Two common themes in these Weekend Warmups – if I finally start doing them regularly – will be discovery and wonder.
Discovery is about deciding whether to go see some obscure but intriguing band that has something special that could give them staying power. The answer to that question is always “yes” unless you have a strong reason to say “no.” Follow your hunches and drag your friends along if you have to. Wonder is about the thrill you get the very first time you hear a band perform a song you really like.
Both of those themes apply to a concert over 40 years ago by that enigmatic band from Athens, Georgia known as R.E.M. How obscure was R.E.M. in early 1984? The band certainly lacked appeal at Harvard University, where a couple of friends and I got to see them perform at the campus field house. The Harvard Crimson reported on the day of the show that only around 1,000 tickets of the available 2,500 had been sold. The price was $8.50 for us non-students, which equates to a very affordable $25 in today's money.
I don’t recall precisely when I first heard of R.E.M., but reports referred to the band as a sort of “punk rock meets the Byrds” hybrid. Their first L.P. Murmur received plenty of turntable time in my dorm room at the University of Chicago. The opportunity to see them in the Boston area during spring break in 1984 was too good to pass up.
The problem: I didn’t have a driver’s license and making the trip by train and the T (Boston’s subway system) may have been impossible. I’m not sure if there was a train available back to my hometown of Mansfield that late at night. So I recruited, cajoled, and probably bribed a couple of friends (we’ll call them Wally and Claude) to make the trip with me. Getting them psyched for R.E.M. ("Who?!? Auriem?!? Never heard of them") was a hard sell, but it eventually worked.
Three songs were on my wish list that night: “Moral Kiosk”, “Radio Free Europe”, and “Talk About the Passion” and the band obliged with “Moral Kiosk” early in the set. What makes that song fun to experience live is that it provides all four band members a chance to shine, so that your eye is constantly roving the stage.
I have to admit that much of the concert is a blur, perhaps because I had caught a cold after coming back to Boston from Chicago, or perhaps because of a lingering headache after enduring the relentless swirl of loud guitar riffs that defined the opening set by Hüsker Dü.
We all know what happened to R.E.M over the course of the next decades. Catching them before that meteoric rise remains one of my favorite concert memories.
Frank Luby is co-founder and CEO of BluesBackroadsBaseball LLC and the author of the book Blues Flashbacks: The Legends In Their Own Words. The "Weekend Warmup" series recalls his favorite concert moments over the last 45 years and counting.
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