Emptyage — merlin: R.E.M. - “Harborcoat” (Live,...

merlin:

R.E.M. - “Harborcoat” (Live, 1984-06-09)

What a canny rhythm section Mills and Berry were.

Also? I always had a special fondness for long-haired, mysterious, pathologically shy, no-eye-liner-havin’ Stipe.

As in…..

Me too. I remember this video. That whole tattered-angel-southern-gothic thing really got to me when I was a kid. I was so far removed in my youth from California and New York that bands from there might as well have come from another plant. I could never see myself being where they were, what they were. But Michael Stipe and REM? Fuck. Those guys were from Georgia. Just one state over. REM gave me permission to be an oddball. I could imagine myself in Bill Berry bomber hats picked up at the army surplus store. Or strolling through the kudzu, pensively. Murmur, Fables of the Reconstruction, Reckoning, Life’s Rich Pageant and Document were instrumental in helping me figure out who I was. Driver 8 was one of the first riffs I learned to play on guitar. My interest in the band led me directly to Howard Finster, whose art sits on and hangs above my desk today. In high school and college I used to drive to Paradise Gardens, drop acid and imagine myself in another world. I’m sure one of the reasons I wound up at UGA was simply because I was so into the Athens, Georgia music scene, which REM largely pioneered (with the B-52s any Pylon, naturally).

They became such a massive pop band in the 90s that it’s easy to forget how fucking cool they were in the 80s. But to me, growing up weird in Alabama in the 80s, they were the everything.