saying goodbye to R.E.M.

I find that I’m missing R.E.M.–missing the idea of R.E.M.–more and more as each day slowly passes us by (it hurts, and everybody hurts). I miss Michael Stipe’s surrealistic early lyrics, the Rickenbacker jangle of Peter Buck’s guitar, the inventive counter-melodies and melodic bass of Mike Mills. For the first time since I was a sophomore in college, I face a world without R.E.M. The breakup took me completely by surprise: I’m bereft, uncertain, tentative, as if I just lost a lover or a child. I think I’ll take a week or so and listen to little else than R.E.M., trying to touch that part of myself that fell in love with them in the first place.

They shifted the statues for harboring ghosts
Reddened their necks, collared their clothes
Then we danced the dance till the menace got out
She gathered the corners and called it her gown

I’m having trouble dealing with this. R.E.M. has been a sort of spiritual touchstone with me, one of the few bands able to give me chills for creating the perfect moment on record. Their music has always been perfectly economical, nothing wasted, like a musical prose poem. I always felt that R.E.M. was a secret shared between me and other like-minded fans, a club with it’s own rituals and signs. I always believed that it took a true fan to understand just how great they were, whether in their murky, early eighties incarnation, or the glam blast of their mid-1990s output.

There’s a secret stigma, reaping wheel.
Diminish, a carnival of sorts.
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel.
stranger, stranger to these parts.

Watching R.E.M. from the second row during a 1995 concert, I nodded at Michael at the conclusion of “Country Feedback.” The performance seemed beyond applause, beyond simple admiration. Applause didn’t seem good enough. So I nodded at Michael, and he nodded back at me.

I wish I knew what came next. I hope that individually they’ll keep making music, and that someday far in the future, they’ll walk out together onstage again. But I know in my heart that they won’t. That day is done, and we’ll keep on living as best we can without them.

There’s a problem, feathers iron
Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys
Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air

I will never be that young or that much in love again.

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