Down Is The New Up

In the comments to my post on Reveal, 2f's says he's looking forward to my comments on Up.

Up was an album by a band trying to reinvent themselves after losing a key member. It's R.E.M.'s ..And Then There Were Three. Instead of replacing Bill Berry with another drummer and continuing to do what they were doing, R.E.M. embraced the late 90's electronica fad, with more emphasis on keyboards and drum machines, but no matter how hard they try to make it something else, it still sounds like an R.E.M. album.

When I listen to Up, I always wonder why I don't listen to it more, but takes a lot of patience to listen all the way through. One challenge is that it's a really long album, with 14 songs that don't fit on one side of a 110 minute cassette. Another challenge is that there isn't a lot of variation to the sound, and my favorite songs ("Lotus","Daysleeper","Walk Unafraid","At My Most Beautiful") are tracks 2,5,8, and 11, which leaves two tracks in between them. Up is like a really strong EP with about seven filler tracks. It still creeps into my top ten in my final ranking (below), ahead of Monster, Reveal, and Around The Sun, but well below their peak.

Here's my R.E.M. album ranking, as of 3/31/2008. My month of listening elevated the status of Green and Out Of Time and dropped Fables and Reckoning, but the other albums are roughly in chronological order.

1. Murmur
2. Automatic For The People
3. Document
4. Out Of Time
5. Green
6. Fables of the Reconstruction
7. Reckoning
8. Lifes Rich Pageant
9. New Adventures in Hi-Fi
10. Up
11. Monster
12. Reveal
13. Around The Sun

Thirteen albums in 25 years is quite a run, since Bruce Springsteen and U2 have only released eight studio albums since 1983 (if you don't count Rattle & Hum, which I don't). This pace was helped by releasing an album a year from 1983-1988. Album #14 Accelerate comes out tomorrow. It leaked on the internet a couple of weeks ago, and I've only heard three songs. It's supposed to be a return to form (whatever "form" is), and even though a part of me is still skeptical, I'm going to buy the CD tomorrow, my first time purchasing an R.E.M. album on the first day since New Adventures. I'll probably post my first impressions after buying it, but I'm kind of R.E.M.'d out after this month, so it might take me awhile to fully digest Accelerate.

I got a basketball Jones

After picking all four of the final four teams in the NCAA Championship (it was all four top seeds but still!), my bracket is now in the 85% bracket on ESPN. It's a combination of picking favorites in a year when favorites did well and not knowing enough about college basketball to be tempted by underdogs.

Picking the final four correctly combined with my alma mater making the finals in the CBI (a best-of three series against our former MVC rivals Tulsa) made this a good week for me to start following college basketball. Maybe there's something to that sport after all?

Reveal This

"If you’re a music fan who has 15 artists you follow, and one of them kind of takes a nose dive — well, that’s disappointing, but you’ll move on. But to us this is everything that we do."
-- Michael Stipe in the Sunday NY Times, 3/30/2008



Anyone who's been following ye olde blog this month has probably found my routine of reviewing R.E.M. albums on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which leaves me something else to write about during the other four days of the week. Now I have two more albums, and only one more day in the month. Forgot to account for Dead Letter Office! I guess that's not one of the "official" albums, even though I treated it as one. Mea Culpa.

The two R.E.M. albums left in alphabetical order are Reveal and Up, which are two thirds of their weak post-Berry triumvirate. I'm the biggest R.E.M. fan I know (6'2" and 220lbs if you're wondering), and even I can't rally behind these three albums. Listening to Reveal after Reckoning (as I did during my morning and evening commutes yesterday) makes someone wonder how these two albums, twenty years apart, are by the same band. But they really aren't.

When I listened to Reveal, I liked "Imitation Of Live","All The Way From Reno", "She Just Wants To Be", and... that's it. Three songs out of twelve. The Reveal album would have made a good maxi-single. In food analogies, it's like a really bland dish that you try to rescue with spices, but after you've added coriander and mustard seed and paprika, it tastes even worse than it did originally. The songs are under-written and over-produced.

Here's a quote by Peter Buck from the same NY Times article, on R.E.M.'s new album Accelerate. "Of the 14 records we’ve made, I think 12 of them are pretty close to this one". I think Reveal is one of Peter's two runts of the R.E.M. litter, along with Around The Sun. These are the only two of their albums that I've had to work to get all the way through.

Dead Reckoning

Here's R.E.M. in November 1984, performing a medley of "Moon River" and "Pretty Persuasion" on BBC2's Old Grey Whistle Test.



We're slowly approaching the end of the R.E.M. alphabetical discography and today's album is Reckoning, which has the same title as an acoustic live album by the Grateful Dead. There are quite a few parallels between early R.E.M. and the Dead: Both bands built up a grassroots following through constant touring, had a network of dedicated fans who traded bootleg recordings of live shows, and had a strong bond with their fans.

Reckoning isn't my favorite R.E.M. album, but 1984 is definitely my favorite year for R.E.M. concert recordings. 1984 R.E.M. is like 1978 Springsteen: Darkness or Reckoning might not be their strongest albums, but both artists were at the height of their rock power during the tours, and were still playing venues that were small enough that there was a bond between the bond between the band and the audience at all the shows.

The one Reckoning tour show I saw in person at the NIU auditorium in DeKalb IL in the Fall (early October). The show was on a Sunday night, and I found out that R.E.M. were playing by reading it in Rolling Stone on Thursday. I took a two hour bus ride from Peoria to DeKalb, by myself, without having a clue where the concert was, or if it was sold out. I figured the show was somewhere on the NIU campus, so I could find it by blindly wandering around campus when I got to DeKalb.

I found the concert (at the university theater), paid my $6 general admission, and saw one of the best concerts I've ever seen, with the dB's and R.E.M. When Peter Buck told everyone to register to vote so we wouldn't get four more years of Reagan, most people cheered, even even though DeKalb is just a few miles from Dutch's hometown of Dixon. That concert was like a secret meeting of Young Democrats from Reagan Country.

After the concert, I was grabbing something to eat at McDonald's near campus (there weren't many places to eat after 10pm in DeKalb!) and the group at the other table were talking about tonight's concert, and how it compared to last night in St. Louis, or Friday in Carbondale. "I like that new 'Auctioneer' song -- why didn't they play that tonight?". I thought I was dedicated by taking a two hour bus trip by myself to see the show, but here were people following R.E.M. around the Midwest, just like Deadheads.

At the half-dozen R.E.M. shows I saw in the Midwest between 1984 and 1987 (DeKalb, Chicago, Champaign, Iowa City IA, Bloomington IN), I started seeing these same faces who would go see the band wherever they played. After that show in DeKalb, I discovered that people would even record the shows and swap the tapes with other fans. In the pre-internet age, this involved replying to ads in the back of Goldmine or Rolling Stone and getting someone else's trade list for yours, then deciding what to trade, then trading it. There was a lot of legwork, but I developed a lot of pen pals via tape trading.

When I traveled to DeKalb two years later to see R.E.M.(on the 1986 Pageantry tour), they played the NIU fieldhouse, tickets were $12 each, and the place was packed. The little college band that could were becoming big rock stars, and the age of showing up at the venue on the day of an R.E.M. show was coming to a close, unless you brought a tie-dyed kaftan and a hand-written "I Need a Miracle" sign. There was a guest appearance by Gary Zekely (the guy who wrote "Superman") that was filmed by MTV, and there are some videos from the show on the youtubes. It was an "arena rock" show at a college gym.

I have about 80-100 R.E.M. live tapes from the early-mid 80s sitting in a big shoebox that I almost never open. The tapes, like most of my cassettes, don't get played very much, but I don't think I'll ever get rid of them. I keep wanting to digitize the best of them, but that would involve sitting through the hours of recordings to find the good one. Plus I think magnetic decay starts to set in after twenty years. Right now the tapes next to my Apple \\c and my old textbooks as souvenirs of my college years. "Have I ever told you kids about the Eighties?"

Bad times never seemed so good

Rich Harden is a world-beatern the MLB baseball video game for my Sony PSP. He throws 100mph fastballs with pinpoint control, so he can strike out anyone without having to resort to off-speed pitches as long as you keep it from the middle of the plate. High fastball, outside fastball, fastball in the hands.. one strike, two strikes, three strikes yer out! The average performance for video Rich Harden is a complete game two-hit shutout with 21 strikeouts.

Unfortunately the real Rich Harden usually makes four starts each year, goes on the 15 Day DL with a "strained shoulder" in mid-May, and is never seen again until the following year. But yesterday at the Tokyo Dome he looked like the Harden I know and love from the video game world, dominating the Red Sox for six innings and salvaging a split in the two game Japan Series.

It's foolish to base an entire year on two games, but if Rich Harden can stay healthy and the A's play as well for the rest of 2008 as they did for these two games, they might not be as bad as everyone fears. They may even contend. Hope springs eternal at the start of the baseball season.

The A's were the "home-team" for the games in Tokyo, but the Sox got the home locker room, most of the crowd was pro-Boston, and they even played "Sweet Caroline" during the 7th inning stretch, just like in Fenway Pahk. And even though it was an A's home game, they played neither Kool nor The Gang after yesterday's win, like they would have at McAfee Coliseum. This apparently made the A's feel like second class citizens, but in major league baseball, it's fairly obvious the Yankees and the Red Sox are up here, and the other 28 teams are down here.

Out Of Time

My next R.E.M. album is 1991's Out Of Time. Which is another album, like Green, that I don't listen to as often as I should. This is R.E.M.'s "mainstream" album, the one with multiple Grammys and top ten hits ("Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People"), and probably their top seller to date.

R.E.M. didn't tour behind Out Of Time, so a lot of the songs weren't ever performed live, and they only put one of the songs (guess which one?) on their 2003 In Time best-of, even though there really isn't a single dud on the entire album. And it ends with two of my favorite R.E.M. songs ever ("Country Feedback" and "Me In Honey"). "Losing My Religion" has been a little overplayed over the last 17 years, but it's really a phenomenal song when you listen to it in isolation. The KRS-One cameo on "Radio Song" grates a little, but it sounds like the greatest thing ever compared to Q-Tip's cameo on Around The Sun. "Texarkana" may be a note-for-note rehash of "The Voice" by the Moody Blues, but that's okay because it's a great song that very few people know. The easiest way to stump a bunch of know-it-all pop geeks is by covering a Moody Blues song.

Lots of people don't like "Shiny Happy People" and the band as almost disowned it (other than to perform a special Sesame Street version, "Furry Happy Monsters") but I think it's great for what it is.  If Trent Reznor can make an entire career being gloomy and dour ("I hurt myself today..pa-rum-pa-pum-pum"), what's so wrong with R.E.M. being relentlessly optimistic and upbeat for just one song? Absolutely nothing.

After listening to Out Of Time, I might need to re-rank my favorite R.E.M. albums to put it somewhere in the top five. It doesn't strike the same emotional wallop, but I think that, song for song, it may be better than Automatic For The People. They're both great records, so it's mostly like declaring your favorite ice cream flavor. It all depends on your mood. And today I'm in an Out Of Time kind of mood. 

Pooray Boru

The baseball season kicked off this morning at 3AM PDT with the first of a two game series between the Oakland Athletics and World Champion Boston Red Sox in the Tokyo Dome. As eager as I am for baseball to start, I did not get up at 3AM to watch this game, but I did get up at 6AM PDT to catch the exciting end of it.

The A's were expected to play the Washington Generals to Dice-K and the Harlem Globetrotters in these two games, but they usually play the Red Sox fairly close. They won the season series last year, and have a better Spring Training record this year (which isn't that relevant -- just throwing out HillaryStats(tm) in the A's favor) so the games should be competitive. The A's were also supposed to play the Generals role five years ago for a series in Japan against Ichiro and the Seattle Mariners, but those games got sidelined by the start of the Iraq War.

Even though (spoiler alert) the end of today's game didn't turn out the way A's fans would have liked, it was competitive to the end, which is all we can ask for. I'm standing by my prediction that it's going to be a lot of fun watching those pesky young Athletics this year. We'll see how that plays out when they're ten games under .500 in mid-June and battling the Rangers for last place, but they're a lot of fun to watch in late March.