Though it wasn’t a major commercial hit, R.E.M.’s third album, Fables Of The Reconstruction, ensured that the upwards trajectory the band had been on since their landmark debut, Murmur, continued apace. The band toured Fables… relentlessly in Europe and North America across the latter half of 1985, and, by the dawn of 1986, were on the cusp of breaking through to the mainstream. The songs the Athens, Georgia, quartet had been working up for their eventual follow-up, Lifes Rich Pageant, were significantly more upbeat and less gnomic than the Southern gothic-flavored tracks on Fables…, and the band seemed poised to connect with a much larger audience.
R.E.M. had crossed the Atlantic to work with former Nick Drake and Fairport Convention producer Joe Boyd during the Fables… sessions, but for their fourth album, they opted to stay in the US and enlist the services of Don Gehman, known primarily for his work with John Cougar Mellencamp.
Gehman was renowned for his crisp, efficient production techniques, and he first hooked up with the band for an extensive demo session at John Keane’s Studio in Athens, during March 1986. Later collected as the Athens Demos as part of Lifes Rich Pageant’s 25th-anniversary release in 2011, this session found the band working up early versions of most of the tracks that would appear on the album proper, in addition to future B-sides such as “Rotary Ten” (or “Jazz (Rotary Ten)” as it was known at this stage) and the inaugural version of their 2003 hit “Bad Day.”
R.E.M. decamped to Indiana for the album sessions proper, where they reunited with Gehman at Mellencamp’s studio – Belmont Mall in Bloomington – and completed the new record’s 12 songs across April and May 1986. Gehman encouraged Michael Stipe’s vocal prowess during the sessions and, accordingly, Lifes Rich Pageant is rightly viewed as a watershed for R.E.M.: the record where Stipe significantly gained in confidence as a frontman and began to clearly enunciate his lyrics.
As a lyricist, it was patently obvious that Stipe had also grown immensely, with a number of Lifes Rich Pageant’s key tracks reflecting his burgeoning interest in contemporary politics and ecological issues. Though the apocryphal tale of Galileo Galilei dropping feathers and lead weights off the Leaning Tower Of Pisa, to test the laws of gravity, partly inspired his eventual lyric, the glorious, yearning “Fall On Me” also commented on environmental issues, most specifically acid rain. The brooding “Cuyahoga,” meanwhile, referred to the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River that flows into Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio. The lyric “We burned the river down” reputedly referred to several occasions (most specifically in 1969) when the river actually caught fire in the locale.
Stipe, however, wasn’t the only band member to benefit from Gehman’s disciplined approach to recording. The entire line-up was on point throughout the sessions, and from the purposeful opener, “Begin The Begin,” to the joyous closing cover of The Clique’s “Superman,” Lifes Rich Pageant was suffused with a swaggering élan that was almost entirely absent on Fables Of The Reconstruction.
Filler was never an issue with Lifes Rich Pageant, and the record has remained a panacea for the ears to this day. Surging, idealistic anthems such as “I Believe” and “These Days” (“We are concern/We are hope despite the times”) have retained both energy and urgency, while the homespun folk of “Swan Swan H”and the curious, rhumba-like “Underneath The Bunker” – with its distorted vocals and nuclear war-related lyric – remind us that, even at their most direct and accessible, R.E.M. always exuded a tantalizing air of mystique. From: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/behind-the-albums/r-e-m-lifes-rich-pageant/
