“They’re coming. For sure.”
“Wow. Too weird.”
Me and Charlie Mars, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2004. Charlie Mars certainly looks like a rock star; a stunning set of cheekbones and long blonde hair that exceeds the legal Strokes limit. Tons of Oxford, Mississippi personality, to boot. He has just flown in from the States that afternoon. We are sharing a dressing room at Debaser, a cavernous club in some sort of bunker by a canal. Within five minutes of arriving he has picked up my guitar and begun a medley of half-learned songs: ‘I’m on Fire’ into ‘Lebanon, TN’ into something else... he says we should do a duet during the show. A bemused Swedish journalist looks on from an overstuffed love seat, smoking a Marlboro.
I hesitatingly sing a high harmony to the Springsteen song whilst musing over Charlie Mars’ guest list. It has now been confirmed that it contains the names of all three members of R.E.M. and twenty or so members of their entourage, all in town on a press junket. Charlie Mars is opening some shows for them in the States in a month or so and will be observed by the band for the first time tonight. To his credit, he is showing no signs of intimidation. (In fact, he will soon fall into a disturbingly peaceful slumber on the aforementioned love seat, sans Swedish journalist) He is nearly delirious with jet-lag, now lurching into a questionable version of the Laverne and Shirley theme on my poor, abused Larrivee.
A few hours later I am popping into the first chords of ‘Indiana’, expertly accompanied by my new friend Bjorn on piano. I met Bjorn a week before at a show in Bergen; Kip was wise enough to convince him to fill in for a few Swedish shows that Andy was unable to play. As I enjoy the mellifluosity of Bjorn’s ivory tickling, I am dimly aware of the intense congregation of bodies at the far end of the bar. The glare of the stage lights empathetically prevents me from ascertaining who these people may be, but I am fairly sure that they were on Charlie Mars’ guest list.
The show is a smashing success. I finish with a cover of The Darkness’ ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’ to a very satisfactory ovation. There are hugs and handshakes in the dressing room; the Swedish debut seems to have been well received. I saunter out to the merchandise table and begin talking to a very tall man dressed like a Republican. His name is Bob; I have met him before at a show in Seattle. He is the tour manager for R.E.M. Thankfully, he is a fan, a large man with overcompensatory hand gestures that seem entirely appropriate for the evening. I am preparing to respond to some of his machine gun repartee’ when a slight, almost elfin figure in a large hat emerges from out of Bob’s considerable shadow and extends a very skinny arm.
‘Hi, I’m Michael.”

The members of Jump (ne’ Little Children) have taken up alcohol in the years between our last touring excursions. They blame their participation in a country band and the constant vigors of touring for their new habit. I only remark upon it because I can remember a particularly lubricated morning of bowling a few years back after a show in Atlanta, me off my face on something or another but still present enough to notice that all members seemed to be entirely beverage-free at 5:00 AM. Talking trash to Matt Bivins about performance, his mother, etc. One of the prettiest men on the planet, Bivins.
The whiskey is currently being passed around (albeit in a moderate fashion)on a night in early December in the dressing room of the Morton Theater, a gorgeously restored vaudeville house in the heart of Athens, GA. Apparently it was slated for demolition back in the eighties but was saved by the efforts of a dedicated town contingency led by the members of R.E.M.
An hour later I am leading a wonderful crowd through an acoustic sing-along rendition of ‘New Mexico.’ I leave the stage to warm applause and the promise of a brief night in Athens, one of the world’s most inviting small cities. Outside the theater I meet Tom and his sister-in-law Mary Katherine, who invite me to a bar down the street for a drink. We happily pass an hour or so over PBR and merlot, a strange combination that is inexplicably Athens. A fine conversation about music and organic farming is left dangling around midnight when I realize that the theater might be shutting down with my gear still in it. After my load-out I hit the road back to my Mom’s house in Acworth, tenderly guiding the Altima through the angelically-lit streets of that strange little place that still smells of quietly contained freedom.

Speaking of quietly contained freedom, try 5:15 AM in a penthouse apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, the quiet resolution of the Manhattan skyline offering comfort from across the East River. Ethan has upgraded his accommodations since my tenure in New York; he now shares a deeluxe apahtment the the skaayy-hi-hi with our friend Andrew. They were kind enough to let me occupy their sectional a week or so before Thanksgiving. An unexplainable bout of insomnia had turned into nostalgia, as it often will. I had spent the day walking around Manhattan with my former tour manager Damian Kozak, catching up and eating a lot of food. Damian is on an almost entirely Asian diet these days; he spends hours ambling through Chinatown looking for the perfect Vietnamese pork sandwich while plotting the intricacies of his new entrepreneurial enterprise, personal training. From the looks of him, he’s definitely got the right idea. The kid is in top form; hundreds of hours spent in a
sweaty boxing gym have sculpted him into a Ukrainian Adonis, a fountain of information towering over the chattering denizens of Canal Street.
New York, that funny sensory recollection, so hard to contain, so hard to call it something familiar, but it is. Who writes the manual for cataloguing experience when experience feels like so many dreams come and gone, coming back again, then leaving you just when you think you might have found a soft red folder in your heart in which to file it? I am onto a new method, actually an old method, one that I’ve been adhering to for years without realizing it: Let it go and it will come back to you when you least expect it and, quite possibly, when you need it most.

“Yes, I know. It’s great to meet you, Michael.” Shuffling, come on, you can think of something here, he smells like booze, ah, my wife... “This is my wife, Natalie.”
“Nice to meet you, Natalie.”
“You too.” I love my wife’s hair.
“Uh, we had an idea.” Bob.
“Yeah. The Darkness song. Bag it.” Laughter. That stifling monotone, undeniably American. 1986, the black boom box in my bedroom, the feedback intro to ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’.
“Really?” You parsimonious little bastard. I got the idea of doing weird covers from seeing you people pulling ‘Moon River’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’ out of your asses. MTSU Arena, 1989.
“Yes. I think you should always leave the audience with a taste of your own material.” Bob nods along, seemingly adept to the guttural rhythms of his employer. He is wearing a John Kerry button. On a tweed jacket.
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s a little bit of a gimmick move. Sometimes you have to surprise people.”
‘Yeah, maybe. I really liked the rest of your set. The songs are good. Yours, I assume?” I love Michael Stipe; he is one of the most influential artists America has ever produced. An Icon, so rare in our baby country’s brief lexicon. A giant of mythological proportions. He has seen more than I may ever see. He knows things.
“Well, actually, they’re all Darkness B-sides.”

An hour later, stuffed into a cab with my wife, manager and two Norwegians, I am still trying to absorb it. Beer and a commanding view of the Stockholm skyline from our hotel room will help a little, but it’s not until we get to London that I will find a temporary location for it, a cramped space in the revolving door of a foreign country; my fickle little soul talking back to me, yet again.