Man, it’s a been a while, and I’m sorry, and I miss the things I used to do. By way of explanation/apology/fishing for sympathy, I’ve been doing my ‘normal’ job every day from like 8-830 till about 5-530, then heading to the book shop til 8 or so, then back home for work then beddy bye. Crazy crazy.
That being said, my plan this evening is to drink enough keg beer to get the appropriate buzz on to be able to review and discuss R.E.M.’s next album, Fables of the Reconstruction (or, as you may know, ‘Reconstruction of the Fables’).
I officially first bought this cassette off a friend of mine in 1985 or 1986, because she that it was ‘too fucking slow’. I have to confess I didn’t listen to it until AFTER I fell in love with Reckoning, their album prior to this one.
As with Reckoning it will be impossible to be objective about this record. The summer of 1990, when my girlfriend’s mom died from cancer and I was at math camp, I listened pretty non stop to this, a Robyn Hitchcock tape (queen elvis) and a mix my gf had made for me that had a bunch of tunes from the Lou Reed/John Cale ‘Songs for Drella’ album. I’ve listened to this album, I would guess, over a thousand times.
Let me just say, it’s great. But listen, I have reasons.
This is the first album where REM seemed to be growing, and also, seemed a little sad. Gone (for now) were the hit-you-over-the-head early twenties sad songs like ‘Perfect Circle’. In their place came songs almost wholly about being stuck in one place while simultaneously rushing towards some impending doom. Or good fortune. It’s hard to tell. It’s certainly their darkest, and least pop album. But in that darkness is a sort of hope for the future.
Let’s consider the top songs of 1985, as compiled by Billboard.
1. Careless Whisper – Wham
2. Say You Say Me – Lionel Richie
3. Seperate Lives – Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin
4. I Want to Know What Love Is – Foreigner
5. Money for Nothing – Dire Straits
6. We Are the World – USA for Africa
7. Broken Wings – Mr. Mister
8. Everybody Wants to Rule the World – Tears for Fears
9. The Power of Love – Huey Lewis
10. We Built this City – Starship
Compare that to ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’, ‘Life and How to Live it’, ‘Kohoutek’, ‘Can’t Get there from Here’.
Feeling Gravity’s Pull, a song that always seemed out of place to me, makes perfect sense now. A song about, literally, the weight of life, is a brilliant way to kick off the record. I could do without the violins, but how sweet a line is, ‘This is the easiest task I’ve ever had to do’? And a beautiful transition into Maps and Legends, a beautiful song about being lost.
I’m sure rock critics way smarter than me have made the observation that Stipe appears to be talking about himself in the third person when he sings, “ Called the fool and the company, on his own where he’d rather be. Where he ought to be, he sees what you can’t see, can’t you see that?”
But it makes sense – REM had achieved a small level of fame by this point, and weren’t sure really, what the fuck to do with it. They weren’t yet capital P political, and they didn’t sound like other college rock. They were excited and scared, so they wrote about THAT.
The same is true of Driver 8. ‘He piloted this song in a plane like that one’.
From there we move away from introspection, and into singing about the freaks they felt they might be, or might become. Life and How to Live it, is notoriously about a guy who lived his life with a line drawn down the middle of his house. Sometimes he’d live on this side, sometimes on that. When he died, they discovered a closet full of a book the man had written called, ‘Life and How to Live It’.
Old Man Kensey, similarly is a fucked up old guy. He wants to be a sign painter, but is illiterate. Kensey is full of desires and wants, but he can’t quite achieve them because he’s just not good enough yet. Maybe like a band in transition….?
Can’t Get there from Here is their ‘happy bouncy song’ for this album, but is based on a traditional southern expression. When you ask someone for directions in, say, rural Georgia, you might be met with, ‘Boy, you can’t get there from here’ as your response.
Green Grow the Rushes is a little trickier. It’s got one of my favorite little Peter Buck riffs of all time, and such a sweet melody from msrs. stipe and mills. At it’s face value, it’s a song about an old farmer. Or, it might be about slavery. I’m not sure. I mean, they ARE southern.
Kohoutek is the most painfully obvious song on the album, lyrically. It’s a classic broken heart song, but instead of disguising himself as an old man, an engineer, an auctioneer, a sign painter, or a crazy writer, Stipe merely calls himself ‘Michael’ as he sings of hollering along and tearing down bridges. A quiet beauty this one.
Auctioneer is the angry flip side of the Kohoutek coin. He even sings about hollering. But again, it’s a song about leaving – no about FLEEING. And he’s pissed watching the girl escape town. Not my favorite song musically, but a far more bitter precursor to ‘the one I love’.
Good Advices. Mmmmm……My buddy Adam and I used to listen to this song over and over again. It’s a song of sweetness, and offers silly advice about traveling and meeting people. But that line, ‘Who are you going to call for?’ STILL hits me in the gut every fucking time. Keep your hat on your head indeed.
Taken in the REM context though, this is there version of that one Journey song about ‘life on the road’. “A familiar face a foreign place I forget your name. I’d like it here if I could leave and see you from a long way away……home is a long way away.”
And the album end up with Wendell Gee, a drinking song, if you will. It’s the closest legitimate country song REM has ever done. It’s a song about an old man (as I see it) stuck trying to fix his trees. Sigh.
There are some amazing things about the music on this album too. For the first time they’re adding stranger instruments – horns, violins, a banjo – and they work for the most part, or at least they add more than they detract.
Secondly, Mike Mills’ harmonies and backing vocals coat this album with a fine layer of honey, though every time I listen to this record, I’m convinced the EQ is off on my stereo because the whole fucking thing sounds muddled in honey.
I guess if Chronic Town and Murmer were them trying to become a band, and Reckoning was them nailing it, then Fables is them coming to terms with being a BAND. It wasn’t just a hobby anymore. They recorded it in England for months, rather than in North Caroline for a couple of days. They were selling out the Hammersmith Ballroom, a place the fucking CLASH sang about. And they weren’t sure what all it meant, which is good.
Lately, I’ve heard a number of critiques of the way music is disseminated in society. Thanks to the interweb and MySpace, a band can get ‘famous’ 8 minutes after they record a demo by simply uploading it. The critique of course is that bands don’t have time to grow, or in the words of Jim Deregottis, ‘to suck’. I’m not saying REM every sucked, but they at least had time to be interesting, which is something you can’t say of Wolf Parade or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. To listen to a band evolve in an interesting way is an amazing thing.
Admittedly, it was these evolutions that, later, made fans grouse about the ‘old days’, but I had a dream last night – a crazy vivid dream that I went to see R.E.M. at the Continental Club in Austin Texas, a place I went to a few times back in the 90’s. There were maybe a hundred people there, and I got to stand right next to the stage, and when Stipe would come over to sing, he’d smile at me. During song breaks we’d chat a little, and he agreed to give me a setlist when they were done. At one point, we hugged.
Normally, I either dream about buying a newspaper and eating breakfast, or about people I know. So what does it say that this band has entered my subconscious in such a way? Well, it means you should listen to Fables. It’s a lovely album to listen to, and it’s a little challenging. If you are, or ever have been, a person in your late 20’s and not sure what you were doing (or were going to do) with your life, then this could be a great fucking album for you.
