R.E.M. - Fables of the Reconstruction
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 10.06.1985
"When you mix a record, the singer traditionally wants his voice to be louder, the guitarist says, 'Turn up the guitar,' and the bassist asks, 'Can't you make the bass parts punchier?' With R.E.M., everyone wanted to be turned down."
In a few sentences, the producer Joe Boyd summed up the magic secret of the members of "R.E.M.", Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Bill Berry, whose third studio album "Fables of the Reconstruction" was released on June 10, 1985.
Boyd, who had previously worked with Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Richard and Linda Thompson, was not the first choice of the friends from Athens, Georgia. Van Dyke Parks, Hugh Padgham, Elliot Mazer and Elvis Costello were considered, with Parks being Stipe's favorite, but in the end Boyd was chosen.
Unlike the first two albums, which were recorded in North Carolina, the band flew to England to record the album at Livingston Studios in Wood Green, London. Conditions were less than ideal, as the band had a long commute from where they stayed in Mayfair to the studio, and London was at the tail end of a harsh winter. Peter Buck recalled: "It rained every day it wasn't snowing."
Boyd's work ethic caused tensions with the band, as his precise attention to detail contrasted with the more spontaneous approach the band had taken on the previous two albums. Don Dixon and Mitch Easter worked quickly and encouraged the band to experiment. Boyd, by contrast, spent many hours mixing and remixing songs, which the band felt stripped away some of the energy and spontaneity of the recording.
Imagine a house with an attic. You lower the cracked ladder from the ceiling and climb up it alone into the dark attic. There you find worn blankets, rocking chairs, old dressers and toys from a childhood long gone. The attic is high enough off the ground that you don't have to crawl, but low enough that you have to walk slightly hunched over. You light a candle and sit quietly.
This is the feeling a listener discovers while listening to R.E.M.'s "Fables of the Reconstruction". A darker album, though not necessarily in tone. It sounds as if the songs were recorded almost in the dark, by the light of a single small candle.
There are lighter moments on the album, but they come and go as fast as the lamps that used to flash past us on the Carmelit in Haifa. Things can go wrong in the dark, and Fables has its flaws. Still, both beauty and passion can be found in it.
The album's title shows that R.E.M. at that time, although they had gained an audience and become a respected college band, were at a crossroads.
When it came time to choose a title for the album, the lead singer Michael Stipe spoke with his father, a carpenter, who suggested "Reconstruction".
It is a word heavy with meaning, especially for people in the South, where the band was formed. "Reconstruction" is a word that comes with dark, complicated memories. Stipe later claimed that "the album is less about Southern politics and more about the act of regrouping". In fact, at this specific moment in the band's history, "reconstruction" may have represented the very hard work facing the four musicians.
When R.E.M. finished making an album that proved artistically and personally challenging, they were closer to breaking up than ever in those early years, and felt they had some rebuilding to do.
The rock historian Robert Dean Lurie sees the title more narrowly: "The use of the term 'Reconstruction' is, on one level, a bit of a red herring. There are no specific references on the album to the historical period that bears that name."
Lurie offers a great description of that historical period: roughly ten years after the American Civil War, during which the US government tried to reintegrate the defeated South into the Union by giving the freed slaves the vote and promoting them to public office, while barring former Confederate officials from holding government positions.
All this while a flood of missionaries, teachers and businessmen poured into the region to reshape both the Southern economy and the moral fabric of society. Despite the lofty goals, the program went the way of most US military occupations: after great effort, wasted treasure and a brief, tempting glimpse of the desired utopia at gunpoint, the whole thing collapsed into violence, corruption, chaos and intimidation.
A new, violent terror organization called the Ku Klux Klan arose, the Northern carpetbaggers were defeated, and the South returned to a racial caste system, with rich whites on top, poor whites a few rungs below, and the Black population at the bottom.
"Stipe took a genuine interest in the American South," claims the biographer David Buckley, "and approached the subject not as a Southerner per se, but more as a tourist, historian or archaeologist. It wasn't the culture he lived in, but a foreign culture he wanted to explore."
As always, much remains hidden rather than clear, thanks to Stipe's superb mumbling in this period, when he still treated singing as an instrument.
The Old South is everywhere across the album's reconstruction, filled with strange gothic characters woven into their harsh pasts. In "Feeling Gravity's Pull", Stipe sings that time and distance are out of place here, summing up the essence of the album's entire world.
More than half of the tracks deal with the behavior of mysterious older men. These songs fall into two main categories: sentimental portraits of remote eccentrics, or detached observations of unfamiliar figures.
One of the figures Stipe admires is the Baptist minister Howard Finster, whom he sees as an outsider, and "Maps and Legends" was written as a tribute to him.
In "Driver 8", the members of "R.E.M.", who grew up near railroad tracks and saw them as part of mythical America, sing about an overworked train engineer being urged by the conductor to take a break. This message can be applied to many aspects of life. In the song Peter Buck uses a series of minor chords that he used again and again in songs such as "The One I Love", "Losing My Religion" and "Bang and Blame", among others. A harmonica imitates the sound of a train whistle. The video for the song, directed by Michael Stipe and James Herbert, was made before Stipe felt comfortable lip-syncing, so it consists almost entirely of footage of trains. Unintentionally, the song inspired "Imitation of Life", released in 2001.
"Life and How to Live It" drew inspiration from the eccentric Athens-based writer Brivs Mekis. Mekis divided his house into two separate halves and alternated living between them until the day he died.
"Green Grow the Rushes" was written as part of a pact between Stipe and the 10,000 Maniacs singer Natalie Merchant that each of them would write a song about the genocide of Native Americans. Merchant contributed "Among the Americans". Still, the common interpretation is that this song deals with the plight of Mexican guest workers in the United States, and it works as a laid-back protest song meant to raise awareness of the problem.
The darkest and most mysterious song is probably "Old Man Kensey", which opens with a creepy bass line by Mike Mills, but this is no horror movie. It is afternoon tea with a thoroughly bizarre and disturbing family of outcasts, none of whom is truly violent; they just want to be left alone.
The closing song, "Wendell Gee", is a lullaby about loss and, in the end, about coping with change and moving forward. The banjo has a welcome presence, and listening to it as the album draws to a close, you can almost see the sun peeking through the attic window.
The cover of the album, "Fables of the Reconstruction" or "Reconstruction of the Fables", was designed so that the title becomes an endless, never-ending loop.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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