The book Michael Stipe says became R.E.M.’s “template”
Behind the brilliance of R.E.M. is a sense of adventure. The musicology gives you plenty to muse over, but it is bolstered by the often under-credited cliched truism that when the band seem like they’re having fun, it is easy for the listener to share in it. They may well have been innovative and key progenitors of indie, but it was the same old motive to get out on the road and have an adventure that brought them together in the first place.
In this regard, one novel proved pivotal. Inside the sleeve of Jack Kerouac’s seminal 1957-published novel On The Road is the following testimony from Bob Dylan: “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” Indeed, Dylan isn’t putting words in other’s mouths by being so generalised; it changed David Bowie’s life, the entire population of Greenwich Village’s lives, and Michael Stipe and his pals in R.E.M.’s lives too.
As he explains regarding Kerouac’s journey around America: “This book became my band’s template. To explore the country and do it all — having a great big time — on our terms and no one else’s. Hooray! Followed by The First Third by Neal Cassady. The muse speaks, writes, smokes, drinks, seduces,” he told One Grand Books.
Indeed, Kerouac’s vivid sense of juicing life down to the pith, right down to the bitter hardships, might glamourise the idea of an adventurous life that being in a band aligns with. There is an artistic sentiment that seems to have rubbed off on R.E.M.. Kerouac famously said he spent seven years on the road and returned to write up his novel in three weeks. This frenzied nature comes across, and while it has prompted the likes of Truman Capote to quip, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” it is undeniable that the lyrical pace of the prose proves intoxicating when it falls into song.
This vividity is a knack that R.E.M., at their best, also seem to harness. In the hit ‘Nightswimming’, there is a bold, unguarded vulnerability to Stipe’s vocal performance and words that could stop the stride of Usain Bolt and render a cicada speechless for an alluring moment of soul-bearing striptease. And the melody rolls off so naturally that it seems you could whisk the piano away from Mike Mills mid-performance, and the music would still come out of his fingertips.
The whole thing seems so naturalistic that it welcomes you into the adventure as the voyeur of some lakeside memory. That, in itself, is decidedly Kerouacian. So, perhaps the literary master not only inspired R.E.M. to form and get out there, but his style and expressive nature bled into the art they would later conjure.
