The artist Michael Stipe said was responsible for REM forming
When REM emerged in the early 1980s, they were an unusual prospect inasmuch as they weren’t punk nor were they rock, and they didn’t seem to be new wave. They were an entirely new breed that fed off elements of all the above yet felt entirely original, and this is part of the reason why their career ended up taking off in a multitude of exciting directions.
With the distinctive vocals of frontman Michael Stipe and the musicianship of Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry, they gained attention with debut EP Chronic Town in 1982, and would further interest with Murmur in 1983, and while there were shades of classic New York acts like Television and The Velvet Underground, they were also feeding off the exciting waves of innovation happening closer to home in Athens, Georgia, where The B-52s and Pylon were both garnering attention in the underground.
Of course, later in their career, they would move onto greater heights, releasing albums such as Document and Green at the tail end of the ‘80s and solidifying their status as one of the finest bands of the new generation. Once they’d reached a peak with Automatic for the People, the band were seemingly given a free pass to attempt whatever they wanted to. And, from this moment onwards, despite having attracted commercial success, they would begin to bring in shades of the experimentation that characterised their earliest albums.
This is where the signs of their earlier influences began to come full circle and worm their way back into the band’s sound. In 1996, the band released their tenth record, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and in an effort to pay tribute to the artists who had moulded their taste early on, they invited one punk icon to perform on what would become the album’s lead single, ‘E-Bow the Letter’.
The song’s chorus stands out for how it features the vocals of Stipe and one of his musical heroes, Patti Smith, appearing alongside him. “We had become friends at that point, and she, of course, was the mentor who made REM a band in the first place. She was the person that both Peter and I referenced in our first meetings with each other as someone that we greatly admired,” Stipe told The New Cue, adding, “She was our hero, she ranked at the very top.”
While it was a match made in heaven, it wasn’t the first time they’d attempted to get Smith to appear on a song with them. In fact, Stipe had initially intended for their incredible 1992 hit ‘Everybody Hurts’ to have a second set of vocals accompanying him, and had approached Smith as a potential collaborator before scrapping the idea of a duet. “It wasn’t the right time for her to do something like that,” Stipe revealed, “so when ‘E-Bow the Letter’ came along, we were all thrilled to work on something together.”
As two of the finest lyricists and alternative figures in US music, you can certainly see why the respect between Stipe and Smith is mutual, and the fact that they were able to share their talents on record is the sort of collaboration that both sets of fans would have been head over heels about.
