Begin the Begin. Robert Dean Lurie

prog music. A buddy of mine named Richard Marlow swears up and down that Mike and Bill told me over beers one night in Express Pizza that they were going to start a band and asked me if I was interested in playing with them. And I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.’ So . . . I may have blown my shot at playing with R.E.M.” He pauses, then adds, “I would have just screwed them up anyway!”

      Holmes describes Bill Berry—the man who just two years earlier had struck Ian Copeland as a motormouth—as “always kind of quiet. I don’t remember Bill as being all that talkative. The main thing that stuck out to me about Bill is that he had a warped sense of humor, which I liked. Sometimes he would crack jokes, and he was trying to be funny, and people wouldn’t get it. The other thing was, we all made fun of Bill because he had one eyebrow.”

      Billy Holmes, then, has the distinction of being one of the few people who knew all four members of R.E.M. prior to the formation of R.E.M. But he never thought to put the guys together. And why would he? Here was a so-so rhythm section from Macon, good for a couple of beers and some jokes on any given night, but not too promising musically, and there was the singer from Gangster with the reverse mullet—you know, the Steak and Ale guy, Pigpen—who did the Thin Lizzy covers. And Pete Buck? Are you kidding me?

      It took a twisted sort of genius to see that these elements could be mixed to create some kind of radioactive cocktail. Only Kathleen O’Brien could make that leap.

      Washington University’s student-run station, KWUR 90.3 FM, calls itself “St Louis Underground Radio.”

      Just to be clear, the “poly” in this nickname refers to complex polymers (the person in question is a chemist), not to polyamory.

      One possible explanation for Stipe’s delayed communication of his epiphany to Franklin is that he had just been fired up all over again after seeing Patti Smith’s rendition of “Gloria” on Saturday Night Live, on April 17, 1976. The show had a huge youth audience, so it seems quite likely he would have seen it, and Smith’s incendiary performance would certainly have reinforced the impact of her album on the young Stipe.

      Patti Smith was in a long-term relationship with Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult in the mid-1970s, which underscores the fact that many musicians of the period were not nearly as concerned with the divide between punk and classic rock as fans and critics were.

      He has repeatedly claimed to have disliked the Beatles. “I’ve always referred to the Beatles as elevator music, because that’s exactly what they were,” he told Rolling Stone in 1994. “Those guys just didn’t mean a fucking thing to me.”

      Intriguingly, Stipe seems to have abandoned this modulated style of speaking since the breakup of R.E.M. In recent televised and audio interviews, Stipe’s speaking voice is relaxed and dynamic; in other words, he now talks like a “regular” person. This either points to a personal evolution or the possibility that what may have seemed like a vocal quirk during those earlier years was actually a deliberate choice.

      Stipe apparently continued to propagate this tale well into the 1990s. The poet Douglas A. Martin, in his fictionalized account of his four-year relationship with Stipe, Outline of My Lover, recalls the singer boasting of this ascetic phase.

      Chapter Three

      Her fling with Peter Buck notwithstanding, Kathleen still harbored a strong interest in Bill Berry. A year is a pretty long time to carry a torch at that age, particularly when there are so many other potential companions available. So that probably says something about both Berry’s appeal and O’Brien’s ardor.

      Meanwhile, Michael Stipe and Peter Buck found themselves in need of a rhythm section. They had already played with a few other people in the sanctuary—most notably Dan Wall—but nothing had clicked. To Peter’s way of thinking, they were just fucking around, but Michael had latched on to some kind of vision. It was a blurred vision, but it was his. “These are dangerous times / I don’t want to get old,” began one of those early songs. Two lines, both heartfelt expressions, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. Or do they? “I don’t want to get old” is not typically a statement that would flow out of musings on the precarious state of the world; it would be much more likely to indicate a desire to remain in the present. But if the present is so dangerous, as indicated in the preceding line, why would one want to do that? An alternative explanation is that the prospect of growing old is, in itself, what makes these times so dangerous—maybe not physically (aging from 20 to 21 is not going to slow someone down) but perhaps the danger in growing old is the possibility of giving in to convention and losing one’s present identity.

      My tortured attempt here to make sense of lyrics that are—let’s face it—a bit off, somewhat misshapen, is a microcosm of what a generation of listeners and critics would end up doing with Michael Stipe’s words. It was never clear—then or for a while later—if the “offness” was a calculated effect, or if Stipe’s unintentionally awkward phrasing had opened a space of ambiguity into which people could read all kinds of meanings. In either case, opaqueness was a component of Stipe’s writing from the very outset, and it set him apart from most other fledgling songwriters.

      Musically the duo worked the same handful of chords over and over. Buck harbored no illusions concerning his ability on the guitar, but he had enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. Plus, he already looked and acted the part, with his shaggy hair and penchant for wearing vests and carrying knives around. He was a rock star minus the fame and success, which may be the purest sort of rock star there is. Still, the pair needed a bassist and a drummer, no two ways about it. They would not be playing folk gigs at T.K. Harty’s as “Buck and Stipe.” They wanted to play—oh, never mind where; they hadn’t thought that far ahead. But they wanted to play loud—electric.

      It should come as no surprise to the reader that Kathleen O’Brien immediately thought of Bill Berry as the solution to the new duo’s quandary. Sure, she had an ulterior motive—she wanted to bring Berry into the band for the same reason she had recruited him for the Wuoggerz: to be closer to him. But she also knew from that earlier experience that Berry could play, and that he came with an added bonus: Mike Mills.

      What happened next is a matter of some conjecture. We know for certain that Kathleen introduced Michael and Peter to Bill at a party and that Michael was rather taken with Berry’s unusual appearance—particularly his eyebrow. But Kathleen vaguely remembers also introducing the duo to Mike Mills at that same party, whereas the version of the story told by the band members over the years has Berry introducing Buck and Stipe to Mills at Tyrone’s O.C. nightclub a few weeks later. Whatever the exact circumstances, Michael Stipe was initially adamant that Mills not be part of their fledgling band. It wasn’t the fact that the bassist was drunk off his ass that evening, crawling around the floor in his bomber jacket; it was simply that Mills didn’t look cool. No matter his musical talent, his bowl haircut and penchant for bell-bottoms were violently at odds with the mental image Stipe had constructed of his hypothetical ensemble. Buck had some initial concerns too, though his were of a more practical nature: based on the state Mills was in that evening, Buck worried that he might be too out-of-control to shoulder the commitment of being in a band.

      Fortunately for posterity, Berry was equally adamant that he wouldn’t participate in any new musical undertaking without Mills. Since Stipe and Buck had immediately warmed to Berry and desperately wanted him to be in the band, they had no choice but to acquiesce.

      Kathleen still remembers the first rehearsal vividly: “It was just there. You know, the dynamics between the personalities—what Peter and Michael had been doing and then what Mike and Bill already had established from years of playing