Auctioneer (Another Engine) - REM - Fables of the Reconstruction - 1985

The final bar we hit in Jamaica Plain was a place called Brendan Behan Pub, which turned out to be something of a gem...though not really what we were looking for at the moment. It was a smallish bar that was clearly a bit old. The wooden walls and benches were all a bit warped, giving the bar an odd angular look that us NYC-ers would refer to as "Character".

The crowd was mostly neighborhood types and most interestingly enough, dogs. Now, not dogs in an 80's slang, ugly chicks kinda way...I mean actual canines. There were easily 4-5 dogs in there with their owners, just randomly wandering the bar and socializing. As I am a dog person, this was a plus. I'm sure if I lived in JP, I'd find myself in this bar quite often. We were, however, looking for a bit more excitement than that and the pub was not providing it...so we were out after one drink.

We made a quick stop in the CVS, as I had forgotten a toothbrush and deodorant (Prompting Anand to snipe "you use those?") and then it was a cab to "Southie" for the remainder of the night.

Fables of the Reconstruction, the band's 3rd album, has always been my least favorite of the "Golden Age of R.E.M." albums. Sure, I'd listen to it 20 times in a row before I'd listen to Reveal or Around the Sun even one more time...but compared to the stunning debut album and the autumnal majesty of Reckoning, this album has always been a bit of a let down. Not quite sure whether to recapture the murky haze of the early work, or to head towards the arena rock they'd move towards on Life's Rich Pageant and perfect on Document...Fables seems stuck in two places at once, neither one thing nor the other.

Beyond this, it always seemed an odd decision for a band so steeped in Americana (Despite it's artier tendencies) to produce an album explicitly dedicated to a sort of modern American folk lore in London. The band wouldn't record out of The States again until the execrable Reveal. Stripped of all of their baggage, R.E.M. are, at the end of the day, an American rock band and they are at their best when they remember that fact.

Auctioneer - REM - Live Rockplast Oct 2nd 1985 - 1985

As we stumbled East on South St., now fairly lubricated, we came across a bar that hadn't been on our list (Even on vacation, I project manage...I had put together a spreadsheet of 40 bars and restaurants, spread around different neighborhoods, for us to check out). The bar was called Alchemy and was a bit more of a lounge type place, complete with low lighting, a cocktail menu and a fair assortment of Boston skanks in nice-ish dresses.

It was approaching 7 o'clock and the fact that we hadn't eaten anything but a small order of chicken wings and 1 bagel (both split 2 ways) all day long was beginning to take it's toll on our drinking. Additionally, we were beginning to rethink our plan. Clearly JP was too residential to get much of a happy hour scene, and most of the bars we'd been in were drastically under populated. If there was a good time to be had in this city we hadn't found it yet. We debated pulling the plug on this hood and heading over to Southie (our night time plan), but as we only had one JP bar left on the list, Anand insisted (in the insistent way that he does when he is drunk) that we finish the job and visit the last bar.

This is R.E.M., back when they were still a rock band playing in Amsterdam in 1985, complete with some unfinished spoken word nonsense from Stipe to kick off the song. This has never particularly been my favorite song but it is impressive to hear the band kicking in their prime.

At My Most Beautiful - REM - Up - 1998

Well, sorry again for a bit of a lengthy gap between entries, but I took a few couple of days off of work to make a little road trip down to DC and then I had a fair amount of catching up on both work and sleep when I returned.

So anyway, since I've sort of gotten the hang of this whole travel blog thing recently I'll probably be writing a bit about DC...but I actually have a few things to say about this song, so the DC stories can wait for the next entry.

In 1998 I was working night shifts at a hospital's computer help desk in Cincinnati. I worked completely by myself for most of the night, and unless a system was down I rarely got many calls. As such had plenty of time to work on projects, catch up on reading, listen to music, etc. And one of the things I was doing was starting an internet romance with a girl I had known for a few years. She was obsessive about REM and had seriously recommended this album to me.

Now I, like many people, had sort of assumed that Bill Berry's departure after New Adventures in Hi Fi meant the end of REM as a creative force...and by and large I was correct, however they still had one last good album in them (Unless they seriously surprise me in their middle aged incarnation). And that album was Up.

The departure of Berry left the band free to experiment a bit. Their tour with young upstarts Radiohead as openers had left them with a taste for a bit more unusual textures and much of the album shows this influence. At My Most Beautiful however is one of the few songs on the album that looks backwards...it is admittedly a band trying to sound like the Beach Boys and they do a stirling immitation. Michael Stipe has long admitted his boredom with the icons of classic rock, but in doing his band mates a "Favor" and doing this song in the Pet Sounds style actually allowed the song to open up and breathe rather than stagnating in imitation. The sleigh bells, the baritone horns, the perfect pitched harmonies all work to show the delicacy of the song in both lyrical content and structure. It's really a lovely song and makes me wish even further that they had simply hung up their hats after this album.

The Apologist - R.E.M. - Up - 1998

So anyway, we watch this Girltalk show after giving up on being down in the elbow fest that was the ground floor we decided to head up to the much more sedate second floor. The show wraps up and we head for the coat check...which is also on the second floor, so we get a relatively decent place in line.

Now, it was a cold night, and Girltalk is the kind of show that chicks dance at...so most people had worn heavy coats and then checked them into the coat check. The problem was, people show up in trickles...but they all want to leave at the same time. The coat check line quickly decended into chaos, and our place in line was of little importance.

Finally after easily 20 minutes of waiting, we make it to the front of the line. My lady friend had suggested that we give all five coat tickets to one of her friends, as she could lead with her cleavage. Seeing the wisdom of this plan, I turned over the tickets. However, when she collected the coats, she turned to me and said "They lost Anne's coat..."

So, I make my way up to the front to check out the situation, and at this point my temper was on edge. I talk to the floppy haired douchebag behind the counter and he tells me that he needs a description. So I say "It's a small woman's pea coat".

"Dude, I don't know what the hell a peacoat is."

Okay...now maybe I could have been more polite at this point, but I really was in no mood for this shit, so I responded with "It's the same fucking black boxy coat with the big anchor buttons that every fucking chick in New York City wears in the winter!"

At this point, Anne's friends pulled me away from the window, figuring the cleavage would do more good than my incohate rage. So they call Anne to come to the front to help identify it, but the problem is there is a bouncer in between her and the coat check window. And this tiny little prick decides that the only thing he can do in his futile effort at crowd control is to stop my tiny 108 pound girlfriend from claiming her lost coat.

"Sorry ma'am you are just going to have wait until everyone else clears out, I can't let you go up there."

It was at this moment that I basically went bat shit. He was considerably smaller than me, younger than me, and in over his head...so I just went in with both feet and started going off on the dude. Phrases that left my mouth included:
"Look, she's my girlfriend and she wants to stand up here so she can help sort out this mess, what exact problem do you think she's going to cause?"
"What are you going to do, escort me from the building? Try it."
"We paid you to watch our coats, and you incompetant fucks couldn't even handle that job right...I want her coat and I want it now."
"It's a Sunday night, I have to work tomorrow, I want to go home and get some sleep, and now because you all screwed up, I have to wait till this clusterfuck clears up to claim my girlfriend's coat. That's bullshit"

The floppy haired douchebag came out at this point and opinied (sadly, correctly) "this guy is a total asshole"

Finally they got their manager to come out, who actually spoke to me like a reasonable person and allowed Anne to find her coat. He even thanked me for being reasonable at the end of the night.

I suppose I could make a connection to The Apologist by saying something about oweing the staff of Terminal 5's coat check an apology, but frankly fuck those guys hard with both fists.

The song itself, is another decent track from REM's last decent album. Not my favorite on the album, but they've made far worse.

All The Right Friends - R.E.M. - ...And I Feel Fine - 2003

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.

Airportman - R.E.M. - Up - 1998

As I've stated before, I have a complicated relationship with R.E.M. Among the consequences of this is the fact that I will defend Up as a halfway decent album. It was a dark time for the band. Bill Berry had just had his aneurysm scare and had left the band under the condition that the band would not quit, Stipe's growing friendship with Thom Yorke had convinced him that the band needed to be more experimental, and the novelty of the Spice Girls had blossomed into a full fledged teen-pop movement led by a crazy girl in plaid schoolgirl skirt.

Under these circumstances R.E.M. did their best to put out a solid album and mostly hit the target by being relatively modest and not shying away from being moody. This song however completely blows. Just a bunch of keyboard beeps without a distinctive melody to cling to...and worse yet, it's the album opener. Give the album a chance, just start at track 2.

Ages of You - R.E.M. - And I Feel Fine... - 2006

This is actually a live take from their Boston show in 1983. The track demonstrates what a solid drummer live drummer Bill Berry was. Back in the day when they were America's best college band, they were amazingly tight from non-stop touring. The ease with which they spring into this song is breathtaking.

Ages of You - R.E.M. - Dead Letter Office - 1987

A friend of mine recently played the new R.E.M. album for me. I haven't decided if I'll be adding it to the Pod yet or not, but what struck me most about it was how much they wished they were still this band...but this track, which had been floating around since their bar band days, and never made it on a proper studio album still has more energy and spirit than anything on that new album.

I have a complicated relationship with the boys from Athens...but there will be plenty of time to go into that later. For the moment, I'll enjoy them at their youthful best.