So. Central Rain

It’s 1984, and America’s in thrall to Valley Girls, Day-Glo socks and “Billie Jean.” Is this really the best time for a jangly Georgia folk-rock number with a mumbling singer? R.E.M. think so.


June 11, 1983, American music got soaked by some heavy weather down south. R.E.M., an energetic young band from Athens, Georgia, was opening for the Human League at the Palace Theater in Los Angeles, where skies were clear.

“We were all trying to call home to talk to our families and friends, but the phones were out,” says R.E.M.’s guitarist, Peter Buck. “The forecast was for heavy rain in the South Central region.” He soon learned that Athens was getting drenched by a torrential downpour, and that the rains were rapidly turning into floods.

That low-pressure system inspired “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry),” a single that charted for just six weeks, peaking in May 1984 at number 85 (seven notches below R.E.M.’s previous single, “Radio Free Europe”). For an established hitmaker at a major label, such low sales might have suggested failure, but for the members of R.E.M., the song had a lasting legacy — it put the band on the American rock map once and for all.

“The floods were just the starting point for [singer] Michael [Stipe]’s lyric, and I started on the music, quite separately, later that summer in Athens,” Buck says. “It has tons of chords in it, changes key three times, yet it sounds like something you could strum around a campfire.” The guitarist didn’t hear Stipe’s lyrics until September 1983, when R.E.M. headed into Athens’s Stitchcraft studio to record demos. The tune that would become “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)” began with what Buck now dismisses as “a wishy-washy strum.”

R.E.M. began rehearsing the new song to perform it on their fall 1983 tour. “It felt strong, really emotional and good to play,” Buck says. “We hadn’t decided it would be a single, but we knew it would go on the next album.”

Bertis Downs, R.E.M.’s lawyer-manager, remembers its first public performance, on October 3 at Athens’s Legion Field: “I immediately loved the song. That kind of midtempo, folky, melodic song is something they’re particularly good at, and it was hearing ‘So. Central Rain’ that confirmed for me that this wasn’t any one-hit-wonder band. I knew they weren’t going to have any trouble coming up with great songs for their second album.”

Three days later, R.E.M. made their affection for the song public in their national TV debut, on NBC’s Late Night With David Letterman. “David was a fan,” notes Buck, “and when he asked what we wanted to play, we chose ‘Radio Free Europe’ and ‘So. Central Rain,’ even though the song still didn’t have a title.” Downs says, “People considered it brave to play a song that was so new and unfamiliar to them on a major television show.”

By early December, the band was finishing its new album, Reckoning, at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina. But the single still needed work. “[Producers] Mitch Easter and Don Dixon had the idea that the intro was weak — which it was,” recalls Buck. “They came in early one day, and Don took a little guitar hook out of the chorus and stuck it on the front of the song. In those days, you physically had to cut the tapes up and splice them back in to a new position, so it wasn’t quite as simple as it is now. When we came in, they played it to us, and we went, ‘Wow! That’s great!’ ”

The new intro was crucial to the song’s initial impact, and it wasn’t the production team’s only contribution. In early versions of the song, Easter says, drummer Bill Berry “played every other snare beat. When we finished, we thought, ‘It needs something.’ So we had him hit beats in other spots. Just by coincidence, there was some reverb on that channel, so you get this alternating reverb beat and nonreverb beat. I thought that worked very well.”

Buck wasn’t entirely happy with the recording — “I felt that the little riff at the chorus should have come out a bit more,” he says. “But I heard it on the radio recently, and now it sounds fine.”

On January 16, 1984, their last day at Reflection, R.E.M. used the studio to film a video for “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)” — and to demonstrate their unorthodox habits. “Michael would never lip-sync a vocal,” says Buck. “We played a recording of the track, and the rest of us faked it, but Michael insisted on singing a new vocal to make it more real for him.”

R.E.M.’s label, I.R.S. Records, was warming to the foursome’s quirks, seeing them as assets rather than liabilities. “We did a big publicity thing to promote the fact that we had this really cool band that was breaking tradition by not lip-syncing,” says Keith Altomare, who handled promotions for the record company at the time.

Reckoning was released on April 9, 1984, followed a month later by “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry).” “The record company told us we had to have the main chorus line in the title,” Buck says, “because radio programmers were so stupid that unless you did that, they wouldn’t know which song it was.”

Nor would they know what it was about. Stipe’s lyrics and vocals were unintelligible, a common early R.E.M. stylistic staple. “I never purposely tried to make any song indecipherable or slur the words,” Stipe has said. “I’ve been accused of that. I just sing a song the way I think it should be sung. Something like ‘So. Central Rain’ to me is so clear.”

The song’s “city on the river” is obviously Athens (on the mighty Oconee). But what was Stipe so repeatedly, gut-wrenchingly sorry about? “I never asked him,” Buck says now. As they say in all the classic sci-fi movies, there are some things that man is not meant to know.



http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=347

i actually put in reckoning yesterday, after discovering that my needle for the turntable needed replacing (i initially planned on putting on murmur). it's odd that this great little essay would come up the day after i've entered another little REM renaissance

great story, i had never heard it.

I'm a psychich, that's all.