Begin the Begin. Robert Dean Lurie

used to go down there and hang out, because for somebody who’d just discovered the Sex Pistols, that was pretty much the only alternative thing to do, go and sit on the wall. The hipsters with spray-painted hair would do their catwalk down Delmar Boulevard in their homemade stacked-heel tennis shoes.

There was the Underground FM radio(1) and then there were the weirdos, and the weirdos predated the punk-rocky. In the mid to late ’70s, St. Louis was a pretty redneck town, and—you’ve got to remember—you just needed to drive ten miles south of the city into Jefferson County and you were in Klan territory. White chicks got beaten up for dating black dudes; white guys got beaten up for being suspected of being homosexual. To a certain extent, it still is a really tough town. There’s a reason I live in Ohio. There’s a reason why I’ve lived in ten major cities—because I couldn’t get out of St. Louis fast enough. And I think Michael was also one of those people. He couldn’t get out fast enough either. That was obvious.

      One of the first nights I remember him being there, he was sitting on the wall. He was a spindly little guy and he had a book of poetry and he was trying to grow his hair out, you could tell, and he was dressed up as one of the Rocky Horror people. But just the fact that he had brought his journal with him, that was really out of place. And I remember that made an impact on me. When three, four, five years later I see the guy on David Letterman, I was like, “That’s the guy with the goddamn journal, oh my God.”

      I ask Mike if there had been any indication back then that Stipe had musical ambitions. “Absolutely none,” he says.

      Because back then, any guy with an earring I would approach to find out if he also had a guitar. If Stipe was talented as a lyricist, if he was a great singer, he wasn’t then and he certainly gave nobody the impression that he ever wanted to be. Because if he would have, we’d be talking about all the deep conversations I had with the guy I almost started a band with instead of that weirdo who carried a spiral binder drawing the one-footed head people on it.

This would seem to contradict a story Stipe has told about his St. Louis years: that he sang in a new wave band called Nasty Habits (or Bad Habits) and they even played a few shows. If I only had Doskocil’s impressions to go on, I’d be inclined to conclude that this group only ever performed in Stipe’s imagination. But wait—here’s a 2004 post on Murmurs.com (a fan-run message board dedicated to R.E.M.) from someone calling himself Polyman31(2) claiming to have played in a band with Stipe over two years prior to the formation of R.E.M. When asked by the other forum members to elaborate, he said, “Our band had different names since it was very loose, Nasty Habits, the Jotz (both Michael’s ideas), and the Band, even though there was already a band called ‘the Band’—like it really mattered. Most of the time [it] was just jam and try to play a few songs all the way thru.” He mentioned that he and Stipe liked to talk about “punk rock, skinny people, beer, girls (respectfully).”

      Further research revealed that Polyman31 is one Craig Franklin, a former longtime resident of Austin, Texas, and current Minnesotan who continues to write and record music to this day. Like Doskocil, he’s happy to talk. Franklin’s relationship with Stipe actually predates Doskocil’s run-ins with the singer, and was far more substantial. They first met in Collinsville, Illinois, some twenty minutes east of St. Louis, in the summer of 1976, when Stipe was heading into his junior year at Collinsville High and Craig was about to become a freshman. The Stipes lived adjacent to the only major public swimming pool in the town, Town N Country, which has long since been filled in and built over. Michael’s backyard was on the other side of a four-foot chain-link fence. Craig was introduced to Stipe through a mutual acquaintance. He was immediately struck by Stipe’s hair, which he describes as “big, bushy, and curly”—the kind of hairstyle you’d see on a rock star like Roger Daltry. When they parted after their casual “hello,” Franklin’s friend muttered, “This guy is kind of weird.” But Franklin was intrigued. Being a budding musician, he could sense that Stipe was something of a kindred spirit, and the two became friends—though Stipe’s shyness initially presented a challenge. “He’s probably the shyest person I’ve ever met,” Franklin says. “The difference between him and all my other friends was that he was very slow to talk and to respond. You’d ask him a question and it’s like he would think of everything he was going to say, and then say it. And it was just different. He was very quiet, but he also had a very good, bizarre sense of humor. He was a funny guy, once the ice was melted.”

      As will become clear, it’s quite likely that R.E.M. fans owe a major debt of gratitude to Craig Franklin, because it was Franklin who cajoled a reluctant Stipe into singing in public for the first time. But first, we need to deal with the Patti Smith angle . . .

      Perhaps Stipe’s most oft-told story concerning his teenage years—one that, to be quite honest, I thought was a complete fabrication until I met Franklin—is that of his dramatic discovery of Patti Smith’s music. Supposedly, at the end of 1975, Stipe had an epiphany. The story goes like this: he purchased a copy of Smith’s debut album, Horses, and stayed up all night listening to it on headphones while absentmindedly munching from a bowl of cherries. Then, apparently stricken by some sort of cherry poisoning, he vomited. The deeper significance of this story is that he allegedly made a vow the following morning to become a rock star.

      While there is no reason to doubt the key details here, the reality may not be nearly so clear-cut as Stipe remembers it. For one thing, there is the question of the date. Craig Franklin relates a story that seems to pin Stipe’s discovery of Smith not to the release date of Horses in December 1975, but to the following school year.

      Collinsville High, 1978. L to R: Scott Jentsch, Michael Anthony Edson, Craig Heimback, Michael Stipe. Photo by Sandra Casson.

      He calls me up and says, “Craig, you got to hear this record.” I think it had already been out awhile, but I said, “Okay.” I still didn’t have my driver’s license, so I had my mother drive me over to his house, you know, the one by the swimming pool. And he was so excited. I remember him standing outside the house eating a big ball of cheese; you know, the cheese that you get during Christmastime where it’s a ball and it’s got all those nuts or whatever on it? He was eating one of those like an apple.

      Anyway, I pull up and tell my mom, “Okay, I’ll call you when I’m done.” I went into his house. His parents had a big stereo, but in a cabinet—a console stereo. So he put this record on and it was just so different. I was like “What?” because at the time I think I was listening to Peter Frampton, Kansas, Boston, Styx—highly produced, very smooth, glossy types of music, a lot of keyboards, a lot of strings, and all kinds of stuff like that. This was very raw. And I looked at him and I said something like, “This is terrible.” And he looked at me like I had just killed his two poodles in the kitchen or something. Later on I found out that this record was his epiphany. It was Patti Smith’s Horses. At first listen I just didn’t get it . . . Because you didn’t hear it on the radio, for sure . . . And then later on I got it.

      That was his thing, and then he showed me . . . he got this magazine from New York in the mail called the Village Voice. He really was into that.

Franklin is quick to point out that his account doesn’t necessarily contradict Stipe’s story. It’s not unthinkable that the teenaged Stipe purchased the record earlier, had his epiphany, then got fired up later about sharing the ­discovery with his new friend.(3) Regardless of when he discovered Smith (and in either scenario he was an early adopter of Smith’s brand of punk ethos), Stipe quickly began to model his fashion sense on the photos he had seen of Smith and her sometime boyfriend/muse/photographer ­Robert Mapple­thorpe. Franklin remembers Stipe tying his shirt at the waist “­almost like a girl would tie it at the beach,” mimicking a well-known picture of Mapplethorpe.

      He started wearing a blue, and sometimes red, bandana out of his left back pocket and had some very large safety pins he would attach to the black vest he would wear to school. That drew a lot of comments from classmates. Then he started having a few friends that were kind of copying him and kind of had this punk rock thing going, whereas, in the Midwest in 1976, my typical outfit would have been blue jeans