I thought they were already broken up!

Me too!

Salon piece with musicians remembering REM.

Salon piece with musicians remembering REM.

Nice. It's hard to overstate how important they were. Lots of bands were poking around the potsherds of the late sixties and trying to glue the Byrds and Velvet Underground together but they were the ones who pulled off that very tricky splice using lots of Big Star for glue.

Obviously their sound was incredibly influential (bands as diverse as Pavement and The Divine Comedy started as straight up imitators), but as the tributes note they were even more important as an example of How To Do It Right. They just gave back so much.

I first saw them at the 930 Club in DC in the spring of '83 before Murmur had even come out and I was so blown away. They already had so many great songs and such a fantastic sound and were a great live band. I saw them four times and I still remember each gig vividly and who opened for them: Let's Active, Husker Du, The Neats (I think Jon was at that show, at MIT) and the dBs (in Providence).

I was indeed at the MIT show. The very first time REM came to Boston (a couple of years before my time), everyone told them "You sound like the Neats!" Which was true, but unlike the Neats, they had a record label who knew how to promote them and they stayed off the hard drugs.

REM's commitment to the music scene in Athens is huge and ongoing, as is their commitment to the community as a whole. They do a huge amount of charity funding, for example. They help sponsor music programs in the public schools, our elementary school's 5K run, tiny little things probably from their financial perspective, but it adds up to a lot. It's from that perspective that people in Athens are stunned at the news, not even really the music piece at this point.

I remember the first time I listened to Bleach, I was struck by how Nirvana sounded like a harder REM.

A well-considered list of hidden gems in the REM catalog.

Ooh, Find the River is probably my favorite REM song. Something about the chords and the - I don't even have the musical words to describe it - just gets me. For some reason it reminds me of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, which gets me the same way.

Ooh, Find the River is probably my favorite REM song.

It is playing on my iTunes right now.

Not quite coincidental since I just played the whole R.E.M. playlist, but statistically unlikely considering how much I have on my computer.

It is a gorgeous song.

From an AVClub comment on fav REM:

Chronic Town. A dispatch from some alternate universe where the gothic South, the artier wing of the CBGBs crowd, and chiming folk rock all blur together. I want to live there.

Yeah.

Also, somebody noted, "Turns out I wasn't the only kid riding around in circles on his bike, listening to "Fall on Me" on his Walkman."

So Brian Krakowesque.

I think I need to go back to New Adventures in Hi-Fi and Monster.