The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography - Softcover

Carlin, Peter Ames

 
9780593312537: The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593312538 ISBN 13: 9780593312537
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • An electrifying cultural biography of the greatest and last American rock band of the millennium, whose music ignited a generation—and reasserted the power of rock and roll

"[Carlin's] unique gift for capturing the sweep and tenor of a cultural moment...is here on brilliant display." —Michael Chabon

In the spring of 1980, an unexpected group of musical eccentrics came together to play their very first performance at a college party in Athens, Georgia. Within a few short years, they had taken over the world – with smash records like Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster and Green. Raw, outrageous, and expressive, R.E.M.’s distinctive musical flair was unmatched, and a string of mega-successes solidified them as generational spokesmen. In the tumultuous transition between the wide-open 80s and the anxiety of the early 90s, R.E.M. challenged the corporate and social order, chasing a vision and cultivating a magnetic, transgressive sound.

In this rich, intimate biography, critically acclaimed author Peter Ames Carlin looks beyond the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll to open a window into the fascinating lives of four college friends – Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry – who stuck together at any cost, until the end. Deeply descriptive and remarkably poetic, steeped in 80s and 90s nostalgia, The Name of This Band is R.E.M. paints a cultural history of the commercial peak and near-total collapse of a great music era, and the story of the generation that came of age at the apotheosis of rock.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Ames Carlin

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

A few things that make perfect sense in retrospect, after everything he’s done and the way he did it:

Of course the teenage Michael Stipe was a Rocky Horror Picture Show guy.

Of course he was one of the cultists who attended the satiric horror-slash-musical movie’s weekly midnight showings at the Varsity Theater, right there among St. Louis’s other young outsiders, the arty and theatrical and socially dispossessed, the glams and nerds and punks. Anyone an adolescent jock of the late 1970s might refer to, with a derisive snort, as a fag.

And it goes without saying that the young Stipe dressed for the showings in the most outlandish fashion, dolled up as the film’s main hero/villain, the sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, clad in a leather jacket, bustier, stockings, and one of his mom’s strands of pearls, with dark red lipstick and extremely heavy and artfully applied mascara.

And also a button featuring the male/female logo of the lightly transgressive ’70s rock band Blue Öyster Cult.

A TV news crew came to see the Rocky Horror gang that spring, to report a feature story about the bizarre goings-on taking place at the university district theater’s midnight screenings each week. Who knew there could be all these kids dressed up and dancing around, week after week, chorusing key lines of dialogue back at the screen in perfect synchrony, singing along to the songs, leaping to their feet to do the Time Warp again, and again?

Mike Stipe, a senior at Collinsville High School, was in the thick of it, and when the TV news showed up, lights, camera, and all, he beelined right over to see what was going on.

A bunch of kids were standing there, as people do when a portal to fame slides open, but the reporter was focused on one young woman who was excitedly explaining why she was about to see the movie for the sixty-first time. The reporter, expert at drollery, was making gentle but pointed sport of her. “Devotion has its limits,” he was saying. “Sixty is enough. But one more time?”

Mike Stipe was eighteen years old and already impatient. He wasn’t going to be a bystander to this. Not when The Rocky Horror Picture Show was being discussed. So he spoke up. Interrupted interviewer and interviewee in mid-discourse, and grasped the moment.

“This is an excellent movie. It really is,” Mike declared. “And we’re all quite normal, really.”

The reporter was incredulous. How, he wondered, gesturing to the be-dragged, bewigged gaggle of teens, could they even begin to seem normal?

Mike mused for a moment. What were the usual signifiers for standard-issue St. Louis teens? Well, nearly every lunkhead patrolling the hallway at school came wearing the same T-shirts for the same mainstream rock radio station, so . . . He spoke in quick bursts, thinking aloud about how a normal-seeming teen would behave:

“Show up . . . tomorrow afternoon . . . dressed up in our little KSHE pig shirts and our blue jeans.”

Around him, a burst of knowing laughter as the reporter continued. “That’d be normal?”

Mike, amid more laughs: “I guess . . . for the normal St. Louis KSHE fan, yes, it would.”

The laughter, gaining force, became something else: applause.

They applauded him. Or maybe they were applauding themselves.

Mike’s eyes shifted away from the TV reporter to focus on something else. Something that wasn’t visible yet but was out there, somewhere. Maybe closer than it seemed.


2

Many years later, nearing the end of yet another concert in front of yet another packed hall, Michael Stipe noticed a pair of school-aged boys standing in front of his stage. His band had just finished one song and he was about to set up the next, but first he pointed into the crowd. “Kiddo! Hey, kiddo, come on up. You too. Come on up.”

R.E.M. was taping a show for the Austin City Limits public television series. The stage was low, and the boys, one about eleven years old, the other maybe thirteen, came bouncing up the stairs to stand there and beam excitedly at the singer. After asking their names (Simon and Elliott), Michael shook their hands and asked if they were seeing their first R.E.M. concert. They both said yes, so he asked what they thought. The smaller boy, Simon, who was not the least bit shy in front of a thousand concertgoers, a bank of television cameras, and the millions of viewers watching from afar, didn’t hesitate. “I think you’re awesome,” he declared, and Elliott agreed. “That just about sums it up.” This was in 2008, nearly thirty years into a career that had elevated him far above an ordinary person’s experience of life and hero worship. But the singer seemed not just surprised but actually a little stunned by the boys’ compliments. His eyes sparkled, and he laughed. “I like you guys a lot!” he said, taking a moment to shake both their hands one more time. The boys hopped back down into the crowd and he stood at the microphone, still giggling with happiness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I feel awesome.”

Everyone carries their childhood with them throughout their adult lives, and though being part of a military family meant being perpetually on the move, Michael recalled his earliest years as extraordinarily warm and fulfilling. Asked in 2001 where he first felt like he really belonged, he didn’t hesitate: as a child. “My entire childhood,” he said, “I felt I really belonged to a strong family.”

Born on January 4, 1960, John Michael Stipe was the son of John Wesley Mobley Stipe Jr., a rising officer in the U.S. Army, and the former Marianne Hatch, both from small towns in Georgia.

John, a square-jawed young man, came from Augusta, Georgia, and attended North Georgia College, a military institution where he regularly made the dean’s list while earning degrees in physics and mathematics. Ambitious and energetic, he also played intramural sports and served in straight-arrow organizations including the Scabbard and Blade military honor society, the Forensic Senate, the Officer’s Club, the NCO Club, the Radio Club, and the Physics Club. John was still a student at North Georgia College when he met Marianne Hatch, a schoolmate who came from Hapeville, Georgia, a small town just south of Atlanta. The couple married in 1956 and settled in Decatur, Georgia, near Bainbridge Air Base, where John went to flight school. There John learned how to pilot helicopters and used his math skills to help compute the ebb and flow of goods and weaponry in the Army’s supply chain. Cyndy, the couple’s first child, arrived in 1958. Michael came two years later, and the baby of the family, Lynda, was born in 1962, just before John was assigned to a new post on a base in Texas.

From there the Stipe family rotated from one military base to the next as John’s career grew and his duties expanded. From Texas to Alabama to Germany and then back to Texas, where Marianne and the children lived while John served in Vietnam, flying reconnaissance missions in search of enemy positions. The helicopters flew low over the jungle, and when they located the Vietcong embattlements, the air outside the plastic bubble encasing Major Stipe and his crew would erupt with bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-aircraft weapons. Recon helicopter squads faced near-daily battle, were often hit, and regularly got shot down. The pilots who survived the six months of hazardous duty usually went home or switched to less dangerous duty as soon as possible. A few found something transcendent in battle: the heightened...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593312538
ISBN 13 
9780593312537
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
481
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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