LIFE'S RICH PAGEANT (I.R.S, 1986)
GW: Pageant seemed like your Revolver. It's as if you went from black and white
to technicolor, musically speaking. Everything sounded richer and fuller.
BUCK: Well, every producer we'd worked with till then had come from our
background. They were basically guys into Sixties garage rock. Then we got
Don Gehman, who was much more involved in creating dynamic rock tracks with
people like John Mellencamp, and thinking about the radio. I think he was a
little frustrated that we wouldn't go for the jugular in the commercial sense,
but I learned a lot from him about how natural room reverb affects the kick
drum and the guitar sound. Before then, I'd always just close-miked, because
that's what we did live. Don would work for an hour on my guitar tone, mike it
five different ways, and then mix it down. I was like, "Cool, I didn't know
you could do that!"
DOCUMENT (I.R.S., 1987)
GW: Document was a major turning point for the band. Two hit singles, a harder-
edged sound, political messages-and lots of snobs claiming you'd sold out
because they could finally hear the terrific rhythm section.
BUCK: You have to just shrug that kind of thing off. It happens to every band.
Hopefully, the same people who were turned off by our success went on to
support some new band they could claim as their own. There's always gonna be
one guy that's gonna claim to be that much more punk than you, because you did
this or you didn't do that.
GW: "The One I Love" proved you could marry the folk tradition to a rock
structure as intensely as any band around.
BUCK: It is set up a lot like an old Appalachian folk song. But yeah, I'd
gotten a Les Paul and a Marshall amp and I cranked it up to 11. But a folk song
would have gone from Em to D and then to an Am and C, for instance. Instead, I
added those G, D and C suspendeds that took it somewhere else. I also decided
to slide up on the B string in the main figure rather than bend.
GW: "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" has probably
become the best known song of your Eighties output. It's been part of the
soundtracks of three movies, including Independence Day. It's very much a
cranked-up nod to another folk tradition, like Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick
Blues"
BUCK: Right, except Chuck Berry did it first with "Too Much Monkey Business."
It probably has its roots in the old medicine shows, where some guy would go
through town singing about what's in the bottles he's selling.
Document was sort of a political concept record, this surreal attempt to
embrace and reflect the chaos that was going on in America in 1987 under
Ronald Reagan. There were these weird moralists condemning everybody while
Reagan made jokes about threatening to bomb Russia. So Michael tried to
express that in these dreamlike, frantic verses which matched me going from G
to Cmaj7, a much more open, floating chord than a plain C. We still play it as
the last song of the night.
GREEN (Warner Bros., 1988)
GW: Green was your first album for Warner Bros., and as such must have been
burdened by high expectations. Yet "You Are the Everything" and "Stand" are
like going from the sublime to the absurd.
BUCK: You couldn't get farther apart than those two songs. It was the first
time we could stay at home in Athens and write for four months. The untitled
song and "You Are the Everything" were the first things we wrote. "Orange
Crush" had been written at a soundcheck-you can usually tell a song that was
written at soundcheck because it only has one or two chords and the verse is
often the same as the chorus. I'm doing a lot of noise, including E and G chord
harmonics on the twelfth and seventh frets.
"Stand" originated when I came up with this dumb riff, the only time I ever
approached a I-IV-V chord progression. Then Mike said, "Man, I've got this kind
of Beck, Bogert and Appice bass line that can go in there!" It was getting
silly, so we played it through and modulated up. Then we did it again, and we
did one more modulation up, a full step, and we were just howling with
laughter. Michael fell over when he heard it and came up with some cool lyrics.
I knew this was the rare R.E.M. song that did not need a bridge. So I went out
and bought a wah wah pedal, and having never played one before just plugged it
in and did the solo flat off-which just pushed it into total absurdity. Then
they told us, "Hey guys, this is the hit." "Huh? Well, okay."
Out Of Time (Warner Bros., 1991)
GW: So now we come to your "reclusive period." Why the semi-acoustic approach
of "Losing My Religion"? Did you have any sense that the song would resonate
so deeply with people around the world?
BUCK: "Losing" was my favorite song on the album, but I was amazed when they
told us it was "going all the way." I said, "Great, all the way where?" It's
probably the only Number One song you'll ever hear written on a mandolin. I
think the sound changed because at home we had the opportunity to experiment
with switching instruments. I was playing a lot of mandolin, Bill was on bass,
Mike was exploring more keyboards and acoustic guitar. I didn't really know how
to play mandolin, so I just bought one and worked out some chords. Mine are
different, more modal than the ones in the instruction books. The mandolin is
basically strung like a violin, or an upside down bass. I got a few beers and
recorded some stuff on a boom box while watching a baseball game. The next day
I listened to it and what became "Losing My Religion" was on there, pretty much
note for note. Michael came up with the title, which he said was an old
Southern saying meaning "I'm at my wit's end." I figured he'd made it up. Then,
a year later in New Orleans this friend introduces me to his grandmother who
said she used to hear that phrase all the time in the Twenties and Thirties,
and it meant just what Michael said it did. It didn't need a bridge or a solo,
so I did a kind of breakdown. It reminds me of the kind of thing Fleetwood Mac
did at the end of "Chain," a song we used to fool around with at soundcheck.
GW: Michael has called "Shiny Happy People" an "abortion." Is it really that
bad?
BUCK: If we wrote a one-dimensional song on every album and it was a huge hit,
it would be massively embarrassing. In fact, we wrote this in ten minutes, and
Michael put some tongue-in-cheek lyrics on it. And I've got to say, there are
some bands that go an entire career without having one very happy song-ironic
or not.
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