R.E.M.: Road Movie
The 1995 Monster tour was probably R.E.M.’s most anticipated; it was their first in five years, and the first after their multiplatinum smashes Out of Time and Automatic for the People. It was also by far their most tumultuous. Not only did Bill Berry have to undergo brain surgery due to two aneurysms, Mike Mills went under the knife to fix complications from his previous appendectomy and Michael Stipe had a hernia repaired. The official record of that tour is Road Movie, a film that made a few appearances in arthouse theaters before hitting video and eventually DVD. While there are several strong individual performances, the whole never quite clicks.
That could be the result of editing; rather than record a single performance, the filmmakers assembled footage from three of the final shows in Atlanta. (A fun side game is playing Count the Costume Changes as Mills’ gaudy “I’m a rock star dammit” Nudie suits change color, often mid-song.) For the most part, the editors eschew any special post-production that might have added atmosphere to the performance; the result is a fairly straightforward and deliberately lo-fi chronicle that has left a few DVD viewers scratching their heads. Exhaustion setting in at the end of the tour could be a factor was well; it could be memory playing tricks on me or just the difference that being in the audience makes, but I remember songs like “Losing My Religion” having a little more energy when I heard them earlier in the tour. But I think the larger problem is the material itself. Road Movie features 18 songs, 7 of which are from Monster, one of which (”Revolution”) never made it to any album, and two (”Binky the Doormat” and “The Wake-Up Bomb”) that made the lineup of New Adventures in Hi-Fi. That leaves only eight slots for songs from the band’s eight previous albums. Most of those, naturally, were taken up by Automatic and Out of Time entries, with only two songs from Document and one from Green making the cut.
Why is this a problem? For starters, it means that there’s no opportunity to see how the band might have reinterpreted its older material to fit the style of the Monster tour. More importantly, in my mind and the minds of many other fans, the material from Monster is among the band’s weakest, and it tends to drag the whole down. That said, the highlight of the film - as it was of the show I saw live - is that album’s “Let Me In”. Courtney Love loaned the band one of Kurt Cobain’s guitars, and Mills just throws himself into playing it. Next to him, Stipe is almost motionless as he sings; Berry and Peter Buck provide support on percussion and keyboard, respectively. It’s quite a beautiful moment.
While far from a bad show, Road Movie is nowhere close to a definitive R.E.M. tour film. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that.
