Getting down to revisiting "Up"

In 1998, R.E.M. embarked on its biggest artistic shift, a moment that coincided with some of my best college memories. Now 25 years later, their album's re-release brings those thoughts flooding back

I have some thoughts and musings on R.E.M. and the re-release of “Up,” the band’s 1998 album that drew a line in the sand between the band’s mainstream high-water mark in the early ‘90s and the last chapter in what would be a 30-year run as one of the greatest alternative bands of all time.

I don’t plan to discuss all the songs on the album or even categorize this write-up as a “review,” but I felt like getting my thoughts into writing about the album and the songs that resonated with me 25 years ago.

As with most stories from 25 years ago, this one begins with my friend and I getting into trouble…

“I spilled your coffee, Mike!”

Sometime in the spring of 1999, I worked as a college radio DJ with my best friend, Mike. The two of us hosted a morning show named after our on-air personalities, Apex and The Mad Hatter. From May 1998 till our graduation in 2001, “Apex” and I played hundreds of alt-rock songs, many of which never made it to mainstream prominence but ultimately provided a soundtrack for those looking to avoid the explosion of boy bands and girl power on the pop side of the radio dial.

Our studio was located in the dingy basement of our school’s science building, an area festooned with cockroaches, discarded office furniture, dusty electrical equipment, and a closet-sized air studio, complete with aged turntables, cart machines, and a new-fangled CD player. In the middle of all of this sat a soundboard older than the building that housed it, with dials, buttons and knobs that may have been repurposed from World War II-era communications outposts. Yet somehow, that board ran the entire station for years.

Until Apex and The Mad Hatter changed history.

It was early in the morning on a spring day in 1999. Mike and I had started our show as usual, playing a song from the “top-10 list” of approved tracks handed down from our production team. At that time, R.E.M.’s “Up” was in that esteemed position, so I began the show by popping in “Lotus,” the second single from the album. At that time, sales were lagging for the album and reviews were mixed, so while college radio still had a soft spot for the band, it was clear the album was not going to meet the mega expectations of its predecessors in the early ‘90s.

Nevertheless, I always liked “Lotus,” so I queued up the song and started playing it. Mike and I both had large coffees from a local convenience store, and that morning Mike had left the lid off his. The cup sat perilously close to the soundboard, as it had dozens of times before, but on this particular morning, “The Mad Hatter” reached over to put a promo cart into the machine and inadvertently whacked the coffee cup with his elbow. “Oh shit, I spilled your coffee, Mike!” What happened next was five minutes of pure chaos, the kind of goofy series of events that might feel at home in your favorite ‘80s or ‘90s situation comedy.

The coffee poured directly into the board, and immediately started crackling and smoking; not cigarette or campfire smoke, but a thin blue haze that smelled of burnt plastic and singed hair. The audio from the CD continued, but Michael Stipe’s bellowing screech, “I ate the LOW-TUSSSSSSSS,” became crackled and garbled, random bits of voice speckled among the hisses and pops of decayed technology. The smoke grew heavier; one of us tried to find paper towels to remove the excess coffee while the other tried in vain to go into the management office to turn off the transmitter.

For several minutes, this obnoxious scene continued, each moment feeling like hours. We manually turned off everything we could, unplugged whatever cords were in the walls, and called our managers to come in and shut everything down. In the end, the damage caused was almost irreparable. Through some engineering sleight-of-hand, our faculty adviser and a fellow electrical worker were able to piece together enough of the soundboard that the station could function, though the portion that connected to the turntables never worked again. In the aftermath, it was decided that the radio station should be moved from the basement out to a new building on the first floor, with a window facing one of our city’s main streets.

We never got credit for it, but I’m convinced that Apex and The Mad Hatter were the reason why our college radio station got a new studio, and would eventually go on to be nationally recognized as one of the best college stations in the country.

Those were good times, in spite of the unintentional yet wanton destruction of our college radio station. And with the 25th anniversary remastered re-release of “Up” this past week, I found myself revisiting the moments I remember from that time and asking myself if I love the album because of the memory of those moments, or if the album itself holds up on its own merits. I think it’s a little of both, but I still contend that “Up” possesses some of R.E.M.’s most powerful and vivid songs, and in some ways eclipses the albums that put them on the mainstream music map.

“I cried the other night. I can’t even say why.”

The story of “Up” begins with “Daysleeper,” the first single off R.E.M.’s first album since 1996’s “New Adventures In Hi-Fi.” I remember that our radio station had the single before the album’s release date of October 27, 1998 (back in those days, you went to stores to buy albums, and they were generally released on Tuesdays). I was dating a girl at the time, an unfortunate long-distance relationship that came with few upsides but did have its occasional happy moments. One of those was being able to hear “Daysleeper” for the first time before everyone else, and another was being able to bootleg copy the single and send it to the girlfriend, who lived several states away in her first year at college.

It’s a great song, but so drastically different from what R.E.M. had done before. There was a sadness and urgency in “Daysleeper” that was missing from earlier albums, and while Stipe still delivered a passionate vocal performance, the song felt foreign in its own way. The seemingly obvious reason for this discrepancy was the lack of founding member and drummer Bill Barry, who voluntarily and amicably left the band prior to the recording of “Up” due to health issues. Barry played a big part in the band’s musical process, and since the band decided to move forward as a trio, it’s clear something was missing from the album that had been there before.

I think this is where critics diverged on the album and found it to be underwhelming. I feel like most reviewers saw the lack of Barry’s presence as a hinderance, keeping the band from maintaining the momentum they’d built over the previous decade. I saw something different, and it’s evident in tracks like “Daysleeper.” Sure, Stipe might have misgivings about his place in the world and feeling like the world has left him behind, but he turns that emotion into something powerful and captivating, channeling those thoughts into a tale about a third-shift worker who sleeps during the day and works at night. The “daysleeper” in the song laments being left out and struggles with frustration and loneliness, but finds solace in the calm of the overnight and the hypnotic pull of the bed when it’s finally time to sleep.

At 19 years old, it’s easy to relate on an immature level. No one really knows for sure what path their life will take at 19, and the day-to-day existence can feel like a night “colored headache gray.” I consider that whenever I think about my then girlfriend reflecting on her favorite line in the song: “I cried the other night. I can’t even say why.” Whenever I hear the song I’m reminded of that, and regret I didn’t realize the magnitude of it at the time. I never understood why that line hit so hard for her, and it took a lot of years to realize it likely was due to the distance away from home, the loneliness of life at a faraway campus, and likely other things going on in her personal life that I never knew about. I’ll never know, and I didn’t appreciate the poetic depth of the song at the time, but when it finally clicked for me years later, it changed my perspective on other people and on R.E.M.’s message and purpose with “Up.”

“Hey hey! I ate the lotus. Hey hey!”

Mike hated “Lotus.” He still might; I haven’t talked to him about the song in a long time, but I suspect his critique would remain the same now as it did 25 years ago: a whiny, obnoxious vocal performance that doesn’t make much sense and a song that just doesn’t resonate. Maybe he’ll comment on this and let us know what he thinks about it, taking a moment to screech “Hey hey! I ate the lotus. Hey hey!” over and over again like he did during the apex of his “Apex” days.

I don’t recall many of my friends liking “Lotus.” It didn’t get a lot of play at our college parties, as “Up” wasn’t exactly high on the list of albums to be in a person’s 5-disc CD changer for Saturday night shenanigans. My friend Aron, who might be the biggest R.E.M. fan among my close-knit circle, tapped out on R.E.M. after “Automatic For The People,” arguing that “Monster” was a bit of a disappointment. Another friend, Kevin, definitely likes early ‘90s R.E.M., but I can’t recall a huge groundswell of support for repeat plays of “Up.”

People like what they like, and I can’t say “Lotus” is on the same level as the band’s all-time greatest rockers like “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” or “Orange Crush,” the latter of which I discussed in Chart Chat. But “Lotus” is in the conversation as one of the band’s better high-energy rock tracks, easily the most “old-school” R.E.M. track on an album full of experimental electronica and drum machines.

And “Lotus” is more than just Stipe’s high-octave vocal range. In fact, I urge you to take a listen to the live version of the song on the 25th anniversary album, recorded as part of a playlist performed on the set of the TV show “Party Of Five.” Stipe doesn’t hit the high notes anywhere near as high as he does on the recorded album, but the energy he puts behind the lyrics take the song to a completely different level. With a full live band behind him, the song pops in a way it couldn’t on the album, and hearing that version made me fall in love with the song all over again.

I’m not someone who thinks too hard about a song’s lyrics; if it’s a great song, I will sing along with any lyrical gibberish and not give a second thought to what the words mean, or even if they make any logical sense. And, I’ll be honest: I’m not sure much of “Lotus” makes much sense lyrically. I’m no poet, and if there’s poetic beauty in a song that has the lyrics like “Badlands, give a hand, honey dip, flim flam,” I’m missing out on it completely.

But still, the song resonates enough as an uplifting tale, a song about someone who was downcast but rose up again, able to “bring my happy back again” by eating the titular lotus. Whether you derive that pleasure from the ingestion of some kind of substance, or from the metaphorical “lotus” omnipresent in certain religious iconography, the song’s hard-rock edge gives way to a message about finding peace after hitting rock bottom. This again feels like a fitting message for a band transitioning from one phase of life to another, adding even more substance to a song that might otherwise sound goofy.

I suspect “Suspicion” isn’t a top-five R.E.M. song. Or is it?

I was one of the first people to comment on Kevin Alexander’s weekly discussion post asking people to share what they are listening to this week. Without hesitation, I responded that I was listening to the 25th anniversary edition of “Up,” which is one of my favorite R.E.M. albums. One of the first replies came from someone who also liked the album, and shared his favorite tracks: “Lotus,” “Walk Unafraid,” and “Suspicion.” I immediately responded with the hubris of someone with extreme recency bias and said, “‘Suspicion’ is a top-five R.E.M. track IMO.”

Yikes.

Is “Suspicion” a top-five R.E.M. track? Really? Seems awfully bold, sir. After all, R.E.M.’s catalog stretches 30 years, more than a dozen studio albums, along with countless singles, B-sides and compilation albums. To think that “Suspicion” is even in the top 20, behind all the great hits dating back to “Can’t Get There From Here” or “Radio Free Europe,” or at least half of the tracks on “Green,” “Out Of Time,” and “Automatic For The People,” is simply laughable. Right?

As I sat there wondering if I should edit my comment, lest Kevin’s discussion-board followers think I’m some kind of music neophyte blinded by the shiny remastered album consuming all of my attention, people started to like the comment. As of this writing, at least four other people, who are all almost certainly more critically minded and savvy about the ins and outs of music history than I am, thought my statement on the greatness of “Suspicion” was worthy of a thumbs up.

And is it so crazy? I mean, you could make the argument that “Suspicion” is a top-five track if you subdivide it into the realm of slower songs from the band, on par with, say, “Nightswimming” or “Strange Currencies.” Among those types of songs, “Suspicion” shines, as it takes the slow-song approach and mixes it with electronic elements to take it to another level entirely. The wah-wah guitar on the bridge punctuates this effect, but this is one area where the lack of Berry’s drums brings out the best parts of the rest of the band and allows them to stretch their creativity in a way that just … works, somehow. It hits all the pleasure centers of the brain in just the right way, and carries me back to a time when electronic music was becoming more of a presence in alternative rock.

And even after falling in love with the original album version, the band got together for a studio session in London a year later and released another recording of “Suspicion,” and I swear I fell in love all over again. There are so many new flourishes and highlights in the live version that, over time, I find myself preferring this one to the album cut.

I will admit, I am blinded somewhat by how important this song was to me at the time of its release as the fourth single off the album. It was on the radio briefly in the summer of 1999, right around the time I broke up with the girlfriend I mentioned at the outset. And the song resonated with me at the time, given it was about a person who is suspicious about a potential romantic liaison, expressing how he has “known your kind” apprehensively, yet still permitting himself to enter into the affair. But in order to get through it, he imagines himself somewhere else, wanting to avoid anything too deep that might lead him down a road to a relationship that goes nowhere. When you’re 19 and enduring a breakup, that hits home really quick.

Regardless of where one thinks “Suspicion” sits in the pantheon of R.E.M.’s greatest hits, it is at least in the discussion of songs that deserve more praise than their Billboard chart position (or lack thereof) permits.

R.E.M. at their most beautiful

There are some real gems on “Up.” The third single, “At My Most Beautiful,” is a work of poetic art, the band’s self-proclaimed homage to the Beach Boys at their harmony-filled best. “Walk Unafraid” is another brilliant window into the soul of a band moving into uncharted territory. “The Apologist” brings Stipe’s vocals to the forefront, whereas the ethereal “Airportman” opens the album by setting the tone, one of quiet reflection and muted unease.

As I wrap this up, I ask myself the question I brought up at the beginning: Do I love the album because of the memories from its initial release, or does the album hold up on its own merits? I admit, I can’t divorce myself completely from the time in my life when this album meant the most to me, but if I take the time to separate the memories from the music, I can say with some certainty that “Up” is one of R.E.M.’s better albums. I have to think the lack of critical praise stemmed more from the sea change in style than the substance of the record itself, and in a lot of ways R.E.M. pioneered taking electronic elements and incorporating them into an alternative rock album almost seamlessly. Radiohead would be lauded two years later for “Kid A,” a record so apocalyptically different from their rock masterpiece “The Bends” that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was two different bands, so it’s possible R.E.M. was just a bit ahead of the curve in terms of implementing its shift in musical direction.

I won’t say that “Up” is on the same earth-shattering level as “Kid A,” but I think R.E.M. produced some of the most beautiful and thought-provoking songs in the band’s catalog, and arguably some of the most stunningly poetic tracks of the decade. Wherever you land with “Up,” I highly recommend giving it a listen it in its 25th anniversary form and either reliving the memories or making new ones. My suspicion is you will find the band at its most beautiful. Hey hey.