R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

LIFE'S RICH PAGEANT (1986)

BEGIN THE BEGIN

On the verge of a nervous breakdown. Worn down by the frustrating experience of “Fables Of The Reconstruction” and by a grueling string of live shows, R.E.M. were genuinely at risk of falling apart. The most vivid image of that collapse is Peter Buck's Rickenbacker hurled at one of the technicians at New York's Beacon Theater, during the CMJ Awards performance. The set then continued, after Stipe's embarrassed apologies, with an a cappella version of “Moon River”. But the guitarist walking off stage (which earned him the title of “idiot of the week” from Melody Maker) was just one symptom of a malaise that had been building day after day throughout the grueling Preconstruction Tour. There were at least three flashpoints: the audience pelting the band with bottles during a support slot for U2 in Milton Keynes, England; the near-brawl in Canada between Mills and a fan who was insulting the band; and finally the furious backstage reckoning at the JB Scott's Theater in Albany, which Mills would later rebrand as “a nice little session to clear the air”.

If Buck's outbursts only reaffirmed his role as the band's rock'n'roll animal — hot-tempered, yet exuberant and galvanizing — the real cracks lay chiefly in the friction between Mills and Stipe, with the latter increasingly cast himself in the role of misunderstood intellectual. Mills, backed by a classical education and a technical grounding crucial to the band's sonic balance, showed growing impatience with the self-absorbed posturing of an increasingly solitary and restless Stipe, who put his eccentricity on full display on stage too, showing up wrapped in a giant overcoat with white smudges painted under his eyes and his hands bound with tape. Stability, meanwhile, was embodied by Berry's steadiness, his flair as a performer behind the kit matched by a professional's seriousness.
R.E.M., in short, had reached a point of no return: they could become just another of the thousand indie bands that manage a couple of good albums before vanishing into the fog of the underground, or they could raise their heads and aim higher, trying to revive the magic of their early sound and finally break through for good.

The man of providence is named Don Gehman. A producer by trade, he'd already made a fortune off the blue-collar rocker John Cougar Mellencamp, betting everything on a direct, no-frills sound. R.E.M. pegged him as the right man to pull them out of the doldrums of “Fables”. “I couldn't listen to that album, it just sounded like a mournful dirge to me,” Gehman would recall. “I wanted to make records that brought things into sharper focus… To make sure you could hear and understand the words Michael was singing. I realized that even then it might be impossible to grasp the meaning of what he was saying, but at least the feeling you'd take away from it wouldn't be so intangible” (Tony Fletcher, “R.E.M. La storia”). And Stipe would give him his due: “Don Gehman was the first producer to challenge me as a singer, the first to ask me what I was singing about. He pushed me to express myself better, he revealed my abilities as a songwriter to me”. Though he would later add: “He made me take too big a step, and it took me several albums to go back and find myself and my goals again. It was like throwing a baby into freezing water and leaving it there. It traumatized me” (David Buckley, “R.E.M. fiction, una storia vera”).
Even the location of the recording studio – the quiet Bloomington, Indiana, Mellencamp's own hometown, with its lake and surrounding countryside – was far more in tune with the band's sensibility than the metropolitan frenzy of London. So, little by little, R.E.M. rediscovered harmony and good humor. A taste for that “human comedy” that is life, “Lifes Rich Pageant”. A title that wasn't chosen at random: the phrase is actually taken from the Peter Sellers film “A Shot in the Dark”, an installment in the Pink Panther saga. And it is – just as in the film – the magic formula for exorcising every difficulty. Gehman manages to make the sound “both robust and transparent”, exactly as the band asked. But also fuller and catchier, so it could really connect with audiences. With more powerful drumming and a wheezing organ acting as the glue. The energy and inspiration flare back up. Like a fresh start. “Begin The Begin” is, then, the ideal incipit.

Birdie in the hand for life’s rich demand
The insurgency began and you missed it
I looked for it and I found it
Myles Standish proud, congratulate me

A philanderer's tie, a murderer's shoe

Life’s rich demand creates supply in the hand
Of the powers, the only vote that matters
Silence means security, silence means approval
On Zenith, on the TV, tiger run around the tree
Follow the leader, run and turn into butter

Let’s begin again, begin the begin
Let’s begin again like Martin Luther Zen
The mythology begins the begin
Answer me a question I can’t itemize
I can’t think clear, you look to me for reason
It’s not there, I can’t even rhyme here in the begin

A new beginning, then. Somewhat like the one Springsteen would call for in the anthem “The Rising”. Granted, R.E.M. don't tap into the same epic grandeur, their language remains disjointed, fragmented, allusive. But it's precisely starting with “Lifes Rich Pageant” that Stipe and co. gain full awareness of their role as standard-bearers of a new rock nation. “Let's tie ourselves together and build a new country,” they'll sing outright on “Cuyahoga”. It's not the Daydream Nation of Sonic Youth, but it's not too far off either. Wrapped in a veil of rural populism still very much in tune with their Southern roots, the album's lyrics tackle social and political themes with unusual clarity, revealing a positivist streak that dissolves the depressive apathy left behind first by punk and then by new wave. The lexical technique is the — hardly new for Stipe — device of let's, of exhortation, of relentless urging. Against inequality, first of all, which concentrates money and power in the hands of an elite (“Life's rich demand creates supply in the hand / Of the powers, the only vote that matters”). But also against apathy and passivity, because silence gives consent (“Silence means security, silence means approval”, a possible nod to two slogans, the first made famous during World War II, the second borrowed from the anti-AIDS activist rallying cry “Silence = Death”).
To ward off the pitfalls of rhetoric, there's the usual nonsensical irony, with a constant reliance on wordplay, starting with the title itself (which echoes Cole Porter's “Begin The Beguine”) all the way to that Martin Luther Zen, which condenses into a brilliant neologism the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, the Black pacifist leader Martin Luther King, and Eastern Zen philosophy, which rejects the allure of consumer society. Three different forms of rebellion against power, in short. Myles Standish, meanwhile, is the English military officer who led the Pilgrims in founding the Plymouth colony, one of the first slivers of the New World.
But once again Stipe sheds any pretense of being a political bard: he's not the one who can carry the weight of the world, he's not the one to turn to for answers. “Example: the finest example is you”. It's only by putting yourself on the line individually that you can catch the train of revolution before it's too late (“The insurgency began and you missed it”).
The choice to sharpen the political engagement goes hand in hand with a return to a more forceful, direct sound. The drums push forward and take center stage (it's no accident that Berry's face, with his famously furrowed eyebrows, dominates the cover in close-up). Buck's Eastern-tinged phrases swing between softness and distortion, with funk-rock flourishes barely kept on track, over which Stipe's voice bounces along, nimble and full-bodied. The result is a convulsive, headlong boogie that hurls the listener straight into the record without much ceremony.

THESE DAYS

Michael Stipe keeps daring more. If "Begin The Begin" was essentially a call to shake off apathy, "These Days" goes even further, directly involving the band in an unusual attempt to establish direct feedback with their own audience.
A manifesto of hope, in which the four Georgians picture themselves at a moral crossroads, personally voicing generational intentions and ambitions. With an opening line that almost seems to be hedging its bets against what's coming next.

Now I’m not feeding off you, I will rearrange your scales
If I can, and I can
March into the ocean, march into the sea

No symbiosis, then, because a complete identification between artist and audience is impossible — but for the first time R.E.M. "reveal themselves", with an approach never so hymn-like and declamatory.

All the people gather
Fly to carry each his burden
We are young despite the years we are concern
We are hope despite the times
All of the sudden, these days
Happy throngs, take this joy wherever, wherever…

A fierce sense of belonging that comes through even more directly in the next line:

I wish to meet each one of you
And you, me, you, if I can and I can
We have many things in common, name three (three, three, three)

Stipe would later recall writing the song in a hotel room, after a concert during which he'd injured his eyes. Shortly after, his sight had returned. That lyric, then, could also be read as a metaphor for a revelation. But then that veil of shyness and self-irony that has always cloaked R.E.M.'s songs settles back in, abruptly breaking the empathy built up by the previous lines.

I had a hat and it sunk, reached down
Yanked it up, slapped it on my head

Like a comic aside cutting through the tension of a dramatic film. Stipe, then, is torn: on one hand, he increasingly finds himself voicing a generational anxiety that binds him to the indie nation, to his own audience; on the other, he won't give up preserving his independence and detachment, avoiding getting swept up in protest drifts that could undermine the originality of his creation. What's certain is that, as in "Begin The Begin", the words sound as scathing as ever, underscored by aggressive sounds that brush against the fury of punk. A clattering gallop, with Mills finding room for a counter-melody worthy of epics and gunpowder.

FALL ON ME

But R.E.M. certainly have no intention of becoming a combat-band. Not in the lyrics – always filtered through a literary, humanistic approach – nor in the sound, elegantly forged in the tradition of the best folk-rock. They're still, after all, sumptuous balladeers, and the single and masterpiece of the whole collection is here to remind us of exactly that.
Airy and poignant, "Fall On Me" is a classic circular ballad that draws as much on Fifties songwriting as on the psych-folk languor of Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, gorgeous in its brief double arpeggio intro and exemplary in the way its steadily unfolding verses meet a stirring chorus, with Mills delivering one of his magical counterpoints. It remains one of the finest melodies R.E.M. ever wrote. "It's a song about oppression, you can apply it to whatever you want," Stipe explains. The lyric once again proceeds through an accumulation of images, allusive yet at the same time explicit in condemning environmental devastation, progress that scars nature and bloodies the sky. The prologue, however, cites Galileo's experiments, dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, recalling that theme of gravity already touched on in "Feeling Gravitys Pull".

There’s a problem, feathers iron
Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys
Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air
Buy the sky and sell the sky and tell the sky and tell the sky

Don’t fall on me (What is it up in the air for) (It’s gonna fall)
Fall on me (If it’s there for long) (It’s gonna fall)
Fall on me (It’s over it’s over me) (It’s gonna fall)

The ecological j'accuse, instead, surfaces in the following lines, with a reference to acid rain, corroding statues in parks and bleeding the sky.

There’s the progress we have found (when the rain)
A way to talk around the problem (when the children reign)
Building towered foresight (keep your conscience in the dark)
Isn’t anything at all (melt the statues in the park)
Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky…

In the age of Reagan-era demagoguery, when a prosperous America was racing headlong toward progress, R.E.M. paused to contemplate nature wounded by a humanity gone blind and shameless ("keep your conscience in the dark"). A cry of pain that would rise even more vibrantly in the album's other ecological anthem, "Cuyahoga".

CUYAHOGA

The waters of the river running through the Appalachian Mountains have turned red. It's not just the red of mud. It's the blood spilled by Native Americans, a slaughter that remains an open wound and an indelible stain on American history. In R.E.M.'s home state of Georgia, one of the cruelest chapters of that extermination unfolded: the Trail of Tears (1838-39), during which thirteen thousand Native Americans were forced to flee west of the Mississippi River, covering more than 1,500 kilometers; a quarter of them died of cold and hunger. "There's an absence of history that's the American version of Catholic guilt," Stipe, whose great-grandmother was a Cherokee, told British journalist Jon Savage in 1989. "I think there's something wrong with the American dream. People aren't told about the destruction of the Native culture this land belonged to" (Jon Savage, "Time Travel. From The Sex Pistols to Nirvana. Pop, Media and Sexuality", 1977-96, Vintage, 1996).
The waters of the Ohio River, meanwhile, have been poisoned by the industrial waste of the new Americans, who in the name of progress are destroying nature.
While America lulls itself in the Reagan dream, R.E.M. shake consciences with a ballad that is an indictment, but above all a call to active militancy against every injustice. "Let's put our heads together and start a new country up," Stipe cries out. A full-blown political slogan (though, according to another interpretation, the line could instead allude to the rebuilding of national identity on the very ruins of Native civilization).

Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up
Our father’s father’s father tried
Erased the parts he didn’t like
Let’s try to fill it in, bank the quarry river, swim
We knee-skinned it you and me, we knee-skinned that river red

The old Cuyahoga River, which flows through Ohio, running from Cleveland to Lake Erie, crosses a land that historically belonged to Native Americans. It was the cradle of that ancient civilization, but white settlers tore it away from them with violence, soaking it in their blood and polluting it to the point of turning it into a powder keg. For Buck, it's "a metaphor for America and its lost promises".

Underneath the river bed we burned the river down
This is where they walked, swam, hunted, danced and sang
Take a picture here, take a souvenir
Cuyahoga
Cuyahoga, gone

The aching memory of the dying river thus takes on the angry tones of invective. Aimed at those rewriting the book of history, heedless of their own guilt.

Rewrite the book and rule the pages, saving face, secured in faith
Bury, burn the waste behind you

America is guilty, then. For its past of oppression and violence, but also for its present of rampant individualism and corruption. Stipe, however, unlike his predecessors from the punk generation, does not retreat into nihilism. He too breathes the positivist euphoria that infected the entire decade of the Eighties, and still believes in a resurgence, inspired by a sense of brotherhood and unity. A return to lost innocence. The anthemic cadences are well supported by Mills' emphatic bass and the sweeping chorus, which opens into one of the band's typically soaring melodies. "We wanted to bring back some kind of Jefferson Airplane-style call to arms," Buck would joke. Though Mills would admit that "Sixties activism moved from innocence to cynicism very quickly, and now an apathetic mood prevails, where every rock star who thinks they can change things inevitably ends up disillusioned".
But can "Cuyahoga" really be filed under protest songs tout court? Not exactly, according to an interesting observation by David Buckley, which starts from the premise that pop music is a poor vehicle for political messages, since it's designed above all to speak of inner life. "What R.E.M. did," Buckley writes, "was adopt what the writer Simon Reynolds has called the tactic of entryism. Entryist songs use the sweet melodies of pop, but the lyrics of radical political controversy; so, Eighties songs by groups like Hue And Cry, Wet Wet Wet, Style Council, The The, Deacon Blue or Beautiful South might, on first listen, sound like cheerful, carefree pop, but on closer inspection reveal a didactic purpose. It's one way of getting the message across: a polemical lyric wrapped in a sugar-coated package. And while R.E.M.'s music is more explosive and more vivid, and expresses more sorrow and longing than most of the names just mentioned, 'Cuyahoga', despite its metaphorical drift, partly follows this entryist tradition".
Aching and touching, "Cuyahoga" marks one of the emotional peaks of the album and remains an evergreen for the Georgians. The Decemberists, led by Colin Meloy, would go on to record an interesting cover of it.

HYENA

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1933 to 1945, once theorized. Michael Stipe flips the statement to plainly denounce one of the great nightmares of the Eighties: the nuclear threat.

The only thing to fear is fearlessness
The bigger the weapon the greater the fear
Hyena is ambassador to here

Night time fell like the closing
Meager pay, but recognition
Hyena crawls on his belly out
The town is safe again tonight

The specter of nuclear armament, vigorously invoked by the two superpowers during the Cold War, is unmasked once again through a reference to nature: "Hyena", the predatory hyena, thus becomes the only possible "ambassador". Stipe would explain: "The world is a chain in which the big fish eats the medium fish, which in turn has eaten the small fish. The United States is the big fish, Mexico the medium one, Guatemala the small one. The big fish keeps getting bigger. That's what this song is about."
Abrasive guitars and torrential Southern cadences ignite a new, surreal parable against the damage wrought by stars-and-stripes imperialism, reinforcing the album's political core. Not a masterpiece, but a tough, direct track, one that surely appealed to Gehman (even though, in truth, it had originally been intended for Fables). Trivia: the strange grunt at the start is one of the animal impressions Michael Stipe loves to perform, even on stage.

THE FLOWERS OF GUATEMALA

The two-faced nature of "Lifes Rich Pageant" - gentle in its music, ferocious in its lyrics - resurfaces even more clearly in "The Flowers Of Guatemala", an ode to all the victims of Latin American dictatorships, introduced by the brief (semi-)instrumental Tex-Mex of "Underneath The Bunker" (Calexico, ten years early?). A typically Velvet Underground-style guitar arpeggio, persistent and understated, is the barbed wire on which hangs the tender melody of a ballad with funereal, ghostly cadences, its percussion (triangles and glasses) lending an esoteric charm as they dance like shadows in the background. New vocal interweavings underpin Stipe's onomatopoeic lament.
The poisonous amanita mushroom grows lush on the graves of those who fell for freedom, as if to bury, along with them, the historical truth of those massacres.

I took a picture that I’ll have to send
People here are friendly and content
People here are colorful and bright
The flowers often bloom at night

Amanita is the name
The flowers cover everything
The flowers cover everything

There’s something here I find hard to ignore
There’s something that I’ve never seen before
Amanita is the name they cover over everything

It's a fresh indictment of US imperialist policy, architect and unpunished accomplice of that oppression, through its support of Latin American dictatorships and its anti-communist interventionism, which shows no shame even in the face of the massacres carried out by death squads in El Salvador and by the contras in Nicaragua.

I BELIEVE

This time, Stipe has revealed a little too much of himself. He still works by subtraction, leaving metaphorical allusion at the center of the narrative, but he doesn't shy away from unusual first-person confessions either. So, amid the banjo intro, the country guitars and the enchanted accordion of "I Believe", it's time once again to ride the emotional wave of loose, cryptic lyrics that still plunge into the mind's darkest recesses, dig through childhood memories, and conjure fresh primordial imagery and religious symbolism. The title, seemingly assertive, turns out to be just a pretext for another free-flowing stream of thoughts and images.

When I was young and full of grace
And spirited – a rattlesnake
When I was young and fever fell
My spirit, I will not tell
You’re on your honor not to tell

I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract
Explain the change, the difference between
What you want and what you need, there’s the key
Your adventure for today, what do you do
Between the horns of the day?

I believe my shirt is wearing thin
And change is what I believe in

The snake evokes biblical symbolism, while the fever is an autobiographical reference to the scarlet fever Stipe caught at the age of two. Then there's that surreal object of faith – the coyote – a possible homage to the innocence of youth and to a primordial, uncontaminated nature, once again at center stage. It's the faith of Native Americans, capable of mediating between nature and spirit. Just as tied to a spiritual dimension seem the following line "Trust in your calling", along with the biblical precept of not doing unto others what you wouldn't want done to yourself.
Banjo chimes and a compelling refrain light up a song wrapped in the darkness of verses so ambiguous and elusive. But the key to it all is perhaps in that word "change", which once more clarifies the message of resurgence running through the whole album.

SWAN SWAN H

An outpouring of restrained sorrow over the tense dialogue of two acoustic guitars, with yet another legendary breath of accordion ushering in the bitter, distant flavor of tradition. The mournful dirge of "Swan Swan H" is – at least musically – the album's dramatic peak, another fragment of Southern memory rooted in the dark years of the Civil War.

A pistol hot cup of rhyme
The whiskey is water, the water is wine
Marching feet, Johnny Reb, what’s the price of heroes?

Six in one, half dozen the other
Tell that to the captain’s mother
Hey captain don’t you want to buy
Some bone chains and toothpicks?

Another hallucination suspended between delirium and rationality, sleep and wakefulness. A story of whiskey and guns that could easily have found a place among Fables of the Reconstruction. Johnny Reb is the derisive nickname Northerners gave to Southern rebels: "What's the price of heroes?" his enemies taunt him. And that macabre souvenir of "bone chains and toothpicks" sums up all the horror of war ("Six in one, half dozen the other" is instead another colloquial expression, roughly translatable as "it's the same old story").
Rightly dubbed "the Wendell Gee of the album", "Swan Swan H" actually manages to outdo its predecessor, earning a rightful place among the band's hidden little gems. Live, Stipe would often sing it as a duet with his friend Natalie Merchant (10,000 Maniacs), one of the finest performers and songwriters of the era.
As lively and vibrant as "Fables" was introverted and downcast, "Lifes Rich Pageant" is the album with which R.E.M. definitively step into the open, laying the foundations for their mainstream success. A success now within reach, since half a million copies sold for a college-rock LP (the band's first gold record) is already quite an achievement. And "Fall On Me", boosted by a striking video, becomes their first embryonic hit, landing among the top five most-played tracks on rock radio and even cracking the Hot 100.

"Lifes Rich Pageant" is thus the missing link between the early R.E.M., the more alternative and enigmatic band, and the later R.E.M., the one that, without betraying their identity, would soar to worldwide success straddling the late Eighties and early Nineties. It remained the band's only collaboration with Gehman, but it was probably decisive in redirecting the group's sound, also setting a new standard for American alternative music. Ken Stringfellow, musician, singer of Posies and, later on, also a keyboardist for R.E.M., says: "Lifes Rich Pageant was definitely a reference point for many of the people I was playing with at the time. It was strangely lush and choral, but without being overbearing or coming across as maudlin. It was evocative and direct, and behind it lay a passion you couldn't be ashamed of."
"The only thing missing from the record is the apostrophe in Lifes," Rolling Stone would write in its year-end review. Hard to disagree.

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03/05/2026