Now celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary with a deluxe, Dolby Atmos-enhanced four-disc reissue, R.E.M.’s multi-million-selling eighth album, Automated For The Folks, cemented the Athens, Georgia, quartet’s repute as probably the most influential alt.rock band on the planet when it was first launched in 1992. Described by bassist Mike Mills as “our most cohesive record”, this transcendent work is now usually cited as considered one of rock’s touchstone albums. As with Out Of Time, nonetheless, R.E.M. selected to not tour to help the discharge, as a substitute selling the album with a sequence of extremely evocative Automated For The Folks movies.
For the Automated For The Folks marketing campaign, R.E.M. commissioned promos for all six of the report’s particular person singles. They collaborated with progressive administrators Peter Care, Kevin Kerslake, Jake Scott and Jem Cohen, all of whom have shared their insights into working with R.E.M. for the Automated For The Folks movies, completely for uDiscover Music.
‘Drive’ (October 1992; directed by Peter Care)
For the first two Automated For The Folks movies, ‘Drive’ and ‘Man On The Moon’, R.E.M. labored alongside Peter Care, whose monitor report additionally contains collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Depeche Mode and Cabaret Voltaire. Care had labored with R.E.M. beforehand, capturing the memorable visuals for Out Of Time’s fourth single, ‘Radio Song’.
Additional enhanced by John Paul Jones’ swelling string association, ‘Drive’ featured a lyric impressed by David Essex’s 1973 hit ‘Rock On’. Regardless of missing any discernible refrain, this brittle, but immensely highly effective track grew to become a transatlantic Prime 30 hit. For the track’s equally hanging promotional movie, Peter Care captured the band in black-and-white on the Sepulveda Dam in Los Angeles.
“Michael Stipe mentioned to me one thing on the traces of, ‘We want to make it the greatest crowd-surfing music video of all time,’ the director recollects. “After which, ‘To include Peter, Mike and Bill, we want to re-enact a 60s civil-rights demonstration – with the guys being hosed down by power hoses.’
“As well as wanting black-and-white, Michael mentioned lasers and strobes… and that the camera should always look down on the crowd-surfing,” Care elaborates. “We chose the location purely for practicality – a place that was easy for the fans to find and where we could drain the water. I don’t think the dam is recognisable in the video – I did not want a sense of place but, instead, a world defined by the crowd.”
Regardless of the starkness of the black-and-white movie, there’s additionally a messianic, Ziggy Stardust-esque high quality inherent within the visuals for ‘Drive’…
“Yes, and when Michael mentioned that he’d shaved his chest especially to be shot shirtless, I became a little concerned that the rock star, sex god aspect was a bit too on-the-nail, with the call-to-arms refrain in the song,” Peter Care recollects.
“When I look back at our meeting about ‘Drive’, I’m surprised I had the temerity to critique his shirtless idea – and that Michael respected me enough to listen,” he continues. “When he took me through the idea of crowd surfing, I immediately thought of a more ‘poetic’ and ‘historical’ image that a white shirt would lend to the images. I thought about the classical paintings, Death Of Marat (he died in his tub with his shirt on) and The Wreck Of The Hesperus – people clinging to a raft in a storm. I also thought that the white shirt would be more startling under the strobe lights.”
‘Man On The Moon’ (November 1992; directed by Peter Care)
Constructed upon a storyline involving the late US comic Andy Kaufman assembly Elvis Presley in Heaven (although, within the track, Heaven is a truck cease), ‘Man On The Moon’ builds from dreamy, calypso-style verses to a memorably anthemic refrain. It stays an enormous fan favorite.
Once more capturing in black-and-white, Peter Care filmed a lot of the track’s John Steinbeck-esque visuals within the Californian desert close to Palmdale, selecting this location as a result of “it was the closest place to Los Angeles that would give us beautiful as well as ugly desert, electric pylons, the truck-stop set with the gable roof, a working bar for the interiors and the road for Bill [Berry]’s 18-wheeler scene”.
Unusually for R.E.M, a lot of the track’s imagery is visually represented within the promotional movie, one thing which can be atypical of Peter Care’s work. “Throughout my career, I never took the lyrics of a song as inspiration for an idea for a music video,” the director reveals. “Possibly the title, however largely simply the final really feel of the music and the art-versus-commerce wants of the band or artist.
“I always thought it too banal to illustrate the lyrics, especially in a literal way,” he provides. “So when I met Michael and he talked about specific ideas (walking with a staff of wood, stepping over a snake, etc), of course I knew right away that we should illustrate every line as literally as possible. But as we filmed, Michael had second thoughts about some of the ideas. For example: somehow, on the set and during the edit, the shot of him walking with a staff was replaced by an archival shot of an astronaut walking on the moon.”
Then, in fact, there are the people mouthing the phrases to the track within the truck cease. Coming from an unique transient from the band, this solid of extras had been assembled in Los Angeles and bussed as much as the movie shoot for the day, leading to one of the memorable scenes from the Automated For The Folks movies. “We wanted them to look like Midwesterners, salt of the earth types… people with an innate ‘R.E.M.-ness’,” Peter Care says.
“It was necessary to convey to every actor how necessary they’d be within the video. A few days forward of the shoot, we gave them cassettes with the choruses and made them promise to be taught the phrases, encouraging them to sing the track, not simply lip-sync. All of them got here by. With this little desert city bar full of the sound of the repeated choruses, and as we filmed every individual in flip, the environment and sense of camaraderie grew to grow to be fairly palpable.
“For me, it was very emotional,” the director concludes. “A unique moment in my film-making career.”
‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’ (February 1993; directed by Kevin Kerslake)
At the moment ending a documentary on Joan Jett, Kevin Kerslake has labored with a bunch of alt.rock luminaries comparable to Bob Mould, Trip and Mazzy Star, along with collaborating with superstars Prince and Nirvana. As he tells uDiscover Music, he was put along with R.E.M. by Warner Bros’ video commissioner Randy Skinner, after which “we broke some bread one sunny day, and the horses were out of the gate”.
Thought by many to be the poppiest monitor on Automated For The Folks, ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’ was all the time a contender for a single. Accordingly, director Kerslake shot a lot of the video on an outdated soundstage in Los Angeles, although the machine inserts had been carried out in Topanga Canyon outdoors the town, in artist Jonathan Borofsky’s yard.
Echoing sentiments expressed by all of the filmmakers that R.E.M. labored with for the Automated For The Folks movies, Kerslake reveals that Michael Stipe and the band had been all actively concerned within the course of.
“In the case of ‘… Sidewinder’, Michael’s finely-tuned film sense was primarily expressed through his performance,” he says. “As simple as the video’s premise was – the band atop a giant, rotating wheel that was broken into four quarters which each represented a season – it was instantly apparent that Michael’s camera-awareness and command of space were going to yield some pretty magical stuff. We rotated each band member through every season. Whichever season he was in, Michael occupied that space with both a sense of playfulness and authority, which I found endlessly alluring.”
‘Everybody Hurts’ (April 1993; directed by Jake Scott)
Arguably the album’s most universally recognised hit, the soulful ballad ‘Everybody Hurts’ was accompanied by one of the memorable Automated For The Folks movies, shot on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, by director Jake Scott. Son of Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, Jake can be famend for his collaborations with different stellar artists comparable to The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, Soundgarden and Tori Amos.
The truth that Scott was dwelling in LA when he was commissioned to shoot the clip influenced the video, which was based mostly round a visitors jam wherein a automobile carrying the 4 members of R.E.M. is straight concerned.
“One spends a lot of time in the car in LA,” Scott says. “The forlorn, yearning quality of the song, its tempo, suggested the slow roll of a traffic jam, which is where you might find a true cross-section of humanity. [Federico Fellini’s 1963 film] 8½ was really the inspiration that was quoted in my treatment. We were walking a fine line with regard to 8½ as a reference. None of us wanted to plagiarise the maestro, more pay homage. I think we did!”
Nominated for a Grammy Award in 1994, the ‘Everybody Hurts’ video was shot close to an interchange on the I-10, the primary freeway operating from LA to Jacksonville, Florida, and the shoot famously required a bunch of extras. Jake Scott nonetheless recollects it with fondness.
“The architecture was reminiscent of LA freeway structures, a kind of concrete trench, that we were able to actually shut down and control,” he reveals.
“The local authorities were incredibly accommodating. We cast local actors and people off the street. I then sat with each, asking them what specifically “hurts”, what that meant to them. After a number of backwards and forwards, we determined to shoot it in color as we felt it could lend realism, as we cherished the palette of greys in opposition to the blue sky and all of the totally different tones of the vehicles. I discovered lots making that video, which stays my favorite.”
‘Nightswimming’ (July 1993; directed by Jem Cohen)
A protracted-time R.E.M. collaborator, Jem Cohen had already made a number of movies with the band, together with the promo movies for ‘Talk About The Passion’ and Out Of Time’s ‘Country Feedback’, when he returned so as to add his abilities to the Automated For The Folks movies. Acclaimed for his observational portraits of city landscapes and his utilization of small-gauge codecs comparable to Tremendous 8 and 16-millimetre, the New York Metropolis-based filmmaker used the same method when capturing the visuals for ‘Nightswimming’: a chic, piano-based ballad regarding nocturnal skinny-dipping.
“I’d been very fond of R.E.M.’s music from their first single, ‘Radio Free Europe’, and I went to see them early on when they opened for The Ventures at a tiny club in New Haven, Connecticut,” Jem Cohen recollects. “I used to be fascinated by R.E.M.’s readily obvious curiosity in artwork/filmmaking and the freer, extremely unorthodox method they took of their early movies, particularly these directed by Michael [Stipe] and the extraordinary early ones made by [Michael Stipe’s University of Georgia art professor] James Herbert.
“It was all very raw and entwined with small-gauge filmmaking outside the film and music industries, though by the time of ‘Nightswimming’ I was doing 16mm too,” Cohen says. I made what I wished to make with ‘Nightswimming’, handed the outcomes to Michael after I was carried out, and that was that.”
‘Find The River’ (October 1993; directed by Jodi Wille)
Since working with R.E.M., LA filmmaker Jodi Wille has gone on to work as an assistant and improvement guide to feature-film director Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields, The Mission). In 2012, her first feature-length documentary, The Supply Household, premiered on the South By Southwest Movie Competition to sold-out screenings.
Nonetheless, her contribution to the Automated For The Folks movies, for the album’s sleek remaining single, ‘Find The River’, was really her first paying gig. Although included on the R.E.M. video assortment Parallel, it’s the least-known promo right here, however its easy black-and-white footage – primarily of R.E.M. performing the track at their Clayton Avenue rehearsal studio in Athens – completely enhances one of many band’s most wonderful songs.
“Like myself, R.E.M. never wanted to do the same thing twice, or do the expected,” Peter Care says, wanting again on the expertise of working with the band for the Automated For The Folks movies. “They encouraged experimentation, questioning convention. The fact that I was able to make seven videos for them in all gave me the ultimate satisfaction and, looking back, immense pride.”
Declaring that “R.E.M. were the band that helped define me as a director,” Jake Scott agrees that the enduring Athens outfit captured a particular second in time with Automated For The Folks: “They were at their height, the album arguably a masterpiece, so it was an amazing moment to witness and be a part of,” he says. “R.E.M. were/are simply a unique rock band, complex in definition, wonderfully emotional, and risk-takers, too.”
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