The Boy in the Song by Michael Heatley

Author:Michael Heatley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909396876
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2014-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

When the electrician called at Cobain’s waterside home to install a security system, he thought at first that the singer was asleep.

Man on the Moon

R.E.M.

As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, R.E.M., standard-bearers of jangling guitar rock, seemed unstoppable. “Man on the Moon” was the second single to be taken from their 1992 platinum-selling Automatic for the People LP. The album had started out the year before at rehearsals held without singer Michael Stipe, where the band swapped instruments—Peter Buck on mandolin instead of guitar, Mills playing piano instead of bass, and Bill Berry swapping drums for bass.

When the trio presented demos of some 30 new songs to Stipe, the singer told Rolling Stone that they were “very mid-tempo … pretty fucking weird.” The album deals with loss and mortality, a theme fueled by the constantly circulating (and happily false) rumor that Stipe might be dying of an AIDS-related illness.

Written by all four founding members of the band, “Man on the Moon” was a reference to the conspiracy theory that the six manned missions to the Moon (1969–72) were hoaxes staged by NASA. Conspiracy-mongers claim that the film of the missions was made using similar sets to those used in the astronaut training simulations on Earth, like the Mars landing in the 1970s film Capricorn One. The space race was a part of the Cold War era and America had to get to the moon ahead of the Soviets. They believed the landings had to be faked to realize John F. Kennedy’s 1961 vision of “fulfilling the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” Such an achievement would have been vital as a distraction to Americans disillusioned with the escalating war in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s.

The song was inspired by Andy Kaufman, a “Dadaistic” comedian and actor who took performance art and comedy to the edge of irrationality and blurred the borders between imagination and reality. As a teenager, Michael Stipe saw him on TV and cites him as a huge influence.

Kaufman, born in New York in 1949, honed his style of stand-up comedy in the nightclubs and coffeehouses of his hometown before being asked by Lorne Michaels to appear in the first broadcast of what was to become the immensely popular and successful TV show Saturday Night Live, first broadcast on October 11, 1975.

Kaufman was a huge fan of Elvis Presley, and by the time the funnyman was in high school he’d got his impersonations of the King down pat. Many say that he was the first Elvis impersonator—Andy even hitchhiked to Las Vegas to see his idol—and the King considered the impersonation of him his favorite. Stipe makes reference to this in the second line of the second verse:

Hey Andy, are you goofing on Elvis?

Hey baby, are we losing touch?

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