R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People was released fifteen years ago today, October 6, 1992.
Sometime in between the release of Out of Time in March of 1991 and the fall of 1992, I had become a massive R.E.M. fan, and Automatic was the first album of theirs that I was fully fanatical about and whose release I eagerly awaited.
I had received my first issue of the R.E.M. Fanclub newsletter in September, with news about the new album, information on how to register to vote, and some updates about work bandmembers had done with Natalie Merchant, Sam Phillips, and Neneh Cherry. Ah, 1992.
Scott had left for college the previous fall, and I was now driving myself to school in the Jetta. It was the fall of my senior year, and that Tuesday, I left school at lunch for the only time I can remember (?!) and drove to Metro Music and Books (I’m pretty sure it was Metro by this point, and no longer Robber Joe’s Records and Tapes, though I can’t swear by it) on Benson to buy the CD at lunch. That luminescent yellow jewel case sure was something. I eventually bought the wooden box with the sliding lid and the vellum photos, as well, to augment my ever-growing collection of R.E.M. promos and bootlegs, or “Live and Rare” discs, as they called them down the road at Mammoth.
Automatic is one of those albums that I’ve listened to often enough for long enough that I just know it, inside and out, with each song leading into the next, seamlessly. It was certainly my favorite album of all time for a few years, only to be superseded by work from Radiohead, or Wilco, or the reality that I was at that point too old to have a favorite album, or at least too busy to spend hours at my desk, listening to R.E.M. on my old Sony headphones and absorbing the music like I used to.
Other interesting facts:
My oboist friend Sloan and I were happy to add “Nightswimming” to the very short list of pop songs we knew of that featured the oboe: Tanita Tikaram’s “Twist in My Sobriety” was the only other one we’d come up with. If I remember correctly, she requested that song on KGOT so often that they gave her the CD single.
“The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” remains one of the very few songs to which I know all of the words, for some reason.
I saw the video for “Drive” on network TV at some point, either around the release of the album or around the presidential election the next month, and I’m pretty sure it was the first R.E.M. video I ever saw on TV, having grown up without cable. I don’t even know if I’ve seen the video since, but I remember a strange, black and white mosh pit, and I remember wanting to like it more than I actually did.
I finally saw R.E.M. at Great Woods with George on the Monster Tour in the summer of 1995. Many years later, I found out that Aimee was also at that concert. I bought a shirt, and the postmark on a postcard on the shirt happened to be the exact date of the concert, June 16, 1995. At least I believed it was a coincidence; who knows…
I eventually met half (or two-thirds, at that point) of the band, in the spring of 2003, at SXSW in Austin. I sat back to back in a neighboring booth with Mike Mills as we ate breakfast at Las Manitas; it was an odd sensation, hearing that familiar harmony voice talking about eggs a few feet from my head.
Thanks to Aimee for pointing out the anniversary to me through the Drive XV covers project.
