On R.E.M., Giving In, and Unboxing Toys In The Attic

I saw the R.E.M. cover thing last night

Critics work different when they have to work fast. Five years ago, I was invited to submit a ballot of my favorite 50 albums of all time for a Rolling Stone list, but I’d missed the email and only discovered the opportunity right at the deadline. What might have been a very considered exercise instead became a race against the clock, with me listing the favorites I could think of from the top of my head, probably missing a ton of important ones, and not paying much attention to rankings. And gun to my head, down to the wire, I listed my #1 album as R.E.M.’s Murmur — an opinion I’d never expressed before, or even realized I’d held. Until that point I’d never even considered Murmur as my favorite R.E.M. album, let alone my favorite album ever.

It’s a pretty defensible pick, though.

At the time I was in the middle of my second love affair with R.E.M. The first came when I was a kid — not a teenage kid, but an actual kid-kid, probably around nine or 10 years old. R.E.M. were my first favorite band, passed down to me by my dad, who had exceptional taste in ’80s college rock and was generous about lending me his CDs. At that age I knew nothing about music, fandom, notions of cool, or the cultural context of anything I was listening to. In a few years I’d start trading music recommendations with friends and it would become a huge part of how we presented ourselves to the world, but at nine years old music was still a solitary interest, not a social endeavor.

I did most of my listening on a Walkman, which was basically a toy. I bought the R.E.M. albums my dad didn’t already have on CD for myself on cassette. Because this was pre-internet, there was no of knowing about all the albums they’d released. Their discography was vast and, for all I knew, boundless. On any given trip to a department store, I could discover a “new” record from my favorite band.

My second love affair with R.E.M. came more than 25 years later, after a long break from the band. Because I’d listened to them so exhaustively as a little kid, I had burned out on them by the time I was 12 or 13, which I think is for the best — I was moving on to the punk and rap music of my peers, shit that our dads weren’t listening to. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been a kid skateboarding in an oversized Monster T-shirt. R.E.M. were fundamentally a Gen X band, and I needed to discover my own identity as an Millennial.

But by 2020 I was a dad myself, stuck at home with a colicky baby during the scariest, most isolating early days of the pandemic, and I was hungry for old comforts. Adam Scott and Scott Aukerman’s podcast had rekindled my excitement about the band, especially for their IRS era. There was such an intense satisfaction in hearing those old records through the lens of adulthood for the first time, and in learning my tastes had been spot on as a kid. This music really was special, somehow even better and more meaningful than I remembered it.

Murmur in particular completely revealed itself to me. I realized how much of that record, behind the murk, is explicitly about childhood, feeling voiceless, moved more by the forces around you than your own preferences, still trying to distinguish fantasies from realities.

In its codedly impressionistic way, Murmur captured my childhood as vividly as any Calvin & Hobbes comic collection.

Nobody likes an old white guy living in the past, and I’m aware that nostalgia isn’t a great look. So I tried to put boundaries on my renewed R.E.M. fandom, keep it contained to to the Twitter conversations where it’s acceptable, and not wear it as part of my identity. Yet because my love for this band is so strong and I am so weak, last night I crossed a line I never imagined I’d even consider: I paid $60 to see a cover band.
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Years ago, an older co-worker used to bore me to death talking about a Genesis tribute band. They weren’t just a cover band, you see. They recreated entire Genesis concerts from the ’70s down to the encores. They followed exact setlists from the tours. They used actual props from the shows. They were approved by actual members of Genesis. Did you hear that one of the guys from Genesis sat in with them once? This was the real thing. Or as close as you could get to the real thing.

All that seemed like empty justification to me when it was about Genesis, a band I cannot care about. But more than a decade later, I found myself using the same rational to see Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy on their Fables of the Reconstruction tour. These weren’t just some randos covering R.E.M.; they were musicians I’ve heard of, who sometimes play with actual members of R.E.M. That means it must be valid. They’re more than a cover band. You’ve seen those “Pretty Persuasion” performances.

In actuality, all that lore doesn’t matter. It just creates a permission structure for fans to justify spending the money, because in R.E.M.’s steadfast refusal to reunite, they’ve created such market scarcity that there’s no better option. And so I paid $60 to see an actor I do not like front a cover band with a bunch of guys from bands I mostly don’t care about (I never got into Superchunk, or most of the other bands in the Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster’s orbit). As if to save face with myself, I spent the week before the show mostly listening to Zennial rap: I’m not only an R.E.M. dad; I also have thoughts about 2hollis.

I still have mixed feelings about it. But thankfully my embarassment was far outweighed by the gratification of giving in, allowing myself to experience something I really wanted.

I’ll spare you the full concert review, because it was a cover band. But I will say that Michael Shannon really freaked it. He assumed the Michael Stipe role with a method actor’s commitment, recreating Stipe’s stage movements with studied precision — he even has Stipe’s sihloutte and bone structure. Yet at other times he looked like any other dude in the crowd three beers in doing R.E.M. karaoke. The show needed both: the performer and the fan. It had to be specific, but it also had to be free and sloppy. Michael Shannon understood this. He’s one of us.

Outside of Fables, the album most represented on the setlist was the one I long thought of as my favorite: Dead Letter Office, the rarities and B-sides collection that captures that band at their most drunkenly uninhibitated, completely devoid of any suggestion of importance. Shannon and the guys played “Bandwagon” (fuck yeah, I love that one) and three covers from the record, which for night’s purposes were canonically R.E.M. songs. They saved the big crowd pleaser for last: Aerosmith’s ripper “Toys In The Attic,” an unlikely fan favorite, since it challenges the popular imagining of R.E.M. It would be so easy to draw a meatheads vs. art students divide between Aerosmith and R.E.M. Without making a whole thing of it, Dead Letter Office defused that narrative.

Like so much of Mumur, “Toys” is a song about childhood. But if Murmur is about the gradual, blurry awakening from the haze of youth, “Toys” is the violent shock of having that youth ripped away:

Leaving the things that are real behind
Leaving the things that you love from mind

This is how we’re supposed to feel about the relics from our childhood. We’re supposed to move on, keep them in the past, pretend we never wanted them so badly. But if we’re honest with ourselves, don’t we all occasionally want to give in and unbox them and hold them again? Is it our most flattering tendency? No. But it sure feels good to succumb to it sometimes.