This Sugar Cane/This Lemonade/This Hurricane/I'm Not Afraid" – My Favorite R.E.M. Choruses

wrigley, as the red sox were winning the series, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Part of my "Pop! Goes the Radio" metamorphosis involved the liberating power of the chorus. It's the most important part of any song, as this semi-hilarious video will tell you ... it's the part that you hum when the song is over, the part that elevates all that comes before. A good chorus is essential, but not necessary, to a good pop song.

So here are some of my favorite choruses from R.E.M. I could write a thousand words on each song; these are just my stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Maybe someday I'll elaborate on them, but for now, here they are ... and here's a handy pop-up window with all the songs. Or click on the links below.

"Be Mine," New Adventures in Hi-Fi

This one bowled me over when I first heard it, and I spent way too much time trying to figure it out on my acoustic guitar – mainly because you can't get good feedback on an acoustic guitar, especially when you're living with another person in a studio apartment. My first thought was "This is going to be a smash hit," but they didn't release it as a single. It's as dark and brooding a love song as they've ever written.

"Belong," Out of Time

One of the great wordless choruses. I don't know if that disqualifies it from true "great chorus" consideration, but since this is the only thing Google knows about when it comes to "great choruses of the rock era," I'm going to issue a ruling: Words aren't necessary. Certainly they weren't for this gem, which I used to learn fingerpicking during my senior year at Denison.

"Camera," Reckoning

I'll find myself humming this when I'm on a photo shoot. Not the thing most parents want to hear from their photographer, mainly because I can't always get the lyrics right. Who will be your face, indeed? And why are you locking your car doors like that?

"Daysleeper," Up

Oh man, this is killer. It's in 3/4 time, which always helps ... I was working as a temp at TargetCom in Chicago, doing tech support, and the phone system was set to play XRT when people were on hold – and we could pipe it through our speakerphones too. I remember walking down the hall of the Navy Pier offices when I first heard this song. It was late in the afternoon on a cool fall day ... I didn't know it was R.E.M. but I had a good hunch. It sounded amazing even in speakerphone. I'd actually got a sneak preview of the album, thanks to the Oxford American's Southern Sampler 1998, which had the better version of "Why Not Cry" as well as the great Hackberry Ramblers' "I'll Be There."

"Fall on Me," Life's Rich Pageant

I've interpreted this song as an anti-environmentalist song, which would be odd coming from Michael Stipe, but you tell me – "Buy the sky and sell the sky and tell the sky, and tell the sky 'Don't Fall On Me'" ... I think it's a reaction to the anthropomorphism of the environment that was all the rage in the late 1980s. Don't anthropomorphize the environment, dude – it hates it when you do that!

"Falls to Climb," Up

Another one for the vasty underrated "Up," which was the first album after Bill Berry left the group. R.E.M. has a good knack for ending its albums powerfully. It's a martyr song, which makes it all the better for a melodramatic chorus.

"Imitation of Life," Reveal

A weird album – I'd broken my ankle two days before it came out; on that Tuesday, Amina watched me hobble down the street on crutches in Evanston to buy the disc before we ate lunch. It was a pretty weak effort (the disc, not the crutch work) but you can't deny the goosebumps when Buck's Rickenbacker kicks in toward the end. And the lyrics are among my favorite from the group ... I have no idea what they mean, but I understand every word. No one can see me cry ...

"It's a Free World Baby," In Time (Best of, 1988-2003)

This was a song I first heard as a bootleg when Adam Garratt and I shared the "Buena Vista" apartment in northern Chicago. It's a really bad bunch of lyrics, but that chorus! Oh man. "He hit his head!!!!" That's gold, I'm telling you ... I came across a bootleg of the song on T.U.B.E. and that inspired this post. I had no idea you could, you know, pay money for the finished version of the song. It was my white whale for years: "You know, back in they day, I heard the best R.E.M. chorus that's never been released ..." Oh, okay there grandpa. Tell me about how you had to rewind cassette tapes during the Clinton administration.

"It's the End of the World As We Know It," Document

Obligatory. You gotta put this on your list. And I had to include "Leonard Bernstein!" in the clip.

"Man on the Moon," Automatic for the People

In concert, this song just rocks. They played it during the "Monster" tour in '95 and it was a great singalong. I saw them in Pittsburgh, and I had a press pass. I took three rolls of b/w film and can't find the negatives. I kick myself every so often about that. I got a great shot of Mike Mills in his Elvis jumpsuit, pointing the headstock of his bass at me. I must find those negatives. I had an insanely attractive 17 year old girl from eastern Pennsylvania promise me that I'd send her copies of the photos; I did them up at the News-Register and printed out a huge newspaper-sized poster for her. She wrote back and wanted to be a "pen pal." I never replied because I was 23 and she was 17. What a fool I was.

"So. Central Rain," R.E.M. In The Attic

The. best. live. recording. ever. Did you never call? I waited for your call; these rivers of suggestion are driving me away. The oceans sang; the conversations dimmed ... Go buy yourself another dream, this choice wasn't mine. In my Denison years, when I would fantasize about playing a guitar in front of people, I did this song, and Tom Petty's live version of "The Waiting." I kicked ass.

"Until the Day Is Done," Accelerate

I can't agree with the political bent of the lyrics – hell, with most everything Michael Stipe stands for politically – but this chorus not only is eminently sing-along-to-able™ but it's also hauntingly beautiful. Very well produced by Jacknife Lee. If someone who voted the way I voted put this song on repeat on his iPod ... you know it's good.

"Wendell Gee," Fables of the Reconstruction

Named after the proprietor of Wendell Gee's Used Cars in Prendergast, Ga. (I love Wikipedia.) Peter Buck didn't like this song when it first was recorded, but he's come around to it. "Whistle while the wind blows," I'd say to Peter, were I ever to meet him. Given that I live in Nashville, who knows? It could happen.

"What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" Monster

During my two years at the Wheeling News-Register, I was let out of work early for two record releases: The Beatles' "Anthology: Vol I," and "Monster." I had just gotten my first new car, a 1995 Chevrolet S-10 pickup with an after-market stereo system (later stolen while the truck was parked on Montrose Avenue in Chicago) and the first song I really cranked was "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" and I was worried that I'd blow out the speakers before I'd made the first payment.

In the immortal words of Tony Kornheiser: "That's it ... that's the list."

Pop! Goes the Radio

(This little story is just a prelude to a post coming later about ... well, about music.)

When I visited Denison as a senior in high school, I was hosted by a group of guys who – score one for the geniuses in Beth Eden – I came to realize were as nerdy (in their own ways) as I was, though at the time it wasn't obvious. Actually, even after graduation and, I'd wager, even today, it's probably still not obvious ... One of them (I think it was Todd Gutnik) was a bigwig at WDUB, the 50-watt (that's not a typo) radio station that broadcast as far away as Heath. My dad's CB radio had more power, but the station had a professional board and a huge record collection, and I decided during the visit that what I wanted most in life was to be on the radio.

Tryouts were announced in The Bullsheet not long after my first semester started, and I nervously went to the basement of Knapp to fill out the paperwork and be interviewed. DUB's studio was pretty amazing; it didn't look like much from the outside, but it was impressively spacious behind the door. There was a lounge with an absolutely skanky couch and a few offices in the back, an insanely narrow room to the right that housed the record collection ... and straight ahead was the Valhalla, the Holy Grail – the studio.

The board, with all its sliders and dials, intimidated me, though I had to laugh to myself because there actually were two turntables and a microphone, though I was never, ever, not even once, tempted to try my scratching skills ... The board in the studio looked down onto a large, soundproofed room with long tables punctuated by mics and headphones. It was like watching the engineering room on the Enterprise, and I often imagined that's what it was, though the room was usually empty and dark.

During tryouts, though, the senior staff was sitting around down there, and we were ushered into the engineer's studio, which was right next to the main studio upstairs. The windows were taped over – you couldn't see them, and they couldn't see you. I was told to back-announce a few songs I would have just played in my imaginary DJ universe, then to read some on-campus promotional items culled from press releases. I was nervous; I wanted to impress these faceless voices with my oh-so-hip musical tastes, and prove once and for all that the kid with the mullet and paunch was far cooler than he might look at first glance.

It must have worked, because I was called back, tapped on the shoulder and honored by being named as an apprentice for a semester. I was assigned to (if memory serves) Friday Abernethy, on whom I had a massive, major, super-duper crush, made all the more tragic by the fact that I had taken to wearing anti-sexual-attraction cologne for my first year on campus, which made me the pimply equivalent of her nerdy kid brother's even more nerdy friend who always wore that Millenium Falcon t-shirt and started wheezing whenever she smiled.

So I survived not getting ravished on the control room floor, and graduated to full-fledged DJ status to start my sophomore year. I'd been inspired by my good friend Rob (then) Plourde to do an all-Beatles show called "Sitting on a Cornflake," usually on Sunday afternoons – lighter in the first hour, heavier in the second. It was a good show, and had a few off-campus followers. One guy sent me a cassette of some bootlegs that ended up making it onto "Anthology Vol. I" ... the "Whoa love me too" part gave me goosebumps 18 years ago, and listening to it just now, I got 'em again.

I had success, but I got tired of being known as "the Beatles guy" around campus. My good friend Nancy was abroad during our junior year; she and I were active in the theatre department, though I'd say that only one of us actually had talent for it. (I was house manager, if that gives you the answer.) She was stage managing a show, and it was the stage manager's prerogative to play music through the house – she was the boss, and if the boss wanted ABBA, the boss got ABBA.

Which is what she wanted. I hadn't really considered ABBA before that point, but something about the long, October afternoon in Ace Morgan made "Knowing Me, Knowing You" sound like something I should get to know better. She'd brought back "ABBA Gold" from London, and I picked up my copy a few days later. I became transfixed – it was gorgeous, amazing, sugary pop music. The Beatles were pop, of course, but not like this; if the Beatles were chocolate cake, ABBA was cotton candy. And I liked cotton candy.

My final semester, the radio show became "Pop! Goes the Radio," dedicated to a flavor of pop music that didn't get played often on college radio, mainly because only old people were listening to The Turtles and Frank Sinatra and Cyndi Lauper at the time ... but it was all good to me. Something about a catchy hook and an irresistible chorus meant more to me than the latest angst from heroin-thin white men or the Kurt Cobain wannabes that ruled the playlists at the time. I was out of sync with my generation, and I was glad for it.

trotter at denison

Editor's note: I'd written this up a week or so ago, but didn't know whether to publish it here or not. I think it's OK now. – Paul


trotter at denison, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Some things write themselves; others require work. This is a bit of both. I've been telling myself the story in quiet moments -- in the shower, driving to Kroger, taking Trotter for a walk. There hasn't been a moment away from it. How it all fits together is really beyond me at the moment, but somehow it all does in my mind. I hope it does on the page as well.

I'll start with the facts:

Edward Rinkes, my grandfather, died last Thursday.

It's the damnedest sentence to write. It doesn't do justice to what happened -- show me the obit that ever has -- and yet it's remarkably accurate in its clinical, emotionless summary. On Thursday afternoon, Ed Rinkes called the Martins Ferry police and reported a shooting at his address. He then walked into the living room, laid down on the floor, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

When I'm in a forgiving mood (which isn't often lately), I'd say this was the banal, physical culmination 22 years after the emotional death he suffered when my grandmother, Ruth, passed from a long bout with cancer. I'm not exaggerating; on Ruth's tombstone, he put his name next to hers, which is a common practice when a spouse dies. Normally, you'd see the deceased's name and dates, and the survivor's name, with only the year of birth.

But Ed Rinkes put his date of death in stone -- exactly three days after Ruth's. Last week was just an afterthought to him. To the rest of the family, it's all we can think about.

***

You'll note the cute picture at the top of this post. We took Trotter back home with us. We've always wanted him to see his grandparents' house and huge back yard, and he certainly did have fun. To call him spoiled is to call water kinda wet. Trotter lives the life.

On the ride back we had to make a pit stop, coincidentally at the Ohio 37 exit, which leads straight to Granville, home of my alma mater, Denison University. Amina decided we should take Trotter to Denison, to get an education like his dad. He had a great time, though the first thing he did was take a dump on the quad outside Slayter Hall. Like father, like son, I suppose.

We played fetch on the academic quad, the commons area behind Slayter (which is totally new to me) and in front of Swasey Chapel. We had lots of water, we sniffed all the mulched trees and in about an hour, Trotter had as much fun as a dog could have on a perfectly manicured college campus.

I only realized later the irony behind the timing of our visit. I wouldn't have made it to Denison had Ed Rinkes not given my parents a gift of money that they, in turn, dedicated to paying tuition. If it weren't for Ed Rinkes, I never would have afforded a private college.

It used to be known as "a Baptist college of the liberal arts," but the sign at the base of campus had been changed in 2006. Had my grandmother Ruth lived a few more years, she'd have told me all about the Baptist legacy of Denison. She'd spent a week of every summer at Denison, attending the Ohio Women's Baptist Convention. I found a program in her desk at the house. She ate in Curtis West and Huffman, she stayed in Shepardson, she attended events at Swasey ... I never knew this until after she passed.

Something else I never knew: John, Josh and Adam -- my main circle of friends at Denison -- all had grandmothers who attended the same convention. I'm sure their grandmothers knew mine. Adam's mother actually attended my church when she was a little girl; I'm sure my dad pulled her pigtails or somesuch. And even spookier: Rev. Sedgwick, who founded my church way back in the early 1800s, helped create the Granville Literary and Theological Institution, which ... well, I don't need to finish that sentence.

Denison was in my stars. But I never would have realized it had Ed Rinkes not made it possible.

***

So what, you say. Big deal -- your grandpa gave you money to go to college. I'd agree; normally it isn't newsworthy ... except that he wasn't known for magnanimity. Or kindness. Or sensitivity. Or sense of humor.

Basically, Ed wasn't well liked, even within the family.

He wasn't particularly fond of people in general, especially visitors to his house. After Ruth died, he put up a hand-stenciled sign that ordered visitors to "treat this house as you would your neighbor's wife -- look all you want, but do not touch." He was disliked by the families on both sides of his house, and his obsession with one led to a rather embarrassing brush with the police. In his suicide note, he mentioned his "rotten neighbors" and failing health, as though the two were equivalent burdens on his frail psyche.

He didn't seem to be a caring parent or grandparent. Mom told me this story just Sunday, claiming that it perfectly summed up what Ed Rinkes was all about. Apparently, I was just a young boy when this happened:

On a trip home from visiting with our relatives in Cleveland, I asked Ed if he would give me something that he had -- could have been a trinket, or a toy. "Paul," he said to me, "I love you so much I'd give you the sweat off my balls."

The sweat off my balls. To Ed, that was as loving as it got. I helped him put together a metal shed he'd bought at Sears. I must have been 10 or 11, old enough to know what I was doing but not old enough to do it with Ed. We were assembling some part of the shed, and it called for some contortions that ended up with both of us using our left hands to complete the task. He said something about being "no goddamned good" at using his left hand -- "even for jacking off," he said. I had no idea what "jacking off" was, but I could tell that (1) I could not do it left handed, and (2) I probably shouldn't repeat that to grandma.

If you want to hear the harrowing stories, the ones that will leave you breathless and squirming, my dad or uncle would have to fill you in. I know some of them in outline form, but they're dad's stories, not mine -- thank God -- and from the outlines I know, I'm not terribly eager to hear the details. Suffice it to say that he was a few millimeters away from beating the boys with coat hangers. And maybe he did that, too, for all I know.

He was obsessed with possessions -- not in a materialistic way, though as a child of the Depression he hoarded with the best of his generation. He was obsessed with keeping things, his orderly, OCD-addled mind noting the color, size and general condition of anything he happened to let you borrow. Make no mistake, if Ed Rinkes "gave" you something, he was merely allowing you to borrow it. Twenty years later, he'd cock his head, squint through one eye and say "Remember that toaster I gave you in 1988? Where is it?" And you'd better have an answer. "If you don't want it anymore, don't throw it away -- give it to me." He'd take it, fix it and ...

Well, we knew he kept everything he ever fixed. We didn't know the extent of it until he died and we finally were allowed to see the house that had been closed off since November 1986.

***

859 Seabrights Lane is a narrow, gray house with a hill for a front yard on a street that always seemed a bit shabbier than the rest of the shabby town in which it was located. Every house needs a coat of paint or some more attentive landscaping. I'm sure it wasn't always that way, but I'm sure Martins Ferry was a nicer town when men could find jobs at the steel plants that still mark the shoreline of the Ohio River.

I know Grandma Ruth kept the house as nice as she could, and it was a shock to see how Ed had transformed and twisted it. Gone were the little feminine touches, replaced with the stenciled messages (noted above) and paintings done from photographs of Ruth, Ruth and Ed and ... well, the one that freaked me out the most was a scene he had painted not long after her death. I don't remember the details, except that Jesus was greeting Ruth in heaven in one corner. This was a few months after she died. Not only was it in poor taste, it was poorly done as well, which to my young and egotistical mind was the worse of the offenses.

Despite Ed's years of chain-smoking unfiltered Camels with the windows shut, the house retained its trademark smell, and I'm not ashamed to say it made me smile when I walked into the house last week. I smiled, but not too broadly, because the house brings back odd memories for me -- you want the memories of your grandparents to be happy ones, and I must say, when I walk into my Grandma Ethel's house, even to this day I'm bouncy. It feels like home to me, safe and inviting and warm. That Pop doesn't live there anymore makes it bittersweet, but that's never my first though. I'm always happy to go into Grandma's house.

Ed's house, though, is different. Let me tell you a bit about it:

The house had no real bathroom -- just a toilet, sink and stall shower in the basement, next to the coal furnace that had been converted to gas in the 1960s. The shower stall had one cool thing: Ed put a speaker in there, so that you could listen to records played in the living room above while you showered. But it wasn't a bathroom, just part of the basement. We slept on the second floor, and Grandma Ruth had a galvanized white pail she used to "piddle" into in the night. This seemed normal to me for years.

Ruth was given the living room, kitchen and one bedroom to make hers. Ed had run of the rest of the house. The sun porch, just above the coal cellar, had a small zone where we put our toys, but we never went into the second bedroom upstairs, never dreamed of going into the attic, and only went into the basement because it had the toilet.

And yet the basement always fascinated me. You had to walk past Ed's spot at the kitchen table to get to the basement door, which was like running past Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin. If you were granted access, you quickly moved forward. As you walked down the steep stairs, you saw glass two liter bottles, stripped of their labels and filled with water that had to be 10 years old when I was a boy. At the foot of the stairs was a metal cabinet filled with dozens of cans of food, labels all facing outward, organized by food type. You made the left turn into the "play" part of the basement, with an old ringer washing machine and a second fridge lining the walls. I was granted a small space to play with my toys, but one of Ed's workbenches was in this area, and I didn't dare go near it.

Walking down the "hall" toward the bathroom, old Victrolas competed for space on the shelves with cigar boxes full of watch and clock parts, massive rolls of newspapers as yellow as the many packages of Honeycomb cereal Grandma kept around for me and Beth. If you weren't careful you butted up against the piping hot arms of the furnace, which was probably 12 feet in diameter, ducts jutting like kudzu throughout the basement.

When the hallway ended at the gas dryer, you turned right, into the aforementioned "bathroom" area. When you sat on the toilet, you stared straight into the gated door of the furnace. It was nice and toasty back there, and I always marveled at "Rinky-Dink's Perma-Cal," a calendar Ed built that required him to adjust the individual days that hung off hobby hooks. It, too, featured stenciled numbers and letters and was actually quite ingenious. I found it down there on Sunday, and it made me sad to see.

There was a coal cellar, but I never went in there, because it was dark and had cobwebs. I had seen that episode of Gilligan's Island with the giant, hairy spider, and I was convinced its cousin lived in the coal cellar. Besides, it was just a bunch of tools and old lawn mowers.

The house is sad -- you can tell that a sad man with a sad life lived there, all alone.

***

After Ruth died, Ed "took over" the house and declared whole sections off limits to us. This didn't help my grieving process, and I didn't take her death too well anyway -- she passed my freshman year of high school, the week of the OSU-Michigan game, and I don't recall much at all of that or my sophomore year. It's all suppressed, I guess. But I think OSU won the game.

The first thing I did upon entering the house last week: explore. I went into every room that had been banned, poked in every closet and desk drawer. It took me a few minutes to realize that, finally, I didn't have to put every thing back exactly where I'd found it -- Ed wasn't there to terrorize me if I didn't. I started leaving things in totally different rooms, just because I could, and that felt really good to me.

I felt like I was claiming what had been taken from me. I'd like to think this is the last piece of a puzzle I've been putting together since 1985.