R.E.M. had produced two records at the time of this 1983 letter.
Mickey Mouse stamped in black ink on the envelope always seemed incongruous to me.
Mickey struck me as perfectly happy working for the man (Walt Disney), and certainly not worthy of a spot on perhaps the first mailing in the long, successful and influential history of my all-time favorite band, R.E.M.
If I were going to align the Athens, Ga.-based group with any cartoon character, I’d go with Bugs Bunny: clever and cool, sometimes irreverent, fiercely independent. Lead singer Michael Stipe allowed that the “wascally wabbit” was the reason why the band ultimately signed a record deal with Warner Bros.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. This is about the letter inside that envelope, which was postmarked Oct. 28, 1983, and arrived in response to something I had written to the band. No doubt I gushed my admiration for R.E.M., which I had discovered on radio station WTOS in summer 1983, before my junior year of high school in Lisbon, Maine.
This letter is my touchstone to R.E.M.’s promise 30 years ago and its rich legacy. In a single page, it taught me what a rock band could represent and how I could be a better rock fan. It turned me into a lifelong pursuer of great music.
The document itself is nothing to look at: typewritten with erratic margins and hand-written additions. It was a reproduction except for a unique line handwritten at the bottom in blue ink: “We came to Maine — what a state! Fan club out soon, keep in touch.”
‘There is no lyric sheet. Please make up your own words’
‘The band reads every letter’
I’ve always wondered who wrote the letter, assuming it wasn’t as collaborative a process as writing music was for a band that attributed all of its compositions to “Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe,” the surnames of its members.
I suspect it was Stipe, the primary lyricist and charismatic leader. You can hear his typewriter clacking at the beginning of the song “Exhuming McCarthy.” I once asked David Bell, R.E.M.’s fan club director, whose penmanship was on the letter.
“Some of the handwriting on the letter definitely looks like Michael’s,” he wrote back to me in 2006. “The envelope looks a little bit like his writing. I would be hard-pressed to say for certain.”
This May, I met R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills in Harrisburg, where he performed with The Baseball Project at the Stage on Herr. I showed him a picture of the letter on my phone. He thought the letter was cool but said he didn’t know whose handwriting it was. He said that all of the band members answered mail in those days.
“The idea of having a memiographed [stet] ‘fact sheet’ or reply letter for the letters we receive is not very palatable,” the letter began. “Unfortunately there are still only the six of us [the performers plus their manager and attorney] and with the bulk of mail as of late it has become a necessary evil.
“Please rest assured that the band reads every letter sent us; it is just difficult to send personal replies as were [stet] on the road or writing songs or recuperating from both.”
On those early records, Stipe mumbled his words, which on top of his obscure lyrics made R.E.M. songs largely indecipherable. Hence, “catapult” could be misconstrued, as someone in my college dorm did, as “can of fruit.”
Fans, myself included, puzzled over the words and their meanings. In those days, however, R.E.M. played coy, saying in the letter: “There is no lyric sheet. Please make up your own words.”
R.E.M. played its first show in April 1980, toured extensively and had produced an EP (“Chronic Town”) and LP (“Murmur”) by the time of the letter. Big-time success was still a number of years away and certainly not guaranteed, especially for a group that made a point of operating on its own terms.
‘Worth looking into’
Yet evident in the letter are the integrity and generosity of spirit that would help to define the totality of the band’s existence.
Note the attention to detail with regard to T-shirts, written here as it is in the letter: “They’re kind of steep (10 or 11$) but of best quality-no 4color lithos or 50/50polyester. all cotton.” (Remember when $10 for a T-shirt seemed like a lot?)
A large part of the letter is devoted to “other bands worth looking into,” which was an incredible gift in the days before Spotify did the heavy lifting by handing “related artists” to you.
No band in the 1980s did more to promote alternative music than R.E.M., whether it was to mention another act in a fan letter, singing on or producing other bands’ records, or welcoming other groups as opening acts. The band Concrete Blonde even owes its name to Stipe.
Besides following R.E.M. ardently – joining the fan club, which remained just $10 per year through the band’s dissolution in 2011 – I did as suggested and became a fan of many of the recommended bands: Rain Parade, The Replacements, Husker Du, Pylon, Dream Syndicate.
And that started me on a path I still pursue, albeit less ardently than in my teens and 20s but no less hopefully: to discover new bands whose music and ethos I admire and respect.
“It is difficult to write something like this without coming across as either heavy-handed and factual, or chatty and condescending,” the typewritten part of the letter concluded. “Hopefully we’ve succeeded in making this neither. Yours very sincerely, R.E.M.”
