Stipe is Jesus. Shannon is Moses.

I flew 8,000 miles to see the R.E.M. cover band

shirts by @noraek

New Zealand is too damn far away. But listen: my boy Doug (@truckersatlas) has been the tour manager for Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy’s R.E.M. cover project three years running now. Three years now I’ve heard the stories. As he planned this year’s run he laid it out: “Dude. Come to Athens.” We only get one shot at this pageant. I burnt the savings. I got on the plane.

I caught up with the tour in New Orleans, where my oldest bestie Andrew is the unofficial mayor. Together we followed the band to R.E.M.’s hometown of Athens, Georgia for two shows there. It rocked, y’all, and now I have thoughts. A rich pageant deserves a long letter! If you want great concert photos, Jen Arcade has you covered. If you’re not a fan, read this one as a travelogue from the American South. If you dig the post, leave a comment or share it with another fan, all that good social stuff! The whole point of the tour is to keep talking about R.E.M., right? Here we go—

R.E.M. is not a t-shirt band.

Metallica is a t-shirt band. R.E.M. never settled on a color, a logo, a typeface. Illegibility is the whole point. R.E.M. is headspace band, a housecat band, an unlikely empire built on interior weathers and weird poetry and dreams. A good T-shirt, like a good cover band, must be easy to read.

My sister Nora made us all t-shirts anyways. Pure reverence, with a wink. She’s broken an unspoken rule, shouted out our mumbled secret. She debated the design but her chosen lyric was never in doubt:

I BELIEVE
IN COYOTES
AND TIME AS
AN ABSTRACT

It’s a line from I Believe, from Side 2 of Lifes Rich Pageant. It’s a perfect snapshot of the R.E.M. aesthetic: a soaring yawp (I believe!), a poetic image I can’t explain but just makes sense (I believe in coyotes!), and Michael Stipe’s genius freedom from standard grammar (‘and in time’ would neatly complete the list, but and time arrives as a new and separate thought.) It’s also a nifty summary of Nora and I’s own R.E.M. fandom. She first played the band for me in our 1990s Phoenix childhood full of silkscreened howling coyotes. Even then the American frontier myth had shriveled down to a t-shirt. We Zonie kids had nothing else to believe.

My sister wore her shirt to the Austin show. “It was a crop-top, right?” asked a dude I met at the 40 Watt. “Yeah, I saw her. Right up front.”

Time is not an abstract.

with bobcat at the 40 watt

Fabled 80’s comedian Bobcat Goldthwait is the tour’s opening act and joyous cheerleader. “I’m a VHS comedian in a TikTok world,” he declares, and we all salute. In truth me and my boys—deep forties all, dead last of the Xers—are the kids of this crowd. Doug reports a mini-generation gap in the tour, too. Shannon and Narducy, both in their 50s, are devotees of R.E.M.’s jittery, urgent ‘80s stuff; they’re generally less big on the blockbuster ‘90s albums that swept in us tagalongs with anthems and warm hugs. The forward march of these tours, one album a year, will soon bring the debate to ahead. Shannon’s been teasing a run next year for 1987’s Document, which includes The One I Love and It’s the End of the World as We Know It, legit charting singles you still hear on what’s left of radio. Doug tells the story with a mischievous grin: “Next year they’re gonna have to play some HITS.”

New Orleans, House of Blues, Feb. 24.

new orleans setlist, colored in / thx doug!

Doug’s pissed. The House of Blues stagehands were backstage watching The Big Lebowski and refused to lift a finger hauling gear. That tracks, Andrew says. Live Nation bought the club awhile back and now runs it like an upper-deck concession stand, all flat screens and Mich Ultras in the 24 oz can. Whatever. Gen X kids expect the sellout. Doug heads backstage and Andrew and I quit the cramped VIP balcony to show off our t-shirts on the floor.

Shannon & Co. blast off and it’s great! Begin the Begin and These Days are a revelation live, louder and faster and meaner than I hear them on the album. This is what the old heads are on about! Shannon twitches in a flowered silk jacket. Fall on Me and Cuyahoga leave me weeping. I have loved these songs for thirty years and never expected to hear them live.¹ Is such a miracle even allowed? Here comes I Believe and I have my arm around a stranger and we are bellowing about coyotes.

dark club, crappy phone

But I’m going to keep this mad letter down to one song per night. See the setlist screenshots above and below? They’re the real deal, if digital copies are real. Doug types them up as .rtf files every night. The coloring-in is mine. After ripping through Lifes Rich Pageant—so good!—Shannon brings his sister Sarah out to play viola on Nightswimming. As R.E.M. goes, the song is as legible as a Hallmark card: nostalgia, growing up, and skinnydipping. For me, tonight, it’s also quite suddenly about Becky Staggers, a quiet, serious, and brilliant second violinist in our high school orchestra who died of a brain tumor in what would have been her junior year. Or rather it’s about one warm, empty 1994-ish night when me and two friends stood around a driveway in suburban Tempe AZ, bouncing a basketball and talking about her death.²

Vijay Tellis-Nayak has stripped his piano part down and handed most of the melody off to Sarah. The viola is a gawky and sad instrument, born for a song like this. I played it for years as a kid and it always sounded to me like the lonesome honk of geese overhead. I cry at this song too but for the first time I feel the whole project as less tribute than cover. Nightswimming is itself a cover of a memory the singer can no longer access, and in New Orleans I heard Nightswimming as a cover of that cover, a memory of a song about memory. A picture in reverse. The song was no longer R.E.M.’s alone, or even R.E.M.’s song at all. Nightswimming is public record now, scripture to be read, a thing alive and alone and flying south.

So we joined the tour.

I chugged a THC seltzer for brunch. Rock and roll, y’all! The band’s at our same airport gate, looking bright-eyed and well-kept and altogether younger than me. Andrew and I board and there’s Michael Shannon and his new bride in first class, mooning like lovebirds. As we settle into deep Economy the rapture is already descending: I AM ON TOUR WITH R.E.M.

Athens, The Rialto Room, 25 February.

peter b, kevn k, scott mc

Doug’s off at the band-only dinner at an undisclosed location. Andrew and I are embarrassed by how good it feels to listen to music while sitting in a chair. Jason Narducy does a lovely set of his own songs, including one about holding his new granddaughter. He’s only 55. What have I done wrong?³

Then Peter Buck comes out and I AM IN THE ROOM WITH R.E.M.! Peter sits in a chair, too. Beside him sit his old mates Kevn Kinney of Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ and longtime R.E.M. sideman Scott McCaughey. It’s Kevn’s night; Peter and Scott are watching chords and following along. It’s all very chill but then Peter pulls out a mandolin and with a single strum it’s suddenly THE MANDOLIN, the Losing My Religion mandolin heard round the world.⁴ I felt a great disturbance in the force. I shoot a glance at Andrew. He felt it, too.

I live in Athens now.

America still does bar tabs! Leave it open or close it out, the Rialto bartender asks. In civilized countries we just tap and go but here they demand commitment. Make a choice, cowboy. I dunno, man. I have left too much open in my life. Proper Americans know how to close that shit out and move on. Leave it open, I said, and asked if she could charge my phone, too. No prob. Card and phone vanished behind the bar. That’s my whole life right there, I said. She smiled. “You live here now.”

All lead singers are actors.

After the show we met some of the band at the Manhattan Cafe, an unrestored dive that is clearly Athens’ finest drinking establishment. Wilco bassist John Stirratt has joined the band this year (!) and is just the nicest dude. I babble about seeing Wilco play Antone’s in Austin on a hot night in summer ‘99. He remembered immediately, happily, and better than I did. Bless that man.⁵

Vijay was also very cool and happy to chat. He confessed to me that he didn’t much like the album version of Nightswimming—the piano was too sturdy, too mechanical. He was glad to play it with a lighter touch and wouldn’t mind experimenting further, but that wasn’t the job at hand. His job, as he saw it, was to make Shannon comfortable up there.

I went to bed that night a-puzzling that one: Is an actor singing with a band different than just a band? Aren’t all lead singers actors? Are all actors lead singers? What comfort do we ask a cover band to provide?

Pilgrimage No. 1.

I though we were just going to see some shows. Turns out we’re attending a full-on R.E.M. convention, and all us convention-goers are trying to score lunch at Weaver D’s, the legendary soul food joint whose slogan R.E.M. borrowed to name 1992’s Automatic for the People. Weaver D’s has been sold and is maybe closing that very weekend? Nobody knows for sure. A long line of old male record dorks take selfies as we wait.⁶ One of the owners—perhaps the daughter of owner Dexter Weaver?—comes out to shoot her own video and we all cheer on cue.

A cook in an apron—Dexter? Too young—tells the crowd that he might need help unloading the food service truck when it comes. This does not suggest a short wait for lunch. Twenty minutes later the truck arrives and the cook is swarmed by a dozen willing disciples. It’s quite the American tableau: the cook is a black man wearing an apron, his disciples all white men in hipster glasses. The cook leads them to the truck, but it seems there is only a single box of shortening to carry. The cook hefts it easily on his shoulder and turns back to the kitchen. The disciples follow, empty-handed but beaming. They would shoulder his burden, but it’s too weird to ask.

Back at the street the uniformed food service man disappears into his truck. When the show is over—the cook in his kitchen, the disciples in line—he emerges with three more boxes on a dolly and quietly finishes the delivery.

Athens No. 1, 40 Watt Club, Feb. 26.

athens no. 1 setlist

Night two for the t-shirts. Unwashed ‘cause we’re a traveling band. I’d give you forty dollars, says a woman next to me. Should I take it off right here? No. A fresh one, please. None of us are that young anymore.

The 40 Watt is just about as old as me and remains the platonic ideal of a ‘80-90s indie rock club. No flatscreens. No stupid drinks. Last of the breed, the cool bartender says, chatting like we’re already mates. Live Nation is sucking ‘em all up.

BILL FREAKIN’ BERRY is three feet away, sitting in a booth with his wife. Andrew was a childhood autograph hound at Spring Training games and knows the drill: he calmly, coolly, tells Mr. Berry Hi and says Thanks For All Your Music and shakes his hand. Then Mr. Berry turns and looks me in the eye and we shake and I also say Thank You. Time is an abstract. I am home.

Jetlag and booze and fun have wiped me out. Athens No. 1 is by necessity the quiet night, the note-taking show. I was so hyped for New Orleans I barely noticed Shannon but now he’s all I see. Is he comfortable up there? He’s skinny like Stipe but head and shoulders taller. He doesn’t dance much; when he does, his moves are less intentional, more possessed. There’s something in this whole project that discourages a direct comparison. Maybe it’s our Gen X fixation on authenticity: Shannon doesn’t even try to be like Stipe, right, because that would be fake. But c’mon. Let’s talk about the passion, shall we?

Stipe is a poet, an angel. Shannon is a wizard and a preacher. Stipe is Jesus, Shannon is Moses. In Exodus the Israelites are guided through the desert by a pillar of fire by night (Stipe) and by day a pillar of cloud (Shannon.) Stipe comes to us bearing mysteries from the future; he mumbles, he bleats, he soars. Shannon proclaims bitter wisdom from the deep past. He booms. He argues. He jabs a finger.

And thus the tour koan: does Shannon know the words to Gardening at Night? Do any of us? What’s the song even about? Who cares? A cover band is first and foremost a legible copy of someone else’s art. But what happens when the absence of legible meaning is the original art’s whole deal?⁷

If I remember right, Vijay played Gardening straight in New Orleans. In Athens he dips his keyboard line in an unexpected psychedelic shimmer. Andrew raises an eyebrow. The sound is not ‘right’—it’s uncomfortable, but exciting? Go for it, man! Shannon dives right in. The lines I never caught from Stipe still elude me. Maybe Shannon’s scat-singing up there. Now he leans out over the crowd, his long frame hung on the mic stand like an elm caught in a powerline. He glares, he proclaims. One line I catch: The sun just hurts my eyes… As Shannon sings the words, he raises one hand to his brow and pantomimes shielding his eyes.

Pilgrimage No. 2.

Next on the R.E.M. Week’s posted schedule is a visit to The Trestle. That’s the old railroad bridge featured in Civil War-esque sepia tone on the back cover of R.E.M.’s first album Murmur. The day is bright and climate-change warm. The original rotting Trestle was torn down and rebuilt in 2021 as part of a new urban park. What was once a gothic dead end is now a jogging trail, with carefully-matched replacement timbers linked up with snazzy pre-rusted steel arches to form a new Frankenstein bridge. It’s a classic Ship of Theseus: to preserve the past, you’ve got to straight-up replace it.

Healthy couples with strollers glide along The Trestle overhead but we pilgrims stand around the muddy creek below and pose for album photos in our stinky shirts. Other conference-goers soon join us. I take a trestle photo for a couple R.E.M. dudes up from Atlanta. We agree someone should put a plaque right here by the creek. We talk band talk. We all hope this whole carnival of sorts continues next year. Doug is discreet about his insider status but here weighs in to suggest the Document tour is all but locked in. Our new buddies are pleased. “It’s not a tradition that I want to give up,” one says. Me neither, bro. I got so few anymore.

Then a pretty woman half our age—yoga pants, mountain bike—brakes as she pedals awkwardly through our little prayer group. “Excuse me, guys.” We clear the path.

Athens No. 2, 40 Watt Club, Feb. 27.

My credit card slept overnight at the 40 Watt. I would leave it open there forever. Doug’s big brother is in town now, with an old buddy of his. R.E.M. heads both. I last saw them at Doug’s wedding twenty years ago, and now the brother’s got a kid in college and another nearly out the door. I wish time was an abstract.

For Athens No. 2 I have recovered, got silly on Guinness pints at the professor bar, and I am ready to render summary judgement and rock my ass off. The club is packed, the VIP section heaving. We rock: Andrew and I stand on a cracked vinyl booth for I Believe and together sing the descant in the last chorus and my heart spilleth over.

And I judge: Cuyahoga wins the tour. So much good stuff but that’s the song that broke out for me. It’s a classic R.E.M. jam: major-minor mix, a belter chorus, a political/historical analogy dreamily unexplained. I always liked it, even if it sat a notch outside my top five or even top ten. But it’s been a banger sing-along all three shows, and on Athens No. 2 I hear it anew: Cuyahoga is our national anthem. Should be. Will be.

Only Shannon can make this pitch. If Stipe is himself an avant-garde revival of Old, Weird America, then Shannon is one of its great modern interpreters. He’s been a murdered President, a Supreme Court Justice, Superman’s nemesis, an everyman farmer struck by apocalyptic visions and ‘70s Elvis with a pistol in his boot. “America the Monster,” as he himself called his sadistic government agent in The Shape of Water. Dude was giving strong Captain Ahab vibes justing checking in at the Delta counter. He would’ve been a killer John Brown. Somebody give him Lincoln already.

shannon was on my flight home, too / nuremberg (2025)

All of this rides in behind him as Shannon delivers Cuyahoga’s opening line: Let’s put our heads together / and start a new country up. He sings it straight the first verse and with a deliberate anti-Trump sneer the second.⁸ The idea seemed cringe my first two nights. We are largely an old, satisfied bunch of white folks with good health insurance. But now it’s like, why the fuck not? Wasn’t America just started up the first time?

Back up here: Cuyahoga—bless all y’all non-fans reading this deep—is an impressionistic retelling of an almost Biblical American legend: that time in the dark 1970s when we trashed Ohio’s Cuyahoga River so badly it caught fire. Stipe’s lyrics swing big and carry heaps. There’s national identity proudly evoked and Native American history awkwardly recounted. There’s colonization, selective memory, and violence. Here comes Woody Guthrie: This land is a land of ours. Then Woody gets weird: This river runs red over it. The river is blood, but the blood is not the land itself, or its possession. The red comes in a flood, but the flood will pass, come again, and pass once more. The big sing-along chorus—we all call out Cuyahoga, the mispelled Mohawk word for crooked river—gathers into an inchoate longing for a place and nation that can one day sit in comfort atop an unfathomably large continent thick with history, pain, and beauty beyond reckoning. Rewrite the book and rule the pages / Saving face, secured in grace.

But it’s also just, y’know, about kids swimming in a river. Cuyahoga is our great national Dayswimming. The song forgives us. The song loves us backwards and forwards, without condition, and with something very much like hope.

And this, this, is why the whole tour works so well, why it’s truly caught fire this year, why a couple of small-club cover-band shows turned into R.E.M.-Con, and why Shannon just might spend 2030 singing Everybody Hurts to packed mid-sized houses across the fading American empire. Stipe once called for an American revolution, Shannon alone can sell it fresh, and we’re out here dying for something to believe.

Wars are no longer local, Feb. 28.

We wake up Saturday and Trump has bombed Iran. Nobody cares. That’s my hangover talking, but also the Great American Hangover: we’ve been bombing the Middle East my entire life. I am out of words, out of gas, out of futures. Doug drives the band north while Andrew and I hunt down a Bloody Mary and another fried chicken sandwich. The pale sun shines bright as it can on a Great American College Town. It’s game day. The bars are filling up, and the frontyards of frat houses. Shirtless boys circle the beer-pong tables. A cloud of chartreuse bridesmaids float out of their hotel and into a waiting trolley. They look amazing. The trolley is actually a bus. The bridesmaids will never wear those dresses again. It’s the end of the world as we know it. I’ll be back in Athens next year. //

1. Or rather: I never expected to hear them live again after the ’95 Monster show in Phoenix. Great show, but a funny night. I took a date from the private Catholic high school who was polite in her utter indifference to me and concert both. We were up on the lawn, while Andrew was in the reserved seats with his date. Nora and friend were there, too. Our misspent youth! We shoulda been together.

2. Becky had an almost Victorian air about her, with porcelain skin and dark brown eyes and chestnut hair she wore up in a French braid. I didn’t know her well. She kept to herself and quit school months before the end. Becky, forgive me if you were actually a first violin. My memory is based not on your ability but on a vague sense of proximity in first-hour rehearsals. The 2nds sat next to us violas, the lost and dreaming masses of the orhestra. That’s where I’ve kept you. You were also in my Geometry class, and killed it.

3. On the small stage Narducy’s resemblance to Steve Kerr, a huge hero of my AZ childhood, is almost overpowering. The dadness is strong in him.

4. Summer ‘95 in small-town Paraguay. Winter down there, I guess. My host brother and I peeling around the red-dirt streets in a Fiat hatchback, shouting along to every word.

5. John also played on Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne, which is to say he played bass on my whole twenties.

6. America loves to wait in line for an instagrammable restaurant. China does too, for that matter. NZ for the most part can’t be arsed, and I love Kiwis for it.

7. Don’t tell me to google the lyrics. I refuse, and so should you.

8. Find me a MAGA R.E.M. fan. Can’t be done.