There Are Some Bands I Like to Namecheck
Thanks to Gary B. for mentioning yet another little joy of YouTube that I had yet to discover myself. It’s R.E.M.’s first national TV appearance, on the Letterman show in the fall of 1983, doing “Radio Free Europe” –
– and then “So. Central Rain,” which at that time was as-yet-untitled. The cringe-inducing band interview segment (from which Michael Stipe has the good sense to absent himself) reminds me uncannily of The Who on the Smothers Brothers show in The Kids Are Alright.
The whole RnR Hall of Fame thing has got people asking the hard questions about the R.E.M. legacy, as in this piece on the Onion AV Club, which I found mostly dumbass – say what you will about the albums, they are not all interchangeable; the insistence that it ain’t real rock & roll unless the band is raising hell & looking stupid is, well, dumbass; and anyway, who in the world thinks Michael Stipe has never looked stupid?
However.
R.E.M. was one of my favourite bands all through Those Important Teen Years and beyond. (As an aside, I can tell you that in the mid-1980s, the letters “R.E.M.” placed on a T-shirt were meaningless to almost everybody & therefore were generally taken to mean “Please make fun of me in shop class.”) I have stood in the abandoned Athens church – long since demolished, I think – where they played their first gig. And yet I can hardly bring myself to listen to their records any more. This is true not just of the recent ones, which I never had any interest in checking out in the first place, but even the old ones that I allegedly loved; the only ones I still listen to with any regularity are Reckoning and (weirdly) New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the latter of which came out when my interest was already well on the wane. And the only song that really rekindles the original thril I felt on first hearing them, the feeling that hey, pop music can sound like this too, is “Harborcoat,” with its fantastically garbled rhythms & rainy harmonies. Too often, though, the records sound dated, played-out, obvious at times & half-baked at others. I tried to listen to Murmur recently & shuddered.
And yet, a couple years ago when I walked up to the bar at the Horseshoe during an El Vez show and found myself standing between Peter Buck & Mike Mills, I was all goshdarn starstruck.
Anyway, speaking of bands on Letterman, check this out, this is funny.
– and then “So. Central Rain,” which at that time was as-yet-untitled. The cringe-inducing band interview segment (from which Michael Stipe has the good sense to absent himself) reminds me uncannily of The Who on the Smothers Brothers show in The Kids Are Alright.
The whole RnR Hall of Fame thing has got people asking the hard questions about the R.E.M. legacy, as in this piece on the Onion AV Club, which I found mostly dumbass – say what you will about the albums, they are not all interchangeable; the insistence that it ain’t real rock & roll unless the band is raising hell & looking stupid is, well, dumbass; and anyway, who in the world thinks Michael Stipe has never looked stupid?
However.
R.E.M. was one of my favourite bands all through Those Important Teen Years and beyond. (As an aside, I can tell you that in the mid-1980s, the letters “R.E.M.” placed on a T-shirt were meaningless to almost everybody & therefore were generally taken to mean “Please make fun of me in shop class.”) I have stood in the abandoned Athens church – long since demolished, I think – where they played their first gig. And yet I can hardly bring myself to listen to their records any more. This is true not just of the recent ones, which I never had any interest in checking out in the first place, but even the old ones that I allegedly loved; the only ones I still listen to with any regularity are Reckoning and (weirdly) New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the latter of which came out when my interest was already well on the wane. And the only song that really rekindles the original thril I felt on first hearing them, the feeling that hey, pop music can sound like this too, is “Harborcoat,” with its fantastically garbled rhythms & rainy harmonies. Too often, though, the records sound dated, played-out, obvious at times & half-baked at others. I tried to listen to Murmur recently & shuddered.
And yet, a couple years ago when I walked up to the bar at the Horseshoe during an El Vez show and found myself standing between Peter Buck & Mike Mills, I was all goshdarn starstruck.
Anyway, speaking of bands on Letterman, check this out, this is funny.
posted by DW | 22.3.07
2 Comments:
Derek, never feel like you're compromising when you namecheck R.E.M. in the same post as you mention me...
As promised, that Sonic Youth footage was hellafunny, but it could have been a truly important historical videoartifact if Paul Shaffer had given 100% and rolled around w/Lee and Thurston. Just saying.
And I believe it was an R.E.M. t-shirt worn to a freshman English class that precipitated a 19-year friendship...
-K.
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