Two-Litre Bottles of Urine: Just one of the problems REM faced in 1985

I was such a big REM fan when I was a teenager that when the college rock giants were forced off stage by a rain of plastic two-litre bottles filled with piss, hucked from an unimpressed crowd of U2 fans at an outdoor festival in Milton Keynes U.K. in 1985, I dodged the backstage security and waited outside REM’s trailer in order to apologize. On behalf of Britain. They never came out of the trailer, or maybe they were never in it, so I still plan on delivering that apology, one day, somehow.

REM had just released its third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, which had finally put a dent in the band’s halo with the British press (commercial success was still a few years away). Fables was muddy, and dense, and lacked either the fevered energy of Reckoning or the seductive qualities of Murmur. Plus REM was starting to sound too hung up on the southern mythology that critics had been reading into its previous work. “Green Grow the Rushes,” “Old Man Kensey.” “Wendell Gee”—these songs were pretty but routine, like the band was working too hard to please.

But Fables also had the bracing, exploratory neo-Television of numbers like the monolithic “Feeling Gravitys Pull” and the sidewindy “Auctioneer (Another Engine), which is a credible approximation of Tom Verlaine trying to go disco. “Life and How to Live It” also felt new, like a strike against the perfect constructions of album one, a gift that was otherwise still evident on the quintessential folk-rock of “Driver 8.” There was also the dreamy and circular “Good Advices,” which seemed to come from the same unconscious place in the REM hive mind that churned out hypnotic melodies like “Perfect Circle,” from Murmur. And “Can’t Get There from Here” finally indicated that REM had a sense of humour, between its disarmingly Caucasian attempt at funk and vocalist Michael Stipe’s matching chicken dance in the fabulously weird and amateurish video that came with it.

There was still more fun to be had in the auxiliary material, most notably the cover of Pylon’s “Crazy” on the flipside of the “Wendell Gee” single. Twenty-five years later, in fact, Fables of the Reconstruction has become a likeable snapshot of REM in transition and turmoil (the recording in London was a legendarily miserable affair for the band). It’s getting the anniversary treatment this week. A bonus disc includes demos that never made it onto the big show; you can sample one of them here at REM HQ. “Throw Those Trolls Away” definitely has its charms, even if it’s not quite there with the material that did survive those grueling winter months in a country that hadn’t learned to love REM yet. And on that note, REM, really, on behalf of Britain, I’m sorry about those piss-bottles. This is the 25th anniversary of an apology that never got past the demo stage.

The Tyee, July 2010