Frogblog • gordonshumway: R.E.M.’s Out of Time was one of...

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R.E.M.’s Out of Time was one of the first CDs I ever bought, dropped onto the Electronics counter at Hills Department store along with Bryan Adams’ Waking Up the Neighbours and Genesis’ I Can’t Dance. Two of them were quickly relegated to the “Things I Wish I’d Never Paid For” pile, along with a number of abstract-patterned silk shirts, a spiral perm and the answers to an English quiz about Lord Byron.¹

The four boys from Athens, though, stayed in my Discman for the rest of the summer and eventually I added to the “R” stack on my CD shelf by signing up for enough Columbia House accounts to get their previous releases for a penny, plus shipping and handling, plus several strongly worded letters that suggested my twelve-year old self was well on her way to learning about collection agencies.

For the next two years (Summer ‘91-Summer ‘93) R.E.M. was my world. I alternated between Out of Time and a friend’s cassette copy of Murmur the night my first for-real boyfriend² dumped me for a girl who had purchased an advance ticket to Puberty. None of the songs were particularly about breakups, but they beat the shit out of Phil Collins singing about dead railroad workers. I was given a week of detention for calling the morning bus driver stupid when he changed the radio station halfway through “Shiny Happy People”.³ I bought Automatic for the People the day I got my first period. Everybody hurts indeed, especially everybody’s intermittently spasming uterus.

This reads a lot like my own REM journey. I found a beer-stained copy* of Murmur at the bottom of my shared gym locker in 1983, and within 1:30 of popping it into my boombox my personality switched from “arrogant kid who thought Pink Floyd and Led Zep were the zenith of Western culture” to “Athens, Georgia obsessed, moody teenager”

I listened to that cassette pretty much non-stop for a full 18 months, with a few short breaks here and there for stuff like Husker Du, The Cure, The Smiths, and whatever else new I discovered on “Night Flight”, the overnight video program that ran on USA Network every Friday and Saturday night. To say I was traumatized when the tape finally broke would be world-class understated commentary - I actually pried the plastic case apart and spliced the thing back together with scotch tape.

I still expect to hear the pause everytime I listen to “Sitting Still”.

*At least I’ve always told myself that the sticky yellowish stain was beer. I still refuse to contemplate any other possibilities.

Source: gordonshumway