Once Upon a Time in the Top Spot: R.E.M., Automatic for the People
22 years ago today, Athens, Georgia’s favorite sons earned their second #1 album in the UK when Automatic for the People premiered atop the British charts, a position the album never earned in America.
The follow-up to 1991’s Out of Time, an album which had provided R.E.M. with their first top-10 single in the UK (“Shiny Happy People,” which hit #6), Automatic for the People was originally intended to be a more rockin’, guitar-driven affair, but it’s pretty clear from the opening track, “Drive,” that those plans fell by the wayside at some point. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: if you polled 100 music critics, you’d almost certainly find that the majority of them would cite Automatic for the People as one of R.E.M.’s strongest albums, if not the strongest. But if you had to pick an adjective to describe the predominant tone of the material, “rockin’” is not one which would come readily to most people’s minds.
If you have to blame someone for the sonic switch-up, then you can probably blame it on frontman Michael Stipe. R.E.M.’s longstanding songwriting process had always been for Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry to go off and write the music, after which they’d pass along the songs to Stipe to figure out which ones he liked best and add lyrics and vocals.
“We leave it up to him to decide which ones suit him best at the moment, so in the culling out process, it just so happened that he picked many of the quietest songs,” Mills told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. “It is somewhat disconcerting that there are no biggie rock songs on there, but that’s okay. We don’t worry, not even a little bit, about having hits. We’re a very insular group, the four of us and (producer) Scott Litt, and we’re the only people we listen to.”
Unfortunately, while the band were quite happy with the results, Stipe acknowledged to Salon in 2011 that R.E.M.’s material at the time made it a bit difficult to hit the road in support of the music they were making. “We couldn’t tour behind Out of Time or Automatic for the People,” said Stipe. “It was all beautifully orchestrated slow songs and that doesn’t really fly at a festival in Belgium in front of 45,000 people who have been there for three days and are drunk and tired and muddy. You can’t do that.”
The next time around, R.E.M. did release the rock album they were after – 1994’s Monster – and in turn they toured the hell out of it, but while the rough and tumble album does have its charms, it isn’t remembered as fondly by as many people as the effort that preceded it.
Although Automatic for the People only remained at #1 for a single week in ’92, it actually re-ascended to the UK’s top spot on three further occasions in ’93 – first on April 24, then again on May 8 and May 22 – and by the time all was said and done, it had gone platinum six times over in Great Britain, four times over in the States, and seven times over in Canada. (Those Canadians sure do love their R.E.M.) And thanks to songs like “Drive,” “Man on the Moon,” “Everybody Hurts,” and “Nightswimming,” it’s certainly not likely to be forgotten anytime soon.
