Begin the Begin. Robert Dean Lurie

see a movie. When Stipe appeared at Franklin’s house that evening, Franklin’s mother said, “Craig, there’s a girl here to see you.” When Franklin acted surprised, his mother scrutinized the impish figure decked out in a vest, white collared shirt, baggy pants, and hat, and corrected herself: “Oh, it’s a boy.” Franklin felt sheepish; Stipe had gotten dressed up for the movie, and here he was in his Rush T-shirt. Michael also brought along his two sisters, who’d been waiting in the car. Later, as the movie began—Woody Allen’s Annie Hall—Franklin realized with a start that Stipe seemed to have patterned his wardrobe after the style Diane Keaton adopted for the title role. “If you look at early R.E.M. photos,” Franklin says, “they were trying to be like Patti Smith as far as their dress and their attitude, especially Michael, but Peter Buck and the other guys too. But that look of the black vest with the white shirt and all that—that was really Annie Hall.”

      A number of journalists and R.E.M. biographers have concluded that it was Stipe’s discovery of Patti Smith that inspired him to become a singer, but that does not seem to have been the case. It’s true that he began singing around this time, but he had to be cajoled into doing so, it seems. The impetus was a high school talent show. Franklin had a loose band ready to play, but he needed a front man. He stopped Stipe in the hallway between classes one day and said, “Michael, we’re going to do a talent show. Would you like to sing?”

      Stipe’s response: “I don’t sing.”

      “But you look like a rock star,” Franklin said. “I’ve got microphones and amplifiers. Come on over to the garage.”

      Stipe began going over to Franklin’s house, where the two tentatively ran through some songs together. “The first time he came over,” Franklin says, “I remember he had two books of sheet music—one of them was the Who, and the other was the Rolling Stones.” After a couple of these informal sessions, Franklin introduced Stipe to his classmates Andy and Danny Gruber, the rhythm section of his hypothetical band, and rehearsals began in earnest. The most pressing task was to select two songs for the talent show. Franklin recalls:

      We did “Working Man” by Rush—which he [Michael] probably would never admit; I’ve never heard him talk about it—and “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. Actually, that was his choice. “Working Man” was my choice because that was one song we all knew pretty well as far as the drums, bass, and my lead guitar. So those were the two songs. I knew he was not too excited about singing the Rush stuff, but, you know, you got to do what you got to do!

      I ask Franklin if Stipe’s singing voice circa 1977 was anything like the distinctive, gravelly voice listeners fell in love with during the subsequent decade. “I think you would definitely recognize it,” he says. “And here’s something I remember: the first time he came over and brought that sheet music book and all that stuff, he brought along some of that stuff you spray in your throat that’s for sore throats. I don’t know what that’s called. It’s a red spray. And every time we’d stop, he’d grab that spray and he’s like, ‘My throat is kind of rough.’ And I told him, ‘That’s fine. It sounded good.’ I was encouraging him because he was really self-conscious.”

      Franklin’s recollection of the talent show itself is that it came off quite well. “My mother and an older brother were there,” he says. “My brother told me, ‘It sounded pretty good but that singer is kinda different.’ That would prove to be an understatement. We received second place behind a pianist and a classmate singing Bette Midler’s ‘The Rose,’ if I remember correctly.” Right before the group went on, someone asked Franklin what the band was called. Various names had been discussed, including Nasty Habits, but nothing had been decided, so Franklin just said “the Band.” When the Collinsville Kahokian 1978 yearbook arrived at the end of the school year, it contained a single photo from that night—a close-up shot of the drummer. The caption read, “The Band plays punk rock.”

      Top and bottom left: Collinsville High yearbook photos of Michael Stipe and Craig Franklin; top right: Michael Stipe and Craig Franklin; bottom right: the former Stipe family home in Collinsville in 2015, photograph by Craig Franklin. All images courtesy of Craig Franklin.

      It’s difficult to tell how seriously Stipe took his singing at the outset. Franklin recalls that Stipe did sing for a brief spell in another covers band (perhaps also called Nasty Habits, or Bad Habits) while still living in Collinsville, and it’s true that upon his arrival in Athens Stipe joined the Southern rock–oriented Gangster. But he harbored a strong desire to become a visual artist, and his choice of major at UGA reflected that ambition. His subsequent career as a rock vocalist was therefore by no means assured. And if we look back to the St. Louis years, it would seem that Stipe also toyed with the idea of being a poet. “He wanted to be a writer,” Mike Doskocil recalls. “Who didn’t want to be a writer? There were only two options in 1978. You were into the Clash and the Sex Pistols and the Dickies and all that other shit. You were going to be a musician, or you were going to be a writer.”

Stipe initially presented his Patti Smith epiphany to journalists as the start of his interest in music. He later amended this account to acknowledge an earlier love of David Essex’s “Rock On” and Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.” But this still left out his mid-’70s love of solidly mainstream rock, as betrayed by that telltale Blue Öyster Cult medallion(4) and an affection (presumably pre-Smith) for REO Speedwagon and Boston. Stipe finally fessed up to his classic rock predilections in a May 2006 interview with Death & Taxes, in which he stated, “What I’ve never told anyone, and this is an exclusive, is that I also bought four other albums that day [of the Horses purchase]. One of them was Hall and Oates, one of them Foghat: Fool for the City. I gravitated towards one over all the others. But the others were still there, and still in my consciousness.”

Going further back, Stipe had a particular fondness for the country music that had constituted much of the sonic background in the Stipe household during his upbringing—Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline, and Glen Campbell in particular—and for such ’60s stalwarts as the Kinks and the Who.(5)

      So it’s likely that the Patti Smith moment may not have been quite the road to Damascus conversion that Stipe has made it out to be. Yet it’s also clear that Smith had a tremendous influence on Stipe’s personality and visual aesthetic. She served as a model for how an outsider like Stipe might move through the world.

      What was it about Patti Smith’s music and persona that spoke so strongly to the young Michael Stipe? Beyond stating that her debut album “tore my limbs off and put them back in a whole different order” (whatever that means), he hasn’t given much by way of specifics. Certainly, Horses would have sounded quite unlike anything a teenager had heard on mainstream radio at the time. On December 13, 1975, the day the album was released, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Bay City Rollers, Barry Manilow, and the Bee Gees ruled the US pop charts. Compared to those artists’ precision-engineered hits, the John Cale–produced Horses sounded like something recorded in a cave. Smith herself could barely carry a tune and preferred to yelp and growl when she was not sing-speaking. At its best, the album has a hypnotic, incantatory quality, with Smith—arguably more talented as a poet than a musician—building elaborate cathedrals of language atop crashing, plodding, drone-like rhythms.

      The lyrical content would have stood out to Stipe. Smith had a crowded lexicon of left-of-center influences and idols, and referenced them liberally in her songs: characters like Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychoanalyst pursued by the FBI and FDA throughout the 1940s and ’50s because of his “unorthodox sex and energy theories” (in the words of Time magazine), who died in prison; and the renegade 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, famed for his incendiary verse, his scandalous affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, and his renouncing of all literary pursuits by the age of 21. These figures make spectral appearances on Smith’s “Birdland” (cited by Stipe as a pivotal track) and “Land,” respectively. Also in “Land,” a character commits suicide by slitting his own throat, which Smith describes by intoning, “His vocal cords started shooting like mad pituitary glands . . . No one heard the butterfly flapping in his throat.”

      In