R.E.M. Will Not Play Together Again: ‘It Would Never Be as Good’
The four founding members of R.E.M. reunited (for an interview only) to reflect on their history with CBS Mornings ahead of their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame Thursday night. The quartet confirmed they would not play together again (it would take “a comet,” according to bassist Mike Mills, and guitarist Peter Buck opined, “It would never be as good,”) but they said they were proud of their accomplishments and ended the band in 2011 at the right time for them.
“At that point, there wasn’t anything we could agree on really, musically: what kind of music, how to record it, are we gonna go on tour,” Buck said of the split as the three other members listened, all gathered at a table in their Athens, Georgia HQ. “We could barely agree on where to go to dinner. And now we can just agree on where to go to dinner.”
“We’re also here to tell the tale and we’re sitting at the same table together with deep admiration and lifelong friendship,” frontman Michael Stipe said. “A lot of people that do this can’t claim that.”
“I think we quit at the right time,” Buck went on. “This was a really great place to finish: great tour, great album, go home.” Stipe and Mills agreed with Buck that none of them had had second thoughts about ending the group.
In an emotional moment, drummer Bill Berry broke down when reflecting on his departure from the band in 1997 after he suffered a brain aneurysm onstage at a concert two years earlier. The medical event and the surgery that followed, he said, “may have lowered my energy level, and I just didn’t have the drive I once did.” That realization prompted Berry to quit the band. “I didn’t regret [leaving] at the time,” he said in the interview. “Um, I sort of regretted it a little later.” With tears in his eyes, Berry said he regretted “making it weird” for his bandmates at the time, but they reacted by saying that wasn’t the case, and Stipe put a hand on the drummer’s shoulder.
The musicians will get together again Thursday night to attend the Songwriters Hall of Fame gala in New York. The honor, they said, was significant to them. “We lived or died on the strength of our songs,” Buck said, “so this is a huge honor.”
“It is the hardest thing that we do,” Mills said, “and it is the thing that we worked on the very most from the beginning.”
“Because we had to,” rejoined Berry. “Really early on, just to put food on the table, we had to write songs just as fast as we could.”
This year’s other Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees include Timbaland, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Dean Pitchford, and Hillary Lindsay. Diane Warren will receive the Johnny Mercer Award.