R.E.M. was an American rock band from Athens, Georgia. They formed in 1980, and consisted of drummer Bill Berry, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills, and vocalist Michael Stipe. They were all students at the University of Georgia at the time.
Buck first met Stipe at the Athens record store Wuxtry Records where he was working. They discovered that they shared similar tastes in music, and Stipe later said, “It turns out that I was buying all the records that he was saving for himself.”
Through mutual friend Kathleen O’Brien, the pair met Berry and Mills who had been playing music together since high school. The quartet were likeminded about their attitude to music and agreed to write a few songs. They jammed on a few ideas, started playing together, and ended up rehearsing together regularly. They wrote even more songs and started playing live shows. Things grew to the extent that they eventually dropped their studies to focus on their developing group. They also found a manager in Jefferson Holt, a record store clerk who was so impressed by an R.E.M. performance in his hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina that he moved to Athens to work with them. He would stay in the role with the band until 1996.
Things progressed naturally, and Stipe later commented that there was never any grand plan behind any of it. The band was almost something that happened to them organically, and they all allowed it to happen. At the same time, there was nothing accidental about the focus and hard work they put into it.
The group’s success was almost immediate in Athens and surrounding areas. The band drew progressively larger crowds for shows, and for the next year and a half, toured throughout the southern United States in an old blue van (driven by their manager Holt) while living on a food allowance of $2 each per day.
The band struck up a working relationship with producer Mitch Easter when they visited his Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to record a few songs for a demo. On 15 April 1981, Easter and the band recorded (at least) three tracks: Radio Free Europe, Sitting Still and the instrumental White Tornado. On the next day they mixed the tracks and duplicated a run of approximately 400 cassette copies (according to Peter Buck). These were distributed to clubs, record labels and magazines ahead of their initial visit to New York City.
One demo tape made its way to Atlanta law student Jonny Hibbert. He offered to release Radio Free Europe and Standing Still as a one-off 7’’ vinyl single on the understanding that he would own the publishing rights for both songs. The band agreed to his terms.
On 24 May 1981, the band returned to the Drive-In Studio to do further work on Radio Free Europe to make it punchier and improve its sonics ahead of the single release. Hibbert felt the recording was sonically unsatisfactory, and personally travelled to the Drive-In Studio to oversee a new remix. Easter said he found the presence of Hibbert “distracting” and added, “He came into my studio and it was like, now the big city guy is going to do it right. We mixed the song for about 12 hours and really, there wasn’t enough equipment to warrant more than 45 minutes.”
The final mastering of the song was a disappointment to both Easter and the band. Easter was so unhappy that he mixed his own version of the song for consideration, which everybody but Hibbert liked better. Hibbert pulled rank and used his mixes on the band’s debut 7’’ on Hib-Tone. To make matters worse, something went awry in the process. The record was mastered terribly, and Peter Buck famously smashed his copy and nailed it to the wall.
Easter’s proposed mix for the 7’’ is the only version the band reissued since then – first on 1988’s Eponymous compilation, and then on 2006’s compilation And I Feel Fine… The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987. A 7’’ reissue of the original single was released in 2021 for its 40th anniversary, but again Easter’s mixes were used although the release is called Radio Free Europe (Original Hib-Tone Single). This is how they always wanted that release to be, and one could say that an injustice has been corrected.
The band may have been unhappy with Hibbert’s mixes and mastering, but the power of the song still shone through, and its success was very important for them at that point in their career. “This song was pivotal to the continuation of our career,” drummer Bill Berry explained in the liner notes for the compilation Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011. “Most fans may not realize that for two years before Murmur was released, we barely made financial ends meet by playing tiny clubs around the southeast. Our gasoline budget prevented us from venturing further. Put simply, our existence was impoverished. College radio and major city club scenes embraced this song and expanded our audience to the extent that we moved from small clubs to medium-sized venues and the additional revenue made it possible to logically pursue this wild musical endeavour. I dare not contemplate what our fate would have been had this song not appeared when it did.”
Radio Free Europe is a radio network run by the United States government that broadcasts to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East. The mission of the broadcasts is to promote democracy and freedom, but R.E.M. makes the point that this can easily cross the line into propaganda.
The other members of the band were reportedly awestruck when they heard the lyrics and melodies Michael Stipe had written for the song. Stipe was unaware that he was doing anything special, simply noting “The guys always said I do something harmonically here that made them all go ‘whoa,’ because it was so advanced … or something, in the ‘straight off the boat’ part. I wonder if I tricked them by accident. I still have no idea what it is they’re talking about.”
A lot of what Michael Stipe sings is hard to figure out, to the point of it being indecipherable. There was a good reason this, as he hadn’t finished the lyrics by the time they recorded the song, with several sections being random vocalizing around sounds. Stipe took the same approach when the song was played live and improvised his own set of lyrics halfway through the song.
R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe said in a 1983 interview with Alternative America: “We were all so scared of what the other one would say, that everyone nodded their head in agreement to anything to come up. Those earlier songs were incredibly fundamental, real simple, songs that you could write in five minutes. Most of them didn’t have any words. I just got up and howled and hollered a lot.” In a 1988 NME interview Stipe went even further, describing some the lyrical content in the song as “complete babbling.”
An argument has often been made that there is also a different layer at play here, where having incoherent lyrics makes sense for this song. Radio Free Europe was written as a protest song against disinformation, propaganda, and just general and unwanted noise. Stipe would have been perfectly capable of writing lyrics had he wanted to. It would not be unlike him to choose to perform the song with babbling, unclear lyrics to prove a point.
The Hib-Tone single was released on 8 July 1981. The cover art for the single came courtesy of Michael Stipe. “Michael brought those negatives over to our place,” explains photographer Terry Allen. “He said, ‘Can you make a print of these?’ and we said, ‘What, you want a picture of this blur?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ and so I said, ‘I’ve got a picture that’s probably better than this that you can use,’ but he said, ‘No, I want this blur!'”
The initial pressing counted 1,000 copies, of which 600 were sent out as promotional copies. Unfortunately, these omitted the Hib-Tone contact address, but as the remaining batch sold out quickly, they were able to correct this oversight when another 6,000 copies were pressed due to popular demand. The single garnered critical acclaim and was even listed as one of the ten best singles of the year by The New York Times.
The band were keen to expand their discography and recorded the Chronic Town EP with Mitch Easter in October 1981. They had no plans to continue their collaboration with Jonny Hibbert and his Hib-Tone label, instead planning to release it on a new indie label named Dasht Hopes. They were unaware that several major labels already had them on their radar at that point.
The demo tape of their first recording session with Easter had reached RCA Records and I.R.S. Records, who were amongst those keen to sign the band. They were not the only ones, and the band turned down the advances of major label RCA in favour of I.R.S., with whom they signed in May 1982. The Chronic Town EP was released on I.R.S. that August and became their first nationwide major label release.
I.R.S. were however keen for the band to record a full-length album, which the band started work on in December 1982. The label paired R.E.M. with producer Stephen Hauge, who had a higher profile and more of a track record than the band’s previous producer Easter. Things quickly went sour. Hauge had a strong emphasis on technical perfection and demanded several retakes, which frustrated the band members. He would also have keyboard parts added to tracks without the band’s knowledge and permission.
The band went back to the label and insistently asked them to let them once again record with Mitch Easter. I.R.S. were hesitant but agreed on them doing one track together as a try-out. The band promptly returned to North Carolina and recorded the song Pilgrimage with Easter and his new producing partner Don Dixon. After hearing the track, I.R.S. permitted the group to record the full album with Dixon and Easter. A significantly happier band started that work on 6 January 1983.
Because of the bad experience with Hauge, the band recorded the album via a process of negation, refusing to incorporate rock music clichés such as guitar solos or then-popular synthesizers to give the music a timeless feel.
The completed album was given the name Murmur and was greeted with critical acclaim upon its release on 12 April 1983. Rolling Stone Magazine were particularly enthusiastic, eventually naming the album as their record of the year. The album reached #36 on the Billboard album chart. Not bad at all for a band that for most of the country had seemingly come out of nowhere.
I.R.S. were keen for Radio Free Europe to be included on the album and had asked the band to re-record it. The band happily agreed, as they felt they had improved significantly since the original 1981 sessions. This new version of the song would be picked as the album’s lead single, funnily enough released on 8 July 1983 – exactly two years to the day after its first Hib-Tone single release. This gave Radio Free Europe the distinction of being the band’s first and second single. The new version reached #78 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and #25 on the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
The 1983 version of the song has more moderate pacing than the original, and crucially, some lyrical changes. In fact, ahead of the new recording, Stipe had to sit down and write actual and final words for the song where this was still lacking.
In an interview that was done before the recording of the album, he said “That’s true. I’ve got to write words for Radio Free Europe, because we’re going to re-record that for the album. It still doesn’t have a second or third verse. I think there are actually lyrics to every song on the EP.”
Decide yourself if radio’s gonna stay
Reason it could polish up the gray
Put that, put that, put that up your wall
That this isn’t country at all
Radio station decide yourselfKeep me out of country and the word
Wheel of fortune’s leading us absurd
Push that, push that, push that to the floor
That this isn’t nothing at all
Straight off the boat, where to goCalling out in transit
Calling out in transit
Radio Free Europe
Both versions of Radio Free Europe begin with brief instrumental intros before the band enters. The ’81 version features a brief synthesizer figure, while the ’83 version contains an errant system hum accidentally recorded on tape.
The song starts with a four-to-the-floor drum beat, and Berry plays a steady backbeat throughout the song. The verses sees Mills play a fast eighth note bassline pulse, characteristic of punk rock and new wave, which is as prominent as it is sonically pleasing. A YouTube commenter said, “This song made me want to play bass,” and the instrument is certainly front and centre. Guitarist Peter Buck does a great showcase of his 1960s-inspired jangly guitar sound, playing the verses with the palm-muted lower strings of his guitar while marking the end of a four-bar repetition with an upstroke strummed chord.
The new version features several subtle musical changes. Guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills play steady eight-note figures during the verse. During the bridge, Buck switches to playing arpeggios, ending each four-bar phrase with a full chord downstroke. Mills accompanies this section by performing independent melody lines with syncopated rhythms. Mills’ last note of the refrain is doubled by a piano. The second chorus is followed by a bridge section where Mills’ one-note ascending bassline is doubled by the piano. At the song’s end, Buck plays an arpeggio figure similar to the pre-chorus refrain, and the band ends on an A chord.
The band did not end up liking the re-recorded version of the song as much as the first one. This is made very clear in the liner notes for the 1988 compilation album Eponymous (which features Easter’s mix of the Hib-Tone version): “Mike and Jefferson think this one [referring to the Hib-Tone version] crushes the other one like a grape.” Peter Buck has also stated that he didn’t think they captured it the way they did on the single. Original producer Mitch Easter also commented on the re-recording, diplomatically saying it was “more pro, but a little sedate.”
At the request of MTV, the 1983 single was accompanied by a music video. It was directed by Arthur Pierson and shot in the famed Paradise Gardens, a folk art sculpture garden crafted by artist and Baptist minister Howard Finster in Pennville, Georgia. Finster would go on to paint the album cover for R.E.M.’s second album, Reckoning.
Radio Free Europe is important for being R.E.M.’s debut single and putting the Georgian band on the map, but as much as launching a new band, it also launched the indie rock movement which rose to prominence in the early 1980s. Initially, the term described rock music released through independent record labels, but the term would become more widely associated with the music the bands produced, often played by independent or college rock radio stations who would frequently play jangle pop bands like The Smiths and R.E.M. The genre solidified itself later on, and even went mainstream, which went against the original credo.
As much as the music itself, alternative rock was also about not being content with being told things by society, a DIY attitude, and frequently also a retro attitude. The latter took shape in the very music and instruments that R.E.M. used. Buck and Mills both used Rickenbacker guitars, something also done by 1960s bands like The Beatles and The Byrds, for a unique tone. Short and succinct pop songs would be their weaponry, but with the adopted aggressive attitude of punk.
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