Bands never really spring into the limelight fully formed. Behind every group, there are months—sometimes years—of conceptualizing, rehearsing, trial and error. Most musicians, understandably, would rather forget these formative fumblings once their vision has been crystallized. But if recorded evidence exists (and it usually does), fans and collectors will pounce. The prospect of hearing a beloved band at its earliest, most innocent stage is irresistible.
R.E.M. hasn’t been shy in recent years about sharing archival and live material, with bonus discs of era-specific shows and demos accompanying recent reissues, not to mention the just-released UnpluggedRecord Store Day four-LP set. But the band has shown little interest in putting out anything from their early 80s days; the deepest they’ve gone is a mid-1983 set included with the deluxe Murmur reissue. That’s a full three years into the band’s existence. But there are plenty of examples of nascent R.E.M. floating around out there. Some of the most revealing—and most fun—of these come from right when the band emerged on the Athens, GA club scene.
So let’s take a listen (below) to the earliest known bootleg of R.E.M., captured at Athens’ venerable 40 Watt Club on May 30, 1980 just a few short months after Michael Stipe, browsing at Wuxtry Records, struck up a conversation with a guitarist who worked there named Peter Buck. In the weeks that followed, the pair wasted little time getting their musical collaboration rolling, quickly recruiting University of Georgia students Mike Mills and Bill Berry into rhythm section duty and playing their first gigs (briefly under the moniker Twisted Kites) by April.
What strikes you immediately when hearing this warbly-but-listenable tape from 34 years ago is the highly caffeinated energy on display. R.E.M burst out of the gate and seem to only gain momentum as the set progresses. It’s not exactly a “loud-fast-rules” punk vibe, though; it’s more that R.E.M. at this stage was a party band—a weird dance band, in a way. Remember, this is the Athens that had catapulted the B-52’s to fame a few years prior. In fact, the revved-up, slightly campy rendition of “Route 66” is a bit like something the B-52’s might’ve played. And the rollicking cover of the R&B chestnut “Shakin’ All Over” probably would’ve gone over just fine at a nearby UGA frat house. “In Athens, it was all about dancing,” Mills told Pitchfork in 2011. “Most of the popular bands playing there—Love Tractor, Pylon, the Method Actors, and the B-52's—were all about getting people together and dancing your ass off. We were certainly a part of that.”
But despite the primary goal of making the audience boogie, many of the elements that are now identified with early R.E.M. are in place on the 40 Watt recording, with the buoyantly propulsive Mills-Berry axis providing an insistent pulse and Buck’s clean, ringing Rickenbacker lines finding the common ground between Gang of Four and the Byrds. The soaring choruses, bolstered by Mills’ and Berry’s backing vocals, are there in places too. And Michael Stipe sounds pretty much exactly like Michael Stipe already—unmistakably Southern but in a way that way that hadn’t really been heard in a rock vocalist before.
Stipe hadn’t quite developed into the obtuse, brooding lyricist that he’d later become on record, however. The opener here, an original entitled “Baby I”, is about as straightforward as it comes (though perhaps winkingly): “Baby, I don't want to be seen with you/Baby, I got better things to do/Baby, I don't wanna hang around with you/Baby, I got better things to do.” The Ramones would’ve approved, but it’s easy to see why the band never deemed the song worthy of a proper studio recording. The other early R.E.M. originals played at the 40 Watt are garage-y stompers in a similar vein, and none of them would make it onto wax (though “Mystery To Me” was dusted off a few years later during the demo sessions for Life’s Rich Pageant and “All The Right Friends” was re-recorded in the late 1990s for the Vanilla Sky soundtrack). Are there any missing masterpieces? Not really, but the whole set is a pleasure, a revved up ride that shows one of the great American rock bands finding its feet.
“One of the main things about R.E.M., especially then, is that you were watching us grow up in public,” Stipe told NPR around the time the band finally called it quits. “You were watching the band learn how to play songs, learn how to be a gang, learn how to perform ... and that was part of the excitement, because every night was a giant new adventure.”