A couple of weeks ago I posted Get Up by R.E.M., the Athens foursome performing it in 1989 on the Green tour, a brilliantly spiky, psychey guitar pop song, Michael Stipe singing about dreams and how they complicate his life. YouTube is an easy place to get lost in and there are plenty of other songs from R.E.M.'s Tourfilm on there at the moment, an audio- visual record of them on stage in '89, at the peak of their powers as a live band. Fairly soon I was watching R.E.M. doing Finest Worksong....
Stipe was a consummate, and unique, performer and front man by 1989. On the tour that became Tourfilm (a tour I saw them at in Liverpool in May '89), he had different dances and actions for different songs. On Finest Worksong he does a sideways run, a run on the spot, and a lithe, hip swinging boogie/ shuffle dance, as his ponytail swings around and mascara runs down his cheeks.
Finest Worksong was the first song on Document, their 1988 album, the fifth in a run of records that took them from playing tiny venues to big ones. It became a single, the third from Document and the last one they released on IRS before the move to Warners and Green.
Finest Worksong is a classic opening song, a call to arms- 'The time to rise/ Has been engaged/ Your better best/ To rearrange'. It's difficult to not hear the lyrics, oblique in places maybe but more overt in others, as a plea to resist the conservative 80s, Reagan and the incoming Bush, a decade of Reaganomics increasing the US's poverty gap- 'You are following this time/ I beg you not beg to rhyme' and 'What we want and what we need/ Has been confused, been confused'.
Peter Buck's guitars sound like a call to the barricades, crunchy, big riffs, ringing lead lines, the guitarist moving from Rickenbacker to Les Paul.
The Other Mix was on the 7" and 12" releases, a big booming late 80s drum sound that wasn't really necessary. The single mix added horns which in retrospect was probably also superfluous. The B-sides included the gorgeous live performance of Time After Time Etc, a medley of Time After Time, Red Rain and So. Central Rain (but we'll come back to that another time).
Document saw them become a rock band, the guitars toughened up and the production much clearer and punchier. Michael Stipe's lyrics had already become more audible and less stream- of- consciousness on the previous two albums (on Fables Of The Reconstruction where he tells stories about people from the south and on Lifes Rich Pageant where he engages with politics, the environmental crisis and the wider world). Document had a hit single (The One I Love), a Wire cover (Strange), some political sounding songs (Welcome To The Occupation, Exhuming McCarthy) and the rattling, end of night, end of the gig, end of the world show stopper, It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine). On release in 1988 Document was very much an album that chimed with the times- but maybe a holding record too, not a discernible move on from Lifes Rich Pageant. Maybe they were saving themselves for Green.
2 comments:
great album and THAT medley is amazing!
So very, very good. As an aside, I recently went to a gig by REM tribute act Stipe, or rather two gigs - an afternoon acoustic set and an evening electric set. They were entirely fantastic and it was a brilliant pair of gigs, partly because I had subconsciously given up hope of hearing songs like these played live. Anyway, they were brilliant, is what I'm trying to say, and very highly recommended if they should come to your neck of the woods.
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