chronic town

R.E.M. emerged fully formed with the deeply dreamy twisted kites of this remarkably influential and inscrutable EP.  The band formed in the University of Georgia college town of Athens as what drummer Bill Berry calls: "nothing more than something to do maybe annihilate a little of the boredom that you get around here."

Mike Mills expounds: "There's not much else to do, unless you just want to sit and drink in a bar. There aren't any out-of-town acts that come through, except for the one or two major acts the univerisity will bring in. So when you get bored with listening to records, you get up and do it yourself."

Peter Buck says:  "We're kind of unassumingly ambitious, in that we never do anything expecting any kind of feedback. We just do things to please ourselves - we write to please ourselves, do the cover, hand in the record and we think, 'Hmmm, I wounder how this is going to do?' And we still wonder - we still talk about how many records we want to sell. 'Okay, no more than this many, because more than that and it starts getting kinda bullshit'."

Michael Stipe rememebers:  "When we first got together, it was just, 'What song does everybody know?' We played old '60's, like 'Stepping Stone,' Troggs' songs, stuff like that. Then Kathleen, the woman who lived there with us, had this grand idea to have a birthday party in three weeks, and she said, 'Why don't you guys play?' So we sat down and wrote a bunch of songs with probably took as long to play as they did to write. I guess we had fifteen songs and a bunch of covers: we ended up doing three sets that night. It was a real hootenanny."

After the success of their debut single 'Radio Free Europe' on  local indie label Hib-Tone the band decided to record an EP.
'Chronic Town' was recorded over a weekend in October of 1981 with Mitch Easter at his Drive-In Studios in Winston-Salem, NC. The sessions were characterized by studio experimentation involving tape loops and recording vocals outside. With Bill Berry on drums and vocals; Peter Buck on guitar; Mike Mills on bass and vocals; and Michael Stipe on vocals, the album established the band's distinctive lo-fidelity janglepop arpeggio sound and arcane lyrics.

The band's manager Jefferson Holt had planned to release the EP on a new independent label he was forming; but the band was signed to I.R.S. Records, who bought them out of their contract with Hib-Tone. Their new label decided that they liked the song 'Wolves, Lower' instead of 'Ages of You'; but they wanted them to record a new version for the release. 'Chronic Town' was released in August of 1982 and became an underground hit in college stations. The EP was later included on CD versions of their compilation album 'Dead Letter Office', which came out five years later. The EP was ranked at number two that year on the Village Voice's EP listing for the critic's Pazz & Jop poll.










http://www.remhq.com/




















Side one – "Chronic Town"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBcCUyHMwPU



"Wolves, Lower" – 4:10
"Gardening at Night" – 3:29
"Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)" – 3:54





Side two – "Poster Torn"

"1,000,000"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhT1cB4vaQ4


"Stumble"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1QHKMbqQq4






live on October 10, 1982 at the Pier in Raleigh, NC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KNwdON8HIk


 
00:00 wolves, lower
05:27 laughing
09:32 1,000,000
12:55 moral kiosk
16:11 catapult
20:00 west of the fields
23:02 radio free europe
27:46 ages of you
31:31 we walk
35:00 what's new pussycat
35:25 carnival of sorts (box cars)
40:13 skank