R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION (1985)

FEELING GRAVITYS PULL

“It makes me think of two oranges held together by a nail”. That's how Michael Stipe answers a question about the meaning of “Fables Of The Reconstruction”. And someone will even take it seriously: “I can't believe they actually printed that line in Rolling Stone”, he'll quip. A deranged bit of nonsense that's just the umpteenth smokescreen thrown up by a band itching to reinvent itself once again. Because, despite the success and the close-knit chemistry with the team behind the first two albums, it's time for radical change. So, having bid farewell without drama to old collaborators Easter and Dixon and dodged the pitfalls of the more commercially-minded producers pushed by Irs (including Hugh Padgham, who had already worked alongside Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and Police), R.E.M. land in England at Livingstone Studios, under the wing of Joe Boyd, deus ex machina of early Pink Floyd and guardian angel of British folk figures like Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Richard Thompson and Nick Drake. It wasn't an entirely new bond, after all, the one linking the Athens band to Great Britain, criss-crossed during the tour for “Reckoning”, with a full twenty dates and even an appearance on the major TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test. And Boyd, drawn in by the band's inventiveness, saw in the gaunt anti-hero Stipe a kind of “American Nick Drake”.

But, more than a turning point, this is a return to roots. The roots of a raw, rural folk music that knows no borders. Whether it's the lush prairies of Georgia or the misty countryside of Albion, the secret lies in that pastoral, mysterious humus, steeped in tradition, nostalgia and honesty. Paradoxically, it's precisely far from home that Stipe and co. rediscover their Southern identity, leafing through an album of old, yellowed snapshots and campfire tales, the kind passed down from generation to generation. Buck explains: “There's more than just a sense of place on the record, there's a sense of home. I know we have a pretty defined idea of what it means to be from the South. I don't know how much that comes through in our music, but I don't see how it couldn't”. A South far removed from cliché and closer to a state of mind: “Being Southern”, Buck continues, “involves a lot of things that are slower and more reflective. I don't think it's redneck heaven, full of racist reactionaries. It's more of a strange, slow, surreal place, and that comes through in a lot of our records” (Anthony De Curtis, Il prezzo della vittoria, “Record”, 1985).

Stipe, then, disguises himself as a storyteller, to recount the fables of the reconstruction of a South torn apart by the Civil War, trying to get back on its feet amid endless contradictions and still-open wounds. A backward journey through defeat, one that will spawn more drives toward separatism than toward reconciliation. But this reconstruction is also that of a band swinging nervously between the anxiety of success and a latent sense of insecurity and disorientation. Because it's a retreat for R.E.M. too. Above all, a retreat from the shimmering melodicism and buoyant immediacy of their first singles. Stipe & co. fold inward into a darker, more reflective sound, all too often convoluted and unresolved, the product of sessions that were anything but easy-going, light years away from the exuberance of Reflection Studios. “There was tension you could cut with a knife, for the first time I got the impression the guys weren't having fun”, Jay Boberg, Irs boss, would recall of his special mission to London to meet his proteges.

The quintessence of this depressed, introverted mood is the overture “Feeling Gravitys Pull”. A sketch of funereal, atonal wave, built from a dissonant guitar riff, a monotone drumming pattern and Stipe's dreamy spoken delivery, which opens up into a clear, almost folk refrain, before making way for an unexpected string section. A track that teeters on a thin thread, in the most delicate of balances, standing perhaps as the finest synthesis of all the album's different approaches (it's no coincidence that Stipe would remember it as his favourite track on the whole record).

 I fell asleep and read just about every paragraph

Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around

Peel back the mountains peel back the sky

Stomp gravity into the floor

It’s a Man Ray kind of sky

Let me show you what I can do with it

Time and distance are out of place here

Step up, step up, step up the sky is open-armed

When the light is mine, I felt gravity pull

A lyric that remains suspended, just like the song, so subdued and disorienting. The reference to gravity won't remain an isolated occurrence in Stipe's catalogue. It will return in "Fall On Me" (on "Lifes Rich Pageant"), in "The Lifting" (on "Reveal"), but also in "Low Desert" and "Leave" (on "New Adventures In Hi-Fi") and in "Daysleeper" (on "Up"). Gravity as a metaphor for a bond with the earth, for being rooted, in a world that spins dizzyingly around you, leaving no escape. As David Buckley puts it, in Stipe "the sublime allure of simple lift-off, in order to escape gravity, is both a fear and a compulsive desire".

The lyric, surreal once again, simulates another hallucination, where anything is possible, even just reading every paragraph of a book after falling asleep, or leafing through mountains. The "Man Ray sky" is instead a direct reference to the American artist and photographer, a leading figure of Dadaism, and more precisely to his 1934 work "à l’heure de l’observatoire, les amoureux".

The album of reconstruction fables opens with a prologue set in the darkest recesses of the mind. One of the bleakest, most disorienting episodes in the band's entire output.

MAPS AND LEGENDS

Downcast by the rain, the cold and the terrible food of Perfidious Albion, Stipe found himself thinking back to the myths of the Frontier, to the literature of the South. Southern Gothic resurfaces amid the London smog, disguised by that absurd surrealist image with a tin ear that the band chose for the cover. "I wanted the record to tell a story. I was fascinated by the idea of old men who, once upon a time, sat around the fire, passing down legends and fables to their grandchildren", Stipe would later explain. "Maps And Legends" is thus the cartography of this fantastical imagery, populated by improbable heroes and magnificent losers. An imagery not unlike the one depicted in the folk iconography of visionary Georgia reverend Howard Finster, who had already provided the artwork for "Reckoning", to whom the band pays an affectionate tribute.

He’s not to be reached, he’s to be reached

He’s not to be reached, he’s to be reached

Called the fool and the company

On his own where he’d rather be

Where he ought to be, he sees what you can’t see, can’t you see that?

Maybe he’s caught in the legend

Maybe he’s caught in the mood

Maybe these maps and legends

Have been misunderstood

Down the way the road’s divided

Paint me the places you have seen

Those who know what I don’t know

Refer to the yellow, red and green

An ode to the misunderstood genius of Finster, but also to all of Athens' vagabond, misfit artists. Perhaps even an autobiographical reference on Stipe's part, a mysterious and misunderstood figure to an America that never managed to decipher him. The lyrics also play on the ambiguity of the word "legends", which can mean both tales passed down through time and the keys used to read the proportions and symbols on maps. The kind so many people search for in trying to decode the songs of the enigmatic Michael. Musically, it's a classic Stipe-esque structure, where, amid the usual vocal harmonies and guitar interplay, strings peek through, suggesting faint Celtic fragrances.

DRIVER 8

What stands apart from the melancholy, downcast mood of these Southern fables is above all the single "Driver 8". A train song with a swaggering country-rock stride, driven by an epic guitar riff and embellished with new, seductive vocal blends. Its lyrics sum up, in a way, the whole thesis of the album.

The walls are built up, stone by stone

The fields divided one by one

And the train conductor says:

"Take a break Driver 8, Driver 8 take a break

We’ve been on this shift too long”

And the train conductor says

"Take a break Driver 8, Driver 8 take a break

We can reach our destination, but we're still a ways away"

It's the story of a train engineer on a journey, but it could also be read as a metaphor for the band's own condition, worn down by an exhausting stretch of touring and recording, endlessly searching for a finish line still hard to make out. The structure is unusually narrative, even if the story unfolds by piling up symbols and images in a kind of cinematic montage, where real-world elements surface — like the Southern Crescent, the railway line that runs through Georgia toward New Orleans, or the bells at railroad crossings (“Bells are ringing through the town again”) — alongside cryptic references, such as the one to a mysterious crusade selling faith (“She is selling faith on the Go Tell crusade”).

The tradition of railroad epics has its roots in Southern Gothic mythology and the blues. R.E.M., ever since the days of “Carnival Of Sorts”, have been ideal heirs to that tradition. Rosalyn Knight writes: “The South has always been associated with trains, ever since the railroads were built at the time of emancipation and Reconstruction. Railroads and trains recur often in blues songs and symbolize movement, power and the widening of horizons. The railroads were also a source of anguish and grief for families who watched their loved ones leave to look for work in some city, or to escape racism by moving North. The fascination the railroad held for a drifter was perhaps similar to the one it held for Michael Stipe. That sense of standing amid so many possible destinations, of belonging nowhere, was something he could identify with…” (“Why is Athens Georgia so important to popular music in America?”, University of Lancaster, 2000).

LIFE AND HOW TO LIVE IT

Among the misfits of Athens there was also an old, deranged man named Brivs Mekis. Afflicted with schizophrenia, he had given physical form to his psychic drama by splitting his own apartment in two and furnishing each half differently. When he died, a rambling “etiquette guide” titled “Life And How To Live It” was found in his home. That title became, for Michael Stipe, the springboard for a new abstract collage, in which the house “is hyperbolically turned into two different houses, for clarity's sake”.

Burn bright through the night, two pockets lead the way

Two doors to go between the wall was raised today

Two doors remain before your others and your own

Keep these books well stocked away and take your happy home

My carpenter’s out and running about, talking to the street

My pockets are out and running about

Barking in the street to tell what I have hidden there

The protagonist's delirium is rendered through frenetic combinations of words and images, as ever unbound from any logical thread, in a tight sequence, well translated into music by the tense, frenzied phrases of Buck's guitar. Right up to that final revelation that circles back to the idea behind the title.

Listen, listen to the holler

If I write a book it will be called “Life and How to Live It”

After the offbeat portrait of “Maps And Legends”, “Life And How To Live It” is another celebration of the eccentric individual, a theme that will resurface in at least two other songs on the album (“Wendell Gee” and “Old Man Kensey”).

CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

In this pastiche of eccentricities and visions of southerness, Stipe also finds room for the man who once dedicated a famous song to his home state (“Georgia On My Mind”). “Can’t Get There From Here”, in fact, isn’t just a divertissement inspired by a Southern turn of phrase (“you can't get there from here”), but also a tribute to Ray Charles (name-checked twice in the lyrics) and to soul music. Trumpets and saxophones enter the fray, the guitars turn almost funk, in a daring flirtation with jingle-jangle, while a bouncing bass and dry drumming drive the whole thing along. The song hinges entirely on the contrast between the backing vocal (“I've been here, I know the way”) and Stipe's reply (“You can't get there from here”). Stipe has never sounded so brazen, unleashing the full range of his voice, from the gloom of the verse to the falsetto shriek of the chorus. “I realized I had more than one voice inside me, and that was probably the first time I used it in a song,” he would tell Julie Panebianco.

When the world is a monster

Bad to swallow you whole

Kick the clay that holds the teeth in

Throw your trolls out the door

If you’re needing inspiration

Philomath is where I go

Lawyer Jeff he knows the low-down

He’s mighty bad to visit home

(I’ve been there I know the way)

Can’t get there from here

Questions and travel notes, journeys and disorientations. Perhaps "Fables Of The Reconstruction" really is nothing more than "an odyssey in search of a final destination," as Parke Puterbaugh suggests (“Rolling Stone”, June 20, 1985). A journey among mysterious ghost-towns, like Philomath, a small town between Lexington and Crawfordville, in Oglethorpe County, southeast of Athens. A cross on the map of Michael Stipe's heart, since Philomath is also home to one of his most unlikely gurus: “I go visit Reverend Ruth a lot. He's got a little organ that he sets on his kitchen table. He sits down and plays it, and his wife stands beside him, hand on the stove, singing gospel songs. It's about the most amazing thing I've ever heard, and it's influenced me more than all the rock music I've listened to in the past five years," he would reveal to Andy Gill in a 1985 interview for NME.

The rest of the song sows further clues: "Land locked" points to a land with no outlet to the sea or, more broadly, a desolate or unreachable land. Ray Charles is first affectionately called "brother" ("Brother Ray can sing my song") and finally thanked in the closing line ("Thank you, Ray").

The fun video – a delirious trip to a drive-in, featuring the real cars Mills and Berry had just bought – mirrors the carefree mood of the song, which, without ever breaking into the singles charts, would become a staple of American rock radio. "It's a fun song. It was fun to write, it's a total blast to play live. Nothing serious, nothing emotionally heavy. Every now and then you need that," Peter Buck would explain in 1986.

GREEN GROW THE RUSHES

New arpeggios in the background, Stipe returning hushed and insinuating, backed by soft harmonies. "Green Grow The Rushes" conceals, beneath the reassuring cover of a rustic ballad, one of R.E.M.'s earliest political indictments. The title borrows from a traditional protest song, "Green Grow The Rashes, O", which the Scottish poet Robert Burns almost certainly also drew on (in the eighteenth century) for his own work "Green Grow The Rashes". Its subjects are Hispanic immigrants in the United States, working under precarious and exploitative conditions.

The wheelbarrow’s fallen

Look at my hands

They've found some surplus, cheaper hands

Rubbing palms and pick and choose

Who will they choose? Here is the news

Look at that building, look at this man

Haloed and whitewashed

Gone to find a cheaper hand

He'll offer a pound, offer a pound

Green grow the rushes go

Green grow the rushes go

Green grow the rushes go

The compass points the workers home

An unusually explicit lyric, then, with direct references to the inhuman conditions of laborers, at the mercy of ruthless bosses "with a halo". Whether in their own homeland, or in the United States, where they emigrated in search of fortune. Regarding the title, another curious anecdote circulates, drawn from a theory by Mexican writer Valle Arizpe: in September 1847, when Winfield Scott's American army occupied the Mexican capital, the soldiers would often hum the very refrain "green grow the rushes" from this traditional; the city's inhabitants supposedly nicknamed the Americans "gringos" (from "green grow"). A suggestive theory that would also explain the derogatory connotation the word "gringo" later took on in the common feeling of Mexicans toward Americans.

The condemnation of the United States' oppressive policies also comes through in the sarcastic reworking of a line from the famous anthem "America The Beautiful": "the amber waves of grain" thus becomes "the amber waves of profit".

Stay off that highway, word is it’s not so safe

The grasses that hide the greenback

The amber waves of gain again

The amber waves of gain

With "Green Grow The Rushes", R.E.M. uncover the political vein that would turn them into a kind of critical conscience for American rock. To the theme of exploitation and America's imperialist occupation of Latin America, in particular, they would go on to dedicate two more impassioned invectives: "Flowers Of Guatemala" on "Lifes Rich Pageant" and "Welcome To The Occupation" on "Document".

WENDELL GEE

But "Fables Of The Reconstruction", as noted, is above all an inexhaustible catalogue of eccentric characters and beautiful losers. Types like Wendell Gee, an old used-car salesman from Pendergrass, a small town near Athens. He died at 69, too soon to receive a final farewell.

He had a dream one night

That the tree had lost its middle

So he built a trunk of chicken wire

To try to hold it up

But the wire, the wire turned to lizard skin

And when he climbed inside

There wasn’t even time to say

Goodbye to Wendell Gee

So whistle as the wind blows

Whistle as the wind blows, with me

Another rural misfit. And another affectionate folk portrait, sketched in the pastel tones of a poignant ballad, with an unusual banjo taking centre stage to once again settle the band's debt to its roots. Strings and horns blend into the background, the vocal interplay is spellbinding. And the memory of the old friend fades into an abstract, dreamlike vignette, an ideal farewell to this eccentric book of fables.

Dark, tortuous fables, for a record troubled from the very choice of its name. It was meant to be called "The Sound And The Fury", in homage to William Faulkner's famous novel, to make the tribute to Southern literature more explicit. Then this reckoning with their own roots turned into something else. Into a title meant to be two-faced, "Fables Of The Reconstruction" on one side of the sleeve and "Reconstruction Of The Fables" on the other. Fables of reconstruction, then, but also fables to be reconstructed, like a puzzle. Putting the pieces back together was perhaps truly the point of the mission undertaken by four Georgians, disoriented and worn grey by London's rain and snow. Because never, as during the "Fables" sessions, did R.E.M. come so close to splitting up. "At that time we were close to a collective nervous breakdown, we weren't even sure anymore that we got on well together, and all that unease inevitably ended up in the record", Stipe recalls. "If there was ever a moment in our career when we thought we were utterly sick of each other, that was it", Buck will add, though he tempers his judgment of the album: "It reflects that negative state of mind, it's a very tormented record, with songwriting of great intensity and evocative power". Berry won't see it that way, and will be decidedly more blunt: "Fables sucks".

Even Boyd himself will end up disappointed by his collaboration with those four young men, "free of doubts, but never arrogant". He will salvage, perhaps not by chance, only "Wendell Gee", the track most oriented towards folk. Even the final mix - rejected by the band, with Stipe going so far as to call it "a monumental load of crap" - will mark the traumatic end of a relationship between two universes too far apart. And Boyd's farewell won't be without its bitterness: "From a professional point of view, the record did its job in terms of sales, so they can say it was a success. But I know the band doesn't like it. We got on very well while recording the album, but I think they couldn't wait to leave England; deep down they saw it as a kind of aberration. I tried to enjoy this role of hired hand, but I ended up disappointed at not having satisfied my employers". A few years later, though, the band will also partly change their minds, reassessing the toil of those London days.

A troubled, transitional record, "Reconstruction" nonetheless wins over part of the critics and gives the band its best commercial success up to that point (over 300,000 copies sold), freeing it - perhaps for good - from the suffocating embrace of Athens and its close-knit circle of affections.

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02/05/2026