R.E.M.

Shaking Through

R.E.M. – Shaking Through

You knew it was coming.

The way I remember it, my brother loaned me his cassette of Murmur over Christmas break my freshman year of college saying, “here, I think you’d really like this.”

So while you could say that this was another case of me just absorbing what my older siblings were listening to, it’s not the same. For one thing, my brother let me take it away to college, so clearly he wasn’t listening to it that much. Plus it was a cassette so when I was listening to it, it was on my Walkman with the headphones on and not a case of just being in the room while it was playing. It was my choice.

To say I listened to it a lot is an understatement. I particularly remember playing it while I was walking from my dorm on campus over to the women’s college a mile away, where I had a job in the dining hall. There’s something about having the music go straight into your ears that feels more intimate, more private. It can only have been a couple of weeks before I decided I needed to have my own copy. Off to Plastic Fantastic, where I then discovered there were more records by R.E.M. At that point there was Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables. I can’t remember if I left the store that day with both Murmur and Reckoning or if I went back for Reckoning a different day. I just know that by the time spring break rolled around the first week of March, I insisted on taking both of them with me to my best friend’s house where I was going to spend the week. I couldn’t live without them for even a week. In short order I went back to the record store and completed my collection. I was also buying any zine I could find that had any article about R.E.M. Word was a new album would be coming out in the summer and I needed to know everything.

Sometimes I wonder, if we had never moved up to Maine halfway through my high school years, surely I would have heard R.E.M. before I got to college. I probably could even have gone to see them in concert. But we did move up to small town Maine in 1983, just when Murmur came out, and as we were so far removed from everything, it took two years before I knew anything about it. At the same time, having them to myself, in my Walkman, in my dorm room, meant I was free to binge listen as much as I wanted. I spent hours looking at the cover and the inner sleeve, hunting for clues. Could I have done that with my siblings around? The answer is no.

Everything in my life changed once I had this album. It’s like the part of my brain that feels music had a combination lock on it, and all the music I heard before Murmur was the numbers you spin clockwise and counter clockwise, before you finally get to the right number and click! The lock opens.

I Believe

R.E.M. – I Believe

Hot fucking damn! Tonight’s results are absolutely on fire! Virginia, New Jersey, the PA courts, ZOHRAN!!! Prop 50!!!

And so many smaller victories, too. All on the day we learned Dick Cheney died. That’s some kind of karma.

Who knows if we can sustain this kind of energy for the midterms. Who knows how batshit crazy things will get between now and then. But for tonight, change is what I believe in.

These Days

R.E.M. – These Days

If you are not on social media much, or your algorithm isn’t like mine, you might not be aware that Michael Stipe has been pretty busy lately. A couple of weeks ago he was with Jason Isbell in Pittsburgh for a GOTV rally with Doug Emhoff. Earlier today he was in Atlanta with Jon Bon Jovi at a Harris/Walz event, where you could see Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff in the audience, living their best lives.

The last time I watched a presidential debate was probably in 2008. Maybe I watched one of the Obama v. Romney debates but I don’t think I did. Debates for a primary could be worth it but the format is awful and everyone would be better served by just going to the candidates websites and reading their policy positions. So I had no intention of watching the first debate between Biden and Trump this year. I didn’t (still haven’t) see the train wreck performance that sent everyone panicking. What made me panic was everyone calling for Biden to step down. I was fearful that there’d be a messy and damaging scramble to head up the ticket. I worried that Trump’s people would challenge the validity of whoever ended up as the candidate if Biden dropped out. I felt like the only person who could legitimately take over at that late stage was Kamala Harris, who at least would be able to continue to use the money that had been donated to the campaign since her name was already on the ballot. But I was not confident that the people pushing for Joe to leave were coming to that same conclusion. I had the impression they wanted some kind of open convention and it scared the crap out of me.

Michael was one of those people calling for Biden to get out of the race. He was posting stuff on Instagram and I was increasingly anxious about it. One day he put out a poll asking if people thought Joe should bow out. I was quite sure he wouldn’t see my reply but I felt compelled to respond and I said, Kamala is the only one who can take over, do you realize that, and do you really think that counties in swing states that wouldn’t vote for Hillary will vote for a Black woman? Really?

Needless to say, he didn’t reply. I think any celebrity on social media must get flooded with so many messages that they probably have DMs turned off. I watched the chorus grow louder and louder for Biden to get out of the way and I got more and more anxious. Not that I wanted Biden to be the candidate, I just wished he had said he wasn’t running months earlier. He was too old, Gaza was a nightmare, and people did not want to rehash 2020. But replacing him felt so risky.

When the news broke that he not only dropped out but also endorsed Kamala, I thought, ok, let’s see if that carries enough weight to make the Ezra Kleins and George Clooneys step back. I did not expect the speed and force with which she took control of the situation and got all of the delegates that had pledged to support Biden, to throw their votes behind her. The difference in the campaign, the energy and enthusiasm, it is night and day. I can’t begin to imagine where we all would be right now… I don’t even want to think about it. I can admit that the people begging Joe to pass the torch were right and I thank them for being brave enough to say so.

It turns out that Michael had met Kamala and Doug at a restaurant in 2018. She came over to him and introduced herself by way of explaining that her husband was a big fan. If you haven’t seen any of the clips from any of these events where Michael has appeared, it is so obvious that Doug is still star struck. And now he’s got Tim Walz beside him, also just pinching himself. No shame, Tim. None at all.

We are still in the fight of our lives. It makes me insane that the whole country, the world, is at the mercy of a few hundred thousand people across seven states. All of us are so scarred from 2016. But a condensed campaign (can all campaigns just be three-months long, please!), that is smart, sharp, and leaves it all on the field, is giving me hope despite the times.

Good Advices

R.E.M. – Good Advices

Today my best friend sent me a link to a video from some VH1 program back in 1987. It was a VJ doing the usual VJ thing with Natalie Merchant there to chat about things during the breaks. It was super awkward because the VJ clearly didn’t know anything about 10,000 Maniacs and Natalie clearly didn’t want to be there, but there she was. You can watch the whole thing if you want to but I am going to link to the relevant part at the mark here. Go ahead, watch him ask Natalie about her shoes.

Ok, it kind of drags on a bit but I want to talk about shoes. Natalie’s shoes, my shoes, people’s perceptions of shoes. First of all, I love that Natalie says they are her dream shoes. I also have had dream shoes. Shoes where you find them and you immediately feel like you are complete. Shoes that state, this is me, I am grounded in these shoes. For me, my dream shoes said to the world, everything you need to know about who I am can be read by looking at my shoes. And you should always look at people’s shoes. Always. If, like the interviewer, you are puzzled by my shoes (or Natalie’s shoes), well, sorry, you just didn’t get it. The shoes will speak to the right people in the right way. I have based my life on it. “When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes” is good advice that has never steered me wrong.

Natalie said her shoes remind her of her grandfather’s shoes. My shoes were old man shoes too. Literally, they are men’s shoes. And let me tell you, Natalie Merchant is tiny and finding shoes in her size is probably no easy task. My old man shoes were a men’s size 6. They rarely come that small. What’s great about them? They are sturdy. They are practical but not in a “practical shoe” way. There’s a tiny bit of a heel but not like a woman’s shoe heel, it’s the whole back part of the shoe so it’s stable. And they lace up so you can make them nice and snug, unlike the slip-on nature of so many women’s shoes. They are a little dressy but they are comfortable. You feel strong and confident in a good pair of shoes like that. Perhaps most importantly, you will not look like everyone else in these shoes.

When I got to college I think I had some regular sneakers, maybe a pair of Keds, and probably a pair or two of flats to go with skirts or dresses. I’m sure I had boots for the winter but after two years getting schooled up in Maine as to what is appropriate footwear for snow, they were likely nothing like the boots my classmates in Pennsylvania wore. By my sophomore year I was really on the hunt for “my” shoes. There is nothing like the conformity of your peers to make you long for something that will set you apart. I knew exactly what I wanted but I had no idea where to find it. I had looked in thrift stores and the big army/navy store I. Goldberg’s in Philadelphia, but I kept striking out. I didn’t want combat boots, I didn’t want Doc Martens, I wanted something more refined, slimmer.

My work-study job was in the theater department as a dresser. Sophomore year the spring musical was Sweeney Todd, set in Victorian London, with a large cast and a good number of male roles. We made the costumes in the costume shop ourselves but one day I came in and saw they had been to the storage space off campus and come back with shoes for everyone. There they were. MY shoes. Black, lace-up, ankle height, low-stacked heel, old man shoes. I asked where we had bought them and was given the name of a men’s shoe store down by the bus station in Philadelphia, near Chinatown. When I finally had enough money saved up I took the train into the city, found the shoe store and left with my dream shoes in hand.

I wore them everywhere with everything. Summer, winter, rain, no matter. I had to have them resoled twice and the heel repaired once. I felt invincible in them. I loved nothing more than taking some $20 bills, folding them in thirds and putting them in my shoes, then lacing them up tight and heading off on adventures; sleeping out for concert tickets, taking the train up to New York or Providence. No one was ever going to guess I had over $100 in my old man shoes. Eventually they developed a crack by my pinky toe that was their undoing. I went back to the shoe store in Chinatown and bought a second pair, though they had changed ever so slightly, now with a cap toe design, that was just never quite as comfortable as the originals. I still loved the second pair but at some point I must have allowed my mom to get rid of them because I wasn’t wearing them any more.

Fast forward to middle-age and not being able to wear heels but not wanting to wear what look like orthopedic shoes either, I started looking for my dream shoes again. I had a couple of different attempts with women’s shoes that were ok and I felt sufficiently comfortable in them, but they were a compromise. I tried a pricey pair of Frye boots that looked online as if they might be close enough to work but when they arrived and I tried them on they were not right. Too pointy, the heel just a tiny bit too high. I sent them back and resigned myself to my sensible mom shoes but couldn’t stop hearing, “Oh, how do I feel about my shoes? They make me awkward and plain, How dearly I would love to kick with the fray…”

Then just after Christmas of 2019, I was looking for something on Etsy and lo and behold, someone was selling my shoes. They were a tiny bit too big (a men’s 6 1/2 now being the smallest they make), a little bit too shiny, and they had the cap toe that my second pair had, but they were the actual real Stacy Adams shoe that I wanted, at less than half the price. I was trying hard to not let myself spend the money on them but my husband said I never spend money on myself and I should get them.

They arrived in January of 2020. I wore them to the office a few times but they were on the stiff side and the leather sole on the carpeting coupled with being a bit too big meant I kind of felt comically slippy in them. I was determined to break them in but not really sure how to go about it. When the pandemic arrived and shut everything down, I put them away and didn’t really think about it for a year and a half. I wore almost no shoes at all during the 18 months I worked from home. I was either in slippers or flip-flops around the house and sneakers if I went out for a walk or the infrequent forays to the store. Once we were ordered back to the office in the fall of 2021, the other shoes I used to wear all the time to work had become so uncomfortable I could barely walk in them. It was time for my old man shoes to come back out.

While I would prefer to be working from home full-time, on the days I have to go to the office I lace up my shoes and look down at my feet and it gives me the little boost I need to get out the door. The snug fit around my ankles shoring me up both physically and emotionally. I see them and I see the memories of my old shoes and all the places and things I did in them. I feel like I have my armor suited up for the day, my trusty shoes ready for anything. I may be a middle-aged mom at a desk job but you can look at my shoes and know that’s not the whole story.

Its the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

R.E.M. – It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine) – Providence, RI, 10/19/1987

I posted this song back in November, when we had an earthquake on the morning after Pennsylvania put Joe Biden over the top. I had really wanted to wait to post it until today, once we were sure we had actually rid ourselves of the Orange Menace, but how can you overlook the rare occurrence of an earthquake in New England?

In that post, I mentioned that I had a live recording from the best show I’ve ever seen, R.E.M. at the Providence Performing Arts Center, on the night of the stock market crash, October 19, 1987. I picked up the bootleg cassettes a year or two later at a record store in New Haven. This morning, I fired up that USB tape player I got for my birthday and transferred it over to SoundCloud. I think the intro to the song is especially relevant today, please give it a listen.

I am so relieved that today went off without a hitch. I am so glad we have a woman vice president. I am so thrilled that Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, killed the Keystone XL pipeline, revoked the Muslim travel ban, and on and on. In the Oval Office, he put up a big portrait of FDR and a bust of Cesar Chavez. His cabinet appointments are diverse and inclusive, and science and experts are welcome once again. That deserves a standing ovation.

 

Disturbance at the Heron House

R.E.M. – Disturbance at the Heron House

Today should have been a celebration of Georgia electing two Democrats to the Senate, and a final formality of pronouncing a Democrat as the next president. Instead we had GOP Senators and Representatives making treasonous statements, and a deranged narcissist unleashing his rabid base of lunatic QAnon radicals on the Capitol.

“…The followers of chaos, out of control…”

I wonder if any of those Republican senators and representatives, who had to shelter in place today from armed white supremacists that had stormed the Capitol, ever stopped to think to themselves, huh, this must be what children feel like when they’re in lockdown at school. Except, you know, those are children and not full-grown ass-lickers that created and enabled the conspiracy-theory, crazed, cult members running around DC in mountain man militia outfits while Capitol police just moved the barriers aside and let them in.

Why are people surprised? I’m more surprised that it took this long for this to happen. Since NaBloPoMo falls in November and I’ve been doing it for many years now, I can go back and see that since Trump was just a candidate for the Republican nomination, I have feared something like this would happen. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back for being right, I truly would have been happy to have been wrong about Twitler and his supporters, and the GOP, but as an explanation for why I’m not shocked and why I’m not posting things about the unbelievable events in DC. It’s totally believable. They lied and misled and winked and fanned the flames and never once worried that this would somehow backfire. Meanwhile peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors were tear gassed, hit with rubber bullets and worse, indigenous people trying to stop an oil pipeline on their own land were blasted with fire hoses in freezing temperatures.

“…try to tell us something we don’t know…”

I’m not hopeful that we’ll see any meaningful accountability for this, not amongst members of the GOP or even those with their faces completely visible, caught on multiple cameras parading through the Capitol with Confederate flags, stealing things from congressional offices, breaking multiple laws. They should ALL be arrested and tried for sedition. This is a coup.

No Time for Love Like Now

Michael Stipe & Big Red Machine – No Time for Love Like Now

When this song came out back in the spring, there were a couple of different performances, varying only slightly by where did Michael seem to be? What was he wearing? Glasses or no glasses? There were interviews where he said, yes, it fits this moment really well but I actually wrote it back in the fall before we had an inkling of the pandemic to come.

The couple of songs he had released prior to this one didn’t really do it for me. I listened/watched the videos, but they weren’t going to be songs I put in my regular rotation. No Time for Love Like Now was different. I’m sure being cooped up in our houses, working from home, doing school from home, afraid to go anywhere, definitely contributed to my feelings about it. Here was Michael, just Michael, singing directly to me. Like a private little concert from his home to my living room. In the middle of a pandemic, in lockdown, in the midst of political turmoil, he was reaching out with a song that felt like a steady hand. Calm reassurance. And yet, at the same time, the power to completely destroy me. We were so fragile. I was trying so hard to hold it together, be strong for the kids and try not to let the worry show (I don’t think I succeeded well at that at all, btw). When his voice has that particular Michaelness about it, which not all the songs do, he still has the ability to just cut right to the very center of my being, exposing all those things I normally keep buried deep beneath the surface.

So now it’s November. We’re heading into winter, which you all know is my hardest season in the best of circumstances. Though we know more about the virus now, it’s still just as random who suffers greatly from it, who dies, and who doesn’t even know they have it. My worry about the pandemic is less panicky but my concerns about our ability to get through this winter, in round two (or whatever number it is) of COVID-19, are weighing on me. I don’t want a repeat of those first couple months from the spring. Everyone is weary after nearly 9 months of just holding on and nerves are frayed, tempers are short. I think this song will be even more important to me for the next few months than it was when it first came out.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

R.E.M. – It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Oh. My. GOD. You guys. I didn’t want to be cheesy, or premature, in playing this song, but there was a LITERAL FUCKING EARTHQUAKE AT MY HOUSE THIS MORNING!!!!!!!

AN. EARTHQUAKE. Epicenter in southeastern Massachusetts. 4.0 on the Richter scale.

I am sorry, but I can NOT get over that. It was loud and rumbly, like a truck dropped a dumpster right outside our house, lasting a few seconds. It’s not like I live in California and can just overlook the symbolism here because this kind of thing happens every day. An earthquake at a place called Bliss Corner. I mean get the fuck out of here!!! There is some karma coming and I am here for it!!

I can’t wait. A woman whose parents were immigrants from India and Jamaica is going to be the Vice President after the virulently racist administration we’ve had to endure these past four years. What a giant slap in the face to Stephen Miller and all the other ghouls infecting the White House. I can’t wait to see the string of scientists and experts that are allowed to flood back into our government. A First Lady who is an educator with a PhD (and a master’s from my alma mater – we were there at the same time!). Kick that fucking Betsy DeVos to the curb, Jill! I can’t wait to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, to undo everything Cheeto has done by executive order or departmental guidelines. To return to treating our allies like allies. I read that they rang the bells in Paris and had fireworks in London (handy leftovers from Guy Fawkes Day). The bully is on his way out and the world is relieved.

It is the end of the world as we know it, and I really do feel fine.

The best version of this song is from the show I went to in Providence, RI (where they most definitely felt the earthquake today) on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, and no one can ever change my mind. I got a usb cassette player for my birthday so I can digitize my bootlegs and had intended to do that before I would post this song but was pre-empted by an actual earthquake and my need to post this song immediately!

Feeling Gravitys Pull

R.E.M. – Feeling Gravitys Pull

It is Michael Stipe’s birthday so I figured that was a good reason to finally write this post I’ve been mulling over for more than a month now. That I waited until nearly midnight just goes to show that these things are sometimes hard for me to actually commit to writing. It’s so much easier when it stays up in my head, where I know what I mean and don’t have to try to lay it bare.

Just after Thanksgiving, a friend from Instagram posted a very intriguing picture. Actually, the picture would have meant nothing to me but the caption was, “Michael Shannon and friends perform Fables of the Reconstruction.” Um, what? So many questions. 1) Who is Michael Shannon? 2) Why? 3) Why Fables? As opposed to, say, any of the other I.R.S. albums? 4) Had I known about it, and had I been able to go (no on both counts) would I have? The jury is out.

I have since looked up who Michael Shannon is but that did not answer anything for me. I also looked up the event itself and learned that not only was this happening, but the stage show was accompanied by live drawings of the songs projected behind the performers as they played them. I asked my Instagram friend what the drawings were like and she said she couldn’t see them from her angle. But then the artist himself commented with a link to his Instagram with the drawing(s)! Please go check it out.

So then I was really torn in an after-the-fact dilemma of would I have had the guts to go. I really loved the drawings and the idea of witnessing this illustration on the fly of my favorite album would have been really cool. But other people performing the songs from my favorite album of all time? I’m not sure. A number of years ago A.V. Undercover had “Driver 8” on the docket and it was the last song left in that season, meaning no one else dared to cover it and The Walkmen were reluctantly tasked with it. I didn’t make it through watching the whole video. It’s not their fault, really. I’ve often debated with myself if I were in a band and presented with the A.V. Undercover challenge and an R.E.M. song were on the list, would I say we should do it because I wouldn’t want anyone else to, or avoid it for fear of not doing it justice. I’m not sure why Michael Shannon and Friends picked Fables, unless it’s their favorite too and they are not similarly plagued by these thoughts, but I feel like some of the songs would be really hard to do. To be sure, “Driver 8” and “Maps and Legends” along with most of Another Side (as opposed to A Side) could be pretty straight forward. But where would you even start to try and cover “Feeling Gravitys Pull” or “Life and How to Live It” – songs that, to me, are so endowed by their creators with an other-worldly quality that it’s simply not possible for mere mortals to touch them.

A few weeks later, a different Instagram friend, who is in a band out in San Francisco, posted a video snippet of them at a party doing a little preview of their project to perform Fables. It was just a couple of acoustic guitars and a guy singing “Driver 8” in a living room. Didn’t I sit around with my friends in high school playing guitars and singing songs by bands we liked? Of course. My friend Tom and his band even did “Can’t Get There From Here” at a house party the summer after my freshman year of college. That seemed fine. But that was also before I ever saw R.E.M. myself. [And here I have to just interrupt this story to say that, OMG, it happened again at the office Christmas lunch that people started talking about concerts and someone asked what was the best concert you’ve ever been to and I had to just say, “we already covered this” and shut that conversation down.] It is just that no one, ever, will be able to do what Michael Stipe does with these songs. I know that they aren’t trying to do what he does. I’ll bet that at 59, even Michael can’t just summon that up on demand. After all, isn’t that why they disbanded? I guess I am just having a hard time understanding what would make people take the leap from, hey let’s hang out singing our favorite songs off of Fables, to let’s perform the whole album in a club in front of people.

Clearly, as was already known, I have issues with R.E.M. and me and being out in public. It wasn’t always this way. In college I proudly wore my pink R.E.M. bicycle shirt all the time. I spent over a year searching for shoes just like the ones Michael is wearing in this video (close-up at 1:50) and then wore them every day because “when you meet a stranger, look at his shoes.” Maybe it’s because I spent so much of my 20s trying to emulate Michael and falling woefully short that I find this so perplexing. Maybe people who are not trying so hard to be something they can never be are able to just have some fun with songs they love.

In the end, I wasn’t there, I won’t be there, and in these dark times, I feel like creative people should bring whatever light to the world they can. And I really like those illustrations.

Crazy (live)

R.E.M. – Crazy (live cover of a Pylon song)

A friend of mine recently posted about being taken to a concert by her parents when she was very young, a toddler really, and how you don’t see that happen these days. The very next day she saw Robyn Hitchcock at a small venue where a couple had brought their two young children under four to the show. It didn’t go well.

This whole situation reminded me of this one time at work a few years ago, when we had an office lunch outside in the summer, and the conversation turned to concerts we’d been to. A younger guy in our department, he was maybe 30 at the time, mentioned that he had always felt kind of cheated because he’d never been able to see some of his favorite bands when they were still touring. For example, he lamented that his mother could have brought him along to see R.E.M. play when he was a toddler. The very idea horrified me. I didn’t even like having frat boys at R.E.M. shows because of their lack of maturity, I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted actual pre-schoolers in attendance. Hoping to end that line of thought I said that as a mom I so enjoy going out on my own, to have a break from the kids, and would never want to bring them along because I wanted to enjoy myself and not be worried about my kid.¹

But the nightmare didn’t end there. Somehow the subject changed to what was the best concert you’ve ever seen. I can’t remember what most people answered because I was gripped with panic. What was I supposed to say? My best concerts are the best I’ve seen because of how they left me destroyed and exhilarated at the same time. I couldn’t reveal anything like that to co-workers. Of course I wouldn’t have to say that but I was afraid that even just naming the show would betray a level of privacy that I would then never be able to regain. I debated lying, just pick some show that everyone would nod about and move on to the next person, but I worried that my body language would give me away. I am sure I am the only person at the table who was overthinking this thing to death. Probably because of the young co-worker’s earlier mention of having been left at home with a babysitter instead of at an R.E.M. show, I was really sweating it. If I said the best show I’d seen was R.E.M. at a 3,000-person, beautiful old theater in Providence, Black Monday 1987, would he press me for details?² There in front of everyone? I would probably have suddenly been a much cooler person in his estimation but I have spent decades obfuscating my devotions and this hardly seemed like the opportune moment to trash it all.

Just as it was nearly my turn to have to come up with something, our boss arrived and the question was to put to her. She was in her mid- to late-sixties and she answered without hesitation, “The Beatles!” I immediately declared that no one could top that so we should all just stop trying. Crisis averted.

But it bothered me for days afterward that I had been so tormented about it. I still don’t know what I would have answered. Why should it be so difficult for me to say what my best concert experience was? I toyed with the idea of telling him separately later but ultimately decided against it. I am still plagued by the fear that this knowledge in the wrong hands would be my undoing. Whether through cluelessness or maliciousness, I never wanted anyone to be able to unmask me. If people don’t know what your buttons are, they can’t push them.

When your favorite concerts are life-altering events, intensely personal defining moments, giving that away is too hard.

1. I would take my daughter with me to a show if she showed any interest but it’s only been in the last two years or so that I would have felt comfortable doing so.

2. Black Monday, October 19, 1987, the largest single-day crash in stock market history. Also, now a Showtime series. Something tells me they don’t include the awesome R.E.M. concert that night in the series.

P.S. Coincidentally, today (11/18) marks the 10th anniversary of the last R.E.M. show ever. My own last R.E.M. show was, holy shit, more than 29 years ago.

P.P.S. While I have bootlegs (tapes) of a number of the shows I went to, so far this is the only video I’ve found from an R.E.M. show I was at. Not the last, but close to it. Even sharing this video here is hard for me and I’m only doing it because it’s on YouTube and there’s nothing preventing you from finding it on your own. Dodgy quality but what do you expect for 29-year-old video filmed on a smuggled-in video camera?