Men On The Moon: R.E.M at the Hartford Agora, July 20, 1984

On July 20, as the world marked the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, I marked a more private, but equally epic anniversary: the 25th anniversary of the best concert I ever saw: R.E.M. at the smallish club The Agora in West Hartford, CT.

R.E.M. was touring in promotion of their new LP Reckoning, an album that in contrast to Murmur captured their loose, exciting live sound. Far from the world-famous supergroup they are today, R.E.M. circa 1984 was maybe as big as, say, MGMT is today: a serious buzz band with a couple albums. People who were into music were into them, but they hadn’t broken through to Joe Six-Pack yet.

Michael Stipe was not the politically correct Patti-Smith-arm-candy fashionista he is today, but a painfully shy Southern bookworm with a thrift-store wardrobe and a thick mop of hair covering his shyness. But combined with his unique, powerful voice, his overbearing reticence made for a magnetic stage presence. The band crisscrossed the country not in individual Airstream buses but in a single van. They bathed occasionally.

After a strong opening set by the Velvet Underground-ish Dream Syndicate, Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe tore into their best-known song at the time, “Radio Free Europe.” I had been to a few rock shows, but the immediacy and energy coming from the stage was like nothing before I'd ever seen, certainly more riveting than ZZ Top, who I'd seen a few months earlier. More than anything else, the four guys on stage seemed like guys you would want to hang out with.

Next was “Harborcoat” the lead track off Reckoning. During the song's instrumental break, Peter Buck’s amp gave out. Frustrated, he threw his jetglo Rickenbacker on the ground and started dancing like a Russian in the Nutcracker Suite. Stipe, not missing a beat, pulled a harmonica out of his coat pocket and started playing whatever came to mind. The audience ate it up.

The spontaneity and see-what-happens attitude was an epiphany to this teenaged budding rock fan. I stood mesemerized as the band tore through one instant classic after another: “Sitting Still,” “7 Chinese Bros.” “So. Central Rain” “Pretty Persuasion,” “Second Guessing.”

This show, recorded in Hartford-esque Passaic, NJ, a few months prior, captures perfectly the vibe of that night.


A show like the one I was watching raised the question What does one do for an encore? - and R.E.M.’s answer was twofold:
1) Pull a bouncer out of the crowd and ask him what song he wants to sing: “How bout ‘Wild Thing?’” Sounds good. The band launched right into it.
2) Have the bassist sing “Smokin’ in the Boys Room,” the 70s classic by Brownsville Station. This version has become well-known in R.E.M. circles, even becoming the title of a famous bootleg of their live covers. Bassist extraordinaire Mike Mills took the vocals, ending the song by jumping off his bass amp.

For R.E.M. it was another night on the road, headin' for another joint, but for me it was an epiphany. That night, a mere 15 years after man landed on the moon (if you believe), and eight years before "Man on the Moon," I became a fan for life (or at least until Reveal).
That fall I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Connecticut, and the first day I was there, I went to the campus record store and picked up this R.E.M. poster (my roommate hated it):

For all the peaks R.E.M. hit in the ensuing years, from Document to Automatic for the People, Reckoning-era R.E.M. has always been my favorite. They were truly a band with something to prove, and they were proving it again and again.


I don’t have a copy of the Hartford Agora show (if you do, please let me know), but the next best thing is now available: The 2-CD Reckoning Deluxe Edition, released last month. It features a freshly remastered edition of their 1984 classic plus a wonderful concert from the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, recorded about 2 weeks before the epochal Hartford gig.

How dedicated were R.E.M.'s fans in 1984? Michael Stipe dedicates "7 Chinese Bros." to "the guy that broke his leg coming in tonight and went to the hospital and came back." A must.


There's a splinter in your eye and it reads react (R-E-A-C-T)