Maps & Legends: The Story of R.E.M

Maps & Legends: The Story of R.E.M.
John Hunter
706 Pages
ISBN: #979-8987103708
Nottingham Press
2023

Because the phrase Maps & Legends so accurately reflects John Hunter's narrative, it is the ideal main title for depiction of The Story of R.E.M.. The two words in fact accurately mirror his bookending of the iconic band's history: the first word represents an exploration of the four bandmembers' formative years, while the second is an ever-so-meticulous inspection of the group's devolution later on in its career. In addition, while the truncated but graphic accounts of the multiple activities to which the four individuals' turned their attention(s) after the final split of the group might seem an afterthought, that content imbues the tome with a suitable air of finality.

The early chapters of the twenty-five total unfold like the focused introductions of main characters in a well-wrought piece of cinema. Hunter explains just enough in "Begin The Begin" and "Headfull of Rain" to aid the reader in securing a grasp on the differing personalities involved. Yet he leaves just enough unspoken to pique the curiosity about how four such diverse souls as guitarist Peter Buck, vocalist/lyricist Michael Stipe, bassist/ vocalist Mike Mills and drummer/vocalist Bill Berry forged such an unusual creative and personal alliance in the Eighties and Nineties.

Those first seventy-some pages function as a more than adequate introduction to the main content of Maps & Legends. The four-hundred page body of the book is only twice the length of John Hunter's acknowledgements and annotation of sources, but his attention to detail is nonetheless laudable: his descriptions of the earliest underground movements around Athens, Georgia vividly evokes the inherently independent atmosphere of the community at large.

In telling this particular tale, with all its various and sundry sub-themes, the author nevertheless fails to tie R.E.M.'s subsequent activism/idealism to the post-hippie paradigm shift of which they were a part. Yet in describing the rewards of success later on, Hunter is pointed in delineating how the four men's individual and collective self-indulgence(s) contradict their purported idealism.

Past the half-way point of Maps and Legends, it occurs that the author may inadvertently reveal some other prejudices. Scathing as are his asides about the Grateful Dead in general and Jerry Garcia in particular, Hunter's later observations about jam bands are equally eviscerating. There is no doubt, however, that the detail-oriented resident of Oxford, Mississippi is that rarest of band devotees, one so tenacious in his loyalty as to be unrelenting in his objectivity regarding his subject.

Still, as John Hunter describes in near-excruciating detail the hurtful fracture that ensued upon the departure of drummer/songwriter Bill Berry, his accounts of the remaining members' difficulty in communicating sans that man's input is only slightly less painful than lurid details of lifestyles led by Stipe, Buck and Mills in the following phases of R.E.M.'s existence. For better or worse, while the writer is mostly astute in his extrapolation of those weaknesses from the personality traits he elucidates early in the book, he wisely refrains from over-elaborate on the distinctions between their private lives as they compare to their collective public persona.

On the other hand, and to his great credit, Hunter seamlessly interweaves his analyses of the group's music, both on stage and in the studio, with the fragmentation of the four men's personal relationships. In fact, much as he diligently describes how the foursome's bond palpably tightens in writing and recording Life's Rich Pageant (I.R.S., 1986) and Document (I.R.S., 1987), his chronicles devoted to the gestation of later works like Monster (Warner Bros., 1994) and New Adventures in Hi-Fi (Warner Bros., 1996), capture halting sequences of events that not only reflect an inexorable dissolution of the foursome's creative alliances, but also their human connections.

In that respect, and with the aforementioned heretofore novel passages, this book of John Hunter's simultaneously complements and distinguishes itself from Robert Dean Lurie's Begin The Begin: R.E.M.'s Early Years (Verse Chorus, 2019) (read review). If the latter seemed alternately saddened and gladdened by the sign of success symbolized by the quartet's contract with the Warner Brothers label (the point at which his book ends), so does the former come across somewhat bitter and disillusioned by what he discovered about his object of fascination through his voluminous research.

Perhaps as a direct result of his findings, the tone of Hunter's writing becomes markedly more formal around the point he delineates the particulars of that seismic move from the indie label I.R.S. to the aforementioned corporate conglomerate. And notwithstanding the otherwise healthy distance he maintains over the course of Maps and Legends, his detachment may well have manifested itself in this altogether abrupt ending: it's almost as if the writer/researcher all of a sudden turned utterly fatigued with his task.

To be fair, given the herculean effort required (and fully annotated) to assemble his narrative, the author had full right to succumb to such psychic fatigue. After all, as apocryphal as so many of the tales may appear over the course of The Story of R.E.M., they ultimately constitute reaffirmation of a plethora of archetypes rooted in artistic ambition, fame and celebrity. By the time those convoluted conclusions solidify via honorable implication in John Hunter's prose, the thought also crystallizes that such parables transcend the many sundry movements within contemporary music culture, afflicting alternative coalitions as deeply as more conventional ones.

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