“None of us would be alive”: Michael Stipe on the record that would have killed REM
It ought to be understood that REM are not just an example of a band that managed to survive their early struggles for fame in the 1980s only to go on to have an illustrious career from the tail end of the decade onwards, but that they were, in fact, one of the most influential bands to have emerged from this period in American musical history.
While they arguably reached the peak of their fame in the 1990s, many acts emerging at the time were already looking back at their earliest records, Murmur and Reckoning, as key reference points for shaping their own sound. Without these albums—now regarded as cult favourites—bands like Radiohead, Pixies, and Pavement may never have existed, or at the very least, would have sounded radically different.
Another act that REM had a significant influence on was Nirvana, and while their grunge sound was considerably heavier than what they were known for making themselves, Kurt Cobain’s approach to melody took many cues from REM frontman and songwriter Michael Stipe. Citing their 1988 album Green, which featured singles such as ‘Orange Crush’ and ‘Stand’ as his favourite album by the Athens, Georgia group, Cobain was fully enamoured by the work of Stipe and always looked to them as a source of inspiration.
The feeling was mutual, and Stipe was also a big fan of Cobain’s work as well, with him calling the Nirvana frontman “special” and referring to him as a good friend. Speaking to Dazed shortly after Cobain’s untimely suicide in 1994, Stipe spoke highly of him as a songwriter, saying that Kurt was “in a steady transition. As an artist, he had reached the end of one thing and was ready to explore the next phase.” This exploratory nature was something that Cobain and Stipe shared, and both were always looking for ways to further themselves creatively.
The song ‘Let Me In’ from REM’s 1994 album Monster is written in tribute to Cobain, who passed during the creation of the album. The song’s title refers to Stipe imagining himself on the phone to try and drag Cobain away from his suicidal thoughts and attempting to save him from his fate, and in an interview with Newsweek in the same year, Stipe revealed that “in the most genuine way, I wanted him to know that he didn’t need to pay attention to all this, that he was going to make it through.”
Cobain’s rejection of fame and his struggles with being in the limelight were a large contributing factor to his declining mental health, and Stipe would go on to acknowledge that had things gone differently for REM in their early years, he may have ended up feeling the same way as Cobain did about fame. “If REM had sold five million copies of Murmur,” Stipe confessed, “None of us would be alive to tell the tale. I really believe that. I’d have died with Quaaludes in my blood and a lot of Jack Daniels.”
It’s a shame that nothing creative ever came out of Stipe and Cobain’s friendship, and if Cobain had remained alive, perhaps they would have continued to inspire each other and collaborated on occasion. However, the bond that they shared in their brief time as friends inspired both parties to make some of the best records of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, and both bands still have a legacy that exists and inspires today.
