Time Capsule: R.E.M., Document
The Athens four-piece on Document was different from the band that had dominated college radio four years earlier. But that jump from indie-music darlings to real rock stars was done with grace.
Growing up in Georgia probably placed me closer to the orbit of R.E.M. than your average suburban young teenager in the middle of the 1980s, but it wasn’t close enough for the nearby Athens band to break through the classic-rock of my youth. So it was in the summer of 1987, after getting my second of many high-school jobs, that I started turning my radio dial to the left and falling in love with music that wasn’t decades old.
I was working at a one-hour photo shop, and when the twenty-something techs who ran the place weren’t making fun of their customers’ pictures, they were introducing me to all the bands they loved—The Smiths, Public Image Ltd., The Smithereens and, of course, R.E.M. It was the latter that I fell hardest for, and it was their back catalog I gobbled up with my one-cent cassette selections from my monthly Columbia House mailers before I finally got my driver’s license and could visit the nearest indie music store.
But I wasn’t the only one discovering the band that year. Right before we returned to school, “The One I Love” was released as the first single for R.E.M.’s fifth album, Document. It would become the band’s first Top 10 hit that fall, and if learning about college radio bands, the local scene and R.E.M., in particular, become my entire personality, well, I was 15, growing an inch each month and really, really loved music.
Document was the first R.E.M. album that I was there for upon its release, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. “The One I Love” might have been my least favorite song out of the 11 tracks, and I’m still not sure how much of that was an immature resentment that it was all most of my classmates knew about the band those first months of my sophomore year, while I had been learning every word on Dead Letter Office.
The R.E.M. on Document was different from the band I’d just been getting to know. From the opening track, “The Finest Worksong,” Bill Berry’s drums punctured through the mix instead of contentedly shuffling things along. Mike Mill’s bass still bounced around the melody, but more as a traditional rhythm section and less as a counter lead guitar. Pete Buck’s signature jangle still shaped everything, but there was distortion and muscle to it. And most notably, gone were Michael Stipe’s mumbles. You can actually understand the words on Document without looking at the lyrics sheet. They even sometimes made sense.
But that jump from indie-music darlings to real rock stars was done with grace. The songs on Document hold up as well today as anything on Murmur or Reckoning. The band may have been more radio-ready here, but they were still experimenting, adding dulcimer to the gorgeous “King of Birds,” sampling Joseph Welch’s rebuke of the red scare on “Exhuming McCarthy,” and packing dozens of references—including my introduction to Lester Bangs—into the stream-of-consciousness anthem “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” a track we all shout-sang while packed into a friend’s beat-up old Monte Carlo.
It’s not as though the band had been operating in secret—they made their national TV debut on Late Night with David Letterman four years earlier on the strengths of their first full-length album Murmur. But Document was a bridge album between their career as a band for those in the know and their time as one of the biggest bands on the planet—whose poppiest hits “Stand,” “Shiny Happy People” were among its biggest.
R.E.M. was not alone in making the jump from the underground in 1987. That same year, U2 released The Joshua Tree and toured stadiums. New Zealand’s Neil Finn of Split Enz found a global audience with his new band Crowded House. But no one was more emblematic of the budding “alternative rock” movement as the four kids from Athens. And Document served as a gateway into that world for people like me, who’d long been missing out.