It's Kind of a Concept

Album: R.E.M., Fables of the Reconstruction, 1985

Best Track: "Life and How to Live It"

Lasting Memory: I harbored delusions of rock stardom for exactly 19 years too long. Which is why, at age 19, I toyed with the idea of joining a college friend's cover band as a singer. Specifically, this friend wanted to perform a lot of R.E.M. songs.

I pretty much already knew at that time that I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but trying to master the vocal stylings of Michael Stipe and Mike Mills ultimately shamed me into giving up my never-started music career.

If you need to be similarly disabused of your dreams, try singing "Maps and Legends" or "Driver 8" off of R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. If you think you have succeeded, you are either lying to yourself, or you are Michael or Mike. If the latter is the case, how you guys doing?

R.E.M. didn't record Fables to crush my groove, of course. Rather, it appears the band's intent was to construct something very much a like a concept album about living in the last days of antebellum Georgia. Peopled with characters such as "Old Man Kensey" and "Wendell Gee," the world of Fables is very much one Flannery O'Connor would recognized.

All the residents are barely harmless madmen like the real-life person whose tale is told in the album standout "Life and How to Live It." In a story that I can't remember why I heard but which I will never forget, Michael Stipe once explained that "Life and How to Live It" was the title of a self-published book Stipe found hundreds of copies of while helping neighbors clean out the house of a recently deceased, familyless other neighbor.

The book, discovered in the basement of a house divided exactly down the middle and having different sets of furniture and clothing in each half, explained that the best thing a person could do to remain sane was live as one person for six months or so, and then live as a completely different person for the next period of time.

To borrow the lyrics of another one of Fable's songs, "Maybe these maps and legends have been misunderstood." But then again, "the power lines have floaters so the airplanes wont get snagged."

Driving home the concept that Fables was aimed at expressing, the original album cover -- not the one shown above -- was printed in such a way that the title could be read as either Fables of the Reconstruction or as Reconstruction of the Fables. Then the band throws a reinterpretation of "Green Grow the Rushes," which describes the collapse of the agriculture-based economy of the rural South, onto the album. Then the band throws the original "Auctioneer (Another Engine)," which describes the collapse of the dual ties to the people and the land alongside the increasing difficulty of escaping from either, onto the album.

The world of Fables was a weird and depressing place, much like most of the American South in the century and change following the Civil War. Good thing, then, that Georgians have finally put their Confederate legacy to rest and fully emerged as the model of twenty-first century citizens of the world who are not at all haunted by their past.

Up Next: R.E.M., Life's Rich Pageant, 1986