R.E.M.’s Death Murmurs
When Eric Clapton lost a son in a freak high-rise fall, he was so broken up he hired a songwriter to help him write a tune about it. He sold the resulting “Tears in Heaven” as sound track fodder for a dumb, exploitative movie about drugs (Rush). A year later he inserted it into his Unplugged album, which used an eight-piece band to do low-key “acoustic” renditions of old blues numbers and his own “Layla.” All of this–the heartbroken interviews about his son, the two separate “Tears in Heaven” vids, the MTV show, the emetic “Layla”–combined for a quadruple-platinum album (it’s still in the top five) and a half dozen Grammys for a historic sweep.
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Contrast this circus with R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, an explicit and mournful song cycle on death. Michael Stipe, who on the band’s first few albums displayed a notoriously self-conscious unintelligibility, is now wrenchingly decipherable. Revealed on the new record are a set of naked funereal essays united by a spare, almost laconic lyrical artistry and moving, ragged song settings courtesy of the brilliant arrangers and musicians in the rest of the band. “Sweetness Follows” is about how mourning sometimes manufactures a unity that was lacking in life (“Yeah, we were all together / Lost in our little lives”), “Try Not to Breathe” refuses to rage against the dying of the light, “Man on the Moon” finds heaven populated with forgotten 70s rock bands and board games, and “Find the River” is a deathbed farewell. Anchoring it all is “Nightswimming,” which pits memory against fame, love against regret. It includes what is perhaps Stipe’s most distinguished vocal track, which I think is saying something, and a lovely piano part played, ironically enough, on, the same instrument that produced the coda in the original “Layla.”
Bitsville
Last year I wrote an article about Scott Burns, who with director Mark Fenske had conceived Van Halen’s “Right Now” video, which went on to win the big prize on the MTV video awards. The piece comprises about 50 short bits of film, each tied to a piece of text: “Right Now Is Not the Fault of the Japanese” or “Right Now Youth Is King.” As I noted at the time, it attempted and accomplished the Herculean task of making Van Halen look smart. Now it’s a Pepsi commercial, and Van Halen looks dumb again….Another update: Last week I noted a Trib story on cable restructuring that wildly plugged the Tribune Company’s new cable channel, CLTV. I’m grateful to the reader who passed along a February 7 business piece on high-definition TV by Jon Van, which included- reference to another Trib-owned institution: “Thus the same baseball game seen on channel 9 on a regular TV set might also be seen in high clarity on a wider screen on an HDTV set tuned to channel 47.”…Social notes from all over: Former Sun-Times music free-lancer Michael Corcoran, now a writer on country ensconced at the Dallas Morning News, married art dealer Victoria Gaumer February 13, ten days after their first date. The impulsive but talented Corcoran, who slipped through the Sun-Times’s fingers last year, regularly riles Dallasites with his disrespectful treatment of C and W sacred cows and pulls stunts like reviewing an Ice-T concert under his “country music critic” byline. Nevertheless the paper seems to love him: It sent him to LA for a week to write a Super Bowl diary in January and just nominated him for a Pulitzer. The happy couple will attend SXSW and then honeymoon in Rome.
