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WaPo: How the biggest rock band in the world disappeared
WaPo - (archived: https://archive.ph/YMpkU ) How the biggest rock band in the world disappeared
By Will Leitch
January 15. 2025
Michael Stipe turned 65 right after New Year’s. Every generation has their “our childhood heroes are how old now?” moment — jaws surely dropped when Rita Hayworth turned 65, which is the precise age she became soon after Stipe’s band, R.E.M., released “Murmur,” its first album — but there is something about this particular rock star becoming eligible for Medicare that sticks in one’s gullet. Kurt Cobain, were he still here, would be just a couple of years from turning 60 himself. So you know.
It will have been 14 years this March since R.E.M. — an Athens, Georgia, foursome that for a stretch of about five years in the 1990s was arguably the biggest rock band on the planet — released its final album, “Collapse into Now.” Six months later, the band retired, with Stipe saying, “the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave. We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.”
And then R.E.M. did something more or less no other band has ever done: It stopped playing. Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe walked away. They have played one song together in the last 14 years, “Losing My Religion,” at their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and they are explicit about it not happening again. When CBS’s Anthony Mason asked them, on a rare media appearance on “CBS This Morning” last year, what it would take for them to reunite, bassist Mike Mills said, “a comet.”
Reaching your mid-60s is something fortunate rock stars get to do, and they usually spend their golden years making certain the world still cares about them. Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen do world tours; Bono plays the Sphere and gets Joe Biden to put a Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck; Bob Dylan gets a movie made about him. But you haven’t heard a word from Stipe or the other members of R.E.M. this month. You rarely do.
Stipe occasionally does solo appearances, including singing at a Kamala Harris rally in Pennsylvania, and he put out a photography book last year, but on the whole, he just quietly goes about his life like the rest of us. The rest of the band is the same way. The other three members of R.E.M. still live in Athens, something I know for certain because I also live in Athens, and I regularly see them walking around, shopping for groceries, getting coffee, watching a baseball game, blending into the architecture.
/snip
By Will Leitch
January 15. 2025
Michael Stipe turned 65 right after New Year’s. Every generation has their “our childhood heroes are how old now?” moment — jaws surely dropped when Rita Hayworth turned 65, which is the precise age she became soon after Stipe’s band, R.E.M., released “Murmur,” its first album — but there is something about this particular rock star becoming eligible for Medicare that sticks in one’s gullet. Kurt Cobain, were he still here, would be just a couple of years from turning 60 himself. So you know.
It will have been 14 years this March since R.E.M. — an Athens, Georgia, foursome that for a stretch of about five years in the 1990s was arguably the biggest rock band on the planet — released its final album, “Collapse into Now.” Six months later, the band retired, with Stipe saying, “the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave. We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.”
And then R.E.M. did something more or less no other band has ever done: It stopped playing. Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe walked away. They have played one song together in the last 14 years, “Losing My Religion,” at their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and they are explicit about it not happening again. When CBS’s Anthony Mason asked them, on a rare media appearance on “CBS This Morning” last year, what it would take for them to reunite, bassist Mike Mills said, “a comet.”
Reaching your mid-60s is something fortunate rock stars get to do, and they usually spend their golden years making certain the world still cares about them. Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen do world tours; Bono plays the Sphere and gets Joe Biden to put a Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck; Bob Dylan gets a movie made about him. But you haven’t heard a word from Stipe or the other members of R.E.M. this month. You rarely do.
Stipe occasionally does solo appearances, including singing at a Kamala Harris rally in Pennsylvania, and he put out a photography book last year, but on the whole, he just quietly goes about his life like the rest of us. The rest of the band is the same way. The other three members of R.E.M. still live in Athens, something I know for certain because I also live in Athens, and I regularly see them walking around, shopping for groceries, getting coffee, watching a baseball game, blending into the architecture.
/snip
Swan Swan H - R.E.M.
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