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R.E.M.: Lifes Rich Pageant

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: I.R.S. Records
Released: 1986.07.18
Time:
 38:23
Category: Alternative Rock
Producer(s): Don Gehman
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.remhq.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Begin the Begin (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:28
[2] These Days (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:24
[3] Fall on Me (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 2:50
[4] Cuyahoga (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:19
[5] Hyena (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 2:50
[6] Underneath the Bunker (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 1:25
[7] The Flowers of Guatemala (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:55
[8] I Believe (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:49
[9] What If We Give It Away? (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:33
[10] Just a Touch (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:00
[11] Swan Swan H (B.Perry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 2:42
[12] Superman (M.Bottler/G.Zekley) - 2:52

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bill Berry - Drums, Backing Vocals
Peter Buck - Guitar, Banjo
Mike Mills - Bass Guitar, Piano, Backing Vocals, Lead Vocals on [12]
Michael Stipe - Vocals

Don Gehman - Producer, Mixing
Jim Dineen - Engineer
Rick Fetig - Engineer
Ross Hogarth - Engineer
Stan Katayama - Engineer
Gregg Edward - Mixing
Bob Ludwig - Mastering
Sandra Lee Phipps - Photography
B. Slay - Illustrations
M. Bird - Illustrations
Juanita Rogers - Back Cover Painting
R. O. Scarelli - Packaging

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded in April-May 1986 at the Belmont Mall Studios, Belmont, Indiana, United States. Mixed at the  Can-Am Recorders, Los Angeles, California, United States. Mastered at Masterdisc, New York City, New York, United States.



For their fourth album, R.E.M., who previously bought their sonic murk in bulk, hired John Cougar Mellencamp's producer. "It's a great-sounding record, but I really hated [producer] Don Gehman at the time," lead singer Michael Stipe said years later about being pushed to be less willfully obscure. "It was like throwing a baby into ice-cold water and leaving it there."

If Lucite-clear sound wasn't kind to some of Stipe's lyrics — "I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract" might have been better mumbled, for example — it was a boon to most of them. The political message of "The Flowers of Guatemala" became available to anyone who took the time to listen, and the dense thicket of wordplay in "Begin the Begin" (the title itself was a pun on a Cole Porter song) was even better. Life's Rich Pageant is the sound of R.E.M. stepping out of the corner into the spotlight, discovering that losing their indie-rock religion could make their music stronger.

Pageant was also the album on which bassist Mike Mills made his claim as one of the best backing vocalists in rock, with a plaintive tenor that blends perfectly with Stipe's. For the first time on record, Mills took lead vocals on a song (a cover of the obscure pop gem "Superman," originally by the Clique). Even better was his supporting role on "Fall on Me," the finest song in the R.E.M. canon. A lullaby of modern anxiety, it's flexible enough to serve as a potent metaphor for acid rain, nuclear warfare, satellite surveillance or any other modern phobia you choose. "Ask the sky, ask the sky/Don't fall on me," Stipe sings, his voice interlocking with Mills'. Whatever you fear most, the song says, it's as inevitable as gravity, and the only solace available is the beauty of a melody.

Gavin Edwards - June 18, 2003
RollingStone.com



If R.E.M.'s third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, was an insular, heady record steeped in the folklore and archetypes of the American South, its follow-up, Life's Rich Pageant, represented the band's first foray into broad accessibility. That isn't to say the album lacks Michael Stipe's convoluted, rambling stream-of-consciousness lyrics or that R.E.M. had suddenly turned into the MOR act they would devolve into during the early aughts. But it's the first of the band's albums to showcase a couple of pop crossover singles, and it represents the beginning of Stipe's maturation into a true rock frontman and R.E.M.'s most explicitly political period. To that end, Life's Rich Pageant is the record that truly laid the groundwork for R.E.M. to become one of the biggest rock acts in the world.

Albums are most often described as "transitional" when critics can't think of a more diplomatic way to say that the effort lacks direction or that its stylistic departures don't work; such albums usually mark the start of an act's rapid descent into irrelevance. But Life's Rich Pageant, in its exquisitely remastered 25th Anniversary Edition, stands both as a powerful album on its own merits and as a nearly seamless transition piece between R.E.M.'s formative period and their commercial dominance. The ragged, frenetic energy of R.E.M.'s early work is captured on aggressive tracks like "Just a Touch" and "These Days," while "Fall on Me" and their cover of the Clique's "Superman" showcase a newfound emphasis on massive pop hooks.

Few acts have struck that balance as well as R.E.M. do here, and in a lot of ways, Life's Rich Pageant is a template for how the "alternative" music the band was largely responsible for originating would, less than a decade later, become the dominant narrative in the music industry. A song like "Fall on Me," which is a prescient treatise on the destruction of the Earth's environment, should have been a hard sell back in 1986—at least compared to, say, singles from Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. But R.E.M. gave the song an enormous, sing-along chorus with a simple but powerful hook: "Buy the sky/And sell the sky/And ask the sky/And tell the sky/Don't fall on me." Though they would have bigger hits later in their career, "Fall on Me" might just be R.E.M.'s most perfectly constructed pop song.

The remastered version of the album emphasizes how tight R.E.M.'s song construction and arrangements had become after just four albums. With Bill Berry's thundering percussion lines and Peter Buck's trademark jangly lead guitars, "Hyena" is a standout for how R.E.M. and producer Don Gehman, best known at the time for his work with John Mellencamp, foreground the rhythm track. Because the sound of the record is so streamlined, the song's political allegory, which draws a clever parallel between geopolitical maneuvering and the food chain, comes through clearly. While Stipe still throws in a few inscrutable asides ("The Flowers of Guatemala" is allegedly inspired by the burial of political dissidents in mass graves in the titular country, but God only knows how anyone is supposed to get that from the actual lyrics), the fact that his increasingly confident vocal performances and more clear-headed songwriting are the focus of Life's Rich Pageant makes the album far more accessible than its predecessors.

Twenty-five years on, the optimism of "Cuyahoga" is still inspiring and relevant. Its message ("Let's put our heads together/And start a new country up") reflects an intelligent and decidedly nonpartisan approach to political reconstruction without resorting to the didacticism that would infiltrate some of Stipe's later writings. The call to arms of opener "Begin the Begin" looks to goad the band's predominantly college-aged audience to join them as political activists, while the wiseass "These Days" and "Just a Touch" (which concludes with Stipe exuberantly shouting, "I'm so goddamn young!") temper that urgency with some important self-awareness.

The refinement of the songs on Life's Rich Pageant are highlighted by the reissue's second disc, which includes rough demo versions of the 12 songs that would eventually form the album, plus a selection of songs that would turn up on later records. Valuable as a document of the band's creative process, the demos reveal both R.E.M.'s strong editorial instincts and Gehman's instrumental role in guiding the band toward what would eventually become the signature sound of their commercial peak. Life's Rich Pageant serves as both a guidepost for how R.E.M. moved in an arena-sized direction and as another extraordinary album in the band's uninterrupted run of true greatness that spanned between Murmur and Automatic for the People.

Jonathan Keefe - July 12, 2011
© 2015 Slant Magazine.



Fables of the Reconstruction was intentionally murky, and Lifes Rich Pageant was constructed as its polar opposite. Teaming with producer Don Gehman, who previously worked with John Mellencamp, R.E.M. developed their most forceful record to date. Where previous records kept the rhythm section in the background, Pageant emphasizes the beat, and the band turns in its hardest rockers to date, including the anthemic "Begin the Begin" and the punky "Just a Touch." But the cleaner production also benefits the ballads and the mid-tempo janglers, particularly since it helps reveal Michael Stipe's growing political obsessions, especially on the environmental anthems "Fall on Me" and "Cuyahoga." The group hasn't entirely left myths behind - witness the Civil War ballad "Swan Swan H" - but the band sound more contemporary both musically and lyrically than they did on either Fables or Murmur, which helps give the record an extra kick. And even with excellent songs like "I Believe," "Flowers of Guatemala," "These Days," and "What if We Give It Away," it's ironic that the most memorable moment comes from the garage rock obscurity "Superman," which is sung with glee by Mike Mills.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide


 
The cover of Lifes Rich Pageant features the handsome forehead and full eyebrows of drummer Bill Berry, whose face is cut off at the nose by a low-contrast picture of two buffalo. It's a curious image, embedded with a Buffalo Bill pun, and it playfully nods to the band's refusal to practice expected music-industry behaviors like appearing prominently on their album covers, lip-syncing in videos, writing love songs, or generally revealing too much of themselves beyond the music. Even four albums into their career, they still cultivated an enigmatic presence on Lifes Rich Pageant, starting with that cover and extending to the dropped apostrophe in that title and the mismatched tracklists. Furthermore, the mysterious painted figures and roughly sketched symbols in the liner notes presented the album as something more akin to folk art than folk rock.

In direct conflict with that visual impression, Lifes Rich Pageant was R.E.M.'s most pop-oriented and accessible album up to that point. Recording frequently and touring almost constantly, the band had been nurturing a grassroots audience throughout the early 1980s, and Pageant is a pivotal album in their career, representing the moment when their Southern post-punk sound anticipated larger venues and began expanding to fill those spaces. It was also, strangely, their most overtly political collection, with songs addressing environmental crises and political malaise. Rather than sounding sanctimonious, however, such dissent energized R.E.M. and injected more pep into Berry's drumbeats, more incisive jangle into Peter Buck's guitar, and more charisma into Michael Stipe's performance. The album barrels along in just over 30 minutes, lending the songs a sense of purpose. This is music that has to be somewhere.

Lifes is celebratory rather than commiserative, with tense tempos fueling heraldic choruses and shout-outs to Woody Guthrie ("Cuyahoga") and Cole Porter ("Begin the Begin"). Stipe's lyrical dodginess, such a formidable weapon on previous albums, allows the band to come at these issues from obscure angles: With its rousing chorus and pensive bass line, "Cuyahoga" mails postcard dispatches from a museum where rivers and plains are artifacts, consigned to diorama and memory rather than reality. "Fall on Me" mixes spiritual and consumerist language to deliver a knotted ecological message that takes some unpacking: "Buy the sky and sell the sky," Stipe sings, then changes the Wall Street phrasing: "Lift your arms up to the sky. Ask the sky and ask the sky, don't fall on me."

Maybe that's why the band chose to close with Mike Mills-sung cover of the Clique's "Superman". Seemingly out of place on such a serious-minded album and certainly jarring after the Civil War fever dream of "Swan Swan H", it's been derided as R.E.M. at their most superfluous. But that's how they must have felt at the time - like supermen taking on the world's problems and finding they had unknown powers. In that regard, they're aided significantly by producer Don Gehman, who was then famous for helming John Cougar's early albums. Who knew that Gehman would handle R.E.M. better than folk-rock legend Joe Boyd, who nearly made a muddle of their previous album, Fables of the Reconstruction? In addition to giving the melodic leads their own space, he emphasizes the muscle in Berry's beats and the intricate interaction between the rhythm section. No wonder the drummer's on the album cover: Berry's responsible for the furious pace of the album and enables its abrupt detours into salsa and Nuggets pop.

That dynamic makes the remaster on this 25th anniversary reissue sound even livelier and warmer, reinforcing the balance between excitement and gravity that illuminates these songs. It also makes the second disc of demos all the more intriguing, presenting these familiar songs in their most skeletal format. The small flourishes that didn't make the studio versions sound charmingly off-handed: Stipe hums most of "I Believe", then punctuates the end with a sing-songy la-la-la. He tries out a harmonica solo on an early version of "Bad Day", then uses the instrument to cover for forgotten lyrics. This is R.E.M. at their most ramshackle, a vibe that makes Dead Letter Office a fan favorite even today.

Lifes is R.E.M.'s first transition album, one that builds on the innovations of their early releases while hinting at the territory they would cover on Document and Green. It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.

Stephen M. Deusner - July 13, 2011
© 2015 Pitchfork Media Inc.



Lifes Rich Pageant is the fourth studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released in 1986. R.E.M. chose Don Gehman to produce the album, which was recorded at John Mellencamp's Belmont Mall Studios in Belmont, Indiana.

The source for the title of the album is based on an English idiom. Its use is very old, but R.E.M.'s use is, according to guitarist Peter Buck, from the 1964 film A Shot in the Dark, minus the apostrophe:

    Inspector Clouseau opens car door and falls into a fountain.
    Maria: "You should get out of these clothes immediately. You'll catch your death of pneumonia, you will."
    Clouseau: "Yes, I probably will. But it's all part of life's rich pageant, you know?"

The missing apostrophe in the title is deliberate. Nearly all contractions used by R.E.M. lack apostrophes, though "life's" in this case is a possessive. Peter Buck once stated, "We all hate apostrophes. Michael insisted and I agreed that there's never been a good rock album that's had an apostrophe in the title."

The cover of the album is a photograph of drummer Bill Berry on the upper part of the cover and a pair of bison, signifying an environmental theme, on the lower part. It also alludes to Buffalo Bill.

With R.E.M.'s fan base beginning to grow beyond its college rock boundaries, Lifes Rich Pageant proved to be at the time the band's most commercially successful album in the U.S., peaking at #21 on the Billboard charts and scoring them their first gold record. In the UK, the album managed a #43 peak.

Slant Magazine listed the album at #52 on its list of "Best Albums of 1980s" saying "Lifes Rich Pageant stands as a nearly seamless transition between the band's formative period and their commercial dominance."

In 2000, it ranked at number 162 in the list of Virgin's All-Time Album Top 1000 List.

The ecologically conscious "Fall on Me" (a personal favorite of frontman Michael Stipe) and a cover of the Clique's "Superman", sung by bassist Mike Mills, were the only singles released from the album (the single version of the latter removed the sample from one of the Godzilla movies that began the album version).

Another ecologically minded song, "Cuyahoga", refers to the once heavily polluted Cuyahoga River that flows into Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio. The song includes the lyric we burned the river down, which refers to the several occasions (most famously in 1969) when the river actually caught fire.

At the end of "Just a Touch" Michael Stipe can be heard screaming the line "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young", quoting longtime influence Patti Smith's live cover version of The Who's "My Generation" released on the b-side of her 1976 single "Gloria,", which she also uses at end of her cover version of "Privilege (Set Me Free)" from her 1978 album, Easter.

Wikipedia.org
 

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