The Songs - Nightswimming

This is another entry in my ongoing “songs that visited me and decided they wanted to stay” series. I hope you like these enough to become a paid subscriber, because I really need you…

Nightswimming - R.E.M.

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago
Turned around backwards so the windshield shows
Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse
Still, it's so much clearer
I forgot my shirt at the water's edge
The moon is low tonight

I heard R.E.M. before most people heard R.E.M. I was an avid reader of music magazines in the middle 80s, and these 4 misfits from Athens, Georgia were getting all kinds of attention from critics back then. There was airplay on “college radio”, a term that didn’t really exist until it was applied to them, and then to just about any band that barnstormed around the country in a van, playing anywhere somebody could nail some 2X4s together to make a stage.

For early fans it was word of mouth and homemade fanzines and late nights in dorm rooms drinking Bud cans and listening to their debut album Murmur, trying to figure out what the fuck lead singer Michael Stipe was mumbling about. Guys like me became very possessive of bands like R.E.M., and scoffed at anybody who jumped on the train only after “The One I Love” was on MTV every 18 minutes. The first time a guy at my college overhead the band leaking out of my Walkman and said “hey that’s R.E.M.!” I got pissed off. Who was HE to know THAT?

But yea, eventually we had to share them with the world. I left my copy of Murmur on the radiator in the living room and it warped from the heat, to the point where Stipe’s vocals warbled even more, and I eventually had to trudge to the record store to buy another copy. I bought all the others too, of course, especially loving Fables of the Reconstruction, even the bit where everybody argued that its title really was Reconstruction of the Fables and that there was some hidden meaning in the confusion. In the 80s we had time for such things.

Adulting beckoned, but that didn’t mean we didn’t rail against it. Kicking and screaming, I left my teens behind, with R.E.M. as the soundtrack to the struggle. When I turned 20 the band released Lifes Rich Pageant, without the apostrophe ‘s’ to make sure you were still paying attention. All of a sudden you could make out what Stipe was singing, only to discover that the words made about as much sense as Lifes without the apostrophe. But the record, especially coming after the soft noises of Fables, featured loud crunchy guitars and that huge 80s drum sound, and it was when the radio DJs who didn’t have to get up for class the next morning started paying attention. Suddenly the boys were destined to be major label stars. The van was swapped for a tour bus, and the dorm room floors they crashed on between gigs became motel room beds.

And then of course came Losing My Religion, and real stardom, the kind that demands no brown M&Ms and scoffs at Motel 6’s….demanding instead the John Belushi bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. By all accounts R.E.M. resisted this type of rock and roll idiocy, which is why they were able maintain their street cred amidst the cultural carnage of the MTV generation. Well that, and releasing records as stars as good as the ones that made them stars.

Released during the frantic ascension of grunge, at a time when anybody who could tune a guitar while wearing a flannel shirt was getting a record deal, R.E.M.’s 1992 Automatic For the People sounded like a came from another time. Stipe described the songs as “very mid-tempo, pretty fucking weird….more acoustic, more organ-based, less drums”, which was about as far from Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden as you could get. The irony was that in secret all the grunge guys wanted to make records like this, but were locked into whatever everything thought grunge was. Cobain asked Stipe to be the godfather to his daughter, and had this album on the turntable when he died.

The song features only Mike Mills’ piano, and a string accompaniment by John Paul Jones (yes, THAT John Paul Jones). Guitarist Peter Buck swears that Stipe heard the tune, asked Mills to play it a second time, and improvised the complete set of lyrics on the spot, which sounds preposterous, but it’s a helluva story if true. Stream of consciousness or not, it’s one of the few Stipe lyrics I thought I understood. To me a stunning backward glance at the innocence we lose simply by growing up….

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September's coming soon……

September is here now. Nightswimming remains one of the greatest evocations of childhood that I’ve ever heard. It’s as good as anything on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, which was a mountain previously unclimbed.

These things, they go away
Replaced by everyday

In a bit…

—tf

Songs That Visited Me and Decided They Wanted to Stay

Intro
In a Big Country
Found Out About You
Tutti Fruitti
Surrender
Who Knows Where the Time Goes?