An REM thread for r.e.m. stuff

New demos pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase... I need something new! :)

Megatroptimus has got me thinking about REM 1988 -1997 and why I have not heard many demos/outtakes from that era. Automatic for the People or Monster demos never. Green and Out of Time demos on bootleg sound terrible. We all know HIFI was mostly recorded live on the monster tour’s sound-checks or during shows. They recorded sound-checks/full shows/on the tour bus/ back stage, all of it. Where is this stuff? I’m sure there are hundreds of awesome outtakes, covers, alternate versions recorded during the months on the road in 1995. A HI-FI or Automatic for the People never before heard outtake would be incredible. REM Timeline website suggests there are many outtakes sung by Stipe and recorded during the Green/Out of Time/Automatic demos and album sessions that have never been released. Mandolin Strum vocal take for example. There is a vocal version of organ song on a bootleg called Here I Am again. Does Fruity Organ also have a vocal version? I believe that Title and the other instrumentals from the Green/Out of Time demos have vocal versions unheard and in the vaults alongside other unknowns. After every album’s release between 1996 – 2011 I read countless interviews with Peter Buck saying they cut four to six songs from most of their albums and those songs were never released. We have only been delivered four vocal album outtakes from REM’s Warner Brothers discography Fretless, Free World Baby, Photograph, and Fascinating and a small handful of demos/alt versions on singles, I doubt that’s it.

Is the fabled REM box-set now seeing its release through these deluxe editions? I don’t think so.

Green has complete Tourfilm concert and it was a great choice. Considering MTV 91 Unplugged was just released and Out of Time is up next for the Deluxe Edition, I’m guessing demos for the extra disk. Out of Time has countless bootlegs from the demo session, however I’m under the impression there was another more formal demo session for Out of Time that has never been heard. Since Automatic For the People had no tour, I imagine a demo disk for its Deluxe release as well. Let’s hope that it’s not an edited Bingo Hand Job show we’ve heard a million times or a complete Greenpeace from 40 Watt Club which would be a waste. Monster’s deluxe I predict will be Roadmovie. HIFI’s must be more outtakes from the road studio. In-between years I believe they will continue to release live shows/rarities like Unplugged. Then finally, I predict they will not deliver deluxe versions for any further albums after HIFI. Lets be honest, other than us die-hards will want Up and Around the Sun demos. I think then the fabled box set containing mostly Up –Collapse Into Now rarities will be released. It will contain also these left over Studio outtakes and unreleased demos 1988 -1996. We might have been given all from IRS years extras and after the box-set, REM might finally cease releasing no more. That may not be till 2025.

This is all just thought and prediction. Love to hear yours.
 
Mostly agreed, Buckhead, with only one reservation: Green and OOT demos have great-sounding bootlegs, if you were lucky enough to get the right ones. The most famous collection of Green demos was remastered by a fan some time ago and sounds the best you could expect from a demo album. And OOT demos can be found in at least 3 different packages with the same content and different treatments: Outtakes of Time, Slightly Out of Time and Time of Outtakes. I had the opportunity to download all of them a long time ago and compare. Time of Outtakes is clearly the best and most complete, and it's pretty decent.

The unfortunately terrible remasters collection will continue in 2016, as Bertis mentioned in a recent interview. In case you're wondering: terrible because A) they're not properly remastered, just made loud, brickwalled and obnoxious, a horrible job; I stick to other editions any day, mostly vinyls and HDtracks; B) their opportunity to release rare material was incredibly wasted, and instead we got more of the same. I think these anniversary editions are released having in mind a small group of middle-ground curious fans who don't care what the bonus is, as long as there is a bonus disc they'll listen to once and forget about it. We, diehard fans, already have all that material, while casual listeners (the vast majority) will just go for compilations and cheaper, simpler editions.

As for predictions, considering this history record so far, the bonus disc of OOT is certainly gonna be those same demos we already know. Anything else would be a surprise -- except that I can also see them releasing another widely circulated acoustic performance as a bonus disc, which would also be a poor decision. There's probably no way out when it comes to Out of Time, really. I think you're spot on about Automatic and Monster. The best thing for us would be to have demos from them, with or without new songs, but I don't think that's gonna happen. More redundant live shows to come. Whatever comes as a bonus to Hi-Fi should be interesting, as we have nothing. As for the rest, it's still a long time to come. And I honestly have no idea about the oft-mentioned box; they probably do have plenty of unheard-of material in the vaults, stuff that would make us go crazy. If you would ask this diehard fan here, there's no better time than the present time. They should be preparing it right now and for the past few months for a Christmas release, as R.E.M. is still highly-considered and people still care today. But all three guys are busy taking a long post-R.E.M. vacation and dedicating themselves to other projects, so I don't think they are in any kind of hurry. I don't know, ask Bill to do it. There are good opportunities next year (the band's 35 years anniversary) and in the distant 2020 (40 years). Or they could be leaving it to after the last 25-year album edition and I'll probably be dead by then. A side note: Chronic Town still hasn't had a decent CD release and it should have one. Since it's only 5 songs, they could include plenty of bonus material and make it a full record. There are lots of unreleased demos and live stuff from that era. Just don't make it any remastered, please! A collection of all fanclub singles would also be a handsome release as a limited edition, In The Attic style.
 
Yeah, even though we know that there are plenty of unreleased demos out there, I bet we'll mostly get live concerts we already have. It kills me that we'll probably never hear all the great demos recorded over the years just because they're instrumentals. They have tons of those. Some collectors do have them (we know who they are), but they're just too selfish to share them.

About OOT: funny that the official release of the demo for Low didn't sound any better than the demos we already had in bootleg form. Still hoping we'll get demos instead of another acoustic show since they already released the MTV Unplugged concert from 1991.
 
Last edited:
Have to dissent on the issue of live shows vs demos. It would be great to have new material, of course. But the Scott Litt mixes of songs from the Mountain Stage show, for instance, were awesome. It would definitely not be a letdown to have anything of that sort of quality, even if the shows themselves are nothing new.
 
From the R.E.M. Timeline. 80s studio sessions never released, the Bombay Sessions not even a bootleg.
This is Box-set worthy material.

8 February 1981 - Bombay Recording Studios, Smyrna, GA
Sitting Still / Gardening At Night / Radio Free Europe / Shaking Through / Mystery To Me / Rockville / Narrator / White Tornado

1 February 1982 - Studio C, RCA Studios, New York, NY
Romance / Wolves, Lower / Laughing / Shaking Through / Catapult / Stumble / Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars)

Romance (murmur) mystery to me (reckoning) two steps onward (fables) Title (Green) - these are studio outtakes from the albums never released.

The Bootlegs for Murmur, Reckoning, Document, and Green yet to be officially released.
The murmur, document, and Green demos on bootlegs are seemingly incomplete. Reckoning Demos however have seen good release on bootleg.

I never heard a good sounding live show from '86 on bootleg and they never released one track from that tour either.

This is all going to be on the fabled box-set or it should be

Also, Side Note. The new IRS rarities material on ITunes. Are the tracks Gardening at Night and 9-9 live in France 84 or Boston 83, thanks! If they are France 84 i would like a nice copy of those tracks and Ill buy them today.
 
Last edited:
Mostly agreed, Buckhead, with only one reservation: Green and OOT demos have great-sounding bootlegs, if you were lucky enough to get the right ones. The most famous collection of Green demos was remastered by a fan some time ago and sounds the best you could expect from a demo album. And OOT demos can be found in at least 3 different packages with the same content and different treatments: Outtakes of Time, Slightly Out of Time and Time of Outtakes. I had the opportunity to download all of them a long time ago and compare. Time of Outtakes is clearly the best and most complete, and it's pretty decent.

The unfortunately terrible remasters collection will continue in 2016, as Bertis mentioned in a recent interview. In case you're wondering: terrible because A) they're not properly remastered, just made loud, brickwalled and obnoxious, a horrible job; I stick to other editions any day, mostly vinyls and HDtracks; B) their opportunity to release rare material was incredibly wasted, and instead we got more of the same. I think these anniversary editions are released having in mind a small group of middle-ground curious fans who don't care what the bonus is, as long as there is a bonus disc they'll listen to once and forget about it. We, diehard fans, already have all that material, while casual listeners (the vast majority) will just go for compilations and cheaper, simpler editions.

As for predictions, considering this history record so far, the bonus disc of OOT is certainly gonna be those same demos we already know. Anything else would be a surprise -- except that I can also see them releasing another widely circulated acoustic performance as a bonus disc, which would also be a poor decision. There's probably no way out when it comes to Out of Time, really. I think you're spot on about Automatic and Monster. The best thing for us would be to have demos from them, with or without new songs, but I don't think that's gonna happen. More redundant live shows to come. Whatever comes as a bonus to Hi-Fi should be interesting, as we have nothing. As for the rest, it's still a long time to come. And I honestly have no idea about the oft-mentioned box; they probably do have plenty of unheard-of material in the vaults, stuff that would make us go crazy. If you would ask this diehard fan here, there's no better time than the present time. They should be preparing it right now and for the past few months for a Christmas release, as R.E.M. is still highly-considered and people still care today. But all three guys are busy taking a long post-R.E.M. vacation and dedicating themselves to other projects, so I don't think they are in any kind of hurry. I don't know, ask Bill to do it. There are good opportunities next year (the band's 35 years anniversary) and in the distant 2020 (40 years). Or they could be leaving it to after the last 25-year album edition and I'll probably be dead by then. A side note: Chronic Town still hasn't had a decent CD release and it should have one. Since it's only 5 songs, they could include plenty of bonus material and make it a full record. There are lots of unreleased demos and live stuff from that era. Just don't make it any remastered, please! A collection of all fanclub singles would also be a handsome release as a limited edition, In The Attic style.

Yeah, the one good thing I know about the reissues is that Mobile Fidelity has been doing the vinyl remastered pretty consistently. I hear they're well regarded, I can't tell anything about sound quality personally (just not an audiophile). In terms of demos my dream is to hear "The Devil Rides Backward on a Horse Named Maybe" with the two verses Michael Stipe wrote. I'm not sure we'll ever get that, though we did get "Throw Those Trolls Away" and a studio demo of "Two Steps Onward". I've also heard about a different version of Ignoreland that sped up and slowed down weirdly, and Peter said it was better. So AftP reissue is what I'm looking forward to, tentatively.
New Adventures is my favorite album but I don't really trust that there's anything buried, they stuck everything they could on that album.
And what about all the quiet songs they supposedly scrapped for Monster? "The band wrote 45 songs for the record, including 'a whole album's worth of acoustic stuff' that the band demoed, according to guitarist Peter Buck" (wikipedia). I can't imagine ever getting to hear that but it would be amazing.

Anyway nowadays Peter Buck's solo stuff is the biggest source of new R.E.M. material we're going to get. And honestly it makes me really happy. I mean listen to the lyrics of Here in Heaven, that's some straight up Fables of the Reconstruction shit.
 
Here is the revised upload of the Xmas stuff I promised a few weeks back, with bonus tracks, as per inyourroom's info and the uploads Anon. provided. I also used this discography page as a reference.

Disc 1

image.png



Disc 2

image.png

Just stumbled across this thread - fantastic! Any chance you could put CD2 of the fanclub singles up on Sendspace again - thanks very much :)
 
I wonder how Peter's songs would sound like with a real singer. Like... MJS.

Really though Michael trying to sing Ride that Road or My Slobbering Decline would be terrible. Those are the songs where Peter uses his "batshit crazy growling guy" persona. Now on the songs where Peter actually tries to sing a melody I agree that he could use another singer. I'd recommend Mike instead of Michael because of how melodic the songs feel, don't think they would really go with Michael's style ... but yeah Life is Short with Mike Mills vocals would be great. Maybe when he finally does a solo album he'll cover one or two of Peter's songs.

Speaking of that Mike was the one we always thought would do a solo album, wasn't he, because we know he writes songs by himself sometimes (i.e. Rockville), and sings lead vocals sometimes. I think Texarkana and Near Wild Heaven were pretty much all him (in songwriting, not instrumentation).

I've only heard the second Tuatara album and it wasn't very good, and the few good songs on it (which actually were pretty good) didn't have any Peter songwriting input. Still though Allmusic doesn't think its good and says they only got good with their third album, which also had a lot more P. Buck songwriting credits.

So much stuff I haven't listened to yet though, like West and Hindu Love Gods. I just started on the Minus 5 discog with Killington.
 
Anyone has this soundcheck?

16 July 2003 - Marlay Park, Dublin, Ireland
support: Oranger, Starsailor
soundcheck: How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us / How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us (Instrumental) / New Test Leper (Instrumental) / New Test Leper / Strange Currencies (part) / Nightswimming / Make It All Okay (x2) / Strange Currencies )x2, first version with opening lyrics of I Got You Babe) / Radio Free Europe / Strange [some riffs]
 
Quote Originally Posted by doctoracula View Post
i got a shipping notice today for my new peter buck 7". it's got a release date of oct 21, so that's pretty unexpected and cool.

Any chance you can share mp3/flac of it, when you got it?

so what will it be doctoracula? any chance you can? :)

and BTW - does anyone have a good quality recording of the band preforming "Boy go" at the Green-tour? I got 4 versions, all of them quite poorly recorded...
 
Tags
r.e.m. rem
Back
Top Bottom