You Are The Everything: R.E.M.’s Green at 35

Looking back on the Athens, GA band’s transitional classic

November 7, 2023November 7, 2023 Ron Hart 0 Comments 1988, 35th Anniversary, Bill Berry, Green, Keith LeBlanc, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck, Pop Song 89, R.E.M., Scott Litt, Stand!, World Leader Pretend, You Are The Everything

It was 35 years ago today when R.E.M. released their seminal sixth LP Green after making the jump from IRS Records to Warner Bros. Records.

“We discovered a whole new songwriting technique,” drummer Bill Berry said around the time of the album’s original release on November 7, 1988 (according to The Atlantic). “Grab an instrument you don’t know how to play and fool around on it till it sounds right.”

So like Yo La Tengo and The Beta Band have done onstage during their careers, Berry, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills began experimenting with different instruments to see what would emerge from the sonic ether. “You Are The Everything” found Buck playing mandolin while Mills played accordion. Berry played bass on the song as well, along with two others: “The Wrong Child” and “Hairshirt.” All three of these tunes would become the template for the distinctive, more acoustically driven style the band would explore on the next two albums they’d release on Warner Bros., 1991’s Out of Time and 1992’s Automatic for the People, as the band saw the major label jump to be an ample opportunity to move beyond the college radio jangle of their earlier work.

VIDEO: R.E.M. “Get Up”

But that’s not to say Green, the second R.E.M. album produced by Scott Litt, doesn’t rock. On the contrary, the album contains some of the most electrifying work in their catalog, kicking off with the one-two punch of the LP’s third and fourth singles “Pop Song 89” and “Get Up,” a song singer Michael Stipe wrote as a reaction to Mills’ habit of sleeping late. Green’s second single, “Stand,” was an irresistible slab of abstract bubblegum that would catapult them back into the Billboard Top 10 as well as the top of the magazine’s Mainstream and Modern Rock charts.

VIDEO: R.E.M. “Stand”

Yet it was the album’s first single, “Orange Crush,” that would be the defining moment on Green. As Hollywood caught Vietnam Fever with a succession of Oscar-baiting films focusing on the failed American war, R.E.M. counterbalanced the celluloid onslaught with a castigation of the American government’s use of Agent Orange during the war set to the rhythm of an undeniable pop hook. It is the Athens band’s “Bullet The Blue Sky.”

“Like most of our stuff it’s definitely an anti-war song, but it’s a subtle one,” Mills told Louder Sound in 2018. “There was no real sign that it was a big protest song, so most people listened to it and didn’t realise. It’s most directly related to the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange in the deforestation of Vietnam and the horrible effect it had on everyone, from soldiers to civilians. It was just a terrible poison that was so widely used it caused a lot of pain and misery. Yes, there was some irony in the sweet deliciousness of the pop drink versus the horrible effects of this chemical. The ironic juxtaposition of those two terms was no accident.”

VIDEO: R.E.M. “Orange Crush”

“World Leader Pretend” is another pivotal commentary punctuating Green’s songbook, as Stipe utilizes military terms to illustrate one’s war within themselves, as stirring and effective a dissertation on the idea of Man vs. Himself as there’s ever been in American pop.

“Turn You Inside-Out” is no doubt the loudest track on Green, featuring Sugar Hill Records house drummer Keith LeBlanc on percussion and a guitar riff that’s essentially an inverted reworking of “Finest Worksong” off their 1987 LP Document. “I Remember California,” meanwhile, is one of R.E.M.’s most underrated tunes, the penultimate track on Green that plays out like a Douglas Sirk fever dream before sending us off with a ray of hope in the album’s untitled closing number, which features Buck on drums.

R.E.M. Green World Tour 1989 poster (Image: eBay)

“This song is here to keep you strong,” Mills intones as Stipe pleads to “hold her, and keep him strong, while I’m away from here.”

It remains one of the best songs in the group’s canon to feature Stipe and Mills sharing lead vocal duties, playing against one another like Sandy Denny and Robert Plant do during “The Battle of Evermore.”

Green might not be everyone’s choice when someone comes up to you and asks you what’s your favorite album by R.E.M., but it should be. This is the record that captured Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Bill Berry in an inspired state of transition from American modern rockers to global pop superstars.

And it’s got some damn good songs on it to boot.