Take A Picture Here, Take A Souvenir

There are plenty of memories rattling around my iPod and hard drive about REM. I hear their music in the shuffle of seventies, eighties and nineties that pour into my head as I sit at a computer or wander about outside with earbuds keeping the bad news out and the music in. To say that I am a fan could be stretching the facts a little bit, depending on your definition. Do I own more than one of their recordings? Yes. Have I paid to see them perform live? No. Still, I'm generally interested in hearing what new direction these guys from Athens, Georgia might be taking.
Now I won't. After thirty-some years together, their folding the tents and calling it quits. Of course, they do this in the realm where "retiring" means taking a year or two off until the checks being offered to reunite and play one more show swell up to the size that whatever integrity might be gained by staying retired becomes economically unfeasible. I'm looking at you, Rolling Stones. Then there are the inevitable reunion and farewell tours, followed by a new single or two, yes you heard me Motley Crue. Eventually, the original myth of the band is subsumed by the burden of keeping the machine running, and the job of maintaining that myth becomes a tiring and endless road: Eagles.
I will be the first to confess that I have followed my share of dinosaurs around, and bought music that has been made long after it was relevant, but I hope that REM can stick to their guns and stick by their announced plans to walk away. I will always treasure the first time I heard the garbled lyrics of "Radio Free Europe," and fifteen years later winning tickets to see them was only radio contest I ever won. That was about the time that Bill Berry, their drummer suffered an aneurysm, and a lot of people thought we had seen the last of them. Four years ago, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The continued to make music with Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe.
And now they're done. At least that's what they said last Wednesday. A Greatest Hits package will be released soon. I won't be shocked to see them lured from their comfortable stasis, and I won't begrudge them any further creative endeavors, but for the sake of their integrity, I hope they can stick to their faintly intelligible word.