Robert Dean Lurie

I don't know about anyone else but I got a real kick out of this narrative, which works as a life and times of the band, a memoir for Lurie (who spent most of the '90s in Athens), and a trip down memory lane for yours truly; I can remember seeing R.E.M. in Cleveland in 1983, but sort of thought that the Replacements upstaged them. Anyway, what Lurie does really well is to put R.E.M. back into the context out of which they emerged, as just one band that was part of a scene, but which just happened to have the drive to make themselves into one of the paradigmatic outfits of their era. Probably the best audience for this book is one of those folks who discovered R.E.M. during the '90s and are wondering how seriously they should still take the mythology of the band. About the only thing I have to knock this book down for is that an index would have been appreciated.… (más)