It's one of the great mysteries of music how All The Right Friends never made a proper R.E.M. release. The song had been floating around since their early days as an Athens college bar band, and definitely shows the band at their most charming with Buck's chimey guitars, and a great harmony part for Mike Mills.
I used to date a girl who was an R.E.M. fanatic. She had a shoe box full of old bootlegs from those Athens bar days, and this song was certainly one of the highlights...hearing the band in 1979...4 years before Murmur and Rolling Stone's canonizing them as the greatest rock band in America...8 years before Document and the beginning of the arena rock days...10 before Losing My Religion...before the bloat and so on. Just seeing (hearing) them as young southern boys playing a unique brand of rock n roll in a time when bands still played original music in bars was refreshing and gave me a whole new perspective on a group that I thought there was nothing left to know.
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