A book for fans with the voices of fans. The pleasure is much deeper than simply nostalgia. The story of R.E.M. is a reminder of who we were, and perhaps who we still hope to be.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Carlin writes vividly and in close detail about the group's formation and early days. . . [Carlin] is a pro at gathering and unspooling the facts. . . [He] clearly loves the songs and is smart about not just the most popular of them. . . [The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.] gets across all the fundamentals, with both affection and discernment.”
—Washington Post
“Vivid....Peter Ames Carlin's book isn’t just a cultural biography of the band going back to its formation in the-then sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia. It’s also a poetic meditation on what made so many of the band’s songs stand out, and continue to shine.... A fascinating history of a different era in music.”
—Associated Press
“It takes a village to raise a rock band. That’s part of the premise of Peter Ames Carlin’s sensitive and well-made new biography.... That Carlin pays such close attention to how many people had a hand in the band’s early success gives his book a spirited communal vibe.”
—New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner
“The definitive and highly engaging, soup-to-nuts telling of R.E.M.’s story.... A pure delight to read.... Carlin’s attention to detail and focus on the unique characteristics of the band members, the alchemy created by their collaboration and the wholly original, era-defining sound they produced makes The Name of This Band is R.E.M. required reading for any fan of the band.”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution
“The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. carefully tracks the band’s remarkable trajectory from kegger parties in the college town of Athens during the early ’80s to global ubiquity and its slow burn into dissolution in 2011.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Carlin writes rock ‘n’ roll lives with a rare blend of documentary authority, narrative verve, and empathetic insight. His unique gift for capturing the sweep and tenor of a cultural moment—in this case, the long transitional moment between punk and the turn-of-the-century flowering of “indie” that was defined by the lifespan and the records of R.E.M.—is here on brilliant display.”
—Michael Chabon, bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“R.E.M. is the quintessential indie band, a juggernaut of mumbled poetry and jangly guitar that revitalized the landscape of American music at a moment when we needed it the most. Peter Ames Carlin captures it all in this richly detailed and revelatory book—the fertile Athens scene, the alchemy of a great band bursting into life, their ambivalent rise to superstardom, and the tragedies and triumphs and surprises along the way. If you care about R.E.M. or indie rock or American popular culture, this is the book for you.”
—Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of The Leftovers
"Peter Ames Carlin's artful tour through R.E.M.'s remarkable lifespan portrays a band early on choosing to substitute distortion for clean jangle, an aesthetic decision entirely radical in a scene rife with punk rock noise. The fact that they remained true to the communitarian ideals of the underground, regardless of their mainstream success, will always be their most significant strength. And their songs were things of beauty."
—Thurston Moore, author of Sonic Life and founding member of Sonic Youth
“Carlin has compiled, culled, and documented R.E.M.’s life-long, yet ongoing, journey using their own distinctive maps and legends. The book takes an unparalleled deep dive into the individual lives of each band member, from reluctant college kids to unlikely international Rock and Roll superstars. A strangely familiar, yet fresh read. The story ends, but the music never will. Long live R.E.M.”
—David Lowery, founding member of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven
"Indie rock fans have long held up R.E.M. as a reflection and a goal: typical weird kids who found each other in art school or the aisles of a record store, old souls reborn as young punks, lovers of the American arts who tore them apart and built something fresh from the rubble. Peter Ames Carlin, one of our most thorough and insightful music biographers, recognizes the complexity of the R.E.M. story and honors it at every level: personal, musical, cultural. Longtime fans will love the deep dissections of the band's musical process and the way Carlin weaves their story through the bigger tale of indie culture and politics in the 1980s and beyond. Newcomers will appreciate his deft perceptions of four very different personalities and the creative dynamic that produced some of the late twentieth century's most indelible music."
—Ann Powers, NPR music critic and author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
“In the spring of 1983, I saw R.E.M., a band I had never heard of, open for the English Beat in Boston. It is no hyperbole to say it changed my life. It was an electrifying sense of discovery. Reading Peter Ames Carlin's book is like rediscovering R.E.M.. Peter masterfully spins the story and captures the magical chemistry of the most significant band of the 1980s.”
—Bill Janovitz, author of Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time's Journey Through Rock & Roll History
“A definitive account of the iconic alt-rock band. . . Carlin still gives a detailed and nuanced portrait of the unique personalities and musical contributions that made them such an organic success.”
—Rolling Stone
“Catnip for Gen Xers who came of age listening to these eccentric, groundbreaking musicians.”
—AARP
“An adoring, fact-obsessed, cradle-to-grave biography of the band.”
—The Yale Review
“Plenty of books have been written about R.E.M., yet noted biographer Peter Ames Carlin manages to unearth new tidbits about the band members’ formative years through his extensive research and interviews. He tells the story of the band’s rise to fame in an artful fashion, while vividly describing the sound of their music and feel of their performances. This is an impressive feat. . . An essential read for fans old and new.”
—Flood Magazine
“In this vivid and fast-paced story of one of rock’s most important bands, Carlin captures the energetic scene around Athens, Georgia, that produced R.E.M. and the ways that the band helped shape music history. Drawing deeply on archives and interviews, Carlin traces the rapid ascent and slow descent of the band on their over thirty-year run, from their debut at a friend’s birthday party in winter 1980 to their final album in March 2011. Carlin’s vibrant prose paints an intimate portrait of a band of friends whose music shaped a generation.”
—No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music
“The R.E.M. book I’ve been wanting for, oh, three decades or so. . . [R.E.M.’s] was an extraordinary career and [The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.] is an extraordinary biography.”
—The Film Stage
“Here R.E.M. gets its due, which is considerable.”
—Parade
“Carlin brilliantly captures how a ‘spunky alternative band whose singer spoke in riddles’ became a powerhouse that brought alt rock into the mainstream. . . Vividly bringing to life the political and cultural ferment of the 1990s. . . Carlin examines how R.E.M. balanced their ‘countercultural’ ethos with the commercial appeal it brought them, touching on what it means for rock when the “rebels” become the ‘dominant culture.’ Kinetic prose elevates this perceptive portrait of one of America’s most vital bands.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Astute. . . A pageant of riches for R.E.M. and Michael Stipe fans.”
—Booklist
10/25/2024
Carlin (Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince) offers a detailed, descriptive, and exhaustive biography of R.E.M., the arty rock band from Athens, GA. Conducting interviews with friends and colleagues but without any new insights from the group, he begins with band members' childhoods, especially singer Michael Stipe and lead guitarist Peter Buck, and carefully chronicles the group's formation in 1980. Carlin moves to the group's signing with I.R.S. Records two years later and the band's mounting success as an alternative to mainstream music, especially on college campuses. Carlin focuses on R.E.M.'s full-blown entry into the mainstream when it hit with the 1987 album Document (which sold one million copies). The band signed with Warner Bros. Records the following year and emerged as a politically active, socially conscious rock group by the early 1990s before breaking up in 2011. VERDICT Though never pinpointing the reasons for the explosive, major-label success of a rebellious band, which ostensibly distrusted corporate rock, Carlin assembles a solid, much-needed narrative of one of the major alternative rock bands that both complements and updates David Buckley's 2002 R.E.M. Fiction: An Alternative Biography.—Dr. Dave Szatmary
2024-07-10
How four college-town scenesters became unlikely million-sellers and the center of the ’90s zeitgeist.
For most of its 30-year run, R.E.M. enjoyed a charmed life. Formed in Athens, Ga., in 1980, its four members (drummer Bill Berry, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills, singer Michael Stipe), pursued a slow but steady climb to national attention, getting early singles to the right critics, touring constantly, and landing on a major label while controlling their egos and maintaining their artistic integrity. Stipe’s gnomic, often-mumbled lyrics were hard to parse, but the band was expert at sly, jangly hooks; by the end of the decade they'd enjoyed hit singles and topped the album charts with 1991’sOut of Time. Music journalist Carlin ably chronicles the band’s climb and thoughtfully contextualizes it within larger social and political trends in the country. (He suggests that R.E.M., as vocal progressive activists and standard-bearers for Reagan-weary Gen Xers, helped deliver Bill Clinton to the presidency.) Charmed lives don’t always make for dramatic biographies, though. Perhaps because band members declined to be interviewed for the book (Buck confirmed some details), Carlin adheres to a straightforward narrative of the band moving from strength to strength. Bumps in the road—a brain aneurysm that sidelined Berry and his departure from the band, a sexual harassment accusation against the band’s longtime manager—are dealt with crisply and mainly as evidence of the band’s indomitability. To fill out the story, Carlin attempts to interpret Stipe’s lyrics, sometimes questionably. By the book’s end, the band still feels somewhat unknowable, and Carlin doesn’t explore their legacy following their (amicable) 2011 breakup. They started out strange and hard to interpret—and still are.
A well-researched but by-the-numbers biography.
