark shadows: The traffic-stopping soul ballad “Everybody Hurts” is either the most depressing song ever about trying to stay optimistic or the most sanguine song about coping with depression. And the luminous country-rock reverie “Man on the Moon” centers on a subtly subversive chorus line—“If you believe they put a man on the moon”—that effectively presents conspiracy theory as fact and truth as a matter of opinion, an unwittingly ominous harbinger of the info wars that would eventually be waged in U.S. politics.
“Man on the Moon” has since become the official theme song for the Andy Kaufman enigma-cultivation industry, but the late comedian is just one participant in a parade of icons that includes Mott the Hoople and 1960s wrestling star “Classy” Freddie Blassie; elsewhere on the record, we hear an elegy for 1950s screen heartthrob Montgomery Clift cross-wired with allusions to “Let’s Make a Deal” host Monty Hall (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), and Dr. Seuss turns up in a spin on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (i.e., “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” a tune that threatens to join “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People” in the R.E.M. silly-song sweepstakes, but manages to stay on just the right side of the charming/cloying divide). They’re the sort of references that, back in 1992, seemed as adorably antiquated as a “Dragon’s Lair” scene does on “Stranger Things” today—but rather than simply deploy old pop-cultural artifacts as a means to activate our pleasure centers, Stipe uses them as decayed, dust-covered totems to gauge the distance between an idealized idea of America and the turbulent reality that colored the album’s creation. That critical sensibility bleeds right into the cover art. The phrase “automatic for the people” is the satisfaction-guaranteed slogan posted at a popular diner in the band’s native Athens; it also speaks to the pressures of a band that had just sold 10 million albums and needed to serve up more hits. And that striking cover photo is actually a close-up of a star ornament found on an old motel in Miami, but, rendered in brutalist grey, it appears as fierce and fearsome as a medieval cudgel. The image bluntly reinforces the notion that while Automatic for the People isn’t a loud album, it’s certainly a heavy one.
Automatic for the People arrived a mere 18 months after Out of Time—a swift turnaround time for a sequel to a blockbuster album that still seemed ubiquitous well into 1992. But then the early 1990s were to R.E.M. what the late ‘60s were to the Beatles—a period where the band took a break from touring to immerse itself in the possibilities of the studio, breaking down traditional instrumental roles in the process. The star-lit lullaby “Nightswimming”—essentially a demo embellished by John Paul Jones’ wondrous string arrangements—features Stipe accompanied only by bassist Mike Mills on piano; “Everybody Hurts,” a song largely without traditional percussion, was crafted by drummer Bill Berry. Even as Stipe’s celebrity skyrocketed in the wake of “Losing My Religion” getting played nonstop on MTV, R.E.M. remained an intensely democratic unit, a quality that’s emphasized in the outtakes on this 25th-anniversary reissue. Many of them reveal that Stipe’s melodies and lyrics were often the final pieces of the puzzle to be set into place, as he hems and hums his way through otherwise structurally sound versions of “Find the River” (once known as “10K Minimal”) and “Ignoreland” (née “Howler Monkey”). They also reveal that the sessions for R.E.M.’s darkest album did yield moments of playful release, like the self-explanatory “Mike Pop’s Song” (which could’ve been the sunny flipside to Mills’ Out of Time standout “Texarkana”) and “Devil Rides Backwards” (a would-be companion to “Man on the Moon,” had Stipe ever finished writing its lyrics), not to mention an early draft of “Sweetness Follows” bearing the Gulf War-aftershocked title, “Cello Scud”.
I will end with a 1992 review of Automatic for the People from Rolling Stone. They note how, in spite of the fact the album deals with darker themes and big subjects, the music and compositions adds this beauty, spirit and range that means it is a classic all of these years later:
“R.E.M. has never made music more gorgeous than “Nightswimming and “Find the River,” the ballads that close Automatic for the People and sum up its twilit, soulful intensity. A swirl of images natural and technological – midnight car rides and undertow, old photographs and headlong tides – the songs grapple, through a unifying metaphor of “the recklessness of water,” with the interior world of memory, loss and yearning. This is the members of R.E.M. delving deeper than ever; grown sadder and wiser, the Athens subversives reveal a darker vision that shimmers with new, complex beauty.
Despite its difficult concerns, most of Automatic is musically irresistible. Still present, if at a slower tempo, is the tunefulness that without compromising the band’s highly personal message, made these Georgia misfits platinum sellers. Since “The One I Love,” its Top Forty hit from 1987, R.E.M. has conquered by means of artful videos, surer hooks and fatter production and by expanding thematically to embrace the doomsday politics of Document, the eco-utopianism of Green and the sweet rush of Out of Time. Brilliantly, the new album both questions and clinches that outreaching progress; having won the mainstream’s ear, R.E.M. murmurs in voices of experience – from the heart, one on one.
In a minor key, “Drive” opens Automatic with Michael Stipe singing: “Hey kids/Where are you?/Nobody tells you what to do,” a chorus that wryly echoes David Essex’s glam-rock anthem “Rock On.” In its imagining of youth apocalypse, “Drive” upsets the pat assumption that the members of R.E.M. might still see themselves as generational spokesmen. The group then further trashes anyone’s expectation of a nice pop record with “Try Not to Breathe.” Alluding presumably to “suicide doctor” Jack Kevorkian (“I will try not to breathe/This decision is mine/I have lived a full life/These are the eyes I want you to remember”), the song ushers in a series of meditations on mortality that makes Automatic as haunted at times as Lou Reed‘s Magic and Loss. Relief comes in the form of whimsical instrumentation (such low-tech keyboards as piano, clavinet, accordion); political satire (“Ignoreland”) that suggests a revved-up Buffalo Springfield; and, on the catchy “Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” some of Stipe’s niftier faux nursery rhymes (“A can of beans/Of black-eyed peas/Some Nescafe and ice/A candy bar/A falling star/Or a reading from Dr. Seuss”). Yet, without a single “Shiny Happy People” among its twelve songs, Automatic is assuredly an album edged in black.
Famous ghosts are tenderly remembered. The calypsolike “Man on the Moon” fantasizes holy-fool comedian Andy Kaufman in hip heaven (“Andy, are you goofing on Elvis?”), and a paean to Montgomery Clift, “Monty Got a Raw Deal,” exhorts Hollywood’s wrecked Adonis to “just let go.” Hard grief inspires “Sweetness Follows” (“Readying to bury your father and your mother”), yet compassion wins out: The sorrows that make us “lost in our little lives,” the song says, end in an inscrutable sweetness.
A homespun ditty, “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1,” and the woozy jazz of “Star Me Kitten” (featuring the weirdest love lyrics imaginable: “I’m your possession/So fuck me, kitten”) lighten Automatic somewhat, but the darker songs boast the stronger playing. Guitarist Peter Buck dazzles, not only with the finger picking that launched a thousand college bands but with feedback embellishments and sitarlike touches. As always, the rhythm section of bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry kicks; on about half the numbers, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones crafts string arrangements that recall, in their Moorish sweep, his orchestral work for the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request.
If “Nightswimming” and “Find the River” are R.E.M. at its most evocative, “Everybody Hurts,” the album’s third masterpiece, finds the band gaining a startling emotional directness. Spare triplets on electric piano carry a melody as sturdy as a Roy Orbison lament, and Stipe’s voice rises to a keening power. “When you’re sure you’ve had too much of this life, well, hang on,” he entreats, asserting that in the face of the tough truths Automatic for the People explores, hope is, more than ever, essential”.
On 5th October, we look back thirty years to the release of the legendary Automatic for the People. In 1994, R.E.M. followed the album with Monster. Featuring loud, distorted guitar tones and simpler arrangements, it was a shift from the more lush and softer Automatic for the People. Michael Stipe's lyrics at times concerned the nature of celebrity, and some are sung from the viewpoint of a character. Whether you are a fan of R.E.M. or not, you will be familiar with songs from Automatic for the People. In some way, they are part of your life. Drive, Nightswimming, Man on the Moon. All classics from a band who broke up in 2011. Age has not dulled or dented the beauty and arresting wonder of Automatic for the People. In my opinion it is…
A perfect album.