Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from WNYC Studios in Soho. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Today is our final segment of Full Bio featuring Peter Ames Carlin, the author of The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography. We learned about the individual stories of members Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Bill Berry, and Mike Mills, how the band started, their rise among alternative music folks, and then their bursting forth into the mainstream, all while maintaining a commitment to social issues like climate change.

The band moved to Warner Brothers from IRS. In August of 1996, they made a deal for $80 million. That's $156 million today, but band members began to see things differently and they wanted different things. Bill Berry was the first to leave, and their longtime manager split under tense circumstances. Here's our final Full Bio conversation on The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. with Peter Ames Carlin.

[MUSIC - R.E.M.: Losing My Religion]

Alison Stewart: Bill Berry seemed to really want to tour the big stadiums once they got big enough. How did the rest of the band feel?

Peter Ames Carlin: They were all ambivalent, including Bill. I mean, one of the interesting things about Bill Berry, when you think of the drummer of a band, even a drummer who is as definitive a part of the sound as, say, Charlie Watts in the Rolling Stones or Dave Grohl in Nirvana, the guy that plays the drums tends not to be crucial to the band's songwriting and to the band's formulation of its image and idea.

Bill Berry was very crucial to R.E.M. on every level, not just as a drummer, but as a songwriter, as an editor of the other guys' writing, and as the guy who, coming into the band, had actually had experience working in a booking agency in Macon and had come to understand the business of being a rock band, especially when it came to touring. When the very early R.E.M. were trying to make the leap from just being a college basement band who played parties to being a band that could get booked at clubs, not just in Athens or Atlanta, but also down the southeast, Bill was the guy who knew who to call, how to set up a series of dates, and what was required.

When three quarters of the band were still in college but they were beginning to play more, he was the one who said, "We all have to drop out if we're going to really pursue this," and essentially told the other guys, "If we don't all drop out of school, then I'm not going to stay in this band, I'm going to find another band to join," because if you really want to make a play, this is what you have to do. He had this real solid sense of the mechanics of the music industry and was very instrumental in how they built their career and how they became as big as they became.

Really, the moment they began to succeed, you can sort of see him beginning to fade a little bit, that as much as he loved playing music and as much as he loved the idea of becoming successful, the actual labor of being successful and doing all the things it took off stage, which is to say all the traveling and the publicity stuff and the glad-handing folks here and there, it was anathema to him. I mean, he tolerated it because it was his job, but he didn't care for it at all.

They got to this point in the early '90s where their first big arena tour, which was promoting the Green album, which came out in 1988, and it was a year-long world tour, when they finished that tour, they decided, we're not going to tour again for the foreseeable future. They had been on the road for basically an entire decade at that point, so they figured that was a good time to take a break.

It also coincided with the moment when they made their two most popular albums, Out of Time and then Automatic for the People, back to back albums that sold more than 10 million copies in the early '90s without them touring, which was astounding at the time since touring was how you promoted a record. Then, they started work on the next album, 1994's Monster, sort of with the express purpose of making an album that they were then going to take on the road.

When they went on the road for this year-long world tour in 1995, Bill was the one who said, "We're going to play the biggest arenas that we can play," because Peter had talked about maybe just going back to the clubs and doing it that way, and Bill was like, "No, no, no, no, no. We're not going backwards." They went out to do this big tour sort of due to his inspiration and insistence.

You can see again the ambivalence as they're at this press conference with MTV on the eve of them starting out to head to Australia to start this tour. The reporter says, "Bill, what are you most looking forward to on this tour?" And he says, "The end of it," though he was obviously also very excited and happy to go. Of course, then their story takes a major shift when partway, just a couple months into the tour, they were playing in Switzerland. Bill had an aneurysm on stage and nearly died and had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency brain surgery.

Thanks to good luck and happenstance, they just happened to be in La Seine, Switzerland, where they had some of the most sophisticated brain surgeons on the planet, some of whom had just developed new ways to heal these aneurysms. Bill had this very close brush with death that took place on stage, of all places, in the midst of the biggest tour they ever had, nearly died, and then spent six weeks recovering and was back on stage in the US to play the rest of the year's shows.

Alison Stewart: The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography. It's by Peter Ames Carlin. It's our choice for Full Bio. Let's talk about Jefferson Holt. The band met Jefferson Holt when they started out. He was their talent manager for 15 years. He was alleged to have sexually harassed a woman in their office. He went away, we'll say. I'm going to read this from the LA Times

Peter Ames Carlin: Okay.

Alison Stewart: "Why would a rock manager resign at the moment when his band is about to cash in on the most lucrative recording contract of its career? That was the question buzzing through the music industry last month when Jefferson Holt abruptly stepped down as the manager of R.E.M., the superstar rock quartet that just completed the latest album on its Warner Brothers Records contract and is poised to become one of the hottest free agents in the music business.

Sources say that Holt was asked to leave after members of the group investigated allegations that he sexually harassed a female employee at R.E.M.'s tiny Athens, Georgia office." The band members don't talk about him. He does not talk about it. What was unusual about the way this separation went down?

Peter Ames Carlin: Well, in an article like the Times piece there, it's really easy to leap to some conclusions, one of them being that they tossed this guy who was a profit participant right before they were signing a huge new deal with Warner Brothers, and so maybe there's some financial perfidy taking place, that they're ditching this guy so they don't have to pay him for this big deal. On the other hand, or you could say, well, it's because of the sexual harassment thing.

Actually, I think largely it came down to a whole array of factors, as these complicated things often do. Jefferson was a hugely crucial member of their cooperative in the early days and was very central to them developing their group aesthetic, their group ethic of what kind of band they were going to be and how they were going to present themselves. You can see him in those early videos in the '80s. He pops up on practically all of them as a kind of central figure, which tells you something about how central he was and how important he was to the entire band and to Michael Stipe in particular.

Then, as the years go by, and as people grow up, I mean, it's one thing when you're in your early 20s and you don't really know what you're doing to lean on a manager and have someone who is an authority, who's a little older than you explain to you what you should do and how these things are going to work. After you've been at it for 10 or 15 years, you need that less because you know your business better and you know who you are better and you've been in this job for 15 years, so why do you need to have a guy say, well, this is what you should do next, or I think this is how things should go?

At the same time, I think Jefferson was losing interest in the job. People talk about him on that '95 tour, whereas once he had always been around to be there to answer whatever questions and do whatever needed to be done, at this point, there were so many other members of their support network that Jefferson would just go off and go to museums and sightsee, really, touring around the world.

They need him less, he is less involved in what they're doing, and at the same time, according to these stories and according to other things I've heard, he's engaging in relationships with people in the workplace that maybe weren't as welcome as he had hoped they would be, and there were misunderstandings, to put it as gently as possible. It got to a point where somebody complained, and when the band members heard her story and heard some other supporting evidence, they decided that they couldn't continue with Jefferson anymore as part of their central office.

He left the company and left them, and it was very bitter at the time. Now, practically 30 years later, it's nearly as bitter as it's ever been, which, to me, it's sad. The one thing though that's interesting is that for a band that really prided themselves on being progressive, not just in their art, but also in the way they went about their business, they kept their offices in Athens, they never moved to LA or New York or ditched their original advisors for big-time showbiz people, and they always tried to have an office where they would recycle things and be kind of the very model of a good, socially progressive, environmentally conscious organization.

The idea of having someone at the heart of their operation who may have struck at least some people as a sexual predator was unacceptable to them, in a way, especially in rock and roll, which always was and to a great extent remains a boys club. It's interesting to note that years before such concerns really began to resonate with anyone else, they were very quick to side with the employee who felt abused against essentially the head of the office and sent him away and really sided with the woman who had felt wronged in their relationship.

Alison Stewart: Bill Berry left the band in October of 1997. They didn't replace him. The next time all four of them were together was in 2007 when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Let's listen to a bit of Michael Stipe.

Michael Stipe: I would like to personally thank Peter, Mike, and Bill for providing me the least likely candidate to have a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a gang who not only accepted me at face value in 1979, but allowed a frankly fantastical teenage dream to become an adult and lifetime reality. Thank you, guys.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: In 2011, the band broke up. Was it amicable?

Peter Ames Carlin: I think so. Yes. I think anytime that you're involved in such a intense collaboration for decades, working with people that you met and established relationships with when you were still a teenager or very close to one, I think it makes for, in some ways, awkward relationships as you get older and move into middle age and beyond and having these very integral relationships with people that were formed when you were still an adolescent.

Nevertheless, one of the things about R.E.M. that I think distinguishes them from most other bands was that they were in a way uniquely emotionally mature, even from the beginning when we were talking about how they decided to divide all the credit and the royalties equally as a way to avoid having conflicts later. They were always engaged with one another on an emotional level and sensitive to one another's feelings and needs. I think that there's still always going to be creative tensions because not everybody is feeling the same thing at the same time as somebody else.

Somebody might want to go off in a different direction that the others don't want to go in, then you have to work out a compromise of some sort, and that isn't always an easy process. They definitely have had their moments of fighting and yelling and storming off and then eventually coming back together again. I think you get to the end of a 30-year career, you're probably a little bit burned out with your coworkers. Yet, nevertheless, there was never been a time when they have at least publicly disagreed in any way or been visibly alienated from one another.

One of the things that's sweet about them is that throughout their post band years, you still see them coming together in pairs and sometimes threes to work on different projects or just pop up on each other's stages as one or the other's side projects coming through town to play music together and to just kind of hang out. When Peter got married in Portland in about 2013, I think, all the other members of R.E.M. came into town to go to the wedding, and I think there was some music playing at the reception, though they made a point for many, many years of never having the four of them together on a stage.

If three of them were up, the fourth one would sort of excuse himself and go out into the crowd or leave the room and go get a breath of fresh air until they finished playing music. Then, that fourth person might come back and play with some other people. Nevertheless, I think they've always really enjoyed one another's company, and it's nice in a business and in a part of showbiz where so many artists and bands break up in so many vividly awful ways to see this one group maintain their closeness and they're caring for one another despite everything.

Alison Stewart: The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography. It's by Peter Ames Carlin. Peter, thank you for spending so much time with us.

Peter Ames Carlin: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Thanks again to Peter Ames Carlin. His book was not a sanctioned biography, but he said in the acknowledgement that the band "never stood in my way and all found ways to be kind from afar". Full Bio's post production was done by Jordan Lauf, engineered by Jason Isaac, and written by me.