Fables of the REM
Almost Famous ain't got nothing on me.
My first contact with SPIN had been an interview with the Photo Editor, George Dubose. We had hit it off, I was particularly taken with his chaotic cave of an office, every available surface covered in photographs. The only light came from large light tables turned into stained glass by the piles of chromes sitting precariously atop them. I was supposed to be the Art Intern, but gravitated towards George’s photo pit like a moth to a flame.
Unlike most of us at SPIN at the time, George had done some things before arriving there, notably shooting a B-52’s album cover and some features and covers for Punk magazine. His photo of Talking Heads on a vivid yellow background was featured on SPIN’s second issue to great effect. George had a very gonzo, hands-on style of working and chafed at hierarchy. I was a good little assistant, making myself useful, being right there at the right moment with the cup of coffee, the loaded film caddy, the quickly set-up softbox. All this lead to my peak rock and roll photographer experience: shooting REM in their hometown of Athens, GA.
In hindsight, I can’t believe we talked Bob Guccione, Jr. into sending two people down to shoot the job. Most real photographers had crews they traveled with. But not SPIN, we were all about the DIY, punk aesthetic. Which conveniently lends itself to cheapness, which was pretty much our shining star from the East in those early days. Two things made this shoot and the trip to photograph it memorable: George had worked with the B-52s who shared a manager with REM. And far from relegating me to the role of assistant, George let me shoot as many shots as he did. More amazingly, back in NY, we didn’t tell Bob which was which so I had an equal chance at a cover. It ended up being George’s, while mine had to slum it as the big opening double page spread.
I really can’t emphasize enough how unusual, and indeed, strong of self-esteem that attitude of my first boss exhibited. It was a gift of kindness I will never forget. I was a huge fan of REM, had been for years. On like my second month on the job at SPIN, I was flying to Athens to shoot my favorite band for the weekend. It was to be exactly like I’d always pictured it, hanging out with the artists, spending days trying different things, you know, like pals. Spoiler alert, this was to be the exception that proves the rule. Shooting covers for magazines like Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, or album covers for the artists themselves, you’d be lucky to get a half hour, never mind a full weekend.
SPIN was still new and relatively unknown. But Dubose had worked with manager Jefferson Holt before, and he made it his business to do whatever we needed to get awesome coverage for his still striving little rock band. Dubose had photographed the B-52’s, who shared management with REM. Kate Pierson would later sing on REM’s big hit Shiny Happy People. They were one big happy family it seemed, and George’s good turn on their album cover bought a lot of goodwill. That and the fact that Jefferson understood the value of good media coverage and would provide whatever was necessary to achieve that. Later in my career, I would marvel at one-hit wonders who allowed their short term ability to jerk around magazine photographers contrasted with those old warhorses whose careers go on and on because management understands and values media coverage. In short, Jefferson did more to enable that shoot than any other I ever worked on. I slept on the couch in his living room!
And we all spent three days having fun and taking pictures. Looking back from this era of ubiquitous high quality digital phones in everyone’s pocket, it is hard to imagine, but we had to set up lights, cameras, usually backdrops of some kind, then do photo shoots. None of this high quality video clips of us swimming naked in the quarry, no sir, the shoots were the shoots. Which is too bad, as I think how hard I could have crushed these jobs with a high quality digital camera in my pocket.
No matter which of us was shooting (we alternated) the films of that day required lights, and a lot of them. George usually used a square format Hassleblad, though for this cover shoot we both used my Mamiya RZ67. Every time you pushed the button, a loud clunk initiated a series of whirs and clicks which indicated the film and shutter were advancing, getting in position for the next shot. Clunk-whir-click-click-click-whir-CLUNK. Ten times a roll, change the film back, repeat. Clunk-whir-click-click-click-whir-CLUNK. Remember that; Michael Stipe sure did.
We spent the better part of the weekend using REM’s office as our home base, driving around to various locations and activities: BBQ from a shack, naked swimming in a quarry (except Michael Stipe, shy or hydrophobic, who can say?), chatting with the band on long van trips.
REM was at an interesting point in their career. They had just released Reconstruction of the Fables and were beginning to transition from indie college radio darlings to the stadium touring juggernaut they would become. And they had organized their corporate structure into some kind of syndico-anarchist communist system. Jefferson was part of this system, in that he wasn’t their manager, he was part of the band’s corporate structure. There were little signs posted everywhere, about the recycling, what not to put in the microwave, what sorts of activities were permitted with regards to the copier. Apparently most were written by Michael Stipe, the rest of the band just kind of tolerated it. Stipe walks the artist’s path. He is earnest and sincere to a painful degree. As the lyricist and singer of the band most known for mumbling delivery and non-sensical lyrics it would be understandable if he reacted badly when I ribbed him. But obliviousness or crafty self amusement lead me to take advantage of my seat next to him on the ride back from the quarry, where we’d skinny dipped. He was perfectly personable, though shy, and almost literally bristled whenever talk would drift toward his work or the band. My perverse black humored self took over and I leaned in and told him about my relationship to REM in college.
They were among my favorite bands, probably the top of the pyramid. Their inscrutable lyrics, delivered in an unintelligible mumble, far from being a detriment, were a boon. Why bother to use Stipe’s metaphors and similes when you could just make up your own? My friend Candace and I would spend hours doing just that, happily dreaming of a day when we could start a business to reinterpret REM lyrics.
The enigmatic singer had paused at this turn in the conversation. Brow knit, he frowned, paused, then grinned: “Hey, could be worse, you could ask me what the lyrics mean! Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. They’re yours, take them…” And just like that, we were friends again, on the Group W bench, just a couple artists talking. It wouldn’t be decades till I understood how this brief conversation would form the basis for my own view of my work, both photographic and in later years poetic.
I write Haiku poems, on Facebook. Every entry for more than seven years has been in this form, even when I’m selling a mattress on Marketplace. Twyla Tharpe talks about how you have to have constriction, choices, structures that allow your work to thrive in reaction to those strictures. My haikus usually accompany a photo, also usually a portrait. Far from being trivial, I have found those little seventeen syllable prayers to profoundly express my feelings often love, in ways that belie their brevity. Shakespeare said, “Thought she be but little she be fierce.” That’s my haikus. And I have actually had people ask, “What does that mean?” I chuckle and think back to Michael Stipe, “Fuck ‘em, it says what it says.” Tharpe gave her wisdom in a book, I was lucky enough to get it from the Artist himself. The artist’s path can be difficult, but it is not part of that path to conform to civilians’ views on what your art means. On an everyday level, it is just fun to hang out with famous people, maybe get a private performance or pick up a tip. But on a more profound level, the opportunity to learn from great artists while pursuing my own art is the true gift here. Though young people are known for taking gifts for granted, I think even then I suspected I was lucky to be living that life, having those experiences.
And when we got to jam I knew it. Part of their office/corporate headquarters/person-cave was an expansive practice room, set up and ready to rock at a moment’s notice. We were hanging out on Sunday afternoon and guitarist Peter Buck asked if I wanted to jam. I was long considered among the world’s worst guitarists. In fact, one time in Manhattan, the largest noisiest place on Earth, I met a guy a party who said, “Dude, you’re that guy that plays electric guitar across the courtyard with an open window?” and before I could answer proudly, “Christ, what an asshole! You’re terrible, why do you have to play so loud, or maybe just shut the window?” And though a lifelong honestly terrible guitarist, I think I must have been truly awful at that juncture, some two years since beginning to play.
Though chary of bumming out members of the greatest rock band I’d yet encountered I let Buck hand me one of those big beautiful Rickenbacker 301s. Wikipedia tells me he only has two, I played one and he the other. It was a beautiful object, with impressive heft. Then he plugged me in,and I strummed a trial chord: BRONGGGG. Holy shit, an open chord (which is all I knew at that point) , even a little old Eminor, involving only two fingers, produced the hugest, ringiest sound I ‘d ever heard. It may have sounded (almost certainly was) terrible, but it was FUN.
The other band members had begun filtering in by now. But each picked up a different instrument than they normally played. Stipe on drums, drummer Bill Berry picked up a bass, Mike Mills grabbed a banjo or something. Whether they knew it or not they all kind of dumbed themselves down to my level. I asked Buck to show me Wendell G, this obscure little song of a couple albums prior. “Hmm, oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember that one!” Buck answered, which is apparently exactly what it takes to engage Peter Buck who began trying different chords to remember the song. Points for being a fan, but bad choice for a jam. Someone began playing Louie Louie and we went with that instead, a far better song to jam to, even not having learned barre chords yet. And while I technically did jam with REM, the fact that they were all playing different instruments kind of negates the feat. But I knew, even then, that very afternoon, that the weekend would rank as one of the peak experiences of my life. Getting to hang out with, (swim naked, chat, jam!) a huge rock band, particularly one I adored was exactly what one would expect, yet exactly what never happened. Indeed, my rock star shooting career would last another decade or so, but no afternoon was ever as sweet as that loose crazy Louie Louie, or was it Dancing in the Streets? Don’t know, don’t care, pretty much Peak Fun in my life thus far.
The actual shoots that long weekend weren’t bad either. Either I or George would shoot and the other would assist. It was truly egalitarian of Dubose to treat me and this shoot this way. I certainly never let any of my assistants do their own shoots of equal weight and time to mine. Forever grateful, did I mention?
As always in those days you nearly always had to set up lights, even outdoors. Oh, there were like fifteen minutes of Golden Light every day but you couldn’t rely on being exactly in the right place, lights gave you repeatability and let you get shots otherwise out of reach. There was a lot of serendipity on that weekend. George’s largesse was part of it, sure, but without REM’s cooperation it would have been an entirely different story. It was so totally like a dream of how these sorts of shoots must always go. Yet turned out to be utterly sui generis, I never swam naked or played music with any subjects again.
Dubose and I each did several setups involving ten or twenty rolls (of ten shots) each. The band was cooperative, if nonplussed during the actual shoot. George had clearly done a solid for Jefferson prior, perhaps several, and Jefferson was literally a member of the band by statute, posted in their clubhouse. So they gave us virtually unlimited access and seemed eager to do whatever it took to get a SPIN cover. And we all hung out and went swimming and out for pizza and to play in their practice room. And while that was my Almost Famous fantasy, it turned out to be the absolute exception that proved the rule. It was extraordinary, and if I didn’t have the pictures to prove it I wouldn’t believe it happened at all. They did provide me a copy of Fables of the Reconstruction with witty autographs as I recall, have to dig that up, it must still be in the basement somewhere I should really have framed it.
When we got back to New York, we ran the film, made our selects, and laid them all out on a big light table for Bob to edit. This was always tense, as he had a habit of slagging off the hardest won pictures for the dumbest of reasons, in the most childish of ways. It was usually someone else’s pictures so I didn’t really care (though of course how my photographers did reflected on me) how caustic he got. But when it was my work? Fehgeddaboudit! It was absolutely excruciating listening to Bob dissect a shoot, never more than this one when we didn’t tell him who had shot what. It ended up with George’s shots going on the cover, but more of mine got bigger placement on the interior spreads. It was a triumph for both of us and I didn’t really even mind not getting the cover, as the spreads made better portfolio pieces anyway. It was just so very fun a weekend, even then I knew it was a high point of awesomeness never to be equaled. All the sweeter for it. Clunk-whir-click-click-click-whir-CLUNK.
Ah, this one is wonderful, Chris! -t (magdalen from the Well)
Great story, Chris. I was also a big fan.