REM. MICHAEL STIPE interview

Interview with Michael Stipe (REM lead vocals)

Budapest, Hotel Bar

August 1999

If you like REM, you like a band that goes in different directions.

Michael Stipe (M) whispers more, rather than talks. Very respectful, he would concentrated on the person he was speaking to. He answered all questions put to him, thought about the appropriate answers and gave careful, relaxed responses.

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CZB: Is it safe to say that you’re a shy person?

M: Yeah, essentially but it would also be safe to say, as a musician and as a media figure that during my adult life, I have, in some way, overcome my shyness. I’m representing shy people in the world around perhaps!

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CZB: I read on the internet that you give lectures at a college in Athens.

M: I never taught at a college.

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CZB: You have stated that the internet is like a High School Yearbook.

M: What does that mean to you, High School Yearbook?

CZB: It’s a collection of pictures with few words – and you interpret the pictures as you choose.

M: Actually what I said is that it’s like a slam book. Do you know what a slam book is?

It’s a blank notebook that you pass around a school and you write the name of somebody on the top of each page and everybody, anonymously writes what they think of that person and after it has gone all the way around school, everyone reads about what everyone else thinks of everybody and its’ often very brutal. That was the comparison that I made.

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CZB: What’s your stand on religion?

M: What’s my stand on it? I’m OK with it. (laughs, which is seldom for him!). That’s a very general question, I mean, how am I supposed to answer that? What’s your stand on religion?

CZB: I believe in God but I don’t go to church, for example.

M: Which God, there are several religions.

CZB: I believe that there’s only one God and I think that all this separation of religions is due to a difference of cultures and places where people are born.

M: I would agree with that. We have something in common.

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CZB: Why have you supported the Tibetan Freedom concerts?

M: Adam Yauch called me. I’m not a Buddhist, but I can admire and respect a religion for the most part it represents something that’s not really represented that well in this day and time. There are parts of it that I really like, that are really inspiring, particularly along the same lines as the teachings of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, of non-violence and I find that to be really inspiring, particularly in the case of the Tibetans, where they’ve been faced with such carnage and repression … Tibetans have maintained a non-violent stature towards the Chinese. I find that really respectable.

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CZB: What do you think about marriage? You’re 40 and haven’t even proposed to anyone.

M: I have friends who are happily married, I have friends who are happily single. For some people it works, for some people it doesn’t. For some people it’s culturally expected – and I think that’s kind of repressive. But it’s like anything. It can be like apples and oranges – some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate.

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CZB: The press commented on your radical sound and image changes. How did you take this personally?

M: A large part of the press, outside of the music press, doesn’t even listen to the music, they’re just promoting the cult of celebrity. That’s something that we come around to that has nothing to do with why you’re a celebrity, which is the music, a great writer or photographer or whatever – and more to do with you personally. That’s just a reflection of the 20th Century cult of celebrity and the explosion of technology, leading to the explosion of the media, leading to way too many musicians, way too many magazines and way too many outlets for information: people have to talk about something. In the 1960’s there were maybe 6 national magazines; there were no national daily newspapers. Now, there are 500 magazines, 20,000 TV stations and they have to talk about something.

CZB: What do you read?

M: I’m a magazine reader, I don’t really read that much. I don’t like to watch that much television.

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CZB: How do you manage to keep up with the modern flow of things, keeping in mind that you still make music the traditional way?

M: I think it’s more of the spirit of rock’n’roll, which has little or nothing to do with the sound of it, or what kind of instruments you’re using. For example, I would say that the Aphex Twin records are extremely rock’n’roll in terms of the spirit of it and are extremely punk rock in terms of the spirit of it … I don’t think there’s a guitar within 3 miles of those records or a drum kit; it doesn’t really matter in the means of expression, what does matter is the expression of sound. That’s something that will carry through… we’ve already reached ground zero – everything that has come before has already been crushed and collapsed – what we’re in right now, 1999 – coincidentally, it’s the end of the century, but where we really are at right now is that people are trying to figure out different ways to combine different influences and create something that’s very personal, new and like the best music, very cathartic, revolutionary.

CZB: And your influences are not only musical?

M: No, of course not. In my capacity as a photographer and as a video director I used the inspiration of the paintings of Francis Ack to use them as a starting point for what the video would look like – that’s a really simple example of the bringing together of a group of musicians where someone is extremely visually oriented (and that comes from a photographic background, inspired by someone who is a painter – who’s now dead, but whose paintings live on). There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening musically right now and there’s a lot of mutations going on right now. I predict that in the next 5 years or so, there will be a dominant paradigm in music and everything else will just slow down and then people will get bored and then the patterns will change again.

CZB: How would that apply to the Up album?

M: The main difference between this record and the others before is more in how/what was turned off and turned down and turned up and made prominent in the mixes. In regards with not having a drummer, using drum machines, which we’ve done since our first album, musically is about the same in the spirit of terms.

Musically, some of the most inspiring stuff that’s coming out right now is guitar based, like Kirsten Hersch or the last Bob Dylan record, which is a brilliant record – and that just happens to be made with a guitar instead of just main reverbs.

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CZB: You own a movie company, you’ve personally directed REM videos and you’ve published an artistic photography book – when did this interest for imagery start?

M: It all kind of started when I was 15, I started taking photographs and then I decided I was going to be in a band … everything you see now is… the drum of what was 1975; that’s when I became inspired by photography.

CZB: And you’re going to get a new artistic photography out in the fall, called Fear of the Empty?

M: Yeah. It’s actually going to be more like the New Year, because I’m only about the third of the way done with it. It’s less like the last photo book and it’s more of my favorite images from the last 10 years – it’s just pictures of things, landscapes and still lifes and portraits – lots of airports.

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CZB: You talked about rock attitudes and punk spirit. What is your feeling on Patti Smith’s influence on the music scene?

M: Patti Smith is someone who inspired myself and Peter Buck a great deal when we were younger. She has continued as an artist and as a writer to make great music and to write good songs. I find her spirit to be younger than a lot of the bands that I see and hear on the radio and on television. I’ve already listened to a couple of things off her new record. It’s really pushing the boundaries of what you would consider to be popular music. I really appreciate that in her.

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Hollywood is not such a nice place. Most people doing movies do not know what they are doing.

Byte. When we spoke, REM was working on a movie soundtrack for Milos Forman’s Man On The Moon, which was released in the Fall (1999).

Man on the Moon was released as the second single from the 1992 album Automatic for the People. The song gave its name to a 1999 film based on Lithuanian actor Andy Kaufman’s life, Man on the Moon, and was used in the movie soundtrack.

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Bass player Mike Mills interview:

http://clickzoombytes.wordpress.com/artisti-intl/rem-mike-mills-interview/

Guitar player Peter Buck interview, next Saturday (18 July 2009).