Young Despite the Years: Four Decades of R.E.M.’s “Lifes Rich Pageant”

Imagine being an R.E.M. fan, say, forty-years-and-six-months ago. You’re all-in on this band of four white guys from Athens, Georgia, a place you hadn’t previously even realized was a place. They keep releasing albums that bury the frontman’s tantalizing mumbles under bushels of melodic arpeggios like lush kudzu. The guys seem dead-eyed and humorless, which like an onion on your belt was the style at the time, except when glimmers of what almost seems like it might be something resembling humor escape around the edges – the chortling intro to “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” the rollicking funk pastiche of “Can’t Get There From Here.”

Basically, though, the contract was set; a pattern was established. You knew what you were getting with these guys.

Then, exactly forty years ago, the pale skinny-tied sales clerks at your local mall record store unboxed the new album Lifes Rich Pageant and things changed.

I mean, not everything changed. Things were mostly still the same. Reagan was still president, Jessica Fletcher was still solving murders and that girl in your homeroom still didn’t want to go out with you.

To be fair, even a lot about R.E.M. was still mostly the same – lyrics still mostly gnomic and inscrutable, music mostly still fecund with an earthy humidity. But the band’s palette had expanded, the murky undergrowth cleared away. First and most importantly, you could hear the drums! No longer was percussionist Bill Berry buried so far down in the mix that it sounded like he was gently tapping on tom-toms in the Let’s Active studio down the street. This phenomenon wasn’t unique to R.E.M. – lots of bands in the 80s mixed their albums like they were embarrassed to have a rhythm section – but when the drums burst in on Peter Buck’s opening guitar lick in “Begin the Begin,” it’s a liberation, it’s a benediction, it’s proudly and unabashedly audible. And when Berry starts pounding the skins in “These Days” it feels like the guy’s been restrained for too long. R.E.M. had never been music you could really sing along to, but at least now you could dance to it.

And those lyrics? Well, you still couldn’t quite understand them most of the time – the sun is the past? Sonny’s was packed? What are you saying, Michael? – but by this time most of us had come to suspect that calculated opacity was one of R.E.M.’s virtues, and as later albums rolled out with more regrettably intelligible verses we became sure of it.  Besides, even the lyrics you could decipher weren’t entirely clear. I understood that “Fall On Me” was about environmental concerns but only because the Rolling Stone review told me so.

What seemed evident at the time and became even clearer in hindsight was that Lifes Rich Pageant wasn’t just a great R.E.M. album; it was a great rawknroll album. And it seems like a lot of the credit for that might go to its producer Don Gehman, who as John Mellencamp’s collaborator was a counterintuitive hiring choice for counter-culture college-rock gods. One day in the not-too-distant future R.E.M. and Mellencamp would get played side by side on the same mainstream radio stations, but back in 1986 that pairing seemed like an absurdly unlikely juxtaposition. Nevertheless, Gehman’s arena-ready rock-forward production arguably set R.E.M. on the path they ultimately followed to selling out actual arenas.

Sure, the album still had art-school history lessons like “Swan Swan H” and goofball larks like “Superman.” But those only augmented the sense that this was R.E.M. at the peak of their powers: they will rearrange your scales if they can. And they can.