chronic town (1982) - rem: irs records, SP-070502

I remember hearing the song Wolves, Lower on KALX radio in 1982 during my freshman year at UC Berkeley.  There was something about the song that caught my attention so much so that I went down to Rasputin Music on Telegraph Ave the next day, snatched one of the records from the bin, and plunked down my $10 (or whatever it cost back then).  I can still remember it because the clerk - some totally Berkeley looking dude with the serenity of a guy in The Zone - validated my instinct by saying, "Good choice.  You're going to really like this."

In 1982 REM were still almost totally unknown outside of Athens, GA and a few select college campuses, but their name was getting around.  The Chronic Town EP was generating a lot of buzz with it's (at the time) unique musical blend of Southern jangle, rock, and folk.  The combination of unadulterated instruments with Michael Stipe's curiously mumbled singing created an immediate sensation among the cynuical college crowd. 

Chronic Town (Side 1): Wolves, Lower Gardening At Night Carnival Of Sorts
Poster Torn (Side 2): 1,000,000 Stumble

REM's music was uniquely American in the same way so much of the other stuff coming out in the early 80's was not.  So much of the new stuff had a distinct English, if not Euorpean sound.  Even bands like the Ramones, with their retro 'murrcn look of jeans and leather jackets had this whiff of England, especially with the slightly affected accent in Beat on the Brat.  But REM had none of that. They sounded as if they'd never even heard a British band.  More than that, REM (like fellow Georgians, the B52s) sounded Southern, just as Blondie and the Talking Heads sounded New York, and X and the Plimsouls sounded LA.


The other thing about REM was that they somehow had this weight of intellectualism not found in bands like the Plimsouls or Blondie or X or the Ramones or the B52s.  Maybe it was the subdued simplicity of the music, or maybe it was the fact that in 1982 REM was limited to college radio. Or, perhaps (and I think this likely) it was the introverted inflection and mumbled singing of Michael Stipe.  Listening this time around I tried to pay as close attention to the sound of the vocals as I did to the instruments and the actual lyrics.  Maybe it's just me, but the volume, inflection, and register of Stipe's singing sounds more like something you'd hear on an NPR discussion than on a rock song.  And it's a good thing, too, because the lyrics for these songs are, to put it plainly, kind of silly.  That, or so deep that I'm unable to dive far enough to grasp them.

Consider this from Gardening At Night:

We echoed up the garbage sound but they were busy in the rows
We fell up not to see the sun gardening at night just didn't grow The yard is nothing but a fence the sun just hurts my eyes somewhere
It must be time for penitence gardening at night it's never worked

 Or these from Carnival Of Sorts:

There's a secret stigma, reaping wheel / Diminish, a carnival of sorts
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel / Stranger, stranger to these parts

If there is deeper meaning here I'd certainly like to know it, because it seems to me that clothing these lyrics in cautious muttering was a way to make the music match the mocking gargoyle on the cover.  And that's pretty cool, too.

Up next: The eponymous debut from "The Only Band That Matters"