Lance and the R.E.M. Tickets

Love letter, 1982-1985.

In between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a section of I-10 stretches out as a low, dead straight bridge across 25 miles of swamp. This is the story of how I came to be hauling ass across that long, low bridge at 120 mph (still and forever the fastest I have ever driven any car) on my way to an R.E.M. show in a baby blue Ford LTD festooned with vestigial cop antennae.

I had bought the Ford for $300. Its name was Lyman T. Droogworth, and it was a heavy, creaking metaphor for an MC5 song. It had begun life as an unmarked cop car, primarily used to catch speeders on the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge, and when I bought it, all the electronic cop radio guts had been taken out, but the state didn’t bother to remove the antennae. That meant that cops thought that I was also a cop, and that I could pretty much go as fast as I wanted to. This irony was not lost on me. Lyman did not go in reverse, and it took a long time and a half gallon of gas to get up to top speed, but once it got there, it was one terrifying hunk of Detroit steel. The terrifying part was especially pertinent for the people inside the car.

One of my passengers that night was Lance, who has been my best friend since high school. Lance is the kind of generous person who used to supply beer for all his roommates and assorted hangers-on simply because he had a very little bit of money and the rest of us didn’t. At one point he decided it would be cheaper just to buy kegs rather than keep running to the store for cases. He was incorrect in that assumption, since we just drank more beer during the time of the keg experiment, but what a grand experiment it was. Hats off to Lance.

Lance also performed the priceless service of introducing R.E.M.’s music to me. He had seen a show they performed at our local dive, The Bayou, when we were seniors in high school, and told me he thought they were pretty good. I had heard “Radio Free Europe,” and thought it was a good song, but I wasn’t motivated to check out the rest of their work. Lance wasn’t a huge fan either, but he continued to bring up the little band from Athens from time to time over the next couple of years. By that time we were attending college at Loyola University in New Orleans, and when R.E.M.’s Reckoning tour took them to Tulane’s McAlister Auditorium (walking distance from our dorm), it sounded like a good time to go check them out live.

Standing about 30 yards from the stage, I was immediately taken with the band’s energy and tunefulness. I loved the inventive harmonies and their habit of huddling between songs to decide what to play next. About a half hour after the start of the set, Michael Stipe broke out of one of those huddles, closed his eyes, and launched into a beautiful a capella version of “Moon River.” Aside from Stipe’s honey voice floating over the crowd, the theater was breathtakingly silent. When he finished, Stipe looked a little surprised (“wow! that worked!”) and the band launched into one of their harder numbers (probably “9-9” or something). From there, the show just went to a whole new level. It is pretentious and hokey to say so, but it was kind of like we were all sharing and celebrating this exquisite musical moment together, and all that hippie bullshit that is sometimes, rarely, astonishingly true.

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I was completely unprepared for how much that show blew me away. When I entered the auditorium, R.E.M. was a fringy band I knew little about, and when I left, they were my favorite band, and would remain so for a long time. After the show, we decided that we would move heaven and hell to get to the next stop on the tour in Oxford, Mississippi, the next night, to see them again. F%#@ classes, f%#@ work-study, f%#@ even telling anyone where we were going. Lance and I left for Baton Rouge that night, then drove to Oxford the next afternoon with two other friends. The Oxford show was decent, but when Stipe tried the “Moon River” gambit again, the theater echoed with whoops and hollers. Stipe, moody Stipe, halted the song halfway through and sang the rest of the show with his back to the audience. Philistines.

And that was the start of my love affair with R.E.M.. If there had been a last.fm in those days, and if it had been connected to my turntable, R.E.M. would have absolutely dwarfed every other band on my list. In our dingy little dorm rooms, Lance and I would listen to Chronic Town, and then Murmur, and then Reckoning, all the way through, and then do it again. Never before and never since have I been so utterly obsessed with a band; to our friends who did not like or were indifferent to R.E.M., we were insufferable. We were teenage girls.

Much like a hat I used to own, R.E.M. was perfect because it fit perfectly into the space where nothing used to be. They drew on the energy of punk without its harshness and nihilism, replacing growling distortion with chiming Byrds guitars and hoarse, angry shouts with pretty harmonies, and filtered out the cornpone from country/roots, leaving only its forthright beauty, in a way that made perfect and astonishing sense to white Southern kids of a certain age, to whom real country was a cliche beloved by redneck uncles and to whom real punk, however satisfying its aggressive pleasures, was music about New York, and London, and Southern California, exotic places that bore scant resemblance to the tree-lined streets of our hometowns. R.E.M.’s sound validated a kind of modern-South lifestyle that we were already living, and made it seem both mythic and earnestly real. You couldn’t buy drugs that did that. Not consistently, anyway.

The following year, after Lance and I had dropped out of Loyola and moved back to Baton Rouge to get our ya-ya’s out, R.E.M. came back to New Orleans on the Fables of the Reconstruction tour. Because an R.E.M. concert was a sort of religious event for us, of course we planned to go. Even more auspicious, it would be a return to the city where the magic had happened that one time, so our anticipation level was pretty high. This show was IMPORTANT.

On the evening of the show, we left for New Orleans with two other friends in the recently-purchased boat of car, leaving plenty of time to get there for the opening band, 10,000 Maniacs. About halfway to New Orleans (an hour-plus drive at a relatively sane speed), I heard Lance’s voice from the back seat, saying the words, “Oh, SHIT.”

WHAT, I said, an edge of hysteria in my voice, hoping it would be “I dropped my lit cigarette and I can’t find it” or “I forgot my wallet,” or “There’s a big truck about to hit us.” But no. It was the shittiest of oh shits: Lance had forgotten the tickets, which were sitting on the kitchen counter of our apartment.

So I turned the boat around, back to Baton Rouge, pissing and moaning at Lance, who just kept saying, sorry, sorry (and I could tell he really was sorry but I was entitled to some pissing and moaning and I wasn’t going to just let that go), back to the lot at our apartment, Lance practically flew up the stairs, in and out the door, back down with the tickets, and back on the interstate to New Orleans.

At that point I was driving pretty fast, almost uncomfortably fast even for a young indestructible Southern male such as myself, when Lance offered to pay for any speeding tickets and asked if we could go any faster. Which is how we ended up going 120 miles an hour over a swamp bridge on the way to New Orleans, and learning how slow other drivers (going 80 themselves) look at that speed.

We missed all of 10,000 Maniacs, which doesn’t seem all that important with the perspective of time, and we were actually in the lobby of the theater when R.E.M. began their first song, so everything turned out alright. Except that the show, while wonderful, wasn’t as good as that first one at Tulane, and I began to suspect that no show I ever went to would ever be that good. And I was right. I’ve seen some great shows since, from The Fleshtones and The Lyres and Pavement and X and a bunch of other bands who impressed me, but I guess the combination of my age and environment and the atmosphere of that specific McAlister Auditorium show just wasn’t to be repeated. It couldn’t be repeated–I was never going to be 19 years old and seeing R.E.M. for the first time ever again. Not to mention that R.E.M. would never be that specific band again, shortly after their first success but without any hits, playing little college auditoriums before graduating to larger halls and then arenas and stadiums, their sound changing and the world turning and Stipe losing his hair and his religion, and Berry almost dying and then quitting the band.

Maybe you can only get filled up that way once. I’m really not sure about that, but if it’s true, that’s alright, because I was lucky to experience it at all.

Really, when I think about it, everything turned out better than alright, because Lance is still my best friend, and whenever he is late for anything (especially if it involves an event with tickets) I get to bring up the R.E.M. story, which he has to put up with because it has attained the status of enormously entertaining fake grudge. Well, at least it’s entertaining for me. Lance probably just puts up with it because he happens to be guilty and needs to be reminded often of that fact.