If you were coming of age in the ’80s, R.E.M. was a band that you might have gravitated towards. They were four kids living in Athens, Georgia that weren’t the usual brand of rock stars. Their music was band oriented as Peter Buck didn’t spend three minutes every song doing a guitar solo. Singer Michael Stipe sang so that many times you hadn’t a clue what words he was using. The rhythm section of Mike Mills and Bill Berry kept you bouncing when they came to your town. They seemed like the kind of band you’d pal around with after the show. And for a while that was true. During the Fables of the Reconstruction tour, I ended up backstage with them. We even wandered over the after party at The Brewery nightclub to see The Connells. It appears someone else was hanging out at the Brewery around this time. John Hunter was also in Raleigh and seeing other shows. Now he’s written a book about R.E.M. and the times. Maps and Legends: The Story of R.E.M. covers the band from their first indie single to their final major studio album. I’m curious if the book includes snippets from my interview with Mike Mills from my time as a writer at N.C. State’s Technician. I’m also pondering how many times John Hunter and I were at the Brewery for the same shows although that won’t be covered in the book. Here’s the press release from Nottingham Press with all the details:
Maps and Legends: The Story of R.E.M.
by John Hunter
Available August 2nd from Nottingham Press
| Photo by Bob Crisler. R.E.M. performance on September 21, 1982 at the Drumstick in Lincoln, NE. |
| Nottingham Press will release Maps and Legends: The Story of R.E.M. by John Hunter, the most comprehensive biography of R.E.M. yet published. Maps and Legends covers not just the band’s entire career, from Radio Free Europe to Collapse Into Now, but also delves deeply into the childhoods of each of the band members. It tells the story of each of the teenage bands one or more of the members played in before R.E.M. – among them Bad Habits, Shadowfax, the Back Door Band, Gangster, and the Wuoggerz – and concludes with a detailed look at the solo work of Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe. Author John Hunter was born in 1968 in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the age of sixteen, he began to sneak into local clubs such as the Brewery and the Cat’s Cradle, where he saw artists ranging from Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, and the Replacements to the dB’s, Let’s Active, and the Connells. From 1986 to 1991, he studied English at the University of Georgia, during which time he also performed at the 40 Watt Club, Uptown Lounge, and Rockfish Palace. He witnessed firsthand major events in R.E.M.’s career and in the larger Athens music scene during the second half of the 1980s. To research Maps and Legends, Hunter pored through over a thousand original newspaper and magazine articles about R.E.M., and watched and listened to hundreds of video and audio interviews with the band. He also conducted new / original interviews with eyewitness sources and members of the band’s inner circle, ranging from high school classmates, bandmates, and friends of Peter Buck and Michael Stipe, to Hib-Tone Records founder Jonny Hibbert and the band’s catalyst Kathleen O’Brien, to Jeff Walls of Guadalcanal Diary and R.E.M. producer John Keane. Maps and Legends, a whopping 706-page 6” x 9” trade paperback, will be available at select retailers and online outlets on August 2nd. It is also available as an e-book from the Apple store in the following fifteen countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For more details, click HERE. |
