Dreaming At The Wheel

By JAY COCKS

Of the eleven excellent tunes on R.E.M.'s new album Green, one of the most memorable is the last one, . Playful and unabashedly eccentric, R.E.M. has just crashed out from cult status to broad-based popular appeal, and a song like , with its allusive lyrics and lulling, faintly ominous melody, is a bright beacon for the band's breakthrough. The fact that the song's full and complete title really is may make for a number of bookkeeping and bibliographic headaches, as well as considerable white space on record labels and magazine pages. But it demonstrates that this fierce four-man band out of Athens, Ga., is still teasing and challenging even as Green, its seventh record, bounds into the Top Ten.

Fulfilling requests for the tune during their current world tour (which began in January and will end in June) may take a bit of doing. An audience chanting, "Hey, play " would be disconcerting. So much easier, even, to shout out, "Hey, play Untitled," but R.E.M. has not come this far doing things the easy way. In fact, there have been murmurs that Green, their most appealing record, is also the lightest in specific gravity. The implication is that a band this serious couldn't have a success without selling out, even just a little, and it is an implication that raises hackles among band members. Says guitarist Peter Buck: "There are some commercial songs on Green, but there is some stuff that isn't commercial at all. When you look at other songs in the Top Ten, it's a fairly odd record in comparison."

The band began as a cult favorite around the University of Georgia about nine years ago. As its fame spread to other schools, record deals, and some predictability, followed. Green had to be a deliberate switcheroo. "We obviously went out of our way," Buck says, "not to sound like our past." R.E.M. trademarks have been radically modified. The vocals, which on previous records sounded much like mantras from deep inside a Midas muffler, have been spiffed up so they are nearly comprehensible. The concussive guitar has been reworked to something smoother and more melodic, and the lyrics of singer Michael Stipe ("I've a rich understanding of my finest defenses . . . I demand a rematch/ I decree a stalemate") are beginning to shimmer into a fine focus. "We just didn't want to make a safe record," says bass player Mike Mills. "We've got a bunch of mandolin and accordion on the record, and three songs with no drums."

The writing process produced a few surprises. The usual procedure is for Stipe, Buck, Mills and drummer Bill Berry to get together in their Athens studio and play in the musical equivalent of free association. "Sometimes you come up with nothing," Mills admits. "But sometimes somebody comes up with something he likes, or someone hears something and somebody else falls in, and you have a song before you know it." When the band worked up its current ! single, Stand (number 19 and climbing on Billboard's chart), "we all just looked at each other and went, 'God, where did that come from?' I mean, it is a dumb rock-'n'-roll song." Lyricist Stipe agrees with Buck's evaluation but consoles himself with the belief that "anything hugely popular is loaded with simplistic ideas. The irony with which we sing these songs is so thick that I can't imagine that anyone can't see it."

Stipe, the band's front man and most prominent idiosyncrat, writes and performs as if he and irony were locked in a perpetual thumb wrassling match. Onstage, he will show up in an organza suit designed by Adelle Lutz, which, turning transparent under the stage lights, is obviously meant to summon visions of the oversize whites in which Lutz's husband David Byrne cavorted through Stop Making Sense. Stipe (the name rhymes with the slender-billed bird that good ole boys send gullible slickers out to hunt) devotes himself to his eccentricities, currycombing them until they gleam like attributes of genius. He has his own tour bus, separate from the rest of the band and crew, "because I need windows," and because he rarely listens to music, which is in heavy supply aboard the other R.E.M. vehicles. He keeps a bottle of Evian water mixed with herbal powder close at hand and claims he can, as some animals do, anticipate earthquakes days before they occur. His house in Athens has no TV and no phone. Says drummer Berry: "The three of us are just as average as you can get, but Michael is obviously an unusual person. He is different. I don't know if he has hot water in his house even now. We would all be kind of boring if it weren't for him."

The band's history may be pedestrian: Buck and Stipe met in the Athens record store where Buck worked; Berry and Mills, high school friends from Macon, Ga., fell in with the other two when they started school in Athens. Stipe's personal particulars (son of a nonmusical military family that moved a lot) may be unremarkable enough, which could account for his strenuous efforts to keep them from public consumption. But no band that makes music as spooky and splendid as Orange Crush and Hairshirt (two of Green's outstanding cuts) could ever be considered boring, not even potentially. The band's considerable heft and impact reside where they properly belong: in the group's driven, likably demented music, with its passages of unexpected lyricism and its lyrics full of muted menace, in which a sidelong threat can turn, with a twist, into a punch line. The best R.E.M. songs have a kind of intellectual aftershock, and maybe that's what Stipe means when he says he can sense a quake. It's only another song coming on.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York