Not Deja Vu

R.E.M. was one of those bands that was almost like homeboys to those of us hanging around the indie music scene in Nashville in the early to mid-Eighties, since they were from not all that far away in Athens, Georgia and frequently played the Nashville-Knoxville-Memphis-Chattanooga basic circuit.  Bands and people in the scene from those cities, Atlanta, up in Kentucky in Bowling Green and Louisville, over in North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Charlotte - a lot of us knew each other.  I knew and talked with and hung out with the guys from R.E.M. on several occasions, and had seen them play in dive bars from one end of Tennessee to the other and in Georgia, once to I think maybe a grand total of 15 people.

It was kind of weird to see them get more and more famous and known over the years, and then they REALLY hit it big, which was even stranger.  I knew or had met lots and lots of bands and artists from the Southeastern US during my college days and for a few years after, but none that ever came quite as close to the tremendous amount of stardom and success that fell to R.E.M.

One of the strangest nights of my life was seeing them in concert in 1995, after the extreme success of the Automatic for the People and Out of Time albums and touring behind the Monster album.  They played the then fairly new, now empty and unused Pyramid in Memphis in front of thousands and thousands of adoring fans, and it was just one of those "whoa" moments for me.

I looked around at the crowd of thousands, and couldn't help but think of those old shows when nobody knew and few cared who they were, and even though it probably shouldn't have taken me aback so, I really was taken aback.  Success - there ya go.

This is laughable now, but I remember so well the first time I saw them appear on TV, on the Letterman show, and thinking, "Well, they're hitting the big time now, huh?"  What little I knew, me and my vinyl copy of Reckoning I used to play in my dorm room at college back in 1984-85.