Once Through This Portal, There Is No Return

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

Best Track: "I Believe"

Lasting Memory: A good portion of every paycheck I got from every job I worked in high school was spent on cassettes. No sooner would I have deposited my $167 for 80 hours of labor, then I'd be at the mall record store spending about a quarter of that money on magnetized cellophane encased in plastic.

I don't want to give myself too much credit, but I think it's fair to say that I was the fuel that drove the engine of the mid-1980s American music industry. Without my weekly contributions of 30 or 40 bucks, the whole system of rock 'n' roll would have come crashing down and the world would never have been able to basic in the sonic wonders of big stars like White Lion and Pebbles.

Being unschooled in the ways of art and unable to appreciate the true awesomeness of such radio staples, however, I always opted to spend my hard-won cash on album's like R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pageant. I should probably feel foolish -- if not outright ashamed -- to this day for making such choices, but the ear's heart wants what it wants.

R.E.M. in 1986 was a year and an album away from scoring a Top 40 radio and MTV hit, but they were on the cusp of breaking big with Pageant in terms of both sales and sound. In fact, I could not listen to Pageant just now without being struck by how transitional most of the songs on the album are. Pageant stands as the collection where R.E.M. made the switch from Southern Gothic bar band to arena rockers.

The change was not entirely unwelcome, but it was sharp and sudden. In sentiment, lyrical content, and tonality, there is little enough difference between Murmur's "Sitting Still" and Pageant's "I Believe," but the execution of the two songs couldn't be more different. Whereas "Sitting Still" is raucous, "I Believe" is ROCKous. The former is fun, the latter is big.

R.E.M. was obviously swinging for the fences on Pageant, and why the first single off the album, "Fall on Me," wasn't the band's first huge hit is anyone's guess. "These Days," "Hyena," and "Just a Touch" also wrap up the jangle thing on which R.E.M. had made its name in listener-friendly packages that radio programmers largely ignored for reasons known only to themselves.

The problem, if it can be so named, with R.E.M.'s turn to the rock mainstream is that once they put themselves on that path, they could never turn back. From the moment the opening chords of "I Believe" were first written in 1985, it was inevitable that "What's the Frequency, Kenneth" would be written in 1993. R.E.M. had perfected the formula for creating noisy crowd pleasers, and they weren't going to abandon that formula.

To quote some of the band's "I Believe" lyrics back at them,

... practice, practice makes perfect
Perfect is a fault
And fault lines change

Fault lines never return to their original shape, however. Without hating the latter-day version, I miss the old R.E.M. Good thing, then, that I held on to my cassettes.

Up Next: R.E.M., Document, 1987