GREAT APES: Fall On Me ☔️

🎸🔥🪵

How’s your Tuesday going? Tuesdays are crucial. More than any other day, they put their stamp on the week. Mondays set the tone, for sure, but a rough Monday can still be negotiated with, cajoled, even shoved aside. “Fuck you,” you can tell Monday, “that’s not how this is going to go. I’ve got PLANS for this week,” and then you can wrest things back into line. But Tuesday… boy, Tuesday is different. If Tuesday goes south, so does the week — that’s even literally true: if you travel south on Tuesday, you will probably spend the rest of the week down south. (It’s barely worth making the trip if you’re not going to stay through at least the weekend!) “Wednesday, whatever,” as the saying goes. By the time Thursday shuffles into view, shit’s pretty much decided. And of course Friday is merely there to bear witness to the week that was. (Please do not mention Saturday or Sunday to me 🤣.)

So it matters, dammit, how your Tuesday is going. Let’s insure it’s a good one. This should help:

That, of course, or maybe you had no idea, is “Fall On Me,” the first single off of REM’s 1986 album Lifes Rich Pageant. (Yes, they spelled the title without a possessive apostrophe in “Lifes.” According to Peter Buck, “We all hate apostrophes. Michael insisted, and I agreed, that there’s never been a good rock album that’s had an apostrophe in the title.” Please discuss in the comments.) This song was requested by devoted S.D.I.R. community member Louise Tilsley, with an emphatic upvote from Ruth Anderson, over in the Subscriber Requests Zone. After Keith recorded it and sent it over so I (Chris) could make sure he didn't accidentally lapse into satanic prayer during the bridge, we had a little chat about the song, and it went very much like this…

CHRIS: In September of 2008, we went out on the road with REM in Europe, eating lots of top-notch catering, sleeping in little tiny bunkbeds meters above the unfurling blacktop, playing thirteen pretty good shows, and, more memorably, watching thirteen excellent ones. Was “Fall On Me” one of the setlist highlights for you? I don’t even recall REM playing this. Did REM play this?

KEITH: Huh, well, I don’t remember it being in the core set, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t *ever* played on that run. At that point in their career, at least, REM had such a ridiculous glut of great songs that they’d taken to bringing a huge whiteboard covered in the titles of all(?) of their viably-playable songs, and they’d just sort of randomly swap incredible tunes in and out, willy-nilly. They’re really the only band we’ve ever toured with whose actual soundcheck was a must-see event, since their techs would have spent the morning getting their equipment set to their specifications, leaving the band to just spend like an hour re-learning sweet deep-cuts that they might or might not include in that night’s set (also, we were generally trapped at arenas several miles outside of the city center, so what the hell else were we gonna do besides play Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas Two on the bus in a subterranean garage?). I do remember that the band were playing what I considered a heroically-large chunk of their brand new album (like, five or six or seven songs), which, for a band that was then like a quarter-century into their career, seemed quite brazen. And then, of course, they had like ten or twelve “we have to play these songs or we’ll be sued by the promoter” tunes: “Losing My Religion,” “Man On The Moon,”  “It’s The End of the World…,” “The One I Love,” “Orange Crush,” etc. So, there wasn’t a lot of room in the set for their huge body of great-but-potentially-skippable-in-this-context songs. I don’t think we ever heard bangers like “Driver 8,” “Radio Free Europe,” “Stand,” “Nightswimming,” “So. Central Rain,” or “Shiny Happy People” (kidding!). So, short answer: I don’t remember!  They SHOULD have played it, at least.

This is not us during the September 2008 European REM tour, as you can tell from the backdrop that says “Philly’s Rock Station.” I can’t find any great pics from that tour right now — they’re on a dusty old hard-drive in some dust pile down some ventilation shaft in an abandoned old factory somewhere — but this is just a couple months later, in January of 2009, so we still had the smell of REM on us (a very nice scent indeed!). Another thing that makes this such a clever picture to include in this post is that there are acoustic guitars 💯🏆🤩 And we both look very cool 😍

CHRIS: I’d have sworn I remember them playing “Nightswimming,” but I just checked Setlist.fm and it looks like they did not. Too bad I investigated: Now I can no longer enjoy believing I saw it played, like John Waters believing he saw a rollercoaster car fly off the tracks when he was a kid. Many is the time I have entertained myself on a long subway ride or during a boring airport layover by easing my awareness into the warm cognitive bath of the richly remembered, almost pointillistic recollection of REM playing “Nightswimming” on that European tour. There they were on stage, mere feet away from my cheeky spot in the photo pit, so close I could hear the voice coming from Michael Stipe’s own throat before it found its way to the PA. Periodically I would turn back toward the audience and watch them in their varying states of rapture: there were the ones standing silently, eyes brimming with tears; the ones shouting along to every word, tears streaming down each cheek; the ones with a fistful of their own hair in each hand, sanity’s mask already horribly askew; and the ones who had been completely overwhelmed, whose minds were submerged in pleasure and then drowned, who had to be carried away on stretchers as the song’s final piano chords rang out. After visiting setlist.fm, of course, I can barely even remember how “Nightswimming” goes anymore. 

Anyway, I learned that they did play “Fall On Me” a few times while we were out with them. I must have reliably used that time to go to bar?? It’s a nice song, and I’ve just discovered, by reading Wikipedia, that it was originally about — did you know this? — Acid Rain. That’s a very 80s subject. You don’t hear much about Acid Rain anymore (and yet I somehow doubt we solved it). I say “originally about” because at some point Michael Stipe told David Fricke that the song "is not about acid rain. It's a general oppression song about the fact that there are a lot of causes out there that need a song that says, 'Don't smash us.' And specifically, there are references to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the guy dropping weights and feathers.” “The guy” being, presumably, that brat Lucio di Medici, who as a teen loved to drop things like lead weights, partially chewed candies, and feathers onto unfortunate passers by. 

Considering you’ll have given the lyrics a pretty close look before (or at least while) singing them into a microphone, you may have figured out the acid rain thing. But I bet you didn’t know that this song’s UK 10” single included b-side “Toys In the Attic,” an Aerosmith cover. I just listened to it on Spotify. It’s a pretty dumb song to start with — kind of a 70s “Ram It Home” that substitutes key changes for hooks — but it’s fun to hear Peter Buck play Joe Perry’s guitar part. 

KEITH: Look, I love Michael Stipe. He’s one of his generation’s most compelling lyricists, easily, but I wouldn’t say he’s earned that title because his lyrics are actually, uh, *coherent.* I think of him as a super-evocative, vibe-generating, tapestry-weaving writer, but I’m not really sure I’ve ever had the foggiest idea what in god’s name his idiosyncratic turns of phrase really mean. “What’s the frequency, Kenneth, is your Benzedrine,” you say, Michael? Okay, sure. “Aluminum tastes like fear, adrenaline draws us near”? Got it.  “I’m pushing an elephant up the stairs, I’m tossing up punchlines that were never there”? You do you, bud! All very cool lines, loads of fun to sing, absent of cliché. Top marks! Still, I’ve got to admit that a lot of this stuff is inscrutable to this old philistine.

So anyway, yeah, you could tell me that “Fall On Me” is about acid rain or that it’s about the problem of seagulls attacking beachside diners or that it’s about how Tom Wolfe once spilled strawberry lemonade onto his white suit, and I’d be like “Yeah, sure, that totally tracks, great song!”  And it is!

CHRIS: And that, my dear Kenneth, is the frequency.

Think about how insane it is that when people say “the cat’s out of the bag,” the secret that has been revealed doesn’t necessarily have to be a shameful one. That’s fucked. It’s shameful to keep a cat in a bag. They hate it. If you get caught with a cat in your bag — you’re standing there chatting calmly to friends, and suddenly a terrified, furious cat goes zinging out of the sack you’ve been holding — you can’t just innocently shrug. You’ve got some explaining to do! Situations where it’s okay to say “the cat’s out of the bag”: bodies you’ve been hiding under your house have been discovered; your plan to screw over a close friend has outed; your true identity becomes known, and now you’re screwed. Situations when it’s discordant to say “the cat’s out of the bag”: someone finds out a day early that she’s going to win the Nobel prize; a cat finds out about your plan to put him into a bag.

Unbagging cats since the late 70’s,

Keith & Chris