Peter Buck: I Nearly Quit R.E.M.

Source:  www.thestar.com - Ben Rayner Pop Music Critic

(June 8, 2008) Years from now, it's conceivable some earnest fans and critics might attempt to rehabilitate, in hindsight, the trio of iffy albums with which R.E.M. turned the corner on the last millennium. But don't hold your breath waiting for Peter Buck to grant his approval.

So disgusted was the guitarist with the state of things creatively within the band after 2004's widely pilloried Around the Sun, in fact, that he was ready to chuck R.E.M. altogether.

"We've always been a great live band, and on the last tour people who'd been seeing us since the '80s were saying, `That's actually the most exciting tour I've seen you guys do, ever.' And yet it was on a record that no one really liked and was almost impossible to play," says Buck, via the R.E.M. office in Athens, Ga.

"I just said to the guys, `We're good at this. This is what we do well, not spending eight months in the studio worrying about every little note ... I have no interest in spending eight months fiddling with it. If that's the way you wanna work, you're gonna do it without me.'

"Fortunately, everyone kind of agreed the other way didn't work and we kind of need Peter in the band."

The straight-shooting Buck did have a valid point to share with his bandmates.

Although he, singer Michael Stipe and bassist Mike Mills had reacted to the amicable departure in 1997 of friend, drummer and R.E.M. co-founder Bill Berry by turning in a series of increasingly subdued and meandering albums – Up in 1998, Reveal in 2001 and the nearly deal-breaking Around the Sun four years ago – they'd remained a fairly raucous and vital entity onstage throughout their downward slide in the studio.

The disparity between the performances and the recordings thus only made the growing fuzziness of the albums that much harder to take. Why couldn't the records sound as charged as the shows?

Buck agonized over the dilemma, finding rock 'n' roll solace by gigging with Robyn Hitchcock's band and his longtime friends in the Minus Five for a year while R.E.M. drifted uncertainly in the background.

He thought a lot about his favourite records and why they were his favourite records, wondering "whether it's jump blues from 1938 or Big Star's Third, what makes it great and why am I not making that right now? And to me, it just felt like spontaneity was a big part of it."

When he finally reconvened with Stipe and Mills last year to discuss the possibility of a new R.E.M. album, the strategy he posited was simple: let's do this thing quickly, let's not overthink the songs and let's, please, try to enjoy ourselves again.

To keep their energies focused in the right direction, the three agreed that only songs written on the electric guitar would be up for consideration. No acoustic numbers, none of the ambient electronica that had crept into later records. It was time to play rock music again.

At their chums in U2's urging – Stipe and Bono are pretty tight, apparently, and have even "pointed each other in different songwriting directions at different times," says Buck – the members of R.E.M. looked to au courant U.K. producer Jacknife Lee to whip them further into shape.

Lee, who's worked on recent records by Bloc Party, Snow Patrol and Green Day, along with U2's How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, didn't mince words.

"He didn't think our last record was exciting," says Buck. "He wanted us to make an exciting record."

Happily, they did.

Vowing not to get "bogged down," the band – bolstered by the recruitment of ex-Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin, with whom Buck played in the Minus Five – knocked out what would become its bristling new disc, Accelerate, in three quick bursts in Vancouver, Ireland and Athens.

"No more than three takes" was an unofficial rule, and the bulk of the 11 short, sharp and refreshingly punk-ish tunes that wound up on the album were delivered live off the studio floor, a fact that should guarantee a particularly loud and lively set list when R.E.M. returns to the Molson Amphitheatre with Modest Mouse and the National in tow tonight.

The band seems upbeat about where it's at these days, having turned the positive pre-release notices that began accruing to Accelerate around its coming-out performance at the South by Southwest festival in March into renewed critical and commercial potency. Accelerate debuted at No. 1 on the SoundScan album chart in Canada upon its release on April 1, while notching a No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200 for itself in the States.

A nice bounce back, really, considering Around the Sun didn't even make the Top 10.

"You're a writer. You know if it's due Monday, you finish it Sunday. So we figured why book two months (in the studio) and then only work two weeks out of that? Let's book 10 days and then we'll be done before we get bored. And so we really went at it like we didn't have any time at all," says Buck, who'd do the next record even faster if he had his druthers.

"After two weeks in Vancouver, we had seven songs completely finished and a rough mix that was almost good enough. We thought, if we can do that in 10 days, we can finish the record in another 10. And we almost did.

"The last record sounds like it did because we were bored of playing the songs over and over again for no reason. And this record sounds like what it is: People really excited to be playing songs they love."