Michael Stipe Is Not Grumpy

In 1987 Peter Buck said, “I think it’s within us to make one of those Top 20 all-time rock ’n’ roll great records.” Do you think R.E.M. succeeded before breaking up in September?
I don’t think we ever felt like we actually achieved that almost unachievable goal.

Have any of your contemporaries achieved it?
In my mind, my contemporaries go all the way back to Lou Reed. So yeah, I’ve met a lot of people like Lou Reed who’ve made those records.

Like you, he has a reputation for being grumpy.
I’m not as much of a grump as people think I am. I just look really serious.

People like to make a firm demarcation of R.E.M. before and after drummer Bill Berry left the band in 1997. Did R.E.M. suffer from his absence?
Yeah, a lot. And I wish we had figured that out the day he quit because we wouldn’t have made a record a few months later. Bill was a great editor. He couldn’t wait to get to the end of a song, so he kept them short and concise and without flab, and we lost that without him. I noticed it when our record “Up” came out. I’m proud of it, but it’s two songs too long, and there are all these songs that just meander for 5 minutes plus. They didn’t need to, but at that point the band was not talking to each other.

During the early period that R.E.M. experienced great success, you suffered from bulimia. You’ve also said that AIDS made you scared to death that sex would kill you. Sounds like a far cry from a rock-star fantasy.
Most of the time that I was a pop star I loved it. But in this period leading up to 1985 I had this complete nervous breakdown, and nobody recognized it. The guys just thought I was being impossible. Depression wasn’t something that people really talked about back then. Until I was finally able to get an anonymous H.I.V. test in ’87, there was a sense of dread and paranoia every time I got a cold.

The Los Angeles Times once labeled R.E.M. one of the world’s most politically correct bands. Was that a compliment?
It’s backhanded. We were politically correct.

Any highlights?
There’s a live R.E.M. recording that, I think, is from 1989, and between songs I make a comment to some guy who’s holding a cup. I said, “That better not be Styrofoam, bud.” We decided to include that. Not cool. That was embarrassing.

It surprised me to read that you say the Beatles were virtually of no importance as an influence. You actually compared them to elevator music.
I still get death threats about it from Beatles fans. The point that I was trying to make was that I was three years too young for them. I grew up in an era where the Banana Splits, the Archies and the Monkees were the music that I listened to. The Beatles were the music that was playing in the background. By elevator music, I wasn’t being insulting. I’ve sat down with Yoko and Sean and Julian, and they joked with me about elevator music, and I turned bright red and they said, “It’s O.K., we understand.”

As a teenager, Patti Smith and the New York punk movement inspired you. So it was jarring when I turned on the TV in 2008 and saw you driving a Bentley around the Spanish countryside with Gwyneth Paltrow and Mario Batali.
What do you mean? Gwyneth Paltrow and Mario are the most punk-rock people I know. Are you kidding?

I could maybe see Mario. But I certainly don’t see Gwyneth Paltrow as punk rock.
Look closer.