Straight Greats No. 3: R.E.M. and the Years I Was Lost

STRAIGHT GREATS

THREE STRAIGHT

☠☠ 2 CERTIFIED • 1 ON THE EDGE

R.E.M.

Green · Out of Time · Automatic for the People

Straight Greats is the series for artists who put together runs of nearly perfect albums, one after another. Some make it to three. A few go further. The point isn’t whether every sane person on earth has to agree. The point is that a run holds up start to finish, album after album, with no dead weight and no charity required.

Out of Time and Automatic for the People clear that line clean. Green doesn’t quite.

On today’s listen, “Turn You Inside-Out” moved to passing, and so did “Untitled.” “The Wrong Child” still doesn’t make it. It annoys me too much, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to make the scorecard prettier.

But it is strange, short, and self-contained enough to function almost like an interlude. If it annoyed me a little less, I’d just say yes. That keeps Green in the run, but it gets silver instead of a charity certification.

Out of Time and Automatic for the People are Certified beyond any doubt.

R.E.M. may fill out the contact form to claim its badge.

All thirty-four songs in album order: YouTube Music · YouTube

R.E.M. had already made a pile of great records before Green, and serious R.E.M. people would probably pick an earlier run. These are mine because they arrived at three key moments between November 1988 and October 1992, when some of the songs felt like Michael Stipe had written them specifically for me.

All three moments had one thing in common.

I was lost.

Green

Green came out in November 1988, not long after I graduated. I had reached the point where I was supposed to decide what came next, and the normal options in front of me—jobs, careers, corporations, computers, adulthood—didn't look particularly appealing.

Everybody asks what you're going to do next as though the question comes with a list of acceptable answers and one of them must sound good to you. None of them sounded good to me.

Green sounded restless too. It could be big, bright and almost ridiculous with "Stand" or "Pop Song 89," then turn around and give you "World Leader Pretend." It sounded like a band moving into a much larger world without becoming completely comfortable in it. That worked for me because I was moving into the larger world too. I just wasn't interested in any of the places people expected me to go once I got there.

Some of those songs didn't feel like they were describing somebody else. I didn't understand exactly what Stipe meant, and that made them more useful—I could climb inside them and make them mean whatever I needed. Mostly I needed them to mean I wasn't the only one looking at that list and wanting none of it.

Out of Time

The two years after Green didn't produce much of a plan. By March 1991, I had mostly solved being lost by moving around a lot.

I was following the Grateful Dead, going to shows and setting a deadline for myself: by summer, I was moving somewhere. I didn't know where or what I was going to do when I got there. The complete plan was essentially anywhere but Chicago.

At night, I spent a lot of time around the old blues bars on Lincoln Avenue. Wise Fools Pub was one of the main ones. The friend I eventually moved to Colorado with bartended there, which meant I could usually get into the blues shows and drink for free. That was a pretty good arrangement.

I played Out of Time on jukeboxes all over that part of Chicago. Then I'd get up the next day and pretend to be interested in corporations and computers and all the other things that supposedly represented my future. I wasn't fooling myself very well.

Out of Time fit that period perfectly. R.E.M. was becoming one of the biggest bands in the world while making a strange record full of mandolins, orchestration and uncertainty, with songs called "Low," "Half a World Away" and "Country Feedback."

Even the title fit. I was out of time. I'd given myself a deadline, but a deadline isn't the same thing as a plan. I knew I had to leave. I just didn't know what I was moving toward. There was motion everywhere—Dead shows, blues bars, job interviews, jukeboxes, late nights—but motion isn't direction.

Still, it worked. I left Chicago and moved to Colorado.

Automatic for the People

Automatic for the People came out in October 1992, after I had moved to Nederland. By the summer of 1993, Margo—the girl I'd moved there with—was gone. I had gotten fat and out of shape, and I was still lost. I was just lost somewhere much more beautiful.

I was living at Caribou Ranch outside Nederland. That summer I spent a lot of stoned days hiking around the ranch, sitting outside our house and playing Automatic for the People over and over.

After Margo left, I came apart. For the next few years, almost everything I did—hiking, lifting, working harder, sleeping around, building a bigger life—was powered by some combination of wanting her back, hating her for making me want her back, and trying to get her out of my head.

There have been a few times in my life when I turned hopelessness into rage and poured all of it into fitness. This was one of them. I hiked before work and again after work, then went to a new gym in Nederland and worked out for hours. It had classes, a sauna, a steam room and a full gym, and it was usually only half full. It felt almost like a private gym built for me. I did that every day. By my late twenties, I was down to 7 percent body fat.

Walk. Lift. Get tired. Come home. Put the album on again.

At the same time, I was starting to do well in IT and making enough money to live pretty fucking well. Boulder was twenty minutes down the canyon. Denver was still far enough away to feel like a special trip, so I'd stay in hotels or with friends, go out, and use the season tickets I had for the symphony, the ballet and the theater. Golden circle or orchestra, every time. From the outside, it was a pretty amazing life. A lot of the time, it was.

The strange part is that I spent those years looking for the magical time while I was already living one.

Automatic for the People was the soundtrack to all of it, and I still think it's nearly perfect. It sounded the way those years felt: like I should have been happy, and knowing that didn't help. That's "Sweetness Follows" in about four minutes.

The hiking and the gym pulled me out of the downward spiral. Then, as usual back then, I used all that rage and momentum to propel myself straight into a new set of problematic adventures.

Being in the best shape I'd ever been in brought more women, more confidence and the feeling that I was finally in charge of something. I spent all of it on more drugs, harder drinking and more nights out. Feeling better became the reason I could get away with the things that had made me feel like hell in the first place. That was my adulthood until I was about thirty-five: build all the way back, then use the momentum to go straight off the deep end.

The End of the Run

Monster came next, and for me it was a real drop. There are songs on it that I like, but the spell broke. Whatever R.E.M. had been building through these three records reached its peak on Automatic for the People, and that was the end of this run.

Now when I play Automatic for the People, I'm back outside the house at Caribou. Margo is still running around inside my head, the album has just ended, and I'm putting it back on before I go out again.

Thirty-four songs. Thirty-three pass.

“The Wrong Child” isn't getting a mercy ruling. It is the reason Green gets silver instead of gold. But an interlude-sized interruption doesn't break this run—not when the other two albums are Certified beyond any doubt, and not when these are the three R.E.M. records that carried me through the years I was lost.

Your Turn

What's your Straight Greats run?

Give me the artist and the consecutive studio albums you can play all the way through without doing maintenance—no strategic skips and no pretending the bad song is secretly brilliant because you love the band.

Use the contact page and tell me.