One of the odd things about anniversaries is that they can keep on coming. America is currently in the midst of the hundred-fiftieth anniversaries of the Civil War, so we’ll get to experience it all in ‘real time’, from the first shots at Fort Sumter on January 9th, 2011 to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th, 2015. And just as that is winding down in America, Europe will be in the midst of the hundredth anniversaries of the Great War, from Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th, 2014 to the armistice to end all armistices on November 11th, 2018. Of only slightly less importance is the current twenty-fifth anniversaries of the early albums by alternative music icon R.E.M. – each record had been getting a ‘deluxe edition’ re-release with bonus material. We’re up to the fourth in the series, 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant, another classic album, with half-hearted extras.
Lifes Rich Pageant was the beginning of the real breakthrough for R.E.M., out of college-rock and into more mainstream radio, and one can feel why, as the band has a bigger, more accessible sound on Pageant, without losing their alt-touch. From Peter Buck’s killer riff that opens up opener “Begin the Begin” to their cover of The Clique’s kiss-off to the Man of Steel to close out in “Superman”, Pageant is still a record that satisfies both indie-purists & the pop-mainstream. In short, it is an album that is loved by both those who claim R.E.M. were never as good as they were when they were on independent label IRS in the eighties, and those who discovered the band with mega-hit “Losing My Religion” at the start of the nineties. The ‘losing the sky’ bigness to single “Fall On Me”, ‘start a new country in the past’ “Cuyahoga”, jangly greatness of “Hyena” – those back-to-back-to-back numbers showcased what R.E.M. could do. They were also green-minded anthems, without being preachy, like the similarly socially active “What If We Give It Away?” from the ‘Supper side’ (i.e., the b-side – back when there were records, R.E.M. would give each side its own special name, in this case ‘Dinner side’ & ‘Supper side’). Singer Michael Stipe isn’t the only one who believes in “I Believe” – you will too. Even the more ‘out there’ pieces, such as exotic Middle Eastern-sounding instrumental “Underneath the Bunker” or metaphysical poem set to music “Swan Swan H” hold up on all fronts.
The first two 25th anniversary deluxe edition re-releases, Murmur (QRO review) and Reckoning (QRO review), were put out by Universal, and their extra discs had a live recording, top-to-bottom, of a show from that album’s tour. Unfortunately, third album Fables of the Reconstruction (QRO review) re-release on EMI just had unrewarding demos of the songs on Fables and some b-sides heard on IRS b-sides collection Dead Letter Office, and Pageant on EMI subsidiary Capitol sticks to the Fables approach. It is more rewarding than Fables, as the demos occasionally strip away Stipe’s vocals (or he just mumbles/hums everything but the chorus), at least giving a different vantage point on pieces such as “The Flowers of Guatemala”, “I Believe”, and “What If We Give It Away?” – plus a salsa version of already instrumental “Underneath the Bunker”. More significantly, the non-album demos are at least ‘more original’ – new versions of “Bad Day” and “All the Right Friends” were only released on 2003 post-IRS, Warner Brothers-era greatest hits compilation In Time, and the demos only came out on EMI’s 2006 IRS-era collection, And I Feel Fine…. Nether collection was a necessary one, and are not essential parts of the R.E.M. discography the way Dead Letter Office and the original IRS-era greatest hits compilation, 1987’s Eponymous, are, so many fans might not have them. And even if other extra demos like “Mystery To Me” and “Wait” were understandably left off releases back then for being run-of-the-mill IRS-era R.E.M., that’s still a very high mill to run on.
Unlike the deluxe editions of Murmur and Reckoning, Lifes Rich Pageant isn’t rich in extras. And unlike the underrated Fables of the Reconstruction, it’s not an album that needs to be rediscovered. But any excuse to listen to IRS-era R.E.M. is a good one, and this latest 25th anniversary doesn’t fail in that task.
