Long gone, long gone

R.E.M. - 'West of The Fields' (Murmur - 1983)

In 2007, R.E.M. played a five-night residency at The Olympia Theatre in Dublin, captured on  Live at the Olympia. While tracks from their 2008 album Accelerate dominate the setlists, the band delves into their back catalogue by playing songs from 10 albums and their debut release, the E.P. Chronic Town.

When Michael Stipe tackles the final song on 1983's Murmur, 'West of The Fields', for the first time since 1989, it looks like Stipe has looked the lyrics up online and is checking a transcript while he is signing.

Doing this might be an act; it plays well into the mythology of early R.E.M. with Stipe's hushed, cryptic and sometimes near-impenetrable lyrics being so dense that he has no choice but to look them up himself twenty-five years later.

The lyrics themselves appear to develop further the themes of mythology and dreams populated throughout the album. While going west to Elysian Fields is a familiar refrain in Greek Mythology, there has been a suggestion that the song is more literal. With credit for Neil Bogan, the lyrics also refer to Elysian Fields Avenue in the French Quarter on New Orleans, where Stipe allegedly lived on the street for a week when he was 20. That is also where A Streetcar Named Desire takes place, and the talk of dreaming of a living jungle in the song would tie in with the humid atmosphere that story conveys in print or on film.

Back in 1983, when Murmur was released, R.E.M. was a band that sounded very different to what passed for Alternative Rock music in the U.S.A.; it is not a stretch to say that they invented it from that side of the Atlantic. Much was made of the Byrdsian swagger of Peter Buck's jangling guitar lines, but there is less of that on 'West of Fields'. There is almost a more British post-punk influence on the sound than Paisley Underground. Besides the re-recording of 'Radio Free Europe', it is the most driving song on the record, with a real sense of urgency and agency that the others, more melodic and calm songs have. Both songs also have that call and response refrain that British people might call a Chuckle Brothers duet (To me, to you). 

It feels appropriate that the debut R.E.M. album should wobble off muttering and mumbling (murmuring, in fact) rather than having a big declarative end song which is a line drawn and curtain closer. 'Perfect Circle' sounds more like a closing track in many ways, and this song is tonally adjacent to the rest of the record. Some days I would argue that it is pointing to their next album, Reckoning - it also sounds like it could be on Chronic Town.

Even within the song, there is an element of it slipping off somewhere else; the bridge does sound like someone tuning the dial away to a different college rock station around the 1:40 mark and then coming back for the rest of the song. This bait and switch is a neat trick that R.E.M. would pull off time and time again in their later career, and it is thrilling to hear them do so for one of the first times at the end of their debut.

Later this week, we will look at the first 31 entries and see if we can spot any emerging patterns or trends in the closing tracks we have looked at so far.