CARRBORO — It wasn’t that long ago that anthemic songs brought us together. Or, like it or not, got stuck in the heads of the general public.
The 1980s brought the advent of MTV, and our listening choices well through the ’90s and early 2000s were limited to FM and AM radio. So unless you lived under a rock, the songs and sounds of the day were in your face, so to speak.
Who didn’t at least try to recite verbatim Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or R.E.M.’s rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness banger “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”?
While both examples rip from headlines and cultural turning points, each speaking to one generation and the one after — in that order — Joel was bursting the synapses of the boomers (JFK, Joe DiMaggio, Communist bloc) while R.E.M.’s pastiche, which incidentally predated Joel’s by two years, came armed with a video showing a pissed-off American kid rummaging through the trashed remains of an abandoned house. And he had a skateboard.
Not that R.E.M.’s music was only for skaters and angry kids. It was and is for everyone.
And much like a group of boomers who can attempt to rattle off “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and certainly “Piano Man,” an entire generation of Americans, me included, who grew up on R.E.M. were so affected by their music during that stretch of sponge-like adolescence or early adulthood that we got ours too.
From “Fall on Me,” “End of the World,” “The One I Love,” “Superman” and “Everybody Hurts” to “Drive” and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” R.E.M.’s output impressed upon the hearts and minds of Gen Xers (and their younger brothers and sisters) an unextinguishable flame that still burns today.
I was 6 and already had an acute understanding of who and what R.E.M. was. And not merely from being plopped in front of the idiot box watching one music video after another. At the time, my father was publisher of Raleigh’s Spectator Magazine, a weekly with its finger quite literally on the pulse of alternative music, especially that which emerged from the South. I was force-fed R.E.M. from all directions. Consummate hipster, music journalist, film critic-turned-documentarian and author Godfrey Cheshire was part of the circus—and our family— then. His 1987 piece “Over There with R.E.M.,” detailing his experience with the band on their European tour following the release of “Murmur”, felt less like reporting and more like dispatches from myth. I still have a drumhead that once belonged to Bill Berry that hung on Godfrey Cheshire’s office door at the Spectator, signed “Godfrey’s Layer.”
When I told my wife I was headed to Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle to see Michael Shannon, Jason Narducy and the former drummer from Superchunk perform R.E.M.’s 1986 album “Life’s Rich Pageant,” she had two questions: “Is this for work?” and “Michael Shannon the actor?”
Yes, grinning through my teeth, it’s for work. And yes, the actor — you know, the guy who sort of looks like Frankenstein’s monster? He’s in a bunch of stuff.
“Oh, that guy,” she said with a puzzled look on her face.
Shannon and veteran indie rock musician Jason Narducy — bassist for Bob Mould and a player with Superchunk, Sunny Day Real Estate and Verböten — have built their collaboration over a decade, focusing exclusively on R.E.M.-themed shows for the past two years.
Their partnership dates back to Chicago in 2015, when their mutual friend Robbie Fulks asked Narducy to play bass and Shannon to sing for a one-night performance of Lou Reed’s “The Blue Mask.” What followed wasn’t a band in the traditional sense, but a series of carefully curated, one-off album tributes: The Velvet Underground in 2015, The Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead” in 2016, Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” in 2017, The Music of The Cars (2019), Neil Young with Crazy Horse’s “Zuma” (2021), The Music of T. Rex (2022) and The Modern Lovers’ first album in early 2023.
That summer they performed R.E.M.’s “Murmur” coupled with the EP “Chronic Town” at Chicago’s Metro for the venue’s 40th anniversary — where R.E.M. had famously played the maiden show. R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills joined them onstage that evening, offering the first — but not last — blessing from the band.
Athens, Georgia’s R.E.M., comprised of amorphous waif frontman Michael Stipe, singer-bassist Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and drummer Bill Berry, arose through the early 1980s college rock “left of the dial” platform — still exploding onto the scene, the right place at the right time perhaps.
They cut their teeth lighting up small clubs and bars in places like Raleigh and Chapel Hill. Their most iconic early home was The Pier, tucked inside the “Village Subway” — better known as the Raleigh Underground — beneath Cameron Village Shopping Center. An infamous 1980 performance ended with a drunken encore of “Gloria,” when roughly two dozen attendees heaved themselves onto the stage to dance.
North Carolina’s imprint on R.E.M. ran deeper than club stages. Winston-Salem producer Mitch Easter helped define the band’s early recorded sound, producing “Chronic Town” and co-producing “Murmur” at his Drive-In Studio. That bright, jangling, slightly mysterious mix that became synonymous with early R.E.M. — that was forged here, too.
Forty years later, in Carrboro, that lineage felt intact.
To a packed room spanning generations of R.E.M. followers, Shannon, drummer Jon Wurster (Superchunk), bassist John Stirratt (Wilco), keyboardist Vijay Tellis-Nayak and guitarist Dag Juhlin tore through “Life’s Rich Pageant.” The band performed the full 1986 album from start to finish: “Begin the Begin,” “These Days,” “Fall on Me,” “Cuyahoga,” “Hyena,” “Underneath the Bunker,” “The Flowers of Guatemala,” “I Believe,” “What If We Give It Away?,” “Just a Touch,” “Swan Swan H” and the faithful cover of The Clique’s “Superman.”
The audience welcomed every note knew every word by heart.
“It dumbfounds and delights me that we continue our crusade through this astounding catalogue of music from one of America’s most influential and unique bands,” Shannon said in a statement. “Now we find ourselves at a summit, ‘Life’s Rich Pageant,’ and we’re all pinching ourselves in disbelief to be so lucky. The most strange and beautiful adventure.”
If the first set was discipline and devotion, the second was breadth.
They reached back to Murmur, Reckoning and beyond — “Lotus,” “Gardening at Night,” “Try Not to Breathe,” “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars),” “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us,” “Burning Down,” “Fireplace” (featuring Matt Douglas of The Mountain Goats on saxophone), “The Lifting,” “Crush With Eyeliner,” “Me in Honey,” “You Are the Everything,” “The Great Beyond,” “Pilgrimage,” “Country Feedback,” “Sitting Still,” “Camera,” “Radio Free Europe” and “Star 69.”
It wasn’t cosplay. It wasn’t irony. It wasn’t an actor dabbling in indie rock nostalgia.
It was reverence — loud, communal and strangely necessary.
