The tragic moment REM drummer Bill Berry almost died on stage
The masterful force of REM was such that the magic of its holy trinity of members – vocalist Michael Stipe, bassist Mike Mills, guitarist Peter Buck, and drummer Bill Berry – could never be replicated once it faltered. It’s true in this sense that most bands come face to face with a hairy moment or two if they’re to stay for the long haul in rock and roll – but in REM’s case, that near miss also almost destroyed them in the most permanently tragic of ways.
That dreaded fate – or stroke of luck, depending on which angle you look at it – fell on the shoulders of Berry, who was responsible for keeping the beat of the band pumping through its drum kit. But on one inauspicious evening – specifically March 1st, 1995 – while on stage in Lausanne, Switzerland, Berry collapsed, and with him, the legacy of the band threatened to come crashing down.
He had suffered a catastrophic ruptured brain aneurysm, and though he remarkably managed to make a full recovery, things were never the same after that. No longer were the raptures of rock and roll gleaming with the same appeal; suddenly, touring the world became quite disillusioned with the concept of how to live a life, and none of the seismic plaudits of REM could shake that. Ultimately, although he did rejoin the band for their magnum opus record New Adventures in Hi-Fi, two years later, in 1997, Berry decided to hang up his sticks and call it a day.
You can suppose, if death has so grimly been staring you in the eye, that his reasons were understandable. He said the realisation had dawned on him during his recovery, explaining to MTV at the time that: “I wasn’t specifically thinking about quitting the band, but maybe reassessing my priorities and things I want to do with the rest of my life. Maybe not as much travel, for one. Being away from home. I had a lot of time to lay around in a hospital bed and think about things. Maybe I started feeling sorry for myself.” Although REM were in their own other-worldly league, he decided he wanted a life markedly more normal.
The quartet was now reduced to three, and Stipe, Mills, and Buck valiantly continued on the REM track to fulfil Berry’s noble instruction that they were not to disband because of his departure. But oddly enough, the timing of their old drummer’s brush with the other side came as the other rockers were facing their own issues in the health realm, so it could have just as easily been one of them to pull the plug.
Stipe had to face the lights of the operating theatre for a hernia while Mills had a benign intestinal tumour removed all in the space of the same 1995 tour for Monster that Berry had his aneurysm – so really, that ‘monster’ was less of an album title and more of the reality the band were carrying around on their backs.
But the mid-1990s annus horribilis couldn’t tarnish REM’s legacy as a whole. Though the remaining trio eventually called it quits in 2011 following mediocre success compared to their late 1980s heyday, they have since been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a four-piece and, as such, remembered among the genre’s greatest legends. Things may have come close to being left in flaming ruins, but like the best phoenixes, they all rose through the ashes.
