Making a Monster Part 8: "REM's Sergeant Pepper..."

Hello again... It has been a busy couple of weeks for The Reverse Engineers. We have promoting our new album Max Q, which we are happy to report is doing well. For those of you who have picked up a copy, thank you for your support. For those of you who would like to, click here. Our track "Sunshine With the Shade" has been getting some attention recently, and has climbed to #5 on Weedshare.com, the home of the revolutionary Weed music format.

At any rate... on with our story...

Making a Monster Part 8: "REM's Sergeant Pepper..."

The business of marketing music is interesting. At the heart of it, you have art... a soulful musical expression. Since most people are not looking for art, the art has to come looking for them. This requires marketing, which often requires some form of hype or spin... which is usually tough for the band members themselves to stomach. Hence, the "band manager" was invented, to take care of such necessary evils.

Jefferson Holt was the manager of REM during the Monster sessions. Jefferson arrived about 3/4 of the way into the sessions in Atlanta. Jefferson struck me as an interesting person. To me, he looked like a doctor or lawyer. He drove a BMW, wore business casual clothes (at least when I saw him), and spoke in a very slick and deliberate way. For the most part, he was very cordial and polite to me, but he was all business. I didn't get much of a musical vibe off of the guy. I think I had pictured somebody different as the manager of REM. But hey, lets face it... the record business is tough, and great music often goes unnoticed because there aren't enough car salesmen around interested in pushing it.

By this time, the band was deep into tracking Monster. REM would arrive at about 10 each day, run through their set of tunes as a warm up, then spend the afternoon tracking. The idea was to capture as many live takes as possible to capture the magic of REM's live sound. Later during mixing, they could pick the parts that they wanted to keep. This meant that the more performances they recorded, the better chance they had of capturing a magic moment. For me, this was an awesome thing to witness. I really never got tired of it. I would wheel carts of beverages and refreshments around during the recording, frequently passing in front of a stage that happened to have REM playing on it at full concert volume.

During a break between songs, Jefferson approached, and asked me for a Coke (small glass bottle of course). Then he handed me the keys to his BMW. "Could you do me a favor? Could you get me my briefcase out of the back of my car? Here is the key to the trunk. The trunk isn't what your used to... it's Germanic..." He then went on to describe in detail how to open the trunk of a BMW. Since the BMW's trunk was "Germanic" he must have thought that the guy running errands and providing drinks had little hope of figuring it out how to open it... after all, I drove a stinky blue pickup truck. I retrieved the briefcase without incident, and delivered it to Jefferson.

Late one evening, after REM was done tracking, I was counting up my expenses in a small back office. I was given an allowance every day, and that allowance had to be accounted for with receipts, just like balancing a cash register. While I tallied up the receipts, I heard Jefferson in the office next to me, making phone calls... I got a rare opportunity to hear the spin machine of a rock band manager at full bore...

"This is a great album... we are very excited about it..." Jefferson spoke loudly into the phone. "REM has never done an album like this before... I consider it to be REM's version of Sergeant Pepper..."

Sergeant Pepper? I didn't personally see the connection. Sergeant Pepper was a band (The Beatles) pretending to be another band (Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band). But this was REM recording live on a stage. You couldn't get REM to sound more like REM than the music I was hearing. I couldn't help but listen further. The memory is a bit fuzzy for me, but I would swear that he was talking to someone at Rolling Stone.

Maybe the new approach that the band took to recording was so different, that in his mind, REM was a different type of rock band for this record. At any rate, the magazine people seemed to be eating it up.

Jefferson made a few more phone calls, all of them to the media, and gave them the same Sergent Pepper verbiage. Then a reporter arrived to meet him in person. I could see the shadow of the reporter greeting Jefferson in the office next to me, but I didn't see them. To tell you the truth, I had an uneasy feeling that I wasn't supposed to be there, so I sat kind of motionless, staring a bit glassy eyed as I eaves dropped on their conversation. Again, the same Sergent Pepper comparison was made, and the reporter gobbled it up without question, gushing at how cool it was, jotting it down.

I remember briefly thinking to myself, why can't the mere fact that REM is a great band that is recording a new record be something to write about? This was my first exposure to the necessary evils of "hype".

After a while, the office next to me emptied, and I heard Jefferson's loud but slick words grow fainter as he walked down the hall and left the building.

...

Well, that's all for now. I have a few REM stories left, mostly about how the recording session in Atlanta wrapped up. Let me know (leave a comment below) if you are interested in hearing them. Otherwise, I might just get back to Blogging about other things.

Oh, and when you get a chance, stop by and listen to some sound clips from our new CD, Max Q at http://www.theReverseEngineers.com. If you want to hear what we sound like, here is a clip: Sunshine with the Shade wma | mp3. Download the entire song at TheReverseEngineers.com

Charles Cote
Bassist -- The Reverse Engineers