Should we talk about the weather?

Believe it or not, this is a fitting place to begin a discussion of Lifes Rich Pageant the fourth fulllength album by R.E.M. as weather is one of the reasons it marked such a departure from its dark and moody predecessor, Fables of the Reconstruction. Fables had been recorded overseas by an exhausted, out-of-sorts R.E.M. in a cold, gray and unfamiliar land. (Not to denigrate Fables, a deeply mysterious and intoxicating album.) By contrast, however, Pageant got made by a rested, rejuvenated band during a warm, sunny season in the welcoming Midwest. Both meteorology and mental health were in brighter, better places during the 1986 sessions for Lifes Rich Pageant. One thing I really remember about this record was that the weather was so good, says Mike Mills. It was sunshiny, and honestly we felt great about coming into the studio and making noise. We had gotten a chance to recuperate and regenerate, and we were almost a different band than we were when we recorded Fables. Its the sound of the band in a good place. On Lifes Rich Pageant, they worked with Don Gehman, renowned for producing a string of punchy, soulful heartland-rock albums by John Mellencamp. Gehman was a solid commercial craftsman with a focused, straightforward approach to record-making. As a result, Lifes Rich Pageant was the album on which the fog lifted and the world got a clearer look at R.E.M. as an honest-to-God American rock band. We were ready to challenge ourselves, Mills notes, so we brought in Don Gehman. We didnt care about hits, but he did. He was trying to take this band that had made a murky, emotionally down kind of record and shine some light on it, brighten it up. And we were okay with that. We thought maybe now was the time to make a rock record and Gehman was the guy to take us there. Vocalist Michael Stipe brought more lyrical directness and enunciated clarity to Lifes Rich Pageant than on any prior R.E.M. record. This, too, stemmed from Gehman, who pushed Stipe on a matter he was ready and willing to address. As Mills recalls, He really challenged Michael by asking, What do you have to say? Do you really have things you want to say? If you do, lets hear them in the literal sense of the word. He wanted the vocals to be very clear and upfront, and by this point we were ready to try that.

Michael had been evolving as a singer and lyricist, and he was ready to put his lyrics a little more front and center, Mills adds. So this was a difficult but logical next step. Lifes Rich Pageant is a solid album with moods and tempos that range from unrelentingly driven (Hyena) to folkish and pensive (The Flowers of Guatemala). The album contains at least four bonafide R.E.M. classics Begin the Begin, Fall on Me, Cuyahoga and These Days which boast an indelible mix of melody and message. There are even a few whimsical changes of pace the demented, vaguely Greek-sounding Underneath the Bunker and R.E.M.s cover of a tuneful Sixties obscurity, Superman (originally by the Clique) to lighten the albums otherwise dominant mood of committed resistance. Begin the Begin and These Days are brash, hardhitting tracks that moved the group one confident step closer to the rock mainstream without sacrificing their enigmatic essence. Both were calls to arms issued during a period of conservative insurgency. Lifes Rich Pageant was written and recorded midway through Ronald Reagans second term. During this prolonged swing to the right, R.E.M. challenged its youthful constituency by issuing a virtual call to arms. Both directly and obliquely, Stipes lyrics expressed concern in matters related to the ailing environment and what he perceived as Americas reckless, bullying foreign policy. Fall On Me and Cuyahoga, on the other hand, are among R.E.M.s loveliest and most elegiac songs, representing an artful approach to the folk-protest idiom. Cuyahoga is heartbreakingly sad and lovely, from Mike Mills burbling bass lines (which open the song) to the euphonious harmony between Stipes keening vocal and Peter Bucks strummy guitar. Stipes painterly lyrics on Fall On Me are subtle enough to allow for interpretation, be it lamenting acid rain or resisting political oppression. Among the lyrics were these poignant images: Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky. Personally, I believe Stipe, in a subtle and nonscientific way, prophesied a radical thesis that environmental writer Bill McKibben would advance in his 1989 opus The End of Nature. To wit, that by polluting the atmosphere on a grand scale, humankind had gone beyond localized consequences to actually altering the global climate, leaving us with a world that was, sadly and even apocalyptically, no longer natural.

On Lifes Rich Pageant, however, anger and despair is mingled with hope and determination. In Begin the Begin, driven by Bucks ferocious, flinty guitar riffs, Stipe thunders, Lets begin again. In These Days he sings of and to the young, We are concern / We are hope despite the times. In Cuyahoga he urges, Lets put our heads together and start a new country up. There are indeed glimmers of hope in these rallying cries. In It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M Companion, biographer Marcus Gray argued that Lifes Rich Pageant and Fables of the Reconstruction shared an underlying preoccupation, despite their dissimilarities. The concept behind the album as a whole is not a million miles away from that behind Fables, he wrote. On the 1985 album, Michael makes his Utopia from an idealized dream of the past; on the 1986 release, the only real difference is that Utopia is presented as a future possibility, a goal to strive toward. Its a fairly compelling difference, but the point is well-taken. This much is certain: Lifes Rich Pageant was literally a hard-hitting album, due in large part to Bill Berrys noticeably larger drum sound. Bill was very happy to talk drum-miking and mike placement with Don, who got a crackling drum sound, Mills recalls. The drums really drive the record in a lot of ways. Bill was thrilled to be doing it, and that energy transferred to all of us. All of this still didnt give R.E.M. a hit single, though it absolutely should have. Fall On Me stalled just inside Billboards Hot 100 at #96. The album itself fared much better, becoming R.E.M.s first gold album. Given all the strides the band made with Gehman on Lifes Rich Pageant, it might seem somewhat surprising that they didnt work with him again. They would have had him back, says Mills, but it just didnt work out at the time. For their next album, 1987s Document, they tapped Scott Litt as their co-producer, and this evolved into the groups most longlived relationship with a recordist. Document was an even bigger seller that netted the group its breakthrough single, The One I Love, which made the Top Ten. But Lifes Rich Pageant was the album on which R.E.M. kicked open the door to a more extroverted future.

As Anthony DeCurtis noted in his lead review in Rolling Stone: Lifes Rich Pageant is the most outward-looking record R.E.M. has made, a worthy companion to the groups bracing live shows and its earned status as a do-it-yourself and do-it-your-way model for young American bands....For R.E.M, the underground ends here. There was a certain amount of confidence in R.E.M. when we joined up with Don to make Lifes Rich Pageant, Mills acknowledges. We had three albums under our belt. We felt good about who we were, and we felt optimistic about what we were capable of. We knew we had a bunch of songs we really liked, and we were happy to take it to another level.
By Parke Puterbaugh April, 2011