Lifes Rich Pageant
Studio album by R.E.M.
Released July 28, 1986
Recorded April-May 1986 at Belmont Mall Studios, Belmont, Indiana
Genre Rock
Length 38:07
Label I.R.S.
Producer Don Gehman
Lifes Rich Pageant is the fourth album by the American band R.E.M., released in 1986. Intended as an upbeat reaction to the sobering and historical Fables of the Reconstruction, R.E.M. chose Don Gehman to produce the album, which was recorded at John Mellencamp's Belmont Mall Studios in Belmont, Indiana.
The source for the title of the album is based on an English idiom. Its use is very old, but R.E.M.'s use is, according to Peter Buck, from the 1964 film A Shot in the Dark, minus the apostrophe:
Inspector Clouseau opens car door and falls into a fountain.
Maria: "You should get out of these clothes immediately. You'll catch your death of pneumonia, you will."
Clouseau: "Yes, I probably will. But it's all part of life's rich pageant, you know?"
The missing apostrophe in the title is deliberate. Nearly all contractions used by R.E.M. lack apostrophes, though "life's" in this case is a possessive.
The cover of the album depicts drummer Bill Berry on the upper part of the cover and a pair of bison, signifying an environmental theme, on the lower part. It also alludes to Buffalo Bill.
With R.E.M.'s fan base beginning to grow beyond its college rock boundaries, Lifes Rich Pageant proved to be at the time the band's most commercially successful album in the U.S., peaking at #21 on the Billboard charts and scoring them their first gold record. In the UK, the album managed a #43 peak.
The ecologically-conscious "Fall on Me" (a personal favorite of frontman Michael Stipe) and a cover of The Clique's "Superman", sung by bassist Mike Mills, were the only singles released from the album (the single version of the latter removed the sample from one of the Godzilla movies that began the album version).
Another ecologically-minded song, "Cuyahoga", refers to the once heavily polluted Cuyahoga River that flows into Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio. The song includes the lyric we burned the river down, which refers to the several occasions (most famously in 1969) when the river actually caught fire.
At the end of "Just a Touch" Michael Stipe can be heard screaming the line "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young", quoting longtime influence Patti Smith's live cover version of The Who's "My Generation" as recorded as the B-side of her 1976 single "Gloria" and more recent as a bonus track on some CD re-issues of her album Horses.
Professional ratings:
allmusic 4.5/5 stars
Robert Christgau B+
Rolling Stone 4/5 stars
Slant Magazine 4.5/5 stars
Pitchfork Media 8.8/10
Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine of allmusic:
Fables of the Reconstruction was intentionally murky, and Lifes Rich Pageant was constructed as its polar opposite. Teaming with producer Don Gehman, who previously worked with John Mellencamp, R.E.M. developed their most forceful record to date. Where previous records kept the rhythm section in the background, Pageant emphasizes the beat, and the band turns in its hardest rockers to date, including the anthemic "Begin the Begin" and the punky "Just a Touch." But the cleaner production also benefits the ballads and the mid-tempo janglers, particularly since it helps reveal Michael Stipe's growing political obsessions, especially on the environmental anthems "Fall on Me" and "Cuyahoga." The group hasn't entirely left myths behind -- witness the Civil War ballad "Swan Swan H" -- but the band sound more contemporary both musically and lyrically than they did on either Fables or Murmur, which helps give the record an extra kick. And even with excellent songs like "I Believe," "Flowers of Guatemala," "These Days," and "What if We Give It Away," it's ironic that the most memorable moment comes from the garage rock obscurity "Superman," which is sung with glee by Mike Mills.
Review by Robert Christgau:
Musically, this talented minor band's fastest-breaking album represents no significant departure from the past, though just how many recapitulations of their lyricism one needs is clearly beginning to trouble those who took it too seriously in the first place. The players still make them and the singer-lyricist still refuses to define them, and while his projection has improved, it's hardly crystalline and wouldn't tell you anything you didn't know if it was. I mean, this is music for mushheads, and that it retains an undeniable if rather abstract charm only proves that there's a little mushhead in all of us. I give album four the nod over number three for its compelling snare sound and dynamic cover version. And insist that any normal person can make do with number one, when all this was a tad more spontaneous.
Review by Stephen M. Deusner of Pitchfork:
The cover of Lifes Rich Pageant features the handsome forehead and full eyebrows of drummer Bill Berry, whose face is cut off at the nose by a low-contrast picture of two buffalo. It's a curious image, embedded with a Buffalo Bill pun, and it playfully nods to the band's refusal to practice expected music-industry behaviors like appearing prominently on their album covers, lip-syncing in videos, writing love songs, or generally revealing too much of themselves beyond the music. Even four albums into their career, they still cultivated an enigmatic presence on Lifes Rich Pageant, starting with that cover and extending to the dropped apostrophe in that title and the mismatched tracklists. Furthermore, the mysterious painted figures and roughly sketched symbols in the liner notes presented the album as something more akin to folk art than folk rock.
In direct conflict with that visual impression, Lifes Rich Pageant was R.E.M.'s most pop-oriented and accessible album up to that point. Recording frequently and touring almost constantly, the band had been nurturing a grassroots audience throughout the early 1980s, and Pageant is a pivotal album in their career, representing the moment when their Southern post-punk sound anticipated larger venues and began expanding to fill those spaces. It was also, strangely, their most overtly political collection, with songs addressing environmental crises and political malaise. Rather than sounding sanctimonious, however, such dissent energized R.E.M. and injected more pep into Berry's drumbeats, more incisive jangle into Peter Buck's guitar, and more charisma into Michael Stipe's performance. The album barrels along in just over 30 minutes, lending the songs a sense of purpose. This is music that has to be somewhere.
Lifes is celebratory rather than commiserative, with tense tempos fueling heraldic choruses and shout-outs to Woody Guthrie ("Cuyahoga") and Cole Porter ("Begin the Begin"). Stipe's lyrical dodginess, such a formidable weapon on previous albums, allows the band to come at these issues from obscure angles: With its rousing chorus and pensive bass line, "Cuyahoga" mails postcard dispatches from a museum where rivers and plains are artifacts, consigned to diorama and memory rather than reality. "Fall on Me" mixes spiritual and consumerist language to deliver a knotted ecological message that takes some unpacking: "Buy the sky and sell the sky," Stipe sings, then changes the Wall Street phrasing: "Lift your arms up to the sky. Ask the sky and ask the sky, don't fall on me."
Maybe that's why the band chose to close with Mike Mills-sung cover of the Clique's "Superman". Seemingly out of place on such a serious-minded album and certainly jarring after the Civil War fever dream of "Swan Swan H", it's been derided as R.E.M. at their most superfluous. But that's how they must have felt at the time-- like supermen taking on the world's problems and finding they had unknown powers. In that regard, they're aided significantly by producer Don Gehman, who was then famous for helming John Cougar's early albums. Who knew that Gehman would handle R.E.M. better than folk-rock legend Joe Boyd, who nearly made a muddle of their previous album, Fables of the Reconstruction? In addition to giving the melodic leads their own space, he emphasizes the muscle in Berry's beats and the intricate interaction between the rhythm section. No wonder the drummer's on the album cover: Berry's responsible for the furious pace of the album and enables its abrupt detours into salsa and Nuggets pop.
That dynamic makes the remaster on this 25th anniversary reissue sound even livelier and warmer, reinforcing the balance between excitement and gravity that illuminates these songs. It also makes the second disc of demos all the more intriguing, presenting these familiar songs in their most skeletal format. The small flourishes that didn't make the studio versions sound charmingly off-handed: Stipe hums most of "I Believe", then punctuates the end with a sing-songy la-la-la. He tries out a harmonica solo on an early version of "Bad Day", then uses the instrument to cover for forgotten lyrics. This is R.E.M. at their most ramshackle, a vibe that makes Dead Letter Office a fan favorite even today.
Lifes is R.E.M.'s first transition album, one that builds on the innovations of their early releases while hinting at the territory they would cover on Document and Green. It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.
LP track listing
All songs written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe except as noted.
Side One - "Dinner Side"
1. "Begin the Begin" Ð 3:28
2. "These Days" Ð 3:24
3. "Fall On Me" Ð 2:50
4. "Cuyahoga" Ð 4:19
5. "Hyena" Ð 2:50
6. "Underneath the Bunker" Ð 1:25
Side Two Ð "Supper Side"
7. "The Flowers of Guatemala" Ð 3:55
8. "I Believe" Ð 3:49
9. "What If We Give It Away?" Ð 3:33
10. "Just a Touch" Ð 3:00
11. "Swan Swan H" Ð 2:42
12. "Superman" (Mike Bottler and Gary Zekley) Ð 2:52
Personnel
* Michael Stipe - vocals
* Mike Mills - bass guitar, backing vocals, lead vocals on "Superman"
* Peter Buck - guitar
* Bill Berry - drums, backing vocals
Thanks to slipkid68 for providing this mint pressing.