Mojo - The Music Magazine

MOJO: How did the remastering of Murmur come about?
Peter Buck: Well the 25th Anniversary kind of snuck up on me. I had no idea it was that long ago, I guess! And though Murmur has been mastered for CD before, we hadn’t really reapproached it since the early days, and it seemed like the thing to do. We were confident that if [original Murmur producers] Mitch Easter and Don Dixon were supervising it, it would be good; it seemed sensible to give those guys the ball.

I suppose you couldn’t go down the classic “Deluxe” route: adding B-sides and whatnot. All those tracks are on compilations…
Yes, all that stuff is available. But the Toronto gig was another thing. We’d always recorded ourselves, kind of keeping track of our history. As far back as 1982 we have live 16- and 24-track tapes, and we have a bunch of shows that sound pretty cool. But that’s not to say this is the beginning of “a line” of ancient R.E.M. shows!

Isn’t listening to old shows like looking at baby photos? Do you squirm?
It‘s pretty rough and ready. But we’re not worried about how in tune or together it is. It was an occurrence, it happened. It would be against the idea of the band to go in with Pro-Tools and fix it. We were playing 200 shows a year. They were all, you know, to one degree or another, pretty good. It was about finding a show that captured the moment. I’m sure we played more professional shows, but I think that one is pretty representative.

It has spirit. And it’s very well recorded. It’s like the listener’s on stage with the band.
Well it helps that there weren’t many people there! There’s no yelling or applause to get in the way of the recording. I’m pretty sure it was our first time in Canada and no-one knew who we were. That was pretty typical of 1983-84. We could play to 800-1000 people in New York and in Detroit we’d get 20.

And we get early versions of Reckoning tracks 7 Chinese Brothers and Harborcoat…
We wrote those just after Murmur. It made good sense to keep the writing going. ’Cos we’d play once a month in Athens, which would pay all the bills, and to keep that going it was important to have two new songs every month to play to the regulars. So we always had a huge backlog of stuff.

You’re playing Just A Touch, which you wouldn’t record until your fourth album, Lifes Rich Pageant.
It was among the first four or five songs we wrote and for some reason never recorded. I remember touring in 1985 and realising we were sick of all our songs. We thought, Fuck it, let’s play Just A Touch, it’s fast and it’s short. Then we ended up recording it. The summer tour we just did, we played Just A Touch three gigs in a row.

Back to the remix of the studio album, and it’s striking the amount of detail it highlights…
When we were recording Murmur, I remember this conversation with Mitch. He said, “There’s this thing coming out: it’s called digital sound and there are these things called CDs. I’ve read about it. So I really want to put a whole load of stuff on the record; it won’t show up in the mix right now, but when this CD shit comes in we’ll have all this information available. There’ll be higher highs and lower lows and all kinds of stuff.” I remember thinking, Right, that’s gonna happen…

What can you hear that you couldn’t hear before?
Weird little things. On Moral Kiosk, Mitch had all of us go out of the room, all slap our knees and go “Huh!” all at once. Now I never heard that on the original. But you can hear it now.

Then, on We Walk, Michael [Stipe] had his vocal mic in the hallway – he never found a vocal booth that he liked – and the hallway was connected to the pool hall. Bill and Mike were playing pool and the noise of the pool balls leaked into the mic. Mitch and Don turned the tape backwards and slowed it down, and the result is this threatening rumbling sound.

The thunder! I always presumed that was [drummer] Bill Berry on a thunder sheet.
No, it’s pool balls slowed down. And though you can hear that on the original, it’s more pronounced now. Another thing I noticed was the definition between guitar tracks. A lot of the record is me playing the exact same guitar part three times, or doubling the part with a 12-string – it just made the tone a little wider. You can hear that more. And you can really hear the piano doubling the bass, which it does quite often. The idea was to record something we could play live, but kind of broader.

The new version also throws light on the level of musicianship: Mike [Mills]’ countermelodic bass runs, the vocal harmonies…
Mike and Bill in particular are really great musicians. I wrote a lot of the songs so I could play the guitar parts perfectly well but Jimi Hendrix it wasn’t. I remember at one point Don Dixon suggesting I do a little guitar solo. I just said, “I don’t do guitar solos.” And he said, “All four of you guys solo all the time, it just happens to fit together! Mike’s bass lines are all solos!” He had a point. What we did wasn’t playing over each other, it was about interlocking.

You realise some people will prefer the original?
I understand those arguments. I know a guy who was offered to remix Layla. And he went, “What?! Remix Layla? Why would you do that?”

Do you agree that the mix makes you sound like more of a New Wave band, less indebted to the ’60s?
Some guy told me that it reminded him of the week he played the record for the first time. He said it sounds like vinyl. I haven’t played it on vinyl since 1983, but I’m sure it was a clearer-sounding record than it’s been given credit.

But you know, if people asked us what kind of band we were I’m sure we’d have said, “We’re kind of a folk-rock band, kind of a new wave band. Whatever they call it, post-punk, Gang Of Four, English Beat, that’s where we fit in.” But we didn’t want to make a typical first record that was just our live show. We wanted to make something that could have been made in ’67 or ’78 or ’92. We didn’t want to have the modern drum sounds or the modern delays. Our sensibility was totally post-modern, mixing elements of the past and present.

Bands often reckon their first record is overrated. Do you ever think, Shut up already about Murmur! We’ve made other records that are just as good!
Yes and no. I was incredibly proud of that record, and I remember the day I got my copy to play, thinking, We did it! That was exactly what we wanted to do! With the help of Mitch and Don we made a really cool record that really captured who we were at the time. We went other places and we made records I prefer later on. But it’s hard to beat a first record because it comes out of nowhere. In 1983 there wasn’t another record that sounded like that.

There’s something that troubles me. David Bowie’s original production on Iggy & The Stooges’ Raw Power caught a lot of flak, but it was what it was. Now the only CD version you can buy in the shops is Iggy’s ’90s remix. So which is the real Raw Power? And which is the real Murmur?
So far no-one I’ve talked to likes the original Murmur better. But I also know a lot of people who fervently believe that vinyl is the way to listen to everything, and whatever that vinyl has it’s not gonna have on CD. You get used to whatever you have I suppose. I had Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue for decades, then I bought the reissue with the corrected speeds and, you know, I like the old speed better… It’s been this way since 1959! But I’m pretty confident that this Murmur the version to hear unless you’re a vinyl-only guy; in which case go find the best vinyl copy you can.

Murmur’s most enduring, and most fragile element is its air of mystery…
We talked a lot about at the time about not being too literal. The radio wants the vocals out in front, they want the guitars in this place and they want the drums to really boom. We weren’t making that kind of record. People at the time would tell us, “Gahd, this is a weird mix!” No, this is the mix we wanted!

The new version is more clear, but I’m not sure it’s that different. The first CD master, when it first went onto CD in the early ’90s, now that really was different, and not so much in a good way either.

I like to buy used books, first editions, and wonder who bought this and read it in 1968. So I appreciate the character of old stuff. And you know, we really could have made a new version, used different vocal takes, stripped off overdubs or added them. That wasn’t the intention. But that might be fun someday!

Have you got the bug? Can we expect a new Reckoning next year?
Believe me, that’s all coming down the pipeline. And just think, it’s only 21 years until it’s 25 years of Around The Sun. Now there’s a record that would benefit from everyone hearing the first month or so of roughs. It would be ten times the record!

You polished that one until there was almost nothing left.
Yeah, it’s like something you’d imagine someone doing a lot of crystal meth would do [laughs].

So what can we expect from a Deluxe Reckoning?
We’re already sifting through stuff from 1984, ’85, and there are also filmed elements… We’ve discussed putting all that stuff up on the web site, ’cos we’ve got copies of every performance that was ever filmed, and there’s a lot of ’em. I’d love to get all that stuff out there. The live thing is such an important element of who we were, and if you only know us from the records you’re missing out on more than half of what we were about. I’m sure the record company would have a nervous breakdown if they heard me talking like this, but it’s not the earning money thing that concerns me as much as the band entering history in as representative a way as possible. Come on, let’s see the weird Dutch TV performances with us lip-synching in make-up!

Interview by: Danny Eccleston

Photo: Laura Levine

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