Radio Free Europe and So. Central Rain

I love Mike Mills' energy on RFE, he was the band MVP in those days.

awesome - thanks for posting. i could watch this shit all day.

I thought he ALWAYS was.

Man, what happened to these guys?! Was it just that they got old and rich, or was it something else....?



P.S. They airbrushed my face!

Dude is playing some tasty bass guitar on RFE. Damn.

Also, was anything on TV cooler than the Letterman show at that point?

1. Berry left

2. Stipe decided to get coherent, which means more personal, which equals duller.

3. They're still good, in a quiet way, but that's not very exciting

they're good in spots now. a couple songs per album & the rest tips its big toe in dreck.

That was cool. Surprising that they didn't cut over to Paul and the band playing along. That always annoyed the hell out of me. Especially when they wouldn't let the drummer even bring a kit in. (They did that to the Pixies, yes?)

REM breaks my heart how absolutely dull they have become. I did see them on the last tour though, and they are still fantastic live. But the songs, the songs...

Mills is a monster. He and Pete Thomas should have formed some kind of brainy, super tasty bass alliance and fought crime or something.

Buck was also pretty fucking cool.

Man, they sound awesome. Why don't bands sound this good nowadays on Letterman, Leno, et al?

I miss the long-haired Stipe days... they look so young and look like they are having fun....

As for Michael getting serious and becoming dull... you know, as much as I don't care for his stage persona these days, you gotta admit, the guy TRIES to do something positive with his celebrity.

I still like and respect them. But's that's not the same as considering their current songs to be some of the best ever recorded, which I don't. I.R.S. stuff, yes.

Murmur and reckoning are a couple of my all time favorites...So. Central Rain is one of my favorites of theirs. Thanks for the videos.


Yeah, they've gone downhill nowadays, really since they left IRS as far as I'm concerned, but I can't really think of any group that's been together for over 20 years that still makes anything close to as good as their peak material.

Y'all are makin' me wanna grab that new IRS era best of...although I only really need the second disc...got the rest.

They put three albums on my alltime top 100 and will always be my favorite band. That said, if their next album isnt at least 'good' (i.e. the opposite of the last two) it'll be over. Thats it!!!

Hard to believe these guys are almost 50.

edit: and mike mills had the best harmonizing voice of the 80's. check 'superman' for its full effect.

I'm still waiting for a proper release of the MTV Unplugged concert.

I know I've said this a million times, but why VH1 Classic doesnt run all those old episodes (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Cure, etc) is beyond me.

Here's REM doing a cover of The Troggs "Love Is All Around"

This is an answer to those who say R.E.M. are just boring old farts.

If you were up watching that in 1983 (as I was), you knew something special was happening. A band doing something very new on the late-night show hosted by the most interesting show host.

People can mock them now, sure, but they'd be overlooking the impact Chronic Town-through-Document had, how each new song was a revelation at the time.

Rolling Stones impacted my oldest brother's generation. I was impacted by R.E.M.

Hopefully, whomever is the equivalent right now will have tracks that hold up as firmly as these.

R.E.M will always be one of my top ten favorite bands. I remember when I first heard them (Document) I was immediately attracted to how smart they sounded. Hearing them on the radio at the end of the 80s was quite a breath of fresh air. Quite a contrast. There was an audible characteristic of integrity to their sound. Even though you couldn't quite make out what Stipe was saying, you knew he was saying something.

It wasn't long before I went and bought their back catalog. I learned to play guitar by jamming along with Peter Buck on my R.E.M. tapes.

I stopped giving them opportunites to grab my ear around the time that "Monster" came out.

Speaking of R.E.M. & Letterman, It was through my love of R.E.M. That I started exploring more music out of Athens, GA. This, of course, led me to the Athens, GA Inside / Out documentary. There were a lot of cool artists in that film, but for me, the Flat Duo Jets stole the show.

When they played letterman in 1990, they pretty much blew the roof off the joint, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9soFgHMC ... duo%20jets

Two things I have always loved about this performance:

1) The laugh / look Sid McGuiness give Romweber as he plays his 1 note guitar solo.

2) When Romweber points at Paul Shaffer and screams "ROCK!!!!" and Paul launches into a piano solo that pretty much brings him to the brink of a coronary. You can see him struggling to keep up (at one point, he stops playing for a beat to catch up), and check out his face when he finishes... priceless!

Man, that's good stuff. I tend to forget how good of a band, and how energetic, they once were.

These were awesome - Mike Mills sounds awesome - just awesome. I'm going to have to listen to Murmur today, but I think that the bass is mixed way down on the album in comparison with those live clips, which is a shame.

I could never figure out how much that video was mocking other videos like that and how much it was just seriously gay. I don't hate the song as much as most people though.

That may have been the low point of their existence, but they really started the serious slipping downhill with Green.

20 years happened to them. Go back in your own life 20 years - were you the same person, with the same sensibilities and priorities?


I dunno. I remember watching that show - I used to tape the music acts on Letterman onto Beta, to give you a fleeting glimpse into that chasm of two decades. I wouldn't say REM were doing anything particularly new, even at the time they struck me as just a variation on Byrds-inspired folk rock (although in the pretention of my early 20s, I'd bullshit long and hard that Michael Stipe was the first to re-write the rock lyric rulebook since Dylan... or Patti Smith, depending on which bar I was in).

This early-mid '80s era was when alternative rock was vital - long before marketing execs sold the term to a new generation of little brothers - and there were a LOT of bands equal to or greater than REM. Not all of them had the luck, nor worked as hard, but they were just as new/exciting/whatever Frosted's talking about as REM. Hell, back in '83 Pylon was the pick-to-click of all the Athens bands, and even Stipe's sister's band (I think their name was Oh Ok - memory's failing here) wasn't far removed from that same jangly obtuse folk rock that REM took to the bank.

And for what it's worth, 20 years on, Letterman is still a showcase for up-and-coming bands.

Rads, you're right... it was Oh OK. Great memory! And yes, I remember when Pylon was the pick over REM too. But then, I was only a wee lass of 13 in 1983...