Begin the Begin

What 18-year-old has any interest in living in the past? Even those students who are actually R.E.M. fans—and there are fewer and fewer among the college-age set nowadays—quickly get caught up in the experience of living and loving in the now, growing into themselves.

It was likely the combination of such shrewd business decisions with their consistently high-quality output that enabled R.E.M. to vault into the American mainstream at the close of the 1980s

Warner Bros. offered R.E.M. an appropriately artist-friendly deal. The band would have complete artistic control over its output—not just over the music itself, but also the album artwork, videos, and selection of singles. As with the previous deal with I.R.S., the Warner agreement was for five albums, which R.E.M. would deliver to the label completed and ready to go.

But how did things look now, at the close of 1987, when the band in question could drop an album of B-sides and throwaway covers into the marketplace and watch it chart, and when the band’s current single—“The One I Love”—competed with Whitney Houston on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 and dominated MTV via the Robert Longo–­directed video?

It might seem easy to accuse the band of hypocrisy here: For all its emerging sensitivity to the plight of the oppressed in South America, for instance, the band and its entourage (along with most rock acts of the day) seemed relatively untroubled, as Jeff Walls observed, to be bankrolling South American drug cartels via their cocaine consumption

Whatever Emily Post’s rules of pot etiquette may be, they apparently prevent Jeff from reaching down and grabbing the pipe for himself. My host’s act of beneficence is inadvertently spurned, and so here we sit

Walls motions me to a seat, produces a bag of weed and a pipe, and asks, “Do you smoke?”

This sort of question always puts me in a quandary. I’m not overly fond of pot, but I’ve learned that it can be a good icebreaker in interviews. So I say, “When it’s offered to me.”

And rarely again would his words be difficult to discern

neither party had any interest in synthesizers, gated reverb, or any of the other production gimmicks that were then in vogue

the ideal entry point into the R.E.M. catalog for someone new to the band