40 Years Ago: R.E.M.’s Reckoning
How the new college-radio darlings inched toward the mainstream on their own terms — and why I listened every day for an entire semester.
The thing is, you never really know at the time which artists and which albums are going to be remembered decades later. In the spring of 1984, I knew that Aztec Camera, The Smiths, and Prefab Sprout were my three favorite new bands. But I had no idea that two would (here in the states, at least) remain cult bands that only the likes of me have ever heard of, and the other would become one of the most influential bands of the 1980s.
Similarly, based on the brand-new Sparkle in the Rain and its immediate predecessor New Gold Dream, I was absolutely positive in the spring of 1984 that Simple Minds were going to remain a hugely important band for me. Who knew that after one fluke American hit from a John Hughes movie, they were gonna spend the rest of their career trying to be a Scottish mashup of the Waterboys and Bruce Springsteen?
All of this is to say that as much as I’d loved R.E.M.’s Murmur in 1983, at the time it felt like there were basically three ways they could go. They could release another album that was more of the same and stay on the college radio circuit. They could…
