Revelry. A raw expression of joy. Delight. It’s loud, laughing, possibly bawdy, frequently boozy. It’s unexpected, a height you can’t plan.  It’s sparkly, warm, merry.  It’s one more drink, a round for the whole table, thank you very much.  It’s laughing at the past, celebrating the riches of right now, it’s in the moment. It’s tonight’s friends, the band on stage right now, today’s acceptance letter, no worries about the piles of laundry and bills and cranky bosses that will meet you tomorrow. Manufactured grace.  Easy light.  It might be fleeting, but it’s here now.  Savor.  To do:  pop another bite into your mouth, take another sip, stay in bed a little longer, have sex one more time, laugh louder, strike up the band. (C. run time: 46:02; direct link for mobile access: http://8tracks.com/anna-march/revelry/edit.)

-1-

“Strange Angels”

Laurie Anderson

Strange Angels

-2-

“You Yes You”

Tune-Yards

Whokill

-3-

“Last Night”

The Strokes

Is This It?

-4-

“Orange Crush”

R.E.M.

Green

-5-

“Here’s Where the Story Ends”

The Sundays

Reading, Writing & Arithmetic

-6-

“7 Stars”

The Apples In Stereo

New Magnetic Wonder

-7-

“Cannonball”

The Breeders

Rhino Hi-Five: Modern Rock Blender – EP

-8-

“Love In My Pocket”

VHS Or BETA

Bring On the Comets

-9-

“Mr. Big Stuff”

Jean Knight

Mr. Big Stuff

-10-

“Girl”

Das Racist

Relax

-11-

“Road to Nowhere”

Talking Heads 

Little Creatures (Remastered)

-12-

“A Sunday Smile”

Beirut

The Flying Club Cup

-13-

“When the Saints Go Marching In” (Live)

Mahalia Jackson

The Essential Mahalia Jackson

**Please note that this mix will random generate after your first listen in order to accommodate copyright agreements.**

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The news hit me hard and the ache continues to play out with the unpredictability of a middle-aged man’s malady. It’s gone, then suddenly back with a vengeance radiating and referring itself to other places. Then just as suddenly gone again. (I’m sure the guys in R.E.M. could relate.)

Not only was R.E.M. the first band I remember claiming as “one of my own,” they were the first band I discovered and shared with someone – my dearest friend Todd, whom I always think of this time of year because of his Scorpio birthday and the fact that he killed himself in September 2004, just shy of his 40th birthday. We’d been friends since 1972 – my oldest and deepest friendship. I’m sure I am conflating my sadness at his loss, barely numbed after seven years, with the loss of “our” band. Whatever the case, I find myself playing the shimmery VHS tapes in my mind, my recollections of Todd, R.E.M. and me.

***

Todd and I were gawky, spotty teen misfits who shared a love of music since we’d met as seven-year-olds. Beatles, Wings, Elton John, Queen, Kiss, Led Zeppelin – these were our totems. But with puberty came punk and Todd, a fat kid with bright red hair, glommed on to all things edgy, even cutting the word FEAR into his forearm to freak out his tormentors at school (it worked). He lost a lot of weight and literally rebranded himself a punk, sporting a Mohawk, painting the words Killing Joke across the back of his leather biker jacket. I listened to the Cure, U2 and Flying Lizards LPs with him, but I wouldn’t find true, shared sacred ground with my friend until R.E.M.

Even though Todd had cast his lot with the punks and the Rocky Horror kids, he and I both were lost. He was more troubled than ever, actually. (Hormones giveth and hormones taketh away.) Prior to discovering R.E.M., neither of us had enjoyed that particularly enveloping warmth that comes in the light of recognition of a band as one of your own. There’s an intoxicating, tribal intensity particular to youth in that specific epiphany. We knew it existed, but we mostly made fun of it.

I didn’t know what I was missing. I loved my bands, sure; I listened to them relentlessly, learned to play my bass along to their records as Todd strummed a Univox guitar and frequently corrected me. That was devotion, right? Yes, but we felt no real kinship with Robert Plant or Freddie Mercury. We’d bought into the paradigm of fandom as being akin to “Lord and Subject.” We figured the Beatlemaniacs, Deadheads, and all those who felt a sense of family fandom were just, well, loopy.

***

On December 13th, 1981, Todd and I went to see a band to which we’d sworn fealty: Bow Wow Wow. Todd liked their punkiness and the fact that Malcolm McLaren, former Sex Pistols svengali, managed them. I was still a little snobby about chops and liked that they knew their way around their instruments, a rarity in those days. We both lusted after 16-year-old singer and former London laundromat worker Annabella Lwin. We’d pored over their singles, cassette EP, and one album. These were our Talmudic texts.

Due to Annabella’s age, the gig could not take place in a bar, so it was an all-ages affair in the basement of the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Opening act: R.E.M. (This has been erroneously reported as an R.E.M. headline date.) I was 16, Todd, 17.

We loved R.E.M. The fact that we didn’t plan to see them – in fact, knew nothing about them – lent a touch of the fateful to our discovery and subsequent adoration. Most of the crowd consisted of frat guys and their dates mixed with arty kids, both groups from the University of Georgia in Athens. Despite historic disharmony between these two cliques, something about being in the basement of the Biltmore, digging the pop-punky R.E.M., equalized them all. (I maintain this rare synthesizing factor as being the cornerstone to the band’s eventual worldwide success.) Although R.E.M. had been together a little over a year, they’d risen fast. The audience screamed requests between songs and danced until the floor was slick with sweat. I saw the band live at least ten times after this – even saw them inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 – and they often kicked ass, but R.E.M. was never better than in that hotel basement in 1981.

As I mentioned, prior to that night, we’d lusted after Annabella. But the chiming, leaping, bass rumbling, Cousin It-style Stipe-swirling and Rickenbacker strut of those four still-pimply garage rock stars gave rise to Todd’s and my first man crushes, our first rock and roll bromances. We would each buy R.E.M.’s much-ballyhooed debut single “Radio Free Europe b/w Sitting Still”  – for a buck, I think, at the Biltmore – and go home with ringing ears, touched soul-deep by the evening’s events.

Bow Wow Wow, incidentally, was great, very exotic, with piratey conceits, a couple Mohawks, and impressive instrumental facility; plus Annabella, swirling to the Burundi beat, was just as teenage gorgeous and come-hither charismatic as we’d hoped. But the four skinny dudes tearing shit up like nothing we’d ever seen had already stolen our hearts and provided us with that first blast of these are my rock and roll people.

***

Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe seemed like family; they easily could have been our big brothers or neighbors. (Eventually, they would be the latter for me.) As with older siblings, we were fascinated by their clothes; the wrinkly, Rimbaud-esque, Patti Smith Group-inspired threads, Buck’s Beatle boots, Townshend leaps and flopping French cuffs, Stipe’s layers of threadbare sweaters and thick tangle of bangs shrouding his pock marked cheeks, willowy Mills’ gray coveralls and high tops. They looked cool yet seemed not to have invested much time in doing so. “Oh this ole thang? I just got it at AmVets for, like, fifty cents.”

About their fashion: Make no mistake, while R.E.M. made early claims (finally abandoned sometime in the ’90s) that it was all about the music and only the music, these guys had contrived (and I don’t say that pejoratively) a look, a style, and they worked it. And, picking up our cues from them, we noticed, but claimed not to notice. All wide-legged trousers and knit shirts went into the garbage with the running shoes. The thrift store shabby chic, with the Future Farmers of America jackets, occasional bolo tie and cavalierly unpressed dress shirts, made the fashion bell clang loudly for the first time in our teen brains: time to get schooled in this new look, which, by design, required not money but knowledge of the right shops (Potter’s House in Athens was deservedly legendary) and much imagination if you wanted to make an impression without looking like you were trying to make an impression. Todd was better at it than me. Almost every post-R.E.M. Athens band – and many elsewhere – subscribed to this look until everyone’s houses smelled like thrift stores.

And yes, like everyone else, we had no idea what mushmouthed Stipe was singing, not a fucking word, but like legions of fans, that genius stroke – not wholly original (see “Louie, Louie” and almost all the great Rolling Stones songs) – seduced us, eventually prompting repeated listens, conversations, bemused irritation and hilarious imitations. The hilarious part was not always intentional.

Todd got really good at aping Michael Stipe’s look, with hair in the face, dervish dancing and baggy, second hand clothes, which he had a knack for digging out of piles of fabric in dusty, dried out thrift store backrooms. He even had Stipe’s body language down – an effete, hip swaying mix of hauteur and coiled shyness. (Stipe himself would later coin the term “loud shy” to describe this.) In the early ’80s, drinking age was 18 in Atlanta, so Todd made it into the clubs – mostly 688, Atlanta’s premiere “new wave club” – for a few months until I got my fake ID sorted. Todd’s future wife Clare Parker – a former flame of Stipe’s – later confessed to Todd that she and her crew made fun of him mercilessly, calling him “The Michael Imitator.” He charmed them anyway.

In the early days R.E.M. was still accessible and Todd came home from seeing R.E.M. play the Strand in Marietta, Georgia, with news that he’d struck up a conversation with Stipe, who was sitting alone on the curb being arty cool, probably smoking unfiltered Camels. Todd labored to maintain his composure as he related Stipe telling him, “Nothing’s really changed except we can pay our rent now.” Yeah. Right.

Stipe also told Todd about the impending release of their EP Chronic Town, the booster rocket that would carry them to a height where the blast of their debut LP Murmur would send them into the ether. Todd and I began playing our own instruments with more inspiration, heading down the trail of “what would R.E.M. do?” Within months, our own Converse-clad feet were treading the same beer-soaked boards on which Our Heroes had rocked, and we enjoyed a sustained feeling of fraternity as we watched our surrogate older brothers ascend to bigger and bigger stages like the Agora Ballroom, The Fox Theater, and, amazingly, Late Night with David Letterman, where, to our astonishment, they acted bratty. (Stipe virtually ignores Letterman.)

Above all else, R.E.M. seemed like a gang, a confraternity greater than the sum of its parts, an amalgam of nerds, hipsters, rock scholars and artists whose combined power could sell out the venue and rob you of your girlfriend. (They’ve acknowledged this.) This tight-knit quality was part of their template: “We’re friends, first and foremost. This is the source of our power. Letterman can kiss our cracker asses.” The balls! Todd and I were inspired by this and tried to adhere to it, but the fact is, being in a band together strained our friendship. Our band lasted only one year, but luckily our friendship survived. Friendships are work under any circumstances, but alliances that remain within longterm groups are rare indeed. Who else? U2? The Stones? One is hard pressed. It almost seems Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe stumbled onto a formula as unlikely and as potent as the recipe for Coca Cola, also an accident, also from Georgia.

I moved from Atlanta to Athens in 1984, ostensibly to go to school, but mostly to partake of the scene. I crossed paths with The Guys several times. They were all gracious, especially Bill. Mike Mills was a little prickly. I was playing in Athens band Go Van Go, helmed by the “granddaddy” of the Athens scene Vic Varney, whose first band the Method Actors, cited by Buck as a “huge influence on R.E.M.,” had been part of the First Wave of Athens bands which included the B-52s and Pylon. Vic goes down in history as offering R.E.M. their first out-of-town gig, and his cachet opened a lot of doors for me.

When I settled into a room in Vic’s house, a stone’s throw from a couple R.E.M. houses, the band was still intent on staying in the cheap little town that birthed them, despite being able to afford to live anywhere, even then. Bill allowed himself a cool vintage car and they all bought houses, but mostly R.E.M. was absent the year I was there; the boys were in an Econoline, on the road, flogging sophomore LP Reckoning to their metastasizing fanbase. Go Van Go happened to be in New York, playing at Danceteria around the same time R.E.M. was playing the Beacon Theater, and they put us on the guest list with Kate Pierson of the B-52s, who had a place in NYC. Kate looked around at the sold out crowd and laughed, “Sea o’ white boys!”

The rare occasions R.E.M. was around during my 12 months in Athens, they endured the palpable adulation choking the air when they entered a party or bar, and the increasing sniping of jealous fellow Athens bands who clucked about their drug use, salivated over their money, murmured about their sex lives, and variously called them Raving Ego Maniacs and Rear End Men. Sometime in the ’80s I read felt tip pen graffiti on – you guessed it – a bathroom stall that proclaimed: “I gave R.E.M. herpes.”

***

After I moved to Manhattan in ’85 and joined the Fleshtones soon thereafter, Todd became a respected musician in Atlanta. Our separate paths would continue to intersect with R.E.M.; to our delight, we both ended up working with members. Although, in my case, “working” meant sharing the stage of the Uptown club with Buck as the Fleshtones tore through several three chord songs on a tour stop in Athens. Onstage, Pete was brazenly sloppy, cocky and magnetic, his face a manic mess, his body blundering into mine by accident and by design as he screamed into my microphone. I mostly retain images of repairing to Pete’s impressive, refurbished old house and drinking more beer than I ever had before and later paying the price on the tiles of a pretty young woman’s bathroom.

While R.E.M. was reaching its early ’90s apex, Todd was helping eccentric Atlanta scenester Benjamin form the Opal Foxx Quartet. This band often consisted of at least 12 members and mostly played covers in a distinctively shambolic-yet-mesmerizing style. Benjamin dressed in drag to perform as Opal, barking and braying like Nick Cave and/or Tom Waits. On a good night, the band would bring the house down. Benjamin knew everybody, including Michael Stipe, and Stipe, an Opal Foxx fan, asked to produce the band.

Despite Stipe’s imprimatur, no record company would touch The Opal Foxx Quartet. (The recordings are available online as The Love That Won’t Shut Up, also well worth your time.) Although his endorsement got them to Manhattan for a gig or two – a trip the sweaty horde made packed into an illegally converted U-Haul, which I will never forget seeing and smelling on a summer day in the West Village.

During this time, Todd stayed with my wife, Holly, and I. Holly loved Todd, and he and I always effortlessly picked up the thread of the ongoing conversation that was our friendship. Regarding working with the guy who, a decade earlier, proved so inspirational to us, Todd was surprisingly circumspect, even nonplussed by Stipe’s stardom. (That would have been harder for me.) He had nothing bad to report about Michael, no real diva gossip, although he did say Michael once pulled rank on the raggedy band, half-jokingly saying his opinion on a certain vocal track should be appreciated because he was “one of the pre-eminent rock stylists of the 20th century.”

Not long after this R.E.M. lost me. New Adventures In Hi-Fi (1996) was the last album I made it all the way through, and when Bill Berry quit in ’98, they just weren’t the same band anymore. A really good band, but just not as good, for my money. Bill was the secret heart, an accomplished songwriter. (“Everybody Hurts,” “Perfect Circle,” and “Driver 8,” I’m told, are his and “Fall On Me” is mostly his.) He was also a great backing singer, an invaluable multi-instrumentalist and, I know from a good source, a sublime whistler. (Still is.)

Lots of folks thought the band lost its mojo when he quit, but R.E.M., true to form, gave the impression they could not have cared less what people sniped about. They made some wonderful singles, Michael became a successful film producer, Pete played on and produced lots of CDs, and the band took on the stadiums of the world with bona fide rock star gusto, laughing, as ever, in the face of age, health problems, divorces and rumors of Michael having AIDS. Who cares? We’re playin’ Rock In Rio!

I was always happy for The Guys and glad to have crossed paths with them on their way to that hallowed ground of “dream come true.” The connection Todd and I made to the band in those early years has remained strong, visceral, emotional; it’s the soundtrack to the teenage chapter of our friendship. As often happens with a band one discovers during the crucial crucible of teendom, the music retains a singular power to reconnect to a priceless time of discovery, a promise of long days and summer pleasures that seem, for the duration of the music, not so far away, still visible in the rearview as we hurtle ever faster on a one-way road into the future, into the autumn of our lives.

***

By the late ’90s, my moment with R.E.M. had passed and I was in the thick of a new phase – forsaking the rock and roll road for a stab at stability. I’d found joy as a stay-at-home dad. Sometimes, in that rare eye-of-a-hurricane stillness that came when my small child was asleep, I noticed the ever-fading ringing in my ears leftover from the old days. My son grew and childhood memories rose in me, refreshing moments of Todd and me enjoying music, taking on life together, as friends, much like our heroes in R.E.M. My son moves into the world now, finding his traveling companions and connecting to bands that will be the soundtrack to his own adventures.

Todd became a dad too. But the new millennium brought a resurgence of psychic demons that’d first entered his life in our teens. The complicating factors of physical illness, financial woes, poorly maintained medication and other mitigating circumstances, proved too much for him. Todd killed himself in September of 2004, leaving behind a wife and two-year-old daughter.

I’ve read that a difficulty of divorce is that one loses the repository of information provided by a spouse, which includes shared memories made more real in the sharing. Anyone who’s endured any kind of loss, be it broken marriage, crumbled friendship, death or relocation, knows all about this. Sometimes it’s a good thing, of course; some relationships share mostly painful memories and are better left severed. Either way, the connections to the past grow more threadbare, details crumble like the edges of a leaf and, for better or worse, the unknowable future looms ever larger.

I’m glad the guys in R.E.M. stayed close. I know they lost friends along the way, through death, distance and acrimony, but apparently, their four-way friendship survived against incredible odds. The landscape of memories they share is incomprehensibly vast to me.

And I’m glad they told us all about their breakup in autumn. Perhaps it is easier to accept loss as Nature is reclaiming the warmth, the green, and the light, all the while offering up bounties of that which grew in the summer sun.

For me, that bounty includes standing next to Todd in the basement of the Biltmore Hotel as four scruffy guys opened up our hearts and minds to a whole new way of playing in a band; sitting on Todd’s bed in his teenager room, marveling at the lush sounds of Murmur, hearing our fluttering, inchoate desires and attitudes given melody and form, if not distinct words, our friendship galvanized by the music; sitting on a porch at a beach house in 2004, reminiscing deep into the night as our families slept, just weeks before he took himself out. We talked about art, music and women, the expansive past we shared and the possibilities of the future, all while the waves rolled in, and out.

*

Photo by Hank Grebe

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Do you still remember the Internet of last week, just another barrage of all-over-the-place political and cultural events in which millions of people watched, reacted and interacted online? It was the week that social media broke my heart.

On Wednesday afternoon, journalists and activists live-tweeted the suspenseful build-up to the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia. Simultaneously, friends ranted about Facebook’s new format changes and music lovers cracked hackneyed jokes about R.E.M. breaking up through puns on their hit “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Activists and other seasoned politicos were circulating sarcastic observations about the organizational tactics of the protestors occupying Wall Street. Added to this were a steady trickle of tributes to Nirvana’s Nevermind on the occasion of its 20th anniversary and minute-by-minute updates on the in-process liberation of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer after two years of imprisonment in Iran.

By evening, my various feeds took on a competitive tone. Many on Twitter commented humorously they could feel the attention of white people shifting away from Davis and onto indie rock nostalgia as homages to R.E.M. started making the rounds. Later a graphic went viral on Facebook. It showed Troy Davis’ face next to text that read: “I’m glad everybody’s upset about Facebook changing.”

Point taken – some things are a bigger deal than others and it’s good to have perspective. White people like indie rock and are not frequently killed by our government. I got it. But also … something about the mean-spiritedness of it all didn’t sit right with me. Why are we so invested in judging each other’s real-time filtering of current events online? Of course a rock band breaking up isn’t as important as Troy Davis being killed. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t touched in real and important ways by it.

On Thursday morning, Facebook and Twitter were still full of anger and sadness about Davis, as well as brimming with emotional photos of the hikers arriving in Oman en route to the Bay Area. There were a lot of status updates about the “heartbreak and joy” of these concurrent events. As I shared my own blog post about R.E.M., I wondered if my circle of very political friends would comment sarcastically on my decision to talk about music the morning after the state had killed yet another innocent black man. And in music circles, I began to note a different but equally harsh strain of snark making the rounds as the big critics weighed in:

Robert Smith (of NPR, not of the Cure) sings about R.E.M. in karaoke version of “It’s the end of the world as we know it” and can barely stop himself from chuckling most of the way through.

Rob Sheffield headlines his Rolling Stone article on R.E.M. “Thank You for Running It Into the Ground” and then proceeds to declare Life’s Rich Pageant (1986) the moment R.E.M. jumped the shark.

Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker writes more thoughtfully, but still has an overall tone of condescension about the ’90s, R.E.M., and their popularity: “[With Everybody Hurts...] all of R.E.M.’s luminous oddness and nested beauty is turned into penny taffy.”

In the Chicago Reader, Jessica Hopper voices deep anger about the shameless repackaging of a generation’s spirit and bitterly compares Kurt Cobain’s cultural meaning to Jim Morrison’s — action figures and all — for today’s teenagers.

These are all critics I admire and they all make good points. But after the heightened emotion of the previous day’s mess of media events, I felt overwhelmed. Critics are supposed to be critical, sure, but when they start using the first person, aren’t they also supposed to pay tribute to art’s real impact on their lives, not simply debate who sold out and when? When paying homage to two of the most influential bands of the 1990s, where was the music?

Critics want it both ways: we want something to be pure and essential, but we also tend to retrospectively see events based solely on their context/reaction. Particularly in social media, context develops at an increasing pace: we condense the critical cycle into a series of quick “sharing” actions and move straight from “something happens” into criticizing ourselves and each other for liking things. In our rushed effort to provide the “essential” opinion, we forget the part about why we’re being critical in the first place: because the “something” happened made us feel something, and that made us want to contribute.

Perhaps what we should bring back along with the rest of ’90s culture is sincerity. Forget witty bitterness; show me a critic who believes in music the way that the musicians in Nirvana and R.E.M. believed. Show me shared media that can balance leonine ego with intimate emotional pain like these albums can. Show me a meme that can mix politics with poetry in a way that makes you want to get off your couch and actually do something. And in exchange, I’ll show you a lot of human beings who are able to process, feel, and experience large and small events at the exact same time.

So dear Internet, please stop. Just… stop with the judging.

Stop for a minute, and don’t share this link on Facebook until you finish reading it and have thought about it. Find Nevermind and listen to it without doing anything else at the same time. Then listen to the formerly independent-label band of your choosing without getting defensive and relating that band’s mainstream status to your own personal evolution of coolness. Hear those words? Those songs? They are important. They are sincere.

Yes, the Internet has made us all critics. We are spewing media into the world and we are consuming it in the same breath. Pop does and will continue to eat itself. The Internet, like a person, is complex. But let’s see what happens if we reign it in for a minute, shall we? I’ll start it off by sharing with you, friends real and virtual, my own critical complexity:

I feel weary horror and urgent anger at the continued campaign of violence against people of color that is the American “correctional” system, and because I am continually implicated in it the more I do not actively fight it. I feel wistful about R.E.M. breaking up because they were a truly unique band and I liked them. I am upset about the recent Facebook changes because I know this company is turning me into a product and I’m enabling it. I am disappointed in the activist community for behaving just like the media we criticize and not taking the Wall Street protestors seriously until the police escalated the situation. I am happy the hikers were freed, but I am worried about the callousness with which people blame them for their ordeal, as well as the potential for events like this to reinforce racist and anti-Islamic sentiment in America. I feel sad about the slutification of Nirvana, but I also hope their ubiquity will guarantee that future generations of 15-year-olds hear their music — and that the music itself will guarantee some of those kids feel it in their guts the same way I did when I was 15.

I am able to hold all these feelings inside me at once. Bands like R.E.M. and Nirvana helped me learn how to do that. Venues like Facebook help me express it. People like Troy Davis, who last Wednesday declared his innocence while forgiving his killers and still showing sympathy for Marc MacPhail’s family, help me understand the capacity in humans for boundless love and empathy, even in the face of the most horrible things. And empathy is a necessary preface to action.

Come on, you guys. There’s scarce room for snark in all this. It’s not a competition. People are messy and conflicted. We can be simultaneously egotistical and share profound experiences, or be outraged and still act silly. We can “like” pop culture and still want to fight the power. Now, can we be a bit more genuine with one another? Stop. Think. Be true to your feelings. Be sincere. Can we still do that?

The morning after Troy Davis was killed, I cried at photos of Josh and Shane hugging their parents. I also cried while listening to R.E.M.’s “Fall on Me” and reading the Tumblr We Are the 99 Percent. I smiled at a photo of Howard University students giving the black power salute in unison, their mouths taped shut in silent protest of Davis’ execution. And I put on Smells Like Teen Spirit and jumped up and down in my living room, knowing that we all still have a bit of fight in us.

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