John Hunter book on band R.E.M. is big and impressive

Arguing over pop music is a young person’s game. It’s like Paul Simon said: “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts” and who we cherish is as likely an accident of birth and circumstance as it is deep listening.

There was a time, maybe 25 years ago, when I might have argued that R.E.M. was the greatest rock band this country had ever produced. These days that sounds like a barely defensible hot take, one I wouldn’t be interesting in arguing. I know some of you are willing to argue for the Eagles or the Beach Boys or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but in my heart of hearts I’m not sure the greatest band isn’t Los Lobos. If you made me, I could argue for The Band, even though they were four-fifths Canadian. Or Velvet Underground.

I could make a case for Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and Al Jackson Jr. For L.A.-based Wrecking Crew. For the Swampers out of Muscle Shoals. It all depends how you frame the question, what you consider a band and what you consider American. And what is greatness anyway?

R.E.M. was a rock ’n’ roll band from Athens, Ga.

They were not around when I was 12; they emerged about the time I began my working life as an adult. They were an adult obsession. I wrote about them often in the mid-1980s; it still stings when I remember how, in a review of “Murmur,” their first fulllength album, I referred to their singer as Michael Stripe instead of Stipe.

I think that was a typo, that I knew the correct name and simply slipped in an extra character, but maybe not. Maybe I didn’t check the liner notes closely enough.

Anyway, R.E. M. was a part of my life for a long time. I saw them a couple of times before they got unmanageably big. They weren’t arena fillers in the ’80s; they seemed life-size. They were all Southerners — lead singer and front man Michael Stipe was a military brat born in Decatur, Ga.; drummer Bill Berry moved to Macon, Ga., when he was 13; bassist Mike Mills’ family moved to Macon when he was 6 six months old; guitarist Peter Buck was born in California and his family moved to Georgia when he was 12 or 13. They coalesced in the college town of Athens in 1979. They formed the band that would become R.E.M. the next year.

My wife Karen and I still play their albums; we still use them the same way some people use old photo albums, as a way of remembering the way we were.

But I was never curious about bands in the way that consumers of celebrity biographies and fan magazines are curious about people who make music that is important to them. I can be deeply interested in the details of a recording session — who played what on which track and how so-and-so’s voice was routed through a Leslie speaker — but

the gossipy details of who slept with whom and what drugs Johnny was on when he flung the misbegotten mackerel off the balcony of the Hyatt House are of limited interest to me. I can be deeply into a band’s music without knowing the bass player’s hometown or sexual orientation.

It’s often said (often by people who don’t know any better) that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Which may be true, though I can imagine instances where dancing about architecture might be a fruitful enterprise. Most writers don’t write that much about music; they write about fashion or the ways in which people respond to music and the lives of the musicians themselves. I wish there was more dancing about architecture, more bothering of the central mystery of why human beings respond — or don’t respond — to certain frequencies and harmonies, and how seven tones can comprise a language with the potential to rival Shakespeare’s.

Most musical biographies are unable or unwilling to engage this mystery; they default to the safe ground of what is verifiable and documented. They become like the chronologies at the back of those Library of America omnibus editions — useful, practical references. A few — Greil Marcus’ “Mystery Train” being the prime example — might goad us into thinking about the music in a new way, into making novel connections that cause us to better understand artistic intentions and our own tastes. Writing about music, if done with courage, style and a probing intelligence that unfailingly interrogates the received wisdom, can be as rich as making music.

CARNIVAL OF SORTS

So the first thing we should say about John Hunter’s “Maps and Legends: The Story of R.E.M.” (Nottingham Press, $29.95), is that as a work of journalism, it is impressive. This is a big book, more than 700 pages in a 6-inch by 9-inch trade paperback format, that holds up under scrutiny.

Hunter includes about 230 pages of documentation, lists of books and sources and copious notes. (He didn’t cite any of the pieces I wrote about the band for the Shreveport Journal, though I suppose he’d have no way of knowing about them since they’re consigned to microfiche.)

Some of the notes present a near-David Foster Wallace level of scrutiny. For instance, on page 10 of the book, Hunter recounts a 2019 interview that R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck gave to an obscure fanzine about his involvement with band mate Mike Mills’ The Baseball Project, a band that records and performs songs about the game.

“I don’t even like baseball,” Buck complains, then proceeds to talk about how in the last game he “saw personally” in 1964, “Willie Mays hit a home run and Willie McCovey hit a grand slam in Candlestick.”

“While this makes for a great story,” Hunter writes, “it almost certainly isn’t true.”

Hunter (the nerd) knows this because he went through the box scores of the 1964 Giants and found that McCovey only hit one grand slam that year, at an away game in Cincinnati. Mays did not homer in that game. “Nor did Mays ever homer in any of the 17 other games in which McCovey hit a grand slam.”

I am self-aware enough to understand I often do exactly this sort of thing.

But what does that tell us about R.E.M.? That Buck is a fabulist? (That seems harsh; most of us conflate memories from when we were 6 years old.) That he is an unreliable narrator? Maybe it’s a stretch to talk about how Buck was a pretty consistent user of illicit substances since the time he was 14 years old, or that his Atlanta Braves fandom (he has liked them since before they became “good”) is analogous to his “indie rock sensibility and his anxiety over the millions of new fans who had recently come to R.E.M. because of ‘Losing My Religion.’”

Or maybe that’s just good criticism.

The book means to be the most comprehensive biography of the band yet, and meshes nicely with Robert Dean Lurie’s 2019 book “Begin the Begin: R.E.M.’s Early Years,” which covers the band’s career up until 1987, basically the years they spent on I.R.S. records. (Speaking as someone who wasn’t there, Lurie’s book seems like an excellent souvenir of the ’80s scene in Athens, the Fertile Crescent from which bands like the B-52s, Pylon, Love Tractor, Oh-OK and Sneakers emerged.)

Hunter recounts the band members’ childhoods and the bands they played in before R.E.M. — among them Bad Habits, Shadowfax, the Back Door Band, Gangster, and the Wuoggerz — and continues past the retirement of the band in 2011 with considerations of the solo work of Buck, Mills and Stipe.

While he couldn’t get direct access to any of them, he did manage to conduct dozens of interviews with members of the band’s inner circle and other witnesses, including high school classmates, bandmates and friends. Hib-Tone Records founder Jonny Hibbert and R.E.M. producer John Keane sat down with him, as did Kathleen O’Brien, who dated drummer Bill Berry while she was a student — and college station DJ — at the University of Georgia. (O’Brien looms large in R.E.M. lore because she purportedly urged her roommates Stipe and Buck to take on bassist Mills and Berry as the rhythm section in their fledgling band.)

‘HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GET OLD?’

A lot of us eventually reach a point where we believe the music of our youth and young adulthood is all that can matter to us. We probably ought to resist that notion but it’s hard, especially if you find yourself revisiting that old music on a regular basis. Most people stop listening to new music by the time they reach 33, which is as old as the mortal Jesus ever got.

It would have been neat if R.E.M. had lasted 33 years; they only made it to 31. I don’t pay much attention to the albums they released after 1996’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi.” Maybe I should.

Buddy Holly’s 1959 plane crash defined the ideal arc of a rock ’n’ roll career — a flurry of hit records, then out with a blaze of glory. Early rock ’n’ rollers didn’t expect lengthy careers. For all the “rock ’n’ roll will never die” rhetoric, most of them probably believed they’d have to grow up and get a real job. And most did.

Dale Hawkins went to work for Nestle, Jerry Allison of the Crickets joined the Air Force, and Elvis Presley fretted that his success might not last more than a few years. At Graceland, there is some poignant footage of a young Elvis promising a reporter that he’ll hang on to Graceland “as long as I can.” Not even Elvis had complete faith in rock ’n’ roll’s durability, so he set his sights on becoming a movie star, dyeing his hair black because he thought that movie stars with black hair lasted longer, and eventually turned to cabaret music.

For all the ink spilt over the vagaries of rock ’n’ roll, some things are what they are and nothing more. Most of the time, rock ’n’ roll music — even the best-sounding music — is really beneath, or beyond, analysis. Interpretation is death; rock ’n’ roll is not a contest of virtuosity.

It hardly matters whether the performers can play an instrument. What matters with rock ’n’ roll is whether the “artists” who are banging on the guitars make an emotional connection with their audience. At its best, rock ’n’ roll is democratic and inexpert — the expression of inarticulate juvenile longings.

And bands that have lasted — such as the Rolling Stones, who have just announced a new studio album, their first one of new material in 15 years — eventually become perceived as dinosaurs.

It is the way of things that none of the bands I loved in the ’80s seems to matter much anymore, although I still listen to them. The music they made is emotionally complex and open-ended, artfully indirect and intellectually rich. While people who write about rock ’n’ roll are always slipping into hyperbole in an effort to make what is basically meaningless mean something, R.E.M. is the rare rock ’n’ roll band genuinely worth thinking about.

TANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT

We can now definitely say that Ton Clancy’s tank was a World War II vintage Sherman A1M1. Several people with extensive knowledge of military hardware have identified it as such from photos.