If you stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch MTV’s “120 Minutes,” if you made sure your VCR was correctly set up to record IRS Records’ magazine show “The Cutting Edge,” if your record collection is mostly vinyl because that was the superior format of the three that were available at the time and not because “you’re really into vinyl,” you are probably aware that actor Michael Shannon and guitarist Jason Narducy have been leading a project where they tour the country playing the songs of R.E.M., the former leaders of the original alternative nation. It began with a one-off playing “Murmur,” and they recently finished touring “Lifes Rich Pageant” and came through Detroit at the end of September.
There is no way this story isn’t personal; no telling that can leave out my specific interest in this body of work. I saw R.E.M. for the first time the night I graduated high school in 1981, when I took myself and my fake ID to a club in Mt. Vernon, NY, to see the Gang of Four. Someone standing near me asked who was opening: “R.E.M. They’re from Georgia.” I knew who they were; I’d heard the single on WNYU, maybe for once the opening band wouldn’t suck. They didn’t. In my 20s, I ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard in order to see as many R.E.M. shows as I possibly could. I published one of the first R.E.M. fanzines, sitting at my kitchen table in my third-floor Hoboken tenement walkup with an X-Acto knife and a glue stick. I later ended up posted at a Warner Brothers office overseas where I got to work on the beginning of that era of albums.
