Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today, we are discussing the book, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography, by Peter Ames Carlin. R.E.M. has sold more than 85 million albums and changed the definition of a rock band.

The New Yorker called R.E.M. the band that created alternative rock, arty, socially minded, metaphor-driven. The quartet of Michael Stipe on vocals, Peter Buck on guitar, Mike Mills on bass, and Bill Berry on drums got their start in the college town of Athens, Georgia. They came of age when college radio, not record companies, could make a band. When R.E.M. was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Michael Stipe had this to say.

Michael Stipe: We'd like to thank the fans who have stuck with us for 27 years, the new fans, the old fans worldwide, who have brought us such incredible lives and allowed us to continue with our love of music. 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: That is a good place to start with the beginnings of the four men who made up R.E.M. Here's Peter Ames Carlin, author of The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.

[MUSIC - R.E.M.: Finest Worksong]

The time to rise has been engaged

You're better best to rearrange

I'm talkin' here to me alone

I listen to the finest worksong

Your finest hour

Alison Stewart: Michael Stipe was born on January 4th, 1960 to John and Marianne in Decatur, Georgia. His father was a "rising star" in the US Army, which meant they moved a lot. Where did they live?

Peter Ames Carlin: They lived in a bunch of different places and spent quite a bit of time, I think, in Germany, the family did while the father, Lieutenant Colonel, I believe, John Stipe was serving as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. There were quite a few years in there when Michael was young when his dad was off at war, which I think was probably pretty unsettling for the family to some degree.

Happily, even though he had rather hazardous duty flying these little recon helicopters over the enemy encampments where they often got shot at and there was a lot of action in the skies, he did come home safe and sound. The family eventually moved to just outside St. Louis, Missouri, where Michael spent most of his formative childhood years in his early pre-adolescence, through adolescence, and through high school.

Alison Stewart: When you think about Michael Stipe, what kind of personality traits could you attribute to him being an army brat?

Peter Ames Carlin: Well, I think he's very self-sufficient in a lot of ways. I think he also had a very supportive family. I think that they got used to being one another's closest companions and best friends. He and his sisters and their mom were very tight. When his dad got back from the war, for all that, he was, in some ways, a blustery military guy. One of Michael's childhood friends says that he couldn't recall ever seeing Mr. Stipe not wearing a flight suit and that he wore a cavalry hat like the character Robert Duvall plays in Apocalypse Now.

He said that he thought that Lt. Col. Stipe might have been the model for-- Is it Col. Kilgore, Robert Duvall's character? He was much more quiet than that, though he presented as this very macho military guy. He was very soft-spoken and very accepting of his family and his kids. There's a great anecdote where Michael got into going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a high schooler.

People of a certain age will remember those Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings where people would dress up in costumes as the various characters and yell and dance and sing along and throw things at the screen. Michael liked to go as Frank-N-Furter, who wore drag, lace stockings, and a leather bustier and that sort of thing. He and his friends were getting dressed up in his bedroom and getting ready to go out.

As they were walking across the living room, Michael, in full Frank-N-Furter drag past his father who's reading the newspaper, his dad looked up and said, "Are you going out like that?" You think this is the beginning of a story about a huge fight between a military dad and his young avant-garde son. Michael just looked at him and said, "Yes, I am." His dad shrugged and said, "Oh, well, have a nice night." [chuckles] It was that level, I think, of unconditional love and acceptance that really was key to the development of Michael's personality and his ability to be so, in so many ways, outrageous and experimental without fear of some sort of existential struggle.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Peter Ames Carlin. The name of his book is The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography. It's our choice for Full Bio. Musically, Patti Smith set off something in Michael Stipe. You say it catalyzed his imagination. What was it about Patti Smith?

Peter Ames Carlin: Well, I think it was her ability to contrast edgy, punky rock and roll with really sophisticated and emotionally revealing lyrics. Her being such an accomplished poet and drawing from the most raw forms of rock and roll and from very gentle, sophisticated poetry at the same time showed him something, revealed something to him about how a person could combine that kind of visceral attack of rock and roll with the higher language of poetry.

I think that was remarkably moving to him and obviously super influential. He has never not credited her and spoken of her in the highest terms. I think he's, in fact, now scheduled. There's going to be a tribute show for Patti in New York later this winter. I think he's one of the performers. She has always been central to his conception of who his biggest influences were and what helped make him what he is as an artist.

Alison Stewart: He joined some cover bands. One was called Jots, and then there was a group called Bad Habits. What did he learn from being in Bad Habits that set the stage for R.E.M.?

Peter Ames Carlin: The first band you mentioned was kind of a one-off show. It was like a high school talent show type of outfit. At the same time, he was starting to rehearse with this band, the Bad Habits, who were a cover band like so many teenage bands are, but they focused entirely on punk and new wave music in the late '70s, whereas these other bands in and around the suburbs of St. Louis were just plain, the AOR stuff you just find on mainstream rock and roll radio.

His band, they were much more interested in these punk bands, edgier bands, Iggy Pop and the Ramones, and that kind of stuff. They played a few shows. I think that was where he first established or first came to understand what it took to be the frontman in a rock band and how to perform and was such an effective and spellbinding performer even by, I think, really, the sole professional show that they played, which was at a club in St. Louis called Mississippi Nights. They were opening for the great band, Rockpile, which was a great gig to get. Rockpile with Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. They were such a great post-punk band of the late '70s, the pub rock movement in England. They were touring the US.

Michael and the Bad Habits played the show. He was so hypnotic to these two young women who were there with their boyfriends that the boyfriends got mad and decided to teach these guys a lesson and follow the band outside while they were loading up in their van and tried to beat up the kids in the band. Anyway, it turned into a big fist fight of one or the other. I don't think Michael was involved in the fisticuffs, but somebody ended up getting gouged with a beer bottle and had to go to the hospital. It was an interesting illustration of what a natural and powerful performer he could be even as an almost completely inexperienced teenager.

Alison Stewart: When Michael went to college, what was he going to study? Also, why did he change his name from Mike to Michael?

Peter Ames Carlin: [laughs] Why does anyone do anything when they're 18 years old? [chuckles] You know what I mean? You go to college and you get this opportunity to redefine yourself. I think coming out of the suburbs of St. Louis and this very middle-American scene where he always felt little like a fish out of water. The idea of going to Athens and going to the art college at University of Georgia at that moment, I think he came to understand that he really wanted to reestablish himself as an artist and an artistic person.

Mike Stipe, I think, had less of a-- it doesn't flow off the tongue in quite the intriguing way as Michael Stipe somehow. It was interesting because he really didn't want to move down to Georgia and go to school in Athens because his folks moved back to Georgia where they had come from after his dad retired from the military, right after Michael graduated from high school. At first, he did everything he could to stay up in St. Louis.

He was moved into a group house with some people and scraped together enough money to go to community college for a term or two and then realized, I think, that he was running out of money and he really needed his family's support. They essentially said, "Well, that would be great, but you just have to come down to Georgia." He moved down there against his will. He said to one friend in a letter, "I don't want to live in this cow town," but he went there.

I think what happened was he started his classes at the Lamar Dodd School of Art and came to understand that, among many other things, the University of Georgia and particularly the art school were magnets for Southern bohemians. All these young kids who felt out of place in the little towns that they had grown up in were all drawn to the art school there because the fellow who eventually lent his name to the school, Lamar Dodd, and had been the chairman of the department for many years had spent a lot of his time trying to staff up the school with practicing artists who were leaders in their particular discipline.

He brought them a whole array of these people into the faculty. Many of them turned out to be these very bohemian, avant-garde people who were working really at the leading edge of their disciplines. There was a kind of shared aesthetic, not only toward the avant-garde but also this idea of folk culture and of expression in art. Expression over craft, really. When punk rock and that whole punk ethos started bubbling up in the music industry, there was an immediate kind of connection or affinity between these artists, these people who mostly practice visual art, at least the sound and idea of punk music.

The dialogue between the professors and the students often came to be about music and all these different ways to practice art. One of the painting teachers, Judith McWillie, told me that while she was overseeing a workshop class where the students were at the easels doing work, but they were all, at this moment, talking about music, someone asked her if they thought you had to be as sophisticated a musician as Eric Clapton to be an effective rock and roll guitarist. She said, "If you can't play it on a $50 guitar from Sears, it ain't rock and roll."

[laughter]

Peter Ames Carlin: It seemed to be a very valuable thing for them to hear.

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. All right, I want to talk about Bill Berry and Mike Mills in the same sentence because they went to high school together. They were very, very different. Give me a few adjectives to describe young Bill Berry and a few adjectives to describe a young Mike Mills.

Peter Ames Carlin: Well, Bill Berry was a little bit of a rebel, [chuckles] kind of an outsider kid in a way, though he also came from a pretty close family. He was the youngest of several kids, but he wasn't a very enthusiastic student. He was one of those kids that kept to the back row and grumbled. Whereas Mike Mills, [chuckles] to be unkind, you might call him a pencil neck geek. He was very well-dressed and very neatly coiffed and just was one of those kids that does so well in school all the time and charms and delights his teachers.

Bill Berry was seeing this skinny kid with neatly combed chestnut hair at the front of the classroom acing all his classes and just thought, "What a jerk." They became young antagonists and really didn't have any time for each other until they accidentally turned up at the same jam session. Bill said that he was so disgusted when he saw that dorky Mike Mills showing up to play bass that he was tempted just to pack up his drums and leave.

It takes so much time and effort to pack up your drums and leave that he decided that was too awkward and he would just suffer through this wasted afternoon of trying to play music with this geeky kid, but then they started playing together and there was an instant musical connection and rapport between them. Really, from that afternoon, they just looked at each other and said, "We don't need to be enemies anymore," and then they became really, really close friends.

Alison Stewart: They ended up in a band together called Shadowfax?

Peter Ames Carlin: Yes, they were. It was just another high school cover band, but they had this very tight, very well-honed rhythm section in Bill and Mike and a good guitar player and a good singer. They became one of those teenage cover bands that starts getting hired for various professional gigs here and there. They played a lot, parties, school functions, but other kinds of events as well.

They continued that until the lead singer, I guess, decided he was going to go off to college and broke up the enterprise. They tried again. I think they formed a more jammy, Southern rock cover band called the Backdoor Band, but that didn't last very long. Then they ended up just cooling their heels in Macon before they decided to go to the University of Georgia and figure out what was going to be next for them.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting because Mike studied music. He played saxophone in a band. He came from a family that was interested in music. How did that shape Mike Mills as a musician?

Peter Ames Carlin: Well, his dad was quite an accomplished singer and was a featured tenor soloist in one of the leading church choirs in Macon and had performed with a military choir on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was not unfamiliar with professional-caliber music. His mother sang in the choir as well. They were a very musically-focused family in a lot of ways. When Mike began to get interested in music and took a lot of lessons and studied and then began to teach himself other instruments, his parents were excited and happy that he was actually pursuing a goal that they had also had as younger people.

Again, you have another member of the band coming from a very supportive family who were not, in any way, contesting the idea of building a career or some kind of life with music at the fore. Along with being a high-performing student and a good citizen and all these things, he was also given the leeway to pursue this more bohemian life of being a musician with his parents' enthusiastic support.

Alison Stewart: Coming up, we'll continue with the story of R.E.M. and how they came up with the name. That's next.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart and we continue on with Full Bio. It's our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. We are talking about the book, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography, by Peter Ames Carlin. Let's get back into it with the story of guitarist Peter Buck and how they landed on R.E.M.

[MUSIC - R.E.M.: Talk About the Passion]

Empty prayer, empty mouths combien reaction

Empty prayer, empty mouths talk about the passion

Not everyone can carry the weight of the world

Not everyone can carry the weight of the world

Talk about the passion

Alison Stewart: Peter Buck, he came from a family where his dad had some rough times, including being wounded by a grenade when he was in the Marines. He got married. He worked for a mattress company. He thought Peter's interest in music was frivolous.

Peter Ames Carlin: Yes, Peter also did very well in high school, but he wasn't as agreeable student as the others. He found his classes boring essentially and preferred his own reading. Then when the tests came around, he would ace the tests. That was his thing. He was always a quirky kid, a good-looking guy, popular, but not all that involved in the social scene at his high school. He was much more interested in playing guitar, but he wasn't a guy that joined a lot of bands. He wasn't a big joiner. He liked to learn on his own.

He taught himself how to play by listening to records and trying to pick out what he was hearing. He had one friend that he used to jam with on a regular basis. They would sit together in the basement in the Bucks house and sometimes playing with Peter's brother as well. They figured that they weren't good enough to learn other people's songs, so they were just going to create their own music and try to figure out how to play it. On the one hand, he's played constantly and really thought about little else but music. He was and remains a voracious reader. A lot of what he read as a kid were music books and magazines.

He really internalized everything he could about what it took to be a professional musician and a rock star and what the opportunities were and what the pitfalls were. He came away from that with a real solid sense of what he wanted to be and who he wanted to be as an artist, though he also resisted joining bands forever and ever. He used to say, and I'm going to paraphrase here for the radio, that, "Guys who play in rock bands are jerks and I don't want to be a jerk." In some ways, he may have been just fronting, as they say, because he really, really did want to be in a band. He just hadn't found the right bandmates yet.

Alison Stewart: He was a smart kid. You make a note that there was a story that might be apocryphal, but it might have been believable is that Buck had the highest SAT scores in Georgia in 1975. Why was this believable even if it wasn't true?

Peter Ames Carlin: I think it was the fact that he was so smart that he didn't actually have to go to class or pay very close attention to what was happening when he was there in order to ace his tests and do incredibly well. When he left school, he got into Emory University and studied there somewhat lackadaisically for a couple of years before he realized that that really wasn't what he wanted to do. Then he quit and started working in record stores, much, again, to his father's disappointment because both of his parents had gone to graduate school.

Their assumption for their kids was that they were going to get advanced degrees and do something in the professional world as well, but Peter had no interest in that. They didn't care for that at all. Peter is one of these guys who was pretty quiet as an adolescent. You could sense that he was shy, but not because he was insecure or that he felt there was something wrong with himself. If anything, he just found the social scene boring and wanted nothing to do with it. Kids respect that in their peers.

Alison Stewart: How did Peter Buck and now Michael Stipe wind up playing together?

Peter Ames Carlin: Well, Peter would move to Athens to work in a record store called Wuxtry, which is, back in the day, these big used record stores that had vast arrays, not just of records and tapes, but also comic books and other related pop culture Huzari, as my mom would say. Michael, once he got to Athens and looked around town, obviously, this was a place that was going to call to him because they had a lot of import singles and records.

There was a lot of relatively obscure punk records and art records that came out of overseas from London and Europe and from New York that he had been reading about because Michael was a Village Voice subscriber even as a high schooler and just loved the sound of, but hadn't been able really to track down. If Wuxtry didn't have it on their shelves, then probably the guy behind the counter who turned out to be Peter had it at his house. He was more than happy to bring it in and let you borrow it if there was a connection. He and Michael started talking at the store.

Michael noticed that what Peter did to occupy his hands while he was waiting for people to buy records was just to play his guitar. He had an unplugged guitar. He would just strum behind the counter. Michael took note of that. As a new kid in Athens and with an eye toward maybe trying to find some people to join a band with, that encouraged their connection. After a while of talking, they finally decided to try to get together and maybe play some music and see if they could come up with something. They were already playing together, jamming pretty regularly, and trying to write little songs while Bill and Mike were across town on campus also beginning to play with other people.

They had a friend in common named Kathleen O'Brien, who knew both Peter and Michael and also knew Bill and Mike and was the first person to think, "These guys would get along well and would probably make cool music together." She midwifed this meeting between them. Soon, they started playing together. It was one of those connections where, as they say, maybe without too much exaggeration, from the first time they all plugged in and began to play together, they could sense that there was something happening between them that was going to be significant.

Alison Stewart: Once they started playing together, they came up with the name R.E.M. What were some of the other names they considered for the group and then how did they arrive on R.E.M.?

Peter Ames Carlin: They had a bunch of names that would have been terribly regrettable if they had tried to use those.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Peter Ames Carlin: Golly, there were a bunch of different things that people have published, and then I've subsequently heard that maybe those weren't quite right. Again, we're talking about very regrettable names thought up by kids in the late '70s and the early weeks of 1980, but it was like Slut Bank was one of them supposedly. Negro Wives, I don't know where that would have come from, or Negro Eyes.

You begin to understand a little something about what maybe young kids in the Deep South didn't under-- even progressive kids or kids who considered themselves to be progressive weren't considering when they were thinking about using terminology associated with the African-American population, but there they were. They had an array of names that weren't going to work at all that ultimately didn't strike them. Then they were flipping through a dictionary or Michael was when they were considering what to call themselves.

The way he tells the story, he just happened to see the term R.E.M., which, of course, stands for rapid eye movement, the term for the deep state of sleep when you do your dreaming and all that subconscious action takes place. He said that he didn't really connect with that idea. He wasn't thinking about dreams and sleep or different states of consciousness when he saw the name. He just liked the fact that it was three letters and that they were separated by periods.

There was something about the look of it that appealed to his eye and something about the fact that it seemed like an indefinable term that he thought would be a good way to establish something about the essence of this band that they were just putting together. R.E.M., it felt indefinable to him and then to his bandmates. They liked that. They didn't like the idea that they would take a name that would just allow people to instantly pigeonhole them without hearing a note of their music.

Alison Stewart: Tomorrow in Full Bio, how R.E.M. learned the importance of retaining their masters and how they use producers to create their unique sound.