“A Rosetta Stone for a whole generation”: The three albums Peter Buck thought REM could never compete with
By the mid-1980s, REM were no longer just the darlings of college radio; they were the architects of a new American underground.
With Michael Stipe’s cryptic mumbling and Peter Buck’s chiming Rickenbacker, the Georgian outfit had found a way to make the ’80s feel deliciously dangerous again. Yet, despite their rapid ascent to the throne of alternative rock, Buck remained a fanboy at heart, a man, like many great musicians before him, perpetually haunted by the ghosts of his own record collection.
He was never one for the hollow bravado that usually infects rock stars once they start selling out theatres. Instead, he possessed the soul of a high-end record store clerk, constantly measuring his own output against the untouchable monoliths of the past.
As REM began to truly soar in the latter half of the ‘80s, Buck was quick to puncture any burgeoning egos by admitting that while they had flirted with greatness, the band were yet to make a record as good as his own holy trinity: The Beatles’ Revolver, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and Big Star’s Third.
The first, Revolver, remains the standard-bearer for anyone who picks up an instrument with the intent to innovate. Dougie Payne of Travis recently celebrated it as one of his nine favourite records of all time, and it’s easy to see why. Before its release on August 5th, 1966, genres were neatly delineated: you had folk, rock ‘n’ roll, and blues all sitting in their own boxes. Then The Beatles got high, heralded George Martin, and ruffled it all up. For Buck, Revolver represented the moment an album stopped being a collection of singles and became an “unfurling creative splurge.”
At a time when they could have easily acquiesced to safe pastures, the band used their fame to open doors into a new bohemian realm. Regarded by many as the start of their psychedelic period, the record reflected an interest in the avant-garde, Eastern philosophy, and the transcendence of material concerns. They made liberal use of reversed tapes and automatic double tracking, creating masterpieces like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’. As Melody Maker lauded at the time, it was a work that would “change the direction of pop music”, breaking the bounds of what the world understood as a pop song.
If The Beatles provided the sonic curiosity, the second album on Buck’s list, 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited, provided the literary green light, as it was the moment Bob Dylan fused the energy of blues-based rock with the power of poetry. Eric Clapton once remarked that Dylan was “head and shoulders above everyone else”, while David Bowie said that “he doesn’t have competition”, so if MF DOOM is your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper, then Dylan is undoubtedly your favourite songwriter’s favourite songwriter.
Sonically, the record was a flag placed firmly in the future, yet it was rooted in the dirt of Dylan’s past, of the long and winding Highway 61. It gave ‘literate rockers’ permission to create intelligent, probing music that hadn’t existed before. For a band like REM, whose frontman, Michael Stipe, treated lyrics like a series of fragmented, poetic images, Dylan’s revolutionary panache was the essential foundation of their house.
However, the most intimate influence for Buck was Big Star’s Third. While The Beatles and Dylan were global deities, Big Star was the secret language of the American underground, and Buck famously described the record as a “Rosetta Stone for a whole generation of musicians”, and it provided the essential DNA for the early REM sound: jangly but shadowed, regional yet timeless.
Third was darker and more exposed than earlier power-pop, possessing a wounded intimacy that REM would go on to echo in fragile ballads like ‘Perfect Circle’ or ‘Nightswimming’, and throughout the record, Alex Chilton’s songs often feel like they are falling apart at the seams, with strings swelling, structures wobbling, and moods shifting with a volatile intensity. REM adopted this instability into their own music, especially on Fables of the Reconstruction, where a murky atmosphere was allowed to overtake commercial clarity, and beyond the sound, there was the Southern gothic mystique to Big Star, a Memphis-rooted melancholy that REM echoed through their own Georgian identity, in what is regionalism filtered through art-rock introspection.
Buck viewed his band not as masters of a new era, but as students trying to live up to these monoliths, trying to carve out their own Rosetta Stone of an album, and it’s fair to say they did.
