R.E.M. were a very different band when nobody was looking. During their early years on I.R.S. Records, they were hardworking and mysterious, touring constantly and writing songs that glanced toward subjects but didn't walk right up to them. After the quartet signed with Warner Bros., they would eventually embrace the role of Best Band in the World—an aspiration that's toppled nearly every other band that has aimed for it. When drummer Bill Berry left the group, R.E.M. became the band trying to find its way forward, then the band that bowed out rather than rethought or scaled back their operations.
Or, at least that’s how the story played out on their albums; on their B-sides, R.E.M. ranged toward the strange, the one-off, the experimental, the goofy. That sense of play makes their recent, massive rarities dump via iTunes—160-plus tracks—something of a revelation, despite coming a good three years after their break-up. The two sets are divided by record label. Complete Rarities: I.R.S. 1982-1987 gathers odds and ends from 1987’s Dead Letter Office, 1997’s In the Attic, plus the non-album tracks from the 1988 retrospective Eponymous. The more substantial Complete Rarities: Warner Bros. 1988-2011 compiles 23 years’ worth of major-label singles, promo items, remixes, live cuts, and alternate takes. If the recent Unplugged collection paints them as alt-rock pros who seeded some ambitious songcraft into the charts, then these two rarities comps prove that R.E.M. were kinda weirdos at heart.
Below are 10 tracks that may not be their best or best-known moments, but reveal facets of the band that have been forgotten or overlooked over the years. Listen along with this Spotify playlist.
“White Tornado”
“We wrote this song the same afternoon we wrote 'Radio Free Europe', I think,” Peter Buck wrote in the liners to Dead Letter Office. “This is an unreleased version recorded at Mitch Easter’s Drive-In Studio at the same time as our first single on Hibtone.” That locates the song in time right around the time of the band’s Big Bang, when they were just determining what they could do together. And what they could do was make a Peach State surf-rock tune, like they’re joyriding down backroads with the Surfaris. There are two versions on the I.R.S. compilation, a studio version and a live-in-studio version. Neither is two minutes long, but the song nevertheless looms large in the R.E.M. pantheon.
“White Tornado” was the first in a long line of instrumentals that would be receptacles for some of R.E.M.’s genre curiosities. Without it, there would be no “Rotary Ten” or “Rotary Eleven”, no “Tricycle”, no “Winged Mammal Theme”, no “Mandolin Strum” (which sounds less like an instrumental than a backing track that never got vocals). A few of these singer-less tunes even ended up as actual album cuts, namely “Endgame” on Out of Time and “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1” on Automatic for the People.
“Tighten Up”
R.E.M. began life as a cover band, playing bars and parties around Athens, Georgia, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before they started writing originals, they specialized in jumpy, uptempo versions of old pop and R&B hits like Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”, Chan Romero’s “Hippy Hippy Shake”, and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. Some years later, they would release a loose, gangly cover of Archie Bell & the Drells’ 1968 classic “Tighten Up” as a flexidisc for the UK zine Bucketfull of Brains. It’s anything but tight: The band sound like they’re barely holding things together, and Michael Stipe mugs and vamps tirelessly. He whoops and shouts, “Testify!” then calls for Mitch Easter to play a vibes solo and calls Buck “Mr. Guitar Man.” It’s a buzzy performance, charming in its besotted amateurishness. If they didn’t get it down in one take, I’m deleting Live at Tyrone’s from my hard drive.
“Moon River”
R.E.M. included some unlikely covers in their early sets, including Stipe’s a cappella version of this Mancini/Mercer classic. In his book R.E.M.: Perfect Circle, Tony Fletcher recounts an incident in August 1985, when the band played a club in Ottawa. Halfway through the set, Stipe launched into the song, only to be greeted by a heckler yelling “Fuck off!” “The group reacted angrily, and once Mike Mills was restrained from attacking the heckler ('You come up here and fuck off!'), Stipe began the song again... Frustrated with themselves and disappointed in their audience, the group played only three more of their own numbers.” Using covers like a weapon against the unruly audience, R.E.M. finished the set with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “Sweet Home Alabama”, among other uncharacteristic songs. “It ended as one of the most enjoyable nights on the tour, a triumph of the band’s convictions, and a bold statement that no degree of commercial success would dictate that they perform a set-by-numbers.”
“Tired of Singing Trouble”
An outtake from the sessions for 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant, this minute-long tune was written as a skewed gospel-blues, and R.E.M. play it like drunken parishioners in the church band. While it didn’t make the album, it did have a long life in the band’s live sets, most often as a lead-in for “I Believe”. With its ambient footsteps, vocalized bassline, and self-consciously world-weary lyrics, it sounds like a song that was found rather than written (for years I just assumed it was a cover of an old blues standard). Like another rarity in this new set—“Voice of Harold”, which finds Stipe converting the liner notes from an old gospel album into lyrics—“Tired of Singing Trouble” just barely skirts parody. Like another tune from these sessions—“Swan Swan H”—it reconsiders Southern myths and song forms rather than take them at face value.
“Ghost Rider”
By 1988 R.E.M. had an actual radio hit (“The One I Love”) and a growing cult following, but their records were hard to find overseas. Ensuring international distribution was one motivation to sign with Warner Brothers, which promised the band complete creative freedom. Their first major-label single, “Orange Crush”, in retrospect seems designed explicitly to preempt any accusations of sell-out: The song itself addresses the connection between Monsanto and American G.I.s sick from Agent Orange—not exactly radio-friendly subject matter. For the B-sides, the band covered Syd Barrett’s “Dark Globe” and Suicide’s “Ghost Rider”, as if to promise that even during this new chapter in their career, they would still be guided by the same left-of-the-dial influences.
“Shiny Happy People” (Dance to the Music Mix)
How do you make a bad song even worse? Remix it. As good a band as they were—as true as their instincts so often proved—R.E.M. had some horrible ideas, chief and most notorious among them this aggressively bouncy tune. Apparently it started as a joke riff from Peter Buck, but turned into something whose badness is timeless. This remix, which is very similar to two other mixes included in the rarities bundle, features a funky drummer break that would have been generic in 1991, some regrettable turntable scratches, and a disembodied Kate Pierson singing the refrain.
Eventually the band disowned “Shiny Happy People” and all its spawn, but not before it rose to number 10 on the US singles chart. Rather than end their career, it simply became a footnote, a late single off an otherwise solid album—beloved by some, skipped by others, and largely forgotten twenty-plus years later. What makes Complete Rarities incomplete is the absence of “Furry Happy Monsters”, from R.E.M.’s appearance on Sesame Street. Surrounded by bouncy felt creatures and directed at the diaper set, the song finally came into its own. (The song is available on 2000’s Songs from the Street: 35 Years of Music.)
“Wall of Death”
R.E.M. reached their commercial peak during the 1990s, when the CD was still far and away the most common means of music distribution. With that came tribute albums galore, and the band appeared on several. Complete Rarities includes a handful of such covers, including “Sponge” (from Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation: The Songs of Vic Chesnutt) and “First We Take Manhattan” (from I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen). Weirdly absent from Complete Rarities is the excellent “I Walked with a Zombie,” from 1990’s Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye: A Tribute to Roky Erickson.
But their best might be “Wall of Death”, a standout cut from the 1994 tribute album Beat the Retreat: Songs by Richard Thompson. This is the R.E.M. jangle at its breeziest, establishing a loping groove and punctuating it with smudges of pedal steel and a piano solo from Mills. If Thompson’s original is inscrutable, this cover is a bit more straightforward as a valentine to a piece of carnival Americana, but it didn’t come into its own until it appeared as a b-side on the “E-Bow the Letter” single. Arriving several weeks before New Adventures in Hi-Fi landed in stores, the song hinted at that underrated album’s fascination with being lost in America.
“Country Feedback”
Stipe has counted this haunting deep-album cut, originally sequenced near the end of Out of Time, as one of his favorite R.E.M. songs. It’s a low country-soul dirge, with lyrics that Stipe reportedly made up on the spot and recorded in one take. It’s long been a staple of their live sets, which means there are various bootlegs out there (including one featuring Neil Young). Complete Rarities contains only two: one from a 1992 concert in Athens and another from Later with Jools Holland (featuring some stately pedal steel work fro John Keane). But they’re both surpassed by the Unplugged performance, which features a bluesy acoustic guitar solo from Buck and a round of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” near the end. It’s obvious why that version isn’t included in the rarities bundle, but one glaring omission is the live cut from a 2003 show in Wiesbaden, Germany, to which Stipe adds a new intro. It’s available only on the out-of-print deluxe edition of 2003’s In Time.
“(Don’t’ Go Back to) Rockville” (live)
R.E.M.’s career was a three act play: Act I was the I.R.S. years, Act II the Warner years, and Act III the Berry-less years. During Act II, the band had a strange, often strained relationship with the Act I material. In the late 90s they even put a moratorium on performing older material, which fortunately didn’t last very long. By the early 2000s, they were already digging deep into their back catalog, pulling the kudzu off of tracks from Reckoningand Document. Best among them may be “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” which comes full circle nearly 20 years after they committed it to tape. Mills wrote the song to persuade a friend of the band not to go home for the summer, and it quickly became a live favorite. When they finally recorded it, however, they slowed it to a crawl and gave Stipe the lead. This version features a more rollicking tempo and Mills on lead.
“Passenger” (Recorded from Later with Jools Holland)
Stipe tended to broadcast his obsessions loudly, so it was no secret when he became fascinated by glam rock in the 1990s. Early in that decade, when they decided to do another rock album after the quieter, folksier Out of Time and Automatic for the People, they made the stomping, vamping, campy Monster, which drew heavily from Brian Eno, T. Rex, and other acts from the early 70s UK rock scene. It might have been a mere exercise if not for Buck’s richly decadent guitar tone and for Stipe’s sexually frank lyrics, which stopped just short of revealing his sexual identity.
“I’ll be your albatross, devil, dog, Jesus, God,” he sings on “I Took Your Name”. “I don’t wanna be Iggy Pop, but if that’s what it takes, hey.” Four years later, he executive-produced Todd Haynes’ underrated Velvet Goldmine, which does for Bowie/Pop what Citizen Kane did for William Randolph Hearst/sleds. So this live version of “Passenger”, from one of the two Iggy Pop albums produced by Bowie, is more than a mere cover, but a commentary on his obsession, a means of surveying and claiming the sexual and musical possibilities: “Everything is yours and mine.”