Panic! at the Disco at PNC

As my buddies say about me and music - there's REM ......and everyone else

A few weeks back I was making myself a best of REM CD from all the CDs of theirs I own. It was going smooth until Automatic For The People...

I prefer all 6 IRS albums (including DLO) to anything that came after ... but AFTP is the best ... that's not one of those 6

I remember rocking my mix tape of faves from Murmur, Reckoning & Fables, driving down to SLO-town on the 101, summer 1986 ... along with my The Replacements mix and The Alarm mix ... and the first music I bought when I hit my new life of freedom in my 'college town'?

A Cassette of the newly released Lifes Rich Pageant ... which will always be my #1 REM.

The first six albums are marvelous. I consider REMs arc similar to that of Rush. There later stuff is ok, but I prefer the first six albums are so. Probably this is the same for many bands. You can take a five or six album stretch that is your favorite style. Long running bands also redefine themselves over time. It is also funny how the eventual pop popularity gets casual listeners (like myself) to dive deeper into the older stuff. The first Yes I really ever listened to was 90125, but when I got their early albums - I was blown away and they are still some of my favorite. Similar story for Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Genesis, and even The Who (my all time favorite band which I first listened to on Who Are You and the Tommy movie).

U2 is another perfect example ... everything through Achtung is my favorite ... then there's one later clearly superior album in All That You Can't Leave Behind. They're a band I was into since nearly the beginning (really got turned onto them with 3rd album War) along with REM.

Honestly post-IRS for me it goes AFTP, then New Adventures, and then their final Collapse Into Now, which was really a damn good send-off record.

Fables and Document especially...

But AFTP is my favorite.

Like it was mine?

I'm sure sentiment plays a role for me.

AFTP is widely regarded as their masterpiece, so ...

My first experience with REM was watching the music video for "Stand" on MTV in the late 80s. My dad bought me Out Of Time on cassette when I was 11. I didn't discover the IRS stuff until my mid-teens when I found Document at Walmart and realized THAT was where End of the World and The One I Love came from (two songs I loved by REM and had taped off the radio, but didn't have copies of otherwise)...