These Little Things Can Pull You Under - R.E.M.'s 'Automatic For The People' turns 25
Bumbaway Jamaica.
For the last, like, 12 years, my wife and I have had this
joke that when we listen to Automatic For
The People, during “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” (easily the album’s
worst/weakest song), we yell “Bumbaway Jamaica,” or sometimes “Bumblebee
Jamaica,” since that’s what it sounds like Michael Stipe is shouting in the
song’s refrain.
It was only recently—like, a few days ago, when I mentioned
that I had to write a 25th anniversary thing about the album—that my
wife thought to look up what the actual lyrics were. Turns out that it’s not
“Bumbaway Jamaica” at all. It’s also commonly misheard as “Calling Jamaica,”
but it’s not that either. It turns out the lyric is, “Call me when you try to wake her.”
* * *
If 1991’s Out of Time
was a ‘transitional’ album for R.E.M.—moving from college rock heroes toward
something much bigger and more thoughtful than that—Automatic For The People, released, like, 18 months after its
predecessor, is, at least for the time being, the end result of that transition,
and something they could never quite get back to.
There’s so much history and backstory to Automatic, it’s tough to know where to
begin—following promotional duties for Out
of Time, the band (minus Michael Stipe) began working on demos for the
album, with the intent of making a ‘rock’ record, something they would
eventually circle back around to with 1994’s Monster. Automatic isn’t
a ‘rock’ record—far from it, actually. It’s slow, and sad, and most of the
songs are based around acoustic instrumentation, however, it is so much more
focused and full of intent when compared to the seemingly directionless or at
least unfocused Out of Time; it’s
easy to see why it’s become such an iconic and important record for the band.
Recorded in late 1991 and throughout the first part of 1992,
there’s a palpable political tension in parts of Automatic For The People—all
leading up to the 1992 Presidential Election. The most overtly political song
is the slow burning, cavernous opening track, “Drive,” a song about the band’s
support the National Voter Registration Act, as well as Stipe’s well documental
disdain for George H.W. Bush—“Smack,
crack, Bushwacked,” he mumbles in a low voice as the album’s first line.
Just as “Losing My Religion” was an unlikely success and
unlikely single for the band the year before, Automatic For The People is also full of unlikely singles—songs
that would go on to be some of the band’s most popular. “Drive” was released as
the album’s first single, mere days before the record was released—it was
followed a month later by “Man on The Moon,” which is still, 25 years after the
fact, one of R.E.M.’s finest moments, blending Stipe’s evocative lyrics
involving historical figures and fragmented imagery with a very downcast
sounding music—all while still managing to make it accessible as a ‘pop song.’
I was around nine years old when Automatic For The People came out—so even though I was aware of
contemporary popular music thanks to how much time I spent watching MTV—nine
was too young for me to be aware of release dates. I’m not sure I was even
aware that “Man on The Moon” was a single off of the record. It was “Everybody
Hurts” that caught my attention—specifically the song’s legendary music video.
I can recall seeing it for the first time and it stopping me in my tracks, even
as a kid. I went as far to call my mom into the living room and have her watch
it too. My mother bought the CD for Automatic
For The People in 19931—complete with the yellow disc tray as
part of the jewel case.
A glacially paced song like “Everybody Hurts” seems like an
unlikely candidate for a hit single, but it, as well as its accompanying video,
struck a chord at the time. The song’s subject matter and arrangements also are
a far cry from the jangle pop of the band’s earliest material, as well as
whimsical ditties like “Stand” or “Shiny Happy People.” “Everybody Hurts” is
serious—like, really fucking serious.
A bulk of Automatic For The People is though. It’s a dark record (a
meditation on death and mortality at times) dressed up to be accessible or at
least still listenable without being too depressive by the arrangements and
instrumentation chosen. Even the album’s most serious moment, “Sweetness
Follows,” is not a complete downer thanks in part to how it just soars at
times.
Also, the inclusion of the aforementioned “Sidewinder Sleeps
Tonite” was, apparently, done to lighten the mood. I mean, you can kind of tell
since, thematically, it sticks out pretty badly, and is the worst song, by far,
on the record.
The album’s penultimate track is also an unlikely candidate
for a single, or at least an enduring song—“Nightswimming,” a sparse ballad
featuring just bassist Mike Mills on the piano with Stipe’s bittersweet and
plaintive vocals on top of it, joined by an oboe (again, what an interesting
thing to include in a pop song) and it is just one of many tracks on the record
featuring string arrangements by, of all people, Led Zepplin bassist John Paul
Jones.
Automatic For The
People is, like, peak R.E.M—or at least peak major label R.E.M. More
confident than they were on Out of Time
and already a household name at this point thanks to MTV, this represents a
time for the band when they were aware of their celebrity but they hadn’t
succumb to the anxieties that come along with it—that’d come two years later on
Monster.
A bulk of the Pitchfork review of the 25th
anniversary reissue of Automatic For The
People s spent discussing the mythology of the record, and very little time
talking about the remastering job of the album, the live record recorded at a
hometown show at the 40 Watt Club, or the ephemeral disc of demo recordings—and
I’m almost 900 words into this and let’s face it, my review is doing the very
same thing. Why I even bring up the Pitchfork review is that writer Stuart
Berman talks a lot about Michael Stipe losing his hair—something that signified
the anxiety of being this famous was getting to him, as well as adding fuel to
the rumors about his overall health.
* * *
While last year’s Out
of Time reissue included a second disc of demo recordings, Automatic For The People’s 25th
anniversary edition includes both a live album as well as the demo recordings.
There are a whopping 20 demos included on this collection,
and they run the spectrum of being very, very close to the finished song, or
being very rough sketches, sometimes without lyrics. For a passing R.E.M. fan,
sure it may be interesting to hear rough, early version of “Everybody Hurts”
(here as “Michael’s Organ”) or “Drive” (complete with Bill Berry’s seemingly
unsure drumming), but a collection like this is for the diehard R.E.M. fan who needs to hear a ramshackle demo of
“Sidewinder,” here titled “Wake Her Up,” including Stipe not even bothering to
hit certain notes, and audibly laughing at one point.
The live album was recorded as part of a Greenpeace
initiative to promote solar energy, and taped very shortly after Bill Clinton’s
1992 Presidential victory, the band sound great, walking some kind of line
between sounding huge and tight but playing it very loose. Stipe opens up the
set by warning the audience how unrehearsed they are—and it seems worth
mentioning that R.E.M. went for a very long time without touring to support any
records—not hitting the road properly until 1994. Opening with a hard and heavy
version of “Drive,” they play four songs off of Automatic before dipping into hits from Out of Time and Life’s Rich
Pagent. They also end the show with two covers—The Troggs’ “Love is All
Around,” which one can’t laugh at now in a post-Love Actually world, and Iggy Pop’s “Funtime”—not exactly a miscast
cover, but also not exactly what you’d expect from R.E.M.
As for the album itself? Truthfully, I can’t tell much of a
difference between the original 1992 edition and this reissue. It maybe seems a
little bit louder—maybe? But overall, there is nothing drastically different,
so if you were going into this expecting to hear some kind of new depth or
additional layers in the album, you may be disappointed. I mean, in general, Automatic For The People hasn’t aged
terribly—you can tell, at times, that it’s a product of the early 1990s, but
the production doesn’t sound dated, which is a pretty impressive
accomplishment. So maybe the band didn’t think this needed to be updated at
all.
* * *
I remember reading a quote from Thurston Moore a very long
time ago that said something to the effect of, “If we (Sonic Youth) would have
broken up after Dirty, we would have
made so much money.” R.E.M. is not the kind of band that would have benefitted
from calling it a day on such a landmark release, but if we’re being honest, it
was kind of downhill from this point. They broke up temporarily while trying to
record Monster, in fact, but at least
temporarily, worked through the tensions to see it through.
Monster, despite
being a record I actually hold pretty dear for some reason2, upon
release, was a little maligned and possibly a little misunderstood. Its
follow-up, New Adventures in Hi-Fi
found the band navigating a different landscape when it came to ‘alternative
rock’ and contemporary popular music. Sure it received good reviews but it
wasn’t milked for singles the way Automatic
For The People and Monster had
been. By 1997, drummer Bill Berry left the band, and Stipe, Peter Buck, and
Mike Mills trudged on without him, rather than fading away gracefully,
continued to put out albums as a trio (never officially replacing Berry)—but
can you really name any successful singles from the five albums that came
between 1998 and 2011? Can you even remember any of the album titles?
* * *
25 years later, Automatic
For The People is an unquestionable high water mark for the band, one that
has (for the most part) held up very well, and is representative of so much
more than just the music found within. While I want to like R.E.M. more than I
do (I am simply a passing fan), this is not a record that I would say grew with
me through my formative years and into adulthood; despite that, it’s one that I
still enjoy listening to now (the singles are still pretty incredible after all
this time), and upon this anniversary, it is worth revisiting—as someone
returning to it with familiarity, or someone listening for the first time.
1- It was also in 1993 that bassist Mike Mills also
started wearing that green flame suit (as seen at the Video Music Awards, and
in the video for “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?” in 1994.)
2- If we’re all still alive in 2019, I hope that R.E.M.
continues this reissue campaign and releases a 25th anniversary edition for Monster because I will legitimately buy
the shit out of that.
Comments
Post a Comment