Artist

R.E.M.

Formed in Athens, Georgia, 1980 15 studio albums 1 dive so far

R.E.M. started behind a record-store counter. Peter Buck worked at Wuxtry in Athens, Georgia; Michael Stipe was a customer, and in 1980 the two of them talked their way into a band over Patti Smith and the Velvet Underground. Mike Mills and Bill Berry, who had played together since high school, completed it. The 1981 debut single “Radio Free Europe” came out on a tiny label in a pressing of a thousand, and that was the whole template for American alternative rock right there: college radio, jangling guitars, words you had to lean in to catch. Murmur followed in 1983. For most of the decade they were the biggest band almost nobody on mainstream radio had heard of, until Out of Time in 1991 broke that wide open.

Then in March 1995, onstage in Lausanne, Berry collapsed from a brain aneurysm. He recovered, but he left in 1997, reluctant to go if it meant ending the band. The other three carried on without him, never filling the drummer’s chair, for fourteen more years. They stopped in 2011, on their own terms.

The song that turned them from a cult into a phenomenon is “Losing My Religion.” Start there.

Worth knowing

In 1996 R.E.M. signed a Warner Bros. deal reported at roughly $80 million, press-called the largest in music history to that point. The next year, founding drummer Bill Berry quit. The three who stayed never replaced him; they carried R.E.M. on as a trio for fourteen more years.