Remarks Remade by Tony Fletcher

Author:Tony Fletcher [Fletcher Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-002-1
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2002-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

* Even The Replacements, considered for so long by so many as likely to follow R.E.M. into the mainstream, were about to give up battling against all the compromises and frustrations and call it a day.

* An in-studio argument, recorded in the Seventies by a mischievous engineer, was infamous among musicians worldwide.

Fifteen

Money – it was not the reason R.E.M. had entered the music business. It had barely ever influenced their decision-making, and never their music. Frequently over the years R.E.M. had pulled career moves guaranteed to lessen their short-term income, and at times (quietly, without fanfare) given the green stuff away. But once you sell 10 million albums, money can’t but help rear its ugly head.

R.E.M.’s decision early on to divide their songwriting income four equal ways had served well to avoid the minefield that splits up so many pop groups – and which usually explodes when the one songwriting member is discovered to be earning three or more times that of his non-songwriting partners. Being keen students of rock’n’roll history, R.E.M. understood that if a band was a gang, then that gang had to cover each other’s backs.

“The songwriting money we share isn’t necessarily for writing the songs,” Peter Buck would explain a full decade after Out Of Time’s multi-platinum breakthrough. “It’s for sleeping on the floor for ten years while we toured, it’s for the eight hours of rehearsal we used to do, when we were making forty dollars a month.”

Only two other people were given a share in those proceeds: the management partnership of Jefferson Holt (who had a contract to that effect), and Bertis Downs (who after years of insisting that his role as legal advisor would conflict with a job as co-manager, finally accepted the latter position but insisted on a handshake agreement). Both men were considered to have been integral to the group’s success since 1980 and to have earned their percentage. New additions to the camp were not granted the same benefit. Talking just prior to the release of Out Of Time, Peter Buck agreed with the suggestion that his friend Peter Holsapple had pretty much become R.E.M.’s fifth member – “except for the salary part,” he noted with a chuckle. As it turned out, he was being deadly serious.

Peter Holsapple was in a difficult situation by 1992. R.E.M. had looked up to Holsapple’s best-known band, The dB’s, before the two parties met. Holsapple had recommended Mitch Easter as a possible R.E.M. producer to Jefferson Holt back in 1981, without which tie-up who knows what might have happened. The dB’s had opened for R.E.M. in 1985 and gotten on so well that each band frequently joined the other on stage. And so, after The dB’s broke up in 1988, Holsapple was R.E.M.’s immediate choice as extra musician on the Green tour. A generally easy-going southerner from a similar musical background, he came across less as a session musician or a hired hand than a kindred spirit. After all those years of friendship he felt at home in R.

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