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R.E.M. Rock SXSW

by Jarrett Martineau | March 13, 2008 at 03:24 pm | 234 views | add comment

NowPublic has NowReturned to the chilly climes of our Vancouver HQ after a great stint at the 2008 SXSW Interactive festival, but the rock & roll heat continues to get cranked up back in Austin, where the sun is blasting down +90°F temperatures and +800 bands are blasting out across the city's innumerable live venues during the Music portion of the annual conference and festival.

Although we're now out of immediate earshot, we'll still be keeping track of the 'South by' music action, as the blogosphere is abuzz with up-to-the-minute live reviews and the elaborately calendared itineraries of music journalists desperately trying to manage the Texan mayhem.

With that in mind, Wednesday night's big ticket event was R.E.M. playing to an intimate crowd of 2,000 at Stubb's Amphitheatre. From the sounds of things, the show was well-received and typically Stipe-tastic.

The hot ticket for the day was, unquestionably, R.E.M.'s show at Stubb's Amphitheatre - one of the larger venues in town but still incredibly small for a band of their stature. I was on the fence about trying to attend - I saw people lining up as early as a quarter to five but after seeing a couple of unremarkable shows early in the evening, I swung by to see just how bad the lines were and was inside as it turns out, it wasn't bad at all. Sure, I was a couple hours early for the headliners and had to wait through a couple openers - the depressingly ordinary Papercranes from Florida and the decently sludgy Dead Confederate from Georgia - but getting to see R.E.M. come out and rock out the way they haven't in years made it all worthwhile.

[F]rom
minute one, Athens' premiere elder statesmen knew all eyes were
squarely on them. Frontman Michael Stipe strode to the mic, rose his
arms, Messiah-like, and greeted the masses ("Children of South by
Southwest," he laughed, "come to me!") before the band launched into
"Living Well's the Best Revenge," the lead track off their upcoming Accelerate album (the promotion of which was, in theory, the reason they were playing SXSW).

"We're going to play a lot of new songs tonight," Stipe smiled.
"Luckily, they're under two minutes. So if you don't like it, you can
go take a pee."

R.E.M. rocked unafraid last night (March 11) as it previewed its next album with an energetic and politically charged South By Southwest concert at Stubb's BBQ.

The, 22-song, 90-plus minute set, webcast live on NPR.org, offered a generous 10-song sampling from the hard-rocking "Accelerate," which R.E.M. releases on April 1. It all started with the album's opening couplet -- "Living Well's the Best Revenge" and "Mansized Wreath" -- and scored with other new songs such as "Mr. Richards," "Horse to Water," "Hollow Man" and the title track.

Hits were in short supply -- "Drive," "Fall on Me" and "Man on the Moon" came from that distinct minority -- but R.E.M. did dig into its catalog for rare fare such as "Second Guessing" and "Animal," the latter dedicated to Jim Fouratt, who frontman Michael Stipe said promoted R.E.M.'s first New York City show.

"That's the only gig we ever wanted to play," Stipe said. "If we broke up after that it would be OK." He also noted that "The Great Beyond" was his choice for the evening's set list, even though the band hadn't rehearsed it "in about two years."

Stipe punctuated the rest of the night with sharp political comments appropriate for an election year. He saluted Austin for its support of presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and railed that he's "sick to death of politicians telling me what I should be scared of and what I should fear."