R.E.M.

Michael Stipe was fifteen and sitting in high-school detention in Collinsville, Illinois, when he found a Creem magazine someone had left behind, read about the CBGB scene, and saw a photo of Patti Smith. “I bought her album Horses on the day that it came out and sat all night listening to it,” he later told Pitchfork. “‘Birdland’ was the one that just completely lifted me... I had this epiphany and realized that this is what I wanted to do with my life: learn how to sing and start a band.”

listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — How Michael Stipe discovered Patti Smith (Stipe's Pitchfork account of Horses and Birdland) ↗share

1975

BirdlandPatti Smith

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1983

9-9R.E.M.

listen forSmith spends most of “Birdland” half-speaking, half-chanting over a loose, rising band before the song breaks into a keening wail — vocals as raw nerve, barely holding a melody. On Murmur’s “9-9,” Stipe does something similar: repeating a fragmented syllable, mixed low and blurred, until the words dissolve into pure sound. Neither singer is interested in being understood on first listen.

Ask Peter Buck how much of a Byrds fan he was as a kid, and he doesn’t hedge: “It was part of what I listened to, a lot of it... when the band started playing, definitely he was a role model for how to take simple chords and turn them into something really melodic and interesting,” he told Salon in 2016, naming Roger McGuinn directly. The debt got literal in 1984, when McGuinn joined R.E.M. onstage for an MTV special on folk rock, the two guitarists trading the same chiming lines on McGuinn’s own “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star.”

listen: upstream & heresource: Salon — Revisiting The Byrds' So You Want to Be a Rock N Roll Star 55 years later (R.E.M./McGuinn 1984 MTV performance) ↗share

1967

So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll StarThe Byrds

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1984

So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (live with Roger McGuinn, MTV, 1984)R.E.M.

listen forMcGuinn’s original rides on a chiming, arpeggiated 12-string riff — the exact ringing tone Buck spent the next decade chasing on his own Rickenbacker. In the 1984 performance, listen for how closely Buck’s chords track McGuinn’s own phrasing, note for note, while Stipe hangs back and lets the guitarist he modeled his style on set the pace, a rare moment of the student visibly deferring to the teacher.

Mike Mills found Big Star the same way he found most of the music that shaped him: raiding Peter Buck’s record collection. “I knew immediately that I had just heard one of my favorite bands, a band who had gotten it right, who made records that sounded like rock ’n’ roll bands should sound,” he wrote in 2014. That shared discovery became a bond between the two future bandmates before R.E.M. even existed — Buck introduced Mills to the group, and Mills has called Big Star “an encapsulation of everything I believed a band should be.”

listen: upstream & heresource: Salon — Mike Mills ↗share

1972

ThirteenBig Star

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1983

Talk About the PassionR.E.M.

listen for“Thirteen” is just a hushed acoustic strum and a boy’s aching harmony vocal, nothing louder than the feeling underneath it. “Talk About the Passion” works the same trick with a full band: Buck keeps his chiming arpeggios out of the vocal’s way, and Mills’s bassline carries its own separate melody underneath — the same instinct toward melodic songcraft over volume that first hooked Mills on Big Star’s records.