R.E.M.: "Cassette Set" 3-song demo – $335.00

I've stayed away from R.E.M. thus far, because there's just too much to get into. Too many bootlegs, too many tribute albums, too many dubious 8x11 flyers, too many ticket stubs, too many $500 napkins onto which Michael Stipe scrawled some tossed-off missive in eyeliner after that Drumlin's show in '83...just way too much. From the start, I knew it would take a major auction for me to even broach the subject. This is that auction.

In the mixed-up world of R.E.M. collectibles, this is the cassette: the band's original, self-distributed three-song demo, the same tape you might have made in the '80s, when R.E.M. convinced you that your high school band could make it too, armed with only a ballpoint pen and the photocopier in the library two towns over. This is the point when R.E.M. first touched the page, when no one could have known how perfect a circle the band would draw over the next twenty-odd years (well, the first ten anwyay...).

From the esteemed R.E.M. Timeline, here are the details behind this choice piece of rock history:

15 April 1981—Drive-In Studio, Winston-Salem, NC
Sitting Still | Sitting Still (incomplete fast version) | Radio Free Europe | White Tornado (1) | White Tornado (2)

First recording session with Mitch Easter. These tracks were recorded for R.E.M.'s Cassette Set audio tape, sent out to clubs, magazines, and record companies. Cassette Set features "Sitting Still," "Radio Free Europe" and "White Tornado" (2). Also on the cassette are small clips of the fast version of "Sitting Still," and the first take of "White Tornado," which is halted halfway through due to wrong notes by Peter Buck. About 400 copies of the set were produced.

This cassette's auctioneer (finally! Shallow Rewards' most inevitable pun) contacted me, wondering if I wanted to write about the sale. Of course I did—what better way to crack the seal—but when I heard his story, I couldn't even believe it. He found this tape in a box of cassettes at a garage sale in L.A. What's more, the box contained a second tape with the January 1984 demos for Reckoning and the troubled February 1985 Fables of the Reconstruction sessions. After listing Cassette Set in this no-reserve auction (with a ten cent starting bid!), unscrupulous R.E.M. collectors emailed him en masse asking him to cancel the auction and "name his price." To his credit, he did not, though he might have come out on the greener side of things.

I'm fairly shocked by how little this cassette sold for. The 400-copy estimate given by R.E.M. Timeline is probably on the high side, but even if it's not: we are talking about America's biggest independent pop music success story of the last twenty-five years. What gives?

[Warning: you may want to cue up "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" before reading any further]

It's the same problem we see with the Cure, U2, etc.: bands that don't know when to quit. R.E.M. and the Cure and U2 continue to generate corporate-sized profits regardless of creative stasis and critical indifference, because people don't want to admit that the music of their youth—like their youth itself—is a thing of the past. The carnival continues, a ghoulish Something Wicked This Way Comes carousel ride where time and space bend, where teenage dreams are resurrected and these musicians, who've brought so much joy and wonderment and hope to so many, attempt to remain in that embrace, needlessly revalidating what was accomplished decades ago. The suspension of disbelief displayed by these senior circuit "college rock" bands—and perhaps more importantly, their fans—is so pervasive and potent, it registers on an atomic level. It's the only example of collective consciousness that I can accept leaves a tangible footprint in the material world. I have charts.

There's a half-life to this circumstance as well, which I've calculated is half the time the band was together up until their commercial apex. We celebrate the hungry early years of these once-underground bands, but they enjoyed enormous crossover success later on (and deservedly, because in most cases the record they broke through with is one of, if not definitively their best). In contrast with the fantasies that drove them to success, however, their post-fame reality is a crushing, procedural lifelessness that only the most egomaniacal, detached sort of person can enjoy. Like Bono, for example. R.E.M. and the Cure staved off that sort of success, fighting or refusing to accept it, continuing to struggle—even in delusion—until they reached a financial status and popular profile that made clear there was nowhere to go but down. Until recent years this moment was defined by Bowie calling to see if you wanted to do a single with him. These days you just have to get an album out. He'll show up.

When these dinosaur acts break up, we will argue and pine and debate and recontextualize and reevaluate their music for x number of years until, after we've reached the half-life, whatever truly mattered about them will establish itself inalienably. In other words, they will become what they were. From that point forward we will remember the band the way they should be remembered, and significantly, they can reunite at will. Once we've resolved their place in things, we can safely pay our respects without worrying about them betraying our loyalty or taking us somewhere we don't want to go, because we've already been.

Let's say R.E.M. went for twelve years, 1981-1993, and broke up before putting out Monster (most rock critics dream of this possible past at least once a year). By 1999, we would have been ready for a comeback, and I have to wonder, if you took all the money they've made off their output from '94-'06, if it wouldn't be comparable to the profits from a reunion that everyone longed for. Think of how many fans they've lost in sticking around. Every one of them would be front row center for a reunion bid, as would the generation they've raised ("You haven't heard R.E.M.? They're only the most important band in the history of popular music.") Look at R.E.M.'s tourmates: Mission of Burma. There are plenty of precedents, all the way from Elvis (the Comeback) to the Clash (Cut the Crap indeed), the Pixies (barreling down a motorway to "zany" inconsequence before splitting), the Cure (blew a great opportunity with "End"; could have reformed cleanly in 1999), and U2 ("One" = "Eno", duh)...don't even get me started on Nirvana.

What kills all the bands that don't break up and don't let it go—and their fans too—is that they never close the loop. They never put childish ways behind, or at least they never lock the closet, playing with the same toys, the same songs we mowed lawns and made out and made up to. We all do this, we keep listening to the same songs, but when the bands are still playing them—older, fatter, slower—there's no vacuum for nostalgia to fill. You can never return to the place where you started and know it for the first time if you never leave, so the act of listening to R.E.M. when they're still around is tainted by what they are still trying to represent. You can't remember R.E.M. circa '83 or '87 or '92 because of R.E.M. 2006. You can't remember the band fondly, because they still exist: you can only remember the time period, and wonder, "What's with the eye makeup these days, Mike?"

R.E.M. still makes money, of course, but they make less history. Their mark continues to blur and bleed out from a once-brilliant point until it's a huge, hideous Rorschach blot, and nobody sees the same thing. That's how one of the more priceless artifacts in America's pop past sells for just over $300: because we haven't had time to decide what it really means.