REM in the Deep South

I’m listening to REM while I write this.

“Gardening at Night” at this particular moment.

My friend Craig referenced that song title in a story he told me about a guy he knew who tended a large marijuana grove on a secret island in a Mississippi lake.

That strikes me as a quintessentially Southern image. Taking a little canoe in the moonlight. Your boots squishing in the mud as you climb out on the land. Tending your plants, as though they’re exotic orchids, to the music of the screech owl and the mockingbird and the cicadas. Tending your garden. Gardening at night.

There’s no sweeter or gentler way to say that you’re engaging in criminal behavior.

That sweetness and gentleness is very Southern to me, like the song.

Of course, “gardening at night,” in this context, is a perfect example of our love for the courtly euphemism. Please forgive my tardiness. I had to engage in some regrettably necessary nocturnal horticultural procedures.

Where has Walter been these days? Oh, we’re expecting lots of, ahem, customers with the big crowds for the blues festival, so he’s been busy, ahem, gardening at night.

A distinct … very distinct … nostalgia now washes over me … intoxicates me … when I hear anything off REM’s first records — CHRONIC TOWN, MURMUR and RECKONING.

It’s weird. In the 1980s, I played Echo and The Bunnymen’s PORCUPINE and OCEAN RAIN way more than REM. And The Smiths? Forget about it.

But those other bands don’t make me all woozy like REM. You just have to say the title “Talk About the Passion” and my chest feels hollow with an inarticulate longing.

Longing for my youth, I guess. For the South.

And I’m writing now … this writing you’re reading right now … to try to get inside that longing.

While I listen.

If possible, I’d like these words, Dear Reader, to have the same effect on you the music is having on me now.

In this regard, I should stress that you, Dear Reader, are probably one of a very small handful of friends, guys about my age, who were in Mississippi (or the Deep South) in the 80s.

Not that everyone isn’t invited to the party. But … you know … a blog post by a nobody like me is essentially a group email to the very few friends who feel obliged to read it as insurance to make sure I return the obligation later. Like trading stories on the porch while watching the fireflies and sipping our Bourbon.

I was riding in the backseat once when my dad and his cousin Harold were up front trading stories. Harold jumped in with the next tale … took a pause … then said, “You were done with that one, right?”

(Have moved on to MURMUR now. Pilgrimage. Escape momentum.)

I’m trying here to lay stepping stones in a stream. On the other side of this stream, REM-land stretches out like a cotton field beyond overgrown honeysuckle vines. It stretches out like the memory of your youth. Can you hear the cicadas? And I suppose that’s the thing: at certain moments, your youth and REM-land are indistinguishable. Your life at twenty was REM-land. Or at least it feels like that when you listen to them.

(Not everyone can carry the weight of the world.)

A trigger for this particular writing experiment: my friend Steve mentioned that RECKONING was released in 1984. And just seeing “1984” … saying it in my mind … gives me a shiver.

Try it … 1984.

The shivers you get come from … what … maybe from how life really becomes a dream or myth when enough time passes. You know, you don’t want to become old. So you hold onto a perception that nothing is THAT long ago. Old maybe, but not old old.

Like, for me, everything since 1990 feels recent.

The Strokes are a cool, new band. Radiohead’s “Creep” came out in 1992. Doesn’t that feel like yesterday?

But then a friend mentions an REM album that came out in Nineteen Eighty Frigging Four. Sorry, but that’s a long damn time ago. That’s old old.

Go back before 1984 the same distance, it’s 1945. WW II just ended. Ticker tape parades. That sailor kissing the nurse. People in old fashioned clothes that aren’t old fashioned to them dancing to big band music in a black and white reality. They have fresh memories of Hitler like we have of Trump and Biden.

If we had been in college in 1945, then 1984 would be now for us.

Once you go back that far, you’ve stepped into a book, and the illusion that you could somehow return is finally shattered.

1984 is THE PAST.

But with every REM song from those early records, that whole period of my youth springs up in my mind as one eternal day stretching out over the whole rolling landscape of the South. I’m simultaneously crossing the quad at Mississippi State with the flagpole chain clanging in the breeze, I’m watching the midnight freight train crawl by the gravel parking lot of WC DON’s in Jackson, I’m drinking a coke in a styrofoam cup full of ice in the Atlanta bus station, I’m eating beignets in Cafe du Monde and I’m sitting in a window in a dorm in Hattiesburg in the afternoon sun.

And floating over all that in my memory, I’m driving, driving, driving up and down gentle Mississippi hills with the window down, fields beyond barbed wire fences stretching to a line of pines.

When I could, I’d stop for boiled peanuts and eat the whole bag between my legs, my free hand draped over the wheel.

Or, damn, a moon pie. With chocolate milk.

This nostalgia is probably more intense for you if, like me, you live far away from that world now. I’m in Brooklyn. Brownstones on tree-lined streets. Subways. This is my life.

Maybe the nostalgia has made you picture yourself moving back. But … hahaha … only in an ironic, cosplay sort of manner. You know what I mean. You’re not stupid. You’ve heard the phrase “You can never go home.” So you know that it wouldn’t “work” to just move back to your hometown. Not if you were naive about it. Not if you didn’t put it in ironic quotation marks.

I’ve had vicious online arguments with people about that British guy who moved to the Delta and wrote DISPATCHES FROM PLUTO. Oh … yes … the Delta is such a magical place. Sure. America’s best kept secret. Yep. I’m sure I’d feel that way if I could sit around in my underwear drinking coffee and writing books. I just hit “send” then get paid. As soon as I had to drag my ass out of bed at dawn, squeeze into my khaki work pants and drive to some office to sit in a cubicle and look at spreadsheets five days a week, I wonder how magical the Delta would be for me. Going out to my car in the sun on a 100 degree August day to drive to Wendy’s for lunch.

How fast would the charm of gas station barbecue wear off?

But therein is the hack. Working from home and just generally setting things up to avoid anything that would shatter the dream would be necessary to pull off a move back. It’d have to be a conscious act of theater, arranging the stage just right to maintain the illusion that you had jumped into that mystical feeling you get listening to REM.

You’d probably in particular want to avoid gatherings where everyone is sick as shit of living in Mississippi or Tennessee or wherever and think you’re insane for leaving Carmel-by-Sea or France.

But Water Valley is supposed to be cool. They have a feminist bookstore. If I could work from home like the British guy … live in some old house with a breeze blowing the smell of rain through it and billowing the drapes … butter beans in the garden … walking barefoot in the wet grass … wipers thumping as I drive 20 mph into town to buy a trowel in a hardware store that smells like black dirt and oil.

Looking out of my subway window clattering over the Manhattan Bridge and listening to “Talk About the Passion” …

(Oh, we were little boys, oh, we were little girls …)

… I shake my head and say, “ Nah … that’s not gonna happen.”

(There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads “react” … R … E … A … C … T.)

It’s not gonna happen mainly because the place to which I think I want to move isn’t really there.

Imagine you got obsessed with California. You picture yourself cruising by the ocean in a convertible. Blasting The Beach Boys. You picture yourself strumming the guitar by a pool in Laurel Canyon. And imagine you’re making real plans to move there. You’re pricing houses and getting quotes from movers. But then, like a Twilight Zone episode, you realize that California is next to Kansas, far from any ocean. Maybe there isn’t a Pacific Ocean at all. You’re still perfectly free to move to a state called “California,” but it would just be like moving to St. Louis. No beach. No blondes in bikinis swaying as you strum “Hotel California.”

You’re perfectly free to move to a state called “Alabama” or “Louisiana.” But how do you move to REM-land? How do you move to “Time After Time”? How do you move to the drift of your mind when the bottom falls out in that song, when it goes to the bridge, and you suddenly see yourself catching a black and red grasshopper in the dripping azaleas or opening your eyes after your baptism.

More paradoxical, how can you move to Mississippi or Georgia if you already live there?

However, to be academic, what exactly is “Southern” about this? We don’t have some monopoly on nostalgia. Everyone everywhere feels at times a pang to return to a lost afternoon back in college.

Well, I’ll tell what makes it Southern.

A while back, I was watching Antiques Roadshow. A graceful elderly lady had a set of ceramic ware. Elegant bowls and tea cups. The host (I think Dan Elias) discussed with her how the pottery had been made in a legendary art commune in southern Mississippi back in the 1930s where she had been a student as a young woman. She spoke in a stately Old South accent that only the rankest vulgarian would call a drawl, a real music from another time and another world. After the two chatted a bit about her memories, she said, “Yes, those were days gone by.”

I burst into tears because this suddenly reminded me of my mother. In fact, my mother had used this antique phrase or certainly ones like it. “Those were days gone by.”

It’s an odd phrase. I can’t find its history. There’s a power metal song by the band Slaughter called “Those Were Days Gone By.” The phrase is either genuinely old and British or meant to sound old and British.

Wouldn’t it be more natural to say “Those days have passed”? We’re talking about a time that once was the present. Then this time moved into the past. But, okay, you want to sound more poetic. So instead of “passed” you say “gone by.” Present days have gone by. Days that were present are now days that have gone by. “Present days” are now “gone by days.” Those days ARE gone by.

To say that these days “were” gone by makes it sound like they were never present. Those days in the past were already gone by when I lived them.

This distinguished Southern lady was recalling days that were already lost in the past while she lived them.

For me, this is the essence of the Southern.

Growing up in Mississippi, it felt to me that we all moved in a fog of nostalgia or rather that a film of nostalgia lay on everything. We experienced everything as an old memory from long ago, even in the present moment.

Standing around in the woods at a keg party, the general mood was nostalgia. “Remember how we used to have keg parties in the woods?” you thought as you pumped beer into your red cup.

You’d bite into a fat slice of ham on a biscuit and think “remember how we used to eat fat slices of ham on biscuits?”

The church would sing “Softly and Tenderly” for the invitation hymn and the whole congregation would think “remember how we used to sing ‘Softly and Tenderly’ for the invitation hymn?”

I don’t mean that Southerners all do this on a conscious level. It’s a collective mood.

I make the obvious assumption that this goes back to losing the Civil War. The surviving generation felt concrete defeat and loss, but subsequent generations inherited an acute nostalgia that made everything seem to be in the past. Including the present.

The best instance I’ve experienced when a crowd became collectively aware of this mood might have been when Michael Stipe sang “Moon River” a cappella in a chapel in Oxford as an encore. The stage lights behind him stretched his long shadow across the wall of the auditorium as he crooned about his “huckleberry friend.” A roomful of kids were drunk with the memory of a night long, long ago when a shy baritone mumbled a sentimental old tune about lost innocence, a night that was occurring that very moment in front of us, around us, inside us.

So now reading this on your sofa in Massachusetts or California or on your porch in Nashville or Atlanta, maybe listening along with me to “Letter Never Sent,” you’re not actually remembering driving up the Natchez Trace or swimming in a lake. You’re remembering remembering because you experienced the autumn leaves or the cool water only as a memory in the first place.

We lived inside memory. We lived in a dream.

And still do. Your eyes are swirling all around under your sleeping lids. Rapid eye movement. REM.

The spell of nostalgia breaks when I move past RECKONING. The band becomes self-conscious of their brand. The angular “modern” guitar riff and the line about “a Man Ray kind of sky” on the opening track on “Fables of the Reconstruction” hit me as an obvious attempt to move beyond the naive persona of the first records.

The problem with a naive or primitive style is that you can’t tip off your audience that you’re really a sophisticated artist in control of your medium without compromising the naivety.

My mother loved to paint in a Grandma Moses style. The style is called “primitive.” The painting is typically a view of a picturesque town or a farm or maybe skaters on a frozen pond in a little valley. The individual images look like a child’s best effort at a horse or a barn or a car. And they’re part of a world of naive perspectives. The freight train puffing over the hills behind the town is far too big for that distance. The tiny people in the foreground are picking cotton bolls the size of basketballs.

While she loved losing herself in these vignettes, my mother had gone to art school and wanted people to know that training and sophistication were behind the illusion of naivety and primitivism. So she’d switch back to formal styles that showed her ability to capture light and the play of the brush. We don’t always have the luxury of a museum curator standing next to our work telling people that the artist knows what she’s doing.

With “Fables of the Reconstruction,” REM wanted us to know that they knew what they were doing. In particular, they wanted us to link their gentle surrealism to Man Ray, to Modernism, to sophistication. Yes, we are transmuting Southern mythology into self-conscious art. And that’s what we’ve been doing from the beginning.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. But the timing of this evolution corresponded to my having to begin thinking about graduation and some sort of adult life. It corresponded to my own realization that I needed to wipe away the film of nostalgia that covered my reality.

So lately when I fall into this mood, when I choose to return to those first records for my nostalgia trip, the final exquisite and blatantly regressive pleasure is to go back immediately to CHRONIC TOWN. As “Little America” ends … “Jefferson, I think we’re lost” … it’s as though I’ve packed the car after the last move out of the dorm and I’m driving away from Starkville back to Jackson, but then … with that opening riff of “Wolves, Lower” … in a flash, I’m 18 again in a different loaded-down car (a ’74 Mustang) on my way to move into the dorm for the first time. I haven’t even heard of REM yet. All of these new discoveries are ahead of me.

Some time in the next few weeks, someone will say, “Hey, listen to this!” And it’ll be “Gardening at Night.”