LITTLE ROCK — All of us make up stories about the way we were, but over the last couple of centuries we’ve figured out how to affix certain moments to tangible objects. Now we’ve got photographs and records to bear witness, give evidence and call us out as liars. I don’t know how it is for anybody else, but I know how it was for Marcel Proust and still is for me; how some things punch through time.
I don’t have any pictures or a bootleg tape, but I saw R.E.M. play at Ole Miss in 1986. We drove across Louisiana into the dusk and came back early the next morning, sticky with sweat and sleeplessness, Peter Buck’s chiming Rickenbacker chromatics still ringing in our ears and heat lightning in the sky.
That was the first show I was ever at where kids tried to mosh - they didn’t get it; they were behind and the beats (loping foxes diving for the cover of trees) were all wrong, but they were trying, even the chinoed frat boys in the Lacoste shirts with the short hair that in those days made them look Bull Connor-anachronistic. (They scared us a little - nights being darker in Mississippi and all.)
The band had three albums out. I had them all and could even play a couple of them on guitar, though no one I knew could puzzle out the lyrics Michael Stipe breathed and swallowed and wept. All we knew was that they were runic and incantatory, mystery words that leached into certain hearts and ran off others. Not everyone liked them and those of us who did felt smug and tasteful, although there was already a kind of backlash brewing. Some people thought the latest album was too pop and that “Can’t Get There From Here” was a little obvious and radio-ready (which it was, though the only radio stations that played it were the ones we listened to).
Fables of the Reconstruction- which received the 25th anniversary boxed set treatment July 13 with Capitol’s release of a remastered version of the album along with a second disc of demos - was the album they were “touring behind,” if in fact they were supporting anything. To us it just sounded like a concert, a revival tent staked up at the end of the world. Things mattered more in those days and argument felt useful. And I remember arguing about the album with friends of mine although I can’t recall what they didn’t like about it that I did.
Maybe it was that it didn’t sound like the R.E.M. of Murmur or Reckoning, though I don’t think I noticed that much then. I don’t think I knew the band had recorded it in London. I’m sure I was aware that it wasn’t produced by either of the North Carolina wonder boys - Mitch Easter or Don Dixon - who had worked with the band on their earlier recordings, but by Joe Boyd, who had worked with Nick Drake, Pink Floyd and Fairport Convention.
I must have known those things because I studied record jackets in those days and I probably reviewed the album for someone off a couple of quick listens. I’m curious about what I said about it, but not curious enough to queue up microfilm or dig through attic-ed file boxes. Whatever it was, I probably feel different about it today, 25 years after it was released.
Time and the weight of later work has compressed those early, pre-Warners Bros. R.E.M. records into a layer of nostalgia, a stratum that we tend to think of as fairly uniform. But Fables of the Reconstruction was different from the other early R.E.M. releases and, if some people think it’s the weakest link in that chain, I get that. It’s not my favorite either, but it has a certain uneasy gravitas - a wheeling, woozy, doomy flavor that reminds me of certain English bands of the period such as The Cure, The Cult, Gang of Four and even The Smiths.
This is a little ironic in that it was supposed to be the band’s Southern album, its psychotropic tour through Dixie - although you might be forgiven for not noticing the thematic thrust of Stipe’s oblique lyrics. Still, there’s a scent of magnolia in the atmosphere, a perfumed poison mist from which instrumental flourishes (banjo on “Wendell Gee,” horns on “Can’t Get There From Here”) and quirky characters emerge like ghosts of the Confederate dead.
And the stories, the narratives that came to Stipe apparently in fever dreams, were at once bizarre, mundane and evocative of gothic storytelling tradition. “Wendell Gee” repairs a tree with chicken wire and somehow gets subsumed; “Old Man Kensey” is your basic rustic fool-savant, an aspiring sign painter who first needs to learn to read. The Southern Crescent railroad engineer in “Driver Eight” may or may not be related to the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones - in any case, he needs a cup of coffee and a cigarette.
Similarly, the protagonist of “Feeling Gravitys Pull” is falling asleep, caught between stages of consciousness, waiting for what dreams may come and the license they bequeath to him to remake the world. “Life and How to Live It” is a cryptic story about adivided house; “Green Grow the Rushes,” despite its allusion to the Robbie Burns’ poem of similar title, evokes Merle Haggard’s “Working Man Blues.”
“Can’t Get There From Here” was the first single from the album and the most commercial track (although it failed to chart in the United States), with a title right out of a Nashville songwriting combine and a frenetic, post punk beat you could bop to. Though it name checks tiny Philomath, Ga., it’s the song that’s not like the others, a shiny, upbeat piece of popcraft that belongs more to the mid-1980s zeitgeist than to this particular record.
In the brief liner notes to this latest edition, Buck attempts to contravene the received wisdom of some fans, which is that the members of the band don’t really like Fables of the Reconstruction. (Years later, various members of the band would admit in interviews that the sessions in cold, sleetly London - Fables was recorded in March - were not happy and that the band nearly broke up during the recording of the album.) After proclaiming the album a “personal favorite” and telling us he’s “really proud of how strange it is,” Buck explains:
“All four of us were out ofour minds. We had just spent four straight years on the road; we were tense, impoverished, certifiable and prime candidates for rehab.”
And that’s how it is sometimes; great art is rarely made by comfortable artists ... not that I’m arguing that Fables of the Reconstruction is great art.
Maybe it’s not - there’s a sameness to many of the tracks and Buck’s guitar is all jangle and wow, folksy and conversational, an ever sparkling guide through the sometimes dense and murky sonic fog. I mean I like it, but I understand it sometimes approaches self-parody - Fables marks the point where R.E.M.’s trademark gestures became codified style, subject to snobbish blowback. It defined “college music.”
But it’s a record I still play. I use it as a kind of analgesic, a hedge against the overtaking everydayness of existence - or maybe in the way some people pore over old photographs, looking for intimations of the people they used to be. It is a clue; it recalls a time in my life when it wasn’t hard to rouse myself to seek out music, when I would cross state lines just to feel the bass line thudding warmly in my chest, the swarming energy of massed immortals clamoring at the feet of young gods. That kids, was rock ’n’ roll.
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Style, Pages 25 on 07/27/2010