Book Review: ‘The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.,’ by Peter Ames Carlin

THE NAME OF THIS BAND IS R.E.M.: A Biography, by Peter Ames Carlin

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, “The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.” The village was Athens, Ga., in the late 1970s and early ’80s, where an art and music scene thrived in the shadow of University of Georgia football.

Michael Stipe (singer) met Peter Buck (guitarist) in a record store. They bonded in part over their love of Patti Smith’s raw LP “Horses.” They began to collaborate in an old church, remade into apartments, where Buck lived. A UGA student named Kathleen O’Brien lived there, too.

O’Brien was a connector. She introduced Stipe and Buck to Bill Berry (drums) and Mike Mills (bass). Three of these guys were UGA students, too. Buck had dropped out of Emory. Next, she coaxed the four of them into playing their first public gig in the church’s sanctuary. The occasion was her birthday, April 5, 1980. She worked her large network of friends to ensure turnout. She procured the beer and talked some musicians out of their stage fright.

The band, by all accounts, was magic from the start. Others began to pitch in on its behalf. Some volunteered to lug amps or procure gigs or loan them money when they were desperate or work the phones calling DJs, urging them to play the band’s songs. The band was the train, but others laid track. 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.

Athens wasn’t Nowheresville, musically speaking. The city was already home to the party-out-of-bounds art band the B-52s and to Pylon, post-punk regional heroes. Finding a name wasn’t easy. Early options included (oh no!) Third Wives, Slut Bank and Negro Wives. Stipe found “r.e.m.,” an abbreviation of rapid eye movement, while leafing through a dictionary.