Ove teme nema skoro nigde na netu - najzad sam nešto iskopao, pa da podelim sa vama (odnosno - neka ga ovde, zatrebaće):
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Pete uses a Rickenbacker 360, a Les Paul, a Gretsch Country Gentleman, a Deering banjo... the following I got from Ken S:
(Sorry the reply is a little late - I've only just seen your post!
I play a Kurzweil PC 88. I have two. I use the internal sounds from both and use one to trigger samples on an Akai 5000 Sampler. I also play a Hammond B3, a Wurlitzer and a Roland Juno 106. One of the kurzweils runs through some pedals I use on a couple of tunes--a Boss Dig. Delay, a Snarling Dog wah, a Rat pedal.)
Peter has a rackmounted Ibanez effects unit, I think he's used it for years--it has compression, chorus, overdrive etc. It's prob. 80s vintage. He also uses a Rat, a Snarling Dog wah, a roger Mayer Voodoo Vibe, and an overdrive pedal built by the tech shop at the Warehouse studio in Vancouver.
When Scott or I play guitar, we have at our spot a Perscription Electronics Overdrive, a Boss DD6 Delay, an MXR 100 Phase, and a Woolly Mammoth Fuzz.
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(Kako sam znao da će se tu negde pojaviti Wooly Mammoth! Damn you, Zachary V!)
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Amps:
Peter uses a Vox AC-30 Amp. For "Monster" I guess he has also used the internal Tremolo inside the AC-30.
For "New Adentures in Hi-Fi" he has also used a Mesa/Boogie Amp. Either is was a DC-5 or a DC-10. I´m not completely about which of these two, ´cause I have only seen it on telly and pictures....
Strings:
I read somewhere on a Peter Buck-Special in a Guitar-Magazine, that he uses thick strings. .011-Strings, which provide a long and fat tone....
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there was a list floating around somewhere, i think on RMR before We Talk became big, so you could search for it on google hopefully you'll find it. anyways, from what i recall Peter's guitars or "stringed instrument repertoire" includes:
1960s Fender XII
1960s Fender RI Telecaster custom
1970s Fender Telecaster (blonde, black)
1980s Rickenbacker 360 6-string (jetglo and walnut)
1990s Rickenbacker 360v64 (fireglo)
Rickenbacker 330 6- and 12-string (jetglo and natural/mapleglo)
Roger McGuinn signature Rickenbacker 370/12
Danelectro 12-string (sparkleburst)
Danelectro
Rickenbacker 340
Gibson Country Gentleman
Gibson SG
Gibson Les Paul
Gibson F-style mandolin (tobacco sunburst)
Gibson jumbo acoustic
Gretsch
Guild jumbo acoustic
Paul Reed Smith
Jerry Jones electric sitar
Kurt Cobain's Fender JagStang (also played by Mike Mills)
amps:
early gigs - i've heard he ran a lot of his guitars through a Fender Bassman 60w or 100w to get that nice clean, jangly sound
Fender Twin
Vox AC-30
Marshall AVT(?) stack
Mesa Boogie (w/built in tremolo)
pedals:
Big Muff Pi (large green pedal, nicknamed Sputnik by Pete himself)
Pro Co Rat
wah pedal
various other pedals, filters, rackmounts, but don't forget the traditional tape loops and studio effects that contribute to the album material
other:
E-Bow Plus
various slides
Rickenbacker 360 strings:
these are individual Dean Markley strings and quite the heavy gauge, sometimes referred to as telephone wire gauge
.013 Plain- Swedish Steel
.017 Plain- Swedish Steel
.026 Wound- Nickel Steel
.036 Wound- Nickel Steel
.046 Wound- Nickel Steel
.056 Wound- Nickel Steel
Peter also played drums on the untitled 11th track on Green and not to mention has played piano/keyboard as well, such as during early gigs as seen on the sleeve of Reckoning and in Road Movie
of course, there's a lot more than what's listed. it makes me wonder how big his instrument collection really is?
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If you like, you can smell it, the scent of the vinyl, the dusty shelves and the musty carpet, that make up an cult record shop. If you like, you can feel it, all the time, the patience in searching, and the sheer lust for new music, that distinguish the music lover from the normal customer. Peter Buck, at one time a salesman in a record store in Athens, Georgia who earned money to live and buy records, was and is such a lover. One day a shy young man with a soft voice stood in front of him, and was treated to a conversation about music that blew his mind. The two became friends, discovered their mutual passion for making music, and founded a band. By the way, the shy man is named Michael Stipe—right, the one with the voice.
The band christened itself R.E.M., enriches the world with great compositions like “Losing My Religion,” “Drive,” “Shiny Happy People,” or “Man On The Moon,” and understands how to translate melancholy into sound. The truly fascinating thing, however, is that everyone can agree on R.E.M. The tough, the tender, the naive and the jaded, and even people who don’t find their songs “sooo beautiful” have to admit: R.E.M. has a good sound. Very much its own, very moving.
If you like, you can smell it, the expectations of thousands of people and the suspense before this big concert: the R.E.M. Open Air on the Königsplatz in Munich. However, it could be the lasagna on the band’s buffet table. Next to it we find Peter Buck, slurping wine and chilling on a big sofa, and picking on a Big Baby Taylor acoustic guitar. Peter excuses himself and says that he’ll put the guitar aside, if we want. No, we don’t want him to.
These days, if you were a salesman in a record store again, what record would you recommend to Michael now?
Peter: I would recommend the new record by Mars Volta. Pretty cool stuff. I heard it only twice and took off and bought the record. The guitars sound really terrific. The new record by the Eels is also very good.
Do you adopt the ideas of such modern bands?
I’m always looking for music that inspires me, things that I can use in songs. Of course I don’t want to imitate anything, but when someone has a great idea, I think to myself that maybe I can use something from it. It could be anything—a chord progression, a melody, the way someone has arranged a piece, or also a guitar sound.
How does a R.E.M. song develop from the inspiration into a finished product?
Michael and I both write [songs], so I can only speak for myself. I play instruments between two and four hours every day—guitar, bass, keyboards, mandolin. I don’t play scales, but chord progressions or rhythmic ideas instead. Suddenly melodies or chord progressions occur to me. That’s how a good refrain happens. Then I keep working on the rest. And when I get a couple of good ideas together, I record them. For that I use a drum machine, a guitar, keyboards, or percussion, or some kind of way-out sound effects. All that happens in about two hours. I send the results to Michael, and then we sit down together, and he says something like, “That’s great, but I don’t like the bridge.” And then we throw away the bridge and try something new. Or we repeat one part, shorten the piece or make it longer.
How much do other instruments like the mandolin or piano help you in the process?
Although I’m a lousy pianist, I like to sit down at the piano. Since I have no clue what I’m doing there, interesting chord progressions result. I wrote the piece “Saturn Return” on “Reveal” on the piano. Then come chords like Bm 6 or 9th chords or the whole 13th chord stuff. Like I said, I have no idea what I’m doing there, but it sounds good. Then I play the whole thing for the guys, and we try to move it over to the guitar. In the process it gets another structure, because here I know what I’m doing. “Lotus” [from the 1998 album “Up”] was composed on the piano. Normally I would never go from A-major in the verses to A-minor in the refrain. But I played it on the piano and there it sounded pretty logical. I never would have done it that way on the guitar.
You sit down at the piano, have no clue, and stumble by chance onto a chord progression that sounds good?
You could say it that way. That’s why I also like different guitar tunings. I have this TransPerformance part on my Gibson, that can automatically switch to a hundred different tunings. I developed a song from our upcoming regular new album, “I Wanted To Be Wrong,” from an E tuning. I didn’t even need a minute for the piece, and I thought, That sounds interesting, but what am I really playing? Later I looked to see what kind of chords I was playing. In one place it was an E 13, and another chord didn’t even have a name, because it was made up somehow of six different notes. It was a totally crazy thing. But normally I know what I’m doing on the guitar. For example, you can always take this E-minor chord [plays an E-minor on his slightly out of tune Big Baby Taylor] and combine it with a C-major-7 [plays a C-major-7]. That always fits together, with that you can always begin or end a pop song in a wonderful way.
Do you use a capo along with open tunings?
No, never. I much prefer open chords, and let the open strings ring out. That sounds kind of like this [Example 1]. Back then, when I was learning guitar, I didn’t know anyone who did it like that. Here’s another example [Example 2], in which I let the G-string ring through, like in “Man On The Moon.” Then when I go into the B part, I use chords that don’t have that note. That results in a nice progression. There are a lot of little tricks like that.
Have you got more tricks like that?
Sure. For instance, an A part consists of two or three different chords, the B part of two chords, and the refrain again of two or three chords. Often it’s interesting to put in a chord that doesn’t turn up in either of the two parts or in the refrain. Above a chord like that you can lead the vocal line back to the verse. Everybody’s got tricks. I mean, look at songs by the Beatles. John Lennon had his own personal way of putting in seventh chords—very cool!
When did you learn that less is more?
Bill [Berry], our former drummer, was always throwing parts out of songs, because he thought that people wanted to hear the vocal lines, the riffs, and the individual parts clearly—but not a thousand different lines all happening simultaneously. “This bass line sounds too nervous,” he’d say, “just play one or two notes.” So we developed a sense for reducing the songs to their pure essence and only keeping what was really important. Just listen to the Beatles’ “White Album.” There’s really not much to it. In half of the songs you only hear one or two instruments. Take a song like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Piano, acoustic guitar, tambourine, bass, percussion, and the horns. There’s really not much to it. It’s a matter of filling the holes perfectly. And when you don’t have a heavy guitar sound, there’s a lot of room for little things like a short two-note keyboard lick. I like songs where little things like that are only played once. Then I think to myself, “That sounds so cool that I would have played it five times!” A couple of things from Radiohead go in that direction. I often don’t manage it. When I write a good refrain, I’d like to hear it at least ten times.
Tell us more about these little things, these embellishments, that you’ve just mentioned. How do they come about?
When we record new songs, as a rule we play together live, with bass, percussion, and guitar. We keep this track. It has to feel like a finished song already. And then we ask ourselves what we can do to support the dynamic of the song. That could be little things that I put in the refrain. But I also take parts out again sometimes. Mostly we have a song with bass and acoustic guitar. Then maybe keyboards come into it, maybe a complicated part, and then I take the acoustic guitar out again. In other places we have just the acoustic guitar. In the studio we have tons of keyboards standing around.
That fits in very well with what you find in the newer guitar music of, for example, Travis or Coldplay. The bassist from Travis said once that he sort of has to play in order not to be heard—as though he weren’t there at all.
Well, sometimes you have to proceed that way. But sometimes you have to bang on the guitar and just make noise. When I look at Jeff Beck, then I expect that he will show me all that he’s got. But I’m not Jeff Beck, and that’s also not my job. Jeff Beck doesn’t write songs, but I do. It’s the same to me if I’m playing guitar, bass or tambourine, as long as it sounds great.
When it’s time to record, how do you decide which guitars and which amplifiers to use?
When I start recording, I’ve already got a general idea of the sound that I then transfer with my standard setup: there I’ve got effects like Voodoo Vibe [Roger Mayer] or Rat [Proco], in front of that I’ve got a split box that leads the processed signal into a Vox, and the unprocessed one into an old Silvertone Top. I have two different sounds, one a little brighter, the other a little softer. Sometimes I go directly to the board with two or three effects, in order to get special sounds. I use a Boomerang Phrase sampler, a pretty simple backwards effect. You can play into it for 90 seconds, and the thing will play it back to you backwards—that means the chord changes, too. That works well with two or three chord changes—when it’s more than that, though, it can become kind of confusing.
And when it comes to guitars?
I have so many guitars, but ten at most that I really love. I know exactly how they sound. I have a Les Paul Junior from the early sixties with an unbelievable sustain in all positions and a really great sound. I don’t play any chords on it; it’s meant for single-note lines. Then I have a regular Les Paul from the eighties with a big fat sound. Rickenbackers are always very good, when it’s a matter of arpeggios or transferring acoustic parts to the electric guitar.
You said that you practice your instruments and work on songs for two hours a day. What could you do for example if you [have] an idea for a song. . .
I always have some song fragments in my head. There’s a song on the next album called “The Final Straw.” I wrote the music for this song already in 1992. That was a little too late for “Automatic For The People,” and didn’t suit “Monster.” I have stuff lying around that’s even older, for example from the eighties, intros, refrains and bridges that are too good to throw away. You can always haul them out and finish them.
Besides the chords, what’s the most typical feature of your songs. . .
I’m really good at arpeggios. I’ve played with the best people in the world, but I’ve never met a rhythm guitarist who’s as good as I am. On the other hand, anyone is a better solo guitarist than I am. But when well-known people have sessions in L.A. and need a rhythm guitarist, I’m always the best person in the session. I’m reliable and tight, I know when I’m supposed to play and when I’m not, and I know how to make simple chords sound interesting. But I can’t play any solos.
Can you give us a couple of examples from the best rhythm guitarist in the world?
Sure. Wait, I have to tune up – I’m halfway deaf and can’t hear anything with the noise here. This is crosspicking like in “The Final Straw” [Example 3]. Those are all totally simple chords. My way of playing arpeggios inserts its own melody into the chord. That forces the singer to sing things like I hear them. This is a good combination of simple riffing over a couple of chords [Example 4]. It’s not extremely difficult, but it’s hard to hold yourself back from playing more.
That’s a sign of a good rhythm guitarist, like Pete Townshend from The Who or Malcolm Young from AC/DC.
Right. When I was growing up, I liked to listen to Steve Cropper. He plays solos that sound so simple and yet so good, and his rhythm playing was also pretty strange. For me he’s one of the best guitarists ever.
Has the relationship between acoustic guitar and electric guitar shifted for you over the years?
I prefer to write songs on acoustic guitar, and when I go into the studio, I realize that I’ve completely forgotten how to play electric guitar. With electric guitars, maintaining a good sound is always a matter of equipment. You need the right combination, you have to put the right pedals in the right amplifiers and then sort out the best take with four or five microphones. For the acoustic guitar I need exactly one [microphone]. There the only thing that matters is where you put your hands and fingers.
On tour you have to do arrangements with two more guitarists. . .
There are three of us, but never more than two at the same time.
Are you the one who decides who takes what part?
Yes. In “Drive,” for example, I play the acoustic part, and Scott [McCaughey] takes the solo. You have to get the acoustic part absolutely right, and the E-guitar plays only in the refrain and in the chorus.
What acoustic guitars do you play live?
Taylors for the most part. And as E-guitars go, the same Rickenbacker since 1980. And also a new Gretsch Country Gentleman with somewhat thinner strings, a Paula in two songs, and Scott takes my Les Paul Junior, another Gretsch, and a twelve-string.
And if you had to use a single guitar for the rest of your life?
It would be the Rickenbacker. I’ve been playing it since 1980, on every record we’ve ever made.
And what acoustic guitar for the desert island?
I have a Gibson J-50 or 150, I don’t know any more exactly which, from 1961. It has an unbelievable tone and a wonderful feel. I bought it twenty years ago—now it would probably cost $10,000. Once when a fire broke out in my house, it was in its case and survived. Six months later it still smelled completely smoky, and I swear that the sound was better for it. For hours the case was exposed to 180 degrees, but still nothing got warped.
A “smokier” tone. . .
Yes, really! When I get it out, people wrinkle their noses and say, “You smoke, don’t you?” And I say, “No, my house was torched.” For two years I didn’t change the strings, either. I don’t know if they melted a little, but they felt different. I really wanted to suggest hanging guitars in a smokehouse, like hams.
translation c. 2003 by crescent
Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
Moderators: dejankuki, Tiki the Boyler
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Rocket Roll
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Rocket Roll
- Posts: 7274
- Joined: 09 Jul 2006, 00:47
- Location: Beograd
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Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
Još dva bitna linka, zahvaljujući HCUF ekipi:
http://www.geocities.com/lythea/PB98int ... 1480479166
http://www.myrem.com/showthread.php?t=16291
http://www.geocities.com/lythea/PB98int ... 1480479166
http://www.myrem.com/showthread.php?t=16291
Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
OT: Rickenbacker 360
Retko se ova firma pominje na ovim prostorima, a bilo je relativno dosta komada. Svirao sam je sa promenjenim magnetima jer je čovek koristi za jazz, ali i iz tog kratkog susreta mogu reći da se radi o sjajnoj gitari.
Retko se ova firma pominje na ovim prostorima, a bilo je relativno dosta komada. Svirao sam je sa promenjenim magnetima jer je čovek koristi za jazz, ali i iz tog kratkog susreta mogu reći da se radi o sjajnoj gitari.
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Rocket Roll
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Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
Da, čuo sam da je čak bilo organizovanih krađa Rickenbackera po Beogradu... Ne znam da li je u pitanju urbana legenda, ali pominje se da je izvesni Rom, neki Adam, u toku nekoliko dana "pokupio" većinu beogradskih Rickenbackera, preneo ih za Englesku i uzeo dobre pare za njih.
Ako nšta drugo, barem i Beograd ima svoju legendu o Rickenbackerima.
Ako nšta drugo, barem i Beograd ima svoju legendu o Rickenbackerima.
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Jimmy Henderson
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Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
Pa kad vec spominjete Rickenbackere , jedan moj stari drugar iz Karlovca , kupioje onda
u ono YU vreme iz Amerike , Rickenbackera , donio mu neki daljni rodjak.
da me pitate koji model - nemam pojma.
i tako jedan dan pozvoni neki malo tamnoputi tip na vrata njegovog stana . njega nije bilo kod kuce , ali je bila
njegova mama. Ona otvori i covek ni pet ni sest " poslao me vas sin da odnesem njegove gitare i pojacala hitno jer
sad moramo da organizujemo jedan koncert . mama nema pojma i pusti njih dvojicu u stan ....
odneli mu 100 w-tnog Marshalla , jednog Fendera Stratocastera i tog Rickenbackera .............
Mozete li samo zamisliti ocaj i tragediju tog muzicara kad je dosao kuci............
a mati mi se ziva htjela od muke svisnuti....... ni dana danas nisu pronasli tko je to ukrao..
a ko zna , ko sta kaze rockett , ex-Yu Rickenbacker su postali slavni u Engleskoj.......
pa Rockett, lepo organizuj u svome stanu tecaj sigurnosti. tko god da se pojavi na vratima tvog stana ,
a nesto trazi bez tebe ,neka odma zovu tebe.
secam se da je muzicar rekao --uzmite sta hocete , ali VRATITE mi Rickenbackera.
izvunjavam se moderatoru sta sam off sa teme . nece se ponoviti.
u ono YU vreme iz Amerike , Rickenbackera , donio mu neki daljni rodjak.
da me pitate koji model - nemam pojma.
i tako jedan dan pozvoni neki malo tamnoputi tip na vrata njegovog stana . njega nije bilo kod kuce , ali je bila
njegova mama. Ona otvori i covek ni pet ni sest " poslao me vas sin da odnesem njegove gitare i pojacala hitno jer
sad moramo da organizujemo jedan koncert . mama nema pojma i pusti njih dvojicu u stan ....
odneli mu 100 w-tnog Marshalla , jednog Fendera Stratocastera i tog Rickenbackera .............
Mozete li samo zamisliti ocaj i tragediju tog muzicara kad je dosao kuci............
a mati mi se ziva htjela od muke svisnuti....... ni dana danas nisu pronasli tko je to ukrao..
a ko zna , ko sta kaze rockett , ex-Yu Rickenbacker su postali slavni u Engleskoj.......
pa Rockett, lepo organizuj u svome stanu tecaj sigurnosti. tko god da se pojavi na vratima tvog stana ,
a nesto trazi bez tebe ,neka odma zovu tebe.
secam se da je muzicar rekao --uzmite sta hocete , ali VRATITE mi Rickenbackera.
izvunjavam se moderatoru sta sam off sa teme . nece se ponoviti.
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Rocket Roll
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Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
Ne brini, pazim... A - na sreću ili na nesreću! - skupljih stvari od Badija u kući - nemam. Ali, dobar savet! Hvala!
Još par odlomaka iz Piterovih intervjua (hoću da ih u ovom threadu imam sve na jednom mestu, da ih posle ne jurim letnji dan do podne):
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From a 1986 article:
The only subject on which Peter Buck is less than expansive is the equipment he plays. Fact is, the question seemed to irritate him. “I play a Stack Fender Telecaster Custom – I think. “ he said gamely, “and a Fender Twin Reverb amp with two JBL speakers and – “ he grinned like an errant schoolkid “- a black cord.” Luckily, tour manager Geoff Trump has more forthcoming. According to him, Buck’s other guitars include a Rickenbacker 330 thin-line semi-acoustic electric, a Rickenbacker thin-line hollow-body electric, a 12 string 360 model, a Gretsch Tennesean, a Guild FF46-12 12 string electric and another Tele, this one a thin line model with a wood grain finish.
Buck’s only effect unit is an Ibanez UE-400 which includes compression, distortion, flanger/chorus and a phase shifter. “But as everyone knows, “ said Buck, “a phase shifter is one of the most godawful-sounding things ever, so I don’t touch that, “ the distortion he employs on just two songs in the band’s live set, the chorus even less frequently, and the compression he uses, “to make feedback if I feel like it.” In addition to his Fender Twin Reverb, Buck is experimenting with a MESA/Boogie 4-12 cabinet.
From another 86 rem article:
Predictably, R.E.M.’s Rich Pageant of Sound doesn’t require a lot of technological know-how either. When asked what guitars he used on the LP, Buck shrugs, “I don’t know numbers, so I’ll just tell you what they look like. I use a black Rickenbacker with a round body for most of the rhythm stuff, like the strumming chords. I have a guitar guy in Houston makes, called a ‘Robin,’ for the kick-ass overdubs, like the feedback on Begin the Begin. Then I have a purple Rickenbacker with a thinner hollow-body I use for more of the rock & roll stuff. It’s the main guitar on ‘Just A Touch’ and ‘Superman.’ And occasionally, I use a twelve-string Rickenbacker. Of course, I have an acoustic twelve-string and a six-string, along with about three or four amps. Rather than spend a lot of time on overdubs, I went with the original guitar part on record, the one I’ll play onstage. On each cut, the guitar is the first track I laid down with the band in the studio. Usually, we’ll kind of bury that one because I tend to fuck up a lot. This time, we kept it for its live feel. Basically, you’re hearing a trio, with a few additions, rather than a bassist and drummer playing live with 37 guitar overdubs.”
Onstage, though, where he’s required to carry most of the melodic burden, Buck just “turns it up real loud and goes.”
“I switch off between tow of three different Rickenbackers, usually. I go through a Mesa Boogie or a Fender Twin Reverb. Real simple stuff. I don’t even use effects except for a fuzz except the fuzz box. It’s got a nice, cheesy sound with a compressor, which allows me to get feedback from anywhere on the stage. I have a basic tone I don’t like to mess with too much. In the studio, I never use effects. I try to get the tone through amps, milking position, using different guitars, tunings, stuff like that."
Još par odlomaka iz Piterovih intervjua (hoću da ih u ovom threadu imam sve na jednom mestu, da ih posle ne jurim letnji dan do podne):
==============
From a 1986 article:
The only subject on which Peter Buck is less than expansive is the equipment he plays. Fact is, the question seemed to irritate him. “I play a Stack Fender Telecaster Custom – I think. “ he said gamely, “and a Fender Twin Reverb amp with two JBL speakers and – “ he grinned like an errant schoolkid “- a black cord.” Luckily, tour manager Geoff Trump has more forthcoming. According to him, Buck’s other guitars include a Rickenbacker 330 thin-line semi-acoustic electric, a Rickenbacker thin-line hollow-body electric, a 12 string 360 model, a Gretsch Tennesean, a Guild FF46-12 12 string electric and another Tele, this one a thin line model with a wood grain finish.
Buck’s only effect unit is an Ibanez UE-400 which includes compression, distortion, flanger/chorus and a phase shifter. “But as everyone knows, “ said Buck, “a phase shifter is one of the most godawful-sounding things ever, so I don’t touch that, “ the distortion he employs on just two songs in the band’s live set, the chorus even less frequently, and the compression he uses, “to make feedback if I feel like it.” In addition to his Fender Twin Reverb, Buck is experimenting with a MESA/Boogie 4-12 cabinet.
From another 86 rem article:
Predictably, R.E.M.’s Rich Pageant of Sound doesn’t require a lot of technological know-how either. When asked what guitars he used on the LP, Buck shrugs, “I don’t know numbers, so I’ll just tell you what they look like. I use a black Rickenbacker with a round body for most of the rhythm stuff, like the strumming chords. I have a guitar guy in Houston makes, called a ‘Robin,’ for the kick-ass overdubs, like the feedback on Begin the Begin. Then I have a purple Rickenbacker with a thinner hollow-body I use for more of the rock & roll stuff. It’s the main guitar on ‘Just A Touch’ and ‘Superman.’ And occasionally, I use a twelve-string Rickenbacker. Of course, I have an acoustic twelve-string and a six-string, along with about three or four amps. Rather than spend a lot of time on overdubs, I went with the original guitar part on record, the one I’ll play onstage. On each cut, the guitar is the first track I laid down with the band in the studio. Usually, we’ll kind of bury that one because I tend to fuck up a lot. This time, we kept it for its live feel. Basically, you’re hearing a trio, with a few additions, rather than a bassist and drummer playing live with 37 guitar overdubs.”
Onstage, though, where he’s required to carry most of the melodic burden, Buck just “turns it up real loud and goes.”
“I switch off between tow of three different Rickenbackers, usually. I go through a Mesa Boogie or a Fender Twin Reverb. Real simple stuff. I don’t even use effects except for a fuzz except the fuzz box. It’s got a nice, cheesy sound with a compressor, which allows me to get feedback from anywhere on the stage. I have a basic tone I don’t like to mess with too much. In the studio, I never use effects. I try to get the tone through amps, milking position, using different guitars, tunings, stuff like that."
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Rocket Roll
- Posts: 7274
- Joined: 09 Jul 2006, 00:47
- Location: Beograd
- Contact:
Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
"There was a question awhile back about what type and gauge
strings Peter Buck uses on his Rickenbacker 360 JG. My answer
was that all I remembered was that it's a rather heavy set.
But now here's the definitive answer:
..013 Plain- Swedish Steel
..017 Plain- Swedish Steel
..026 Wound- Nickel Steel
..036 Wound- Nickel Steel
..046 Wound- Nickel Steel
..056 Wound- Nickel Steel
These are Dean Markley individual strings.
His guitar (the one with the trucker's playmate sticker on it)
is currently here at the factory so that we can set up a new
instrument exactly like his old one, using the string set listed
above."
[John Hall, jhall@rickenbacker.com, 4/14/1999]
========================================
Sa ovog linka: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/music/guitars/ ... on-33.html
strings Peter Buck uses on his Rickenbacker 360 JG. My answer
was that all I remembered was that it's a rather heavy set.
But now here's the definitive answer:
..013 Plain- Swedish Steel
..017 Plain- Swedish Steel
..026 Wound- Nickel Steel
..036 Wound- Nickel Steel
..046 Wound- Nickel Steel
..056 Wound- Nickel Steel
These are Dean Markley individual strings.
His guitar (the one with the trucker's playmate sticker on it)
is currently here at the factory so that we can set up a new
instrument exactly like his old one, using the string set listed
above."
[John Hall, jhall@rickenbacker.com, 4/14/1999]
========================================
Sa ovog linka: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/music/guitars/ ... on-33.html
-
Rocket Roll
- Posts: 7274
- Joined: 09 Jul 2006, 00:47
- Location: Beograd
- Contact:
Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
This is from the AOL Live session in 94 I believe. You can see what looks like 2 of the UEs in the rack in the upper left. You can see the foot controller plainly on his pedalboard. And part of me is wondering if that pedal is connected into a 3rd unit in that rack at the bottom right with the 3 picks on it.
-
Rocket Roll
- Posts: 7274
- Joined: 09 Jul 2006, 00:47
- Location: Beograd
- Contact:
Re: Peter Buck (R.E.M.) - Oprema
Dodatak: odličan intervju sa http://www.rem-central.com/archives/206
Reconstruction Of The Fables
By Vic Garbarini
11.14.96
Guitar World
The Tortoise and the Hare. That’s the parable that best captures R.E.M.’s steady rise to their position as the most revered alternative rockers in the world. During the Eighties, they grasped that the essence of the punk ideal is to truly be yourself. And so, while everybody else looked around for somebody to tell them who they were and what to play, R.E.M. shrugged and carried on being folk-punks from Athens. If Neil Young is the godfather of the current music scene, Peter Buck and company have become the alternative scene’s mature-but-hip older brothers. No less a personage than Kurt Cobain once marveled at how R.E.M. “handled their success like saints.” It’s common knowledge among their peers that they constantly re-invent themselves musically-and that they are the most decent and sane four guys you’re likely to meet in the music business.
Peter Buck agreed to sit down with Guitar World for his most extensive interview ever, to document, album by album, R.E.M.’s entire recording career.
Murmur (I.R.S, 1983)
GUITAR WORLD: Was the sense of mystery that surrounded Murmur an intentional ploy meant to enable people to bring their own sensibility into the songs?
PETER BUCK: When I started writing with Michael it was obvious that he was a very oblique writer. I liked the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot of explanation. The [legendary Western] director John Ford said something once about people enjoying a message much more if they can find it for themselves. And Murmur is such a lyrically impenetrable record that no one is probably going to ever get all that stuff. I don’t get it all-and some of it isn’t even there to get. Certain bits are just words that sound good strung together.
GW: Musically, the songs are pretty dense and complex. As a guitarist, how did you approach combining folk, rock and punk in your playing?
BUCK: We had this picture in our heads of this danceable record with folky elements. The songs are pretty complicated. There’s lots of chords and they do move around a lot. In those days, if it didn’t have three different bridges and a separate A and B section before the chorus, it just wasn’t any good. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a great player, but I felt I had to put in all those extra chords. “West of the Fields” is a perfect example-there must be 15 chords in that song. So we wanted no lead guitar, and no heavy punk-just a fast, weird folk rock record with tons of overdubs. Every song has 20 guitars on it, most of them doing the same thing.
GW: Meanwhile, the official alternative line at the time was, “Do what you want-so long as you just play the same three chords over and over again really fast.”
BUCK: There are always going to be certain cultural or musical signifiers in punk, like going chromatically from E to F and being loud and irreverent and whatever, that some people think will automatically make you rebellious and cool. And there’s a place for that in the world. But I don’t really need it. Maybe we had one song that continued in the same key from beginning to end. But I like to change from major to minor, or to go from D to F#7. And the point is there are no rules, you can put any chords anywhere you want to, as long as the melody makes them valid.
GW: I remember how much flak you got from the politically correct alternative crowd for the music, lyrics-everything.
BUCK: That’s true; we were considered incredibly unhip when we went to New York. On those early tours, a lot of people really got it and thought we were amazing, and a lot of other people looked at us like we were insane. And to top it all off, we had long hair. People would come up to us and go [whispers], “Jeez, I don’t know if you guys heard, but you’ve got to have short hair now&hellipand, uh, you need to buy some clothes with zippers. And what’s this folk-rock stuff all about?”
GW: It’s funny-for many people, a new movement is just another herd to join. And most herds eventually head over a cliff.
BUCK: Yeah, we’d watch these synth bands come to America and play to 4,000 people a night, and we’d still be playing clubs to 350. But I’d think, “Our records are going to be around a lot longer than these guys.” And they are.
Reckoning (IRS, 1984)
GW: Reckoning was a typical second-album: just go back to your roots and knock it out quickly.
BUCK: True. We wrote the whole album in two weeks between tours.
GW: During this period you must have been the only alternative guitarist using a Rickenbacker. Were you inspired by the Beatles and Byrds in that choice?
BUCK: No, it was just serendipity. My Telecaster got stolen, and I went to Chick Piano in Athens, which is run by this nice family, and they had three used guitars. I pulled out the Rickenbacker because it had this great neck. After I got that guitar, suddenly everything seemed to come together, soundwise.
Fables of the Reconstruction (I.R.S., 1985)
GW: Fables was considered a bit of a failed experiment at the time it was released. Do you still feel that way?
BUCK: Fables. “Boy, those guys, what were they thinking of?” [laughs] We’d been on tour constantly for four-and-a-half years, we had two days to rehearse, we had 22 songs, and we had no idea what we were doing. It was a chaotic experience. We were in England. It was cold, we were almost broke, we had to walk in the winter rain to the tube [subway] station every day, and it was miserable.
But in retrospect, I really like that album because it’s totally out there, really weird. But we threw away half the songs and literally lost one we recorded with a horn section. It could have been the single, but we simply couldn’t find it. Still don’t know where it is. That’s how out of our heads we were. Then we couldn’t decide on a mix. Bill just got fed up and went home. But that record went to a lot of places and tried a lot of things we hadn’t attempted before. If we’d been less worn out and communicating more, maybe we could have made a better record.
GW: And yet out of that chaos came “Driver 8,” the song that almost defines mid-period R.E.M. It also started this fascination you have with rocking out over Em and Am.
BUCK: You’re exactly right. And the funny thing was, we kept trying to rearrange it. We did one version with a really heavy guitar that we felt didn’t cut it. Then we actually tried it with acoustic guitar and banjo, with Bill playing bass. Finally we hit on what you hear on the record. About those chords, I do come back to them on songs like “The One I Love,” “Losing My Religion” and “Bang and Blame,” among others. I can’t think of any band I like that hasn’t used them: The Beatles, Elvis Costello-Neil Young pretty much uses them on every song. Part of why they feel right, especially the Em, is that you’re only fretting two strings. So you have all those open strings resonating, making a real nice harmonic overlay that you don’t get with a barre chord.
Lifes Rich Pagaent (I.R.S, 1986)
GW: Pageant seemed like your Revolver. It’s as if you went from black and white to technicolor, musically speaking. Everything sounded richer and fuller.
BUCK: Well, every producer we’d worked with till then had come from our background. They were basically guys into Sixties garage rock. Then we got Don Gehman, who was much more involved in creating dynamic rock tracks with people like John Mellencamp, and thinking about the radio. I think he was a little frustrated that we wouldn’t go for the jugular in the commercial sense, but I learned a lot from him about how natural room reverb affects the kick drum and the guitar sound. Before then, I’d always just close-miked, because that’s what we did live. Don would work for an hour on my guitar tone, mike it five different ways, and then mix it down. I was like, “Cool, I didn’t know you could do that!”
Document (I.R.S., 1987)
GW: Document was a major turning point for the band. Two hit singles, a harder-edged sound, political messages-and lots of snobs claiming you’d sold out because they could finally hear the terrific rhythm section.
BUCK: You have to just shrug that kind of thing off. It happens to every band. Hopefully, the same people who were turned off by our success went on to support some new band they could claim as their own. There’s always gonna be one guy that’s gonna claim to be that much more punk than you, because you did this or you didn’t do that.
GW: “The One I Love” proved you could marry the folk tradition to a rock structure as intensely as any band around.
BUCK: It is set up a lot like an old Appalachian folk song. But yeah, I’d gotten a Les Paul and a Marshall amp and I cranked it up to 11. But a folk song would have gone from Em to D and then to an Am and C, for instance. Instead, I added those G, D and C suspendeds that took it somewhere else. I also decided to slide up on the B string in the main figure rather than bend.
GW: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” has probably become the best known song of your Eighties output. It’s been part of the soundtracks of three movies, including Independence Day. It’s very much a cranked-up nod to another folk tradition, like Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”
BUCK: Right, except Chuck Berry did it first with “Too Much Monkey Business.” It probably has its roots in the old medicine shows, where some guy would go through town singing about what’s in the bottles he’s selling.
Document was sort of a political concept record, this surreal attempt to embrace and reflect the chaos that was going on in America in 1987 under Ronald Reagan. There were these weird moralists condemning everybody while Reagan made jokes about threatening to bomb Russia. So Michael tried to express that in these dreamlike, frantic verses which matched me going from G to Cmaj7, a much more open, floating chord than a plain C. We still play it as the last song of the night.
Green (Warner Bros., 1988)
GW: Green was your first album for Warner Bros., and as such must have been burdened by high expectations. Yet “You Are the Everything” and “Stand” are like going from the sublime to the absurd.
BUCK: You couldn’t get farther apart than those two songs. It was the first time we could stay at home in Athens and write for four months. The untitled song and “You Are the Everything” were the first things we wrote. “Orange Crush” had been written at a soundcheck-you can usually tell a song that was written at soundcheck because it only has one or two chords and the verse is often the same as the chorus. I’m doing a lot of noise, including E and G chord harmonics on the twelfth and seventh frets.
“Stand” originated when I came up with this dumb riff, the only time I ever approached a I-IV-V chord progression. Then Mike said, “Man, I’ve got this kind of Beck, Bogert and Appice bass line that can go in there!” It was getting silly, so we played it through and modulated up. Then we did it again, and we did one more modulation up, a full step, and we were just howling with laughter. Michael fell over when he heard it and came up with some cool lyrics. I knew this was the rare R.E.M. song that did not need a bridge. So I went out and bought a wah wah pedal, and having never played one before just plugged it in and did the solo flat off-which just pushed it into total absurdity. Then they told us, “Hey guys, this is the hit.” “Huh? Well, okay.”
Out Of Time (Warner Bros., 1991)
GW: So now we come to your “reclusive period.” Why the semi-acoustic approach of “Losing My Religion”? Did you have any sense that the song would resonate so deeply with people around the world?
BUCK: “Losing” was my favorite song on the album, but I was amazed when they told us it was “going all the way.” I said, “Great, all the way where?” It’s probably the only Number One song you’ll ever hear written on a mandolin. I think the sound changed because at home we had the opportunity to experiment with switching instruments. I was playing a lot of mandolin, Bill was on bass, Mike was exploring more keyboards and acoustic guitar. I didn’t really know how to play mandolin, so I just bought one and worked out some chords. Mine are different, more modal than the ones in the instruction books. The mandolin is basically strung like a violin, or an upside down bass. I got a few beers and recorded some stuff on a boom box while watching a baseball game. The next day I listened to it and what became “Losing My Religion” was on there, pretty much note for note. Michael came up with the title, which he said was an old Southern saying meaning “I’m at my wit’s end.” I figured he’d made it up. Then, a year later in New Orleans this friend introduces me to his grandmother who said she used to hear that phrase all the time in the Twenties and Thirties, and it meant just what Michael said it did. It didn’t need a bridge or a solo, so I did a kind of breakdown. It reminds me of the kind of thing Fleetwood Mac did at the end of “Chain,” a song we used to fool around with at soundcheck.
GW: Michael has called “Shiny Happy People” an “abortion.” Is it really that bad?
BUCK: If we wrote a one-dimensional song on every album and it was a huge hit, it would be massively embarrassing. In fact, we wrote this in ten minutes, and Michael put some tongue-in-cheek lyrics on it. And I’ve got to say, there are some bands that go an entire career without having one very happy song-ironic or not.
Automatic for the People (Warner Bros., 1992)
GW: Automatic was an incredible refinement of the semi-acoustic approach you took on “Losing My Religion.” You added touches with the electric that made the songs much more emotionally and musically complex. BUCK: It’s our most successful record, in terms of really maintaining a mood all the way through. I did begin using things like feedback, slide and noise to add more dimensions to certain songs. Noise is a signifier, it has its own tonal quality
GW: Did Bill Berry really create the verse to “Man on the Moon” by falling out of his chair?
BUCK: That’s literally true. He was strumming this C chord and, as he leaned over to get his beer on the amp, he moved his hand, sliding the C up to the third fret. We played that verse forever and, while Michael created this surreal idea of heaven, eventually cobbled together the chorus and bridge. I overdubbed the slide part in a couple of passes. I grew up in Georgia, so even touching a slide after Duane Allman is almost sacrilegious. I compose almost all my solos-I’d be lost jamming on a I-IV-V. Let’s just say I utilized a piece of glass to get some sounds out of the guitar.
Monster (Warner Bros., 1994)
GW: Even though they were meant to be straight-ahead rockers, there was something musically skewed about songs like “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Bang and Blame,” like old blues songs that skipped beats. Was that intentional?
BUCK: Mike came up with the chords to “Kenneth,” and I helped him rearrange them. It was weird, because I really couldn’t get a handle on it at first. It’s so circular, I couldn’t tell the A from the B section, and Michael was asking, “Where do I sing on this one?” Then we simplified it, chopped out a couple of parts, including a bridge, and as we accented the chords the pieces began to fall into place. It slows down at the end. The truth is, Mike [Mills, bassist] slowed down the pace and we all followed, and then I noticed he looked strange. It turned out he had appendicitis and we had to rush him to the hospital. So we never wound up redoing it. What a year!
New Adventures In Hi-Fi (Warner Bros., 1996)
GW: It’s very unusual that you recorded virtually all of your new album on tour, during soundchecks. How difficult was this, compared to working in the studio- and why did you attempt it at all?
BUCK: It was easier than you might guess, because we didn’t have to think about it. Every day, we’d play this set of songs at soundcheck and then we were done. And naturally, the songs would go through incremental changes day by day. As for why-Bill and I, in particular, feel that as a band we tend to work in the studio to the point where some of us often think a song is finished, and the others don’t. Sometimes we wind up smoothing things out too much. I wanted to be involved in a recording process where there wasn’t any chance of doing that.
We didn’t want to make your typical live album with audience applause, either. I also wanted to keep myself busy on tour, and this way I had an hour and a half to look forward to at soundcheck where we’d be doing something creative and refreshing-making our next album.
GW: I get the sense you were after that edgy sense of disorientation, chaos and boredom that one feels on the road…
BUCK: Right, because that’s what the essence of a tour really is. It’s not sightseeing and eating nice food and all that. It’s this chaotic whirlwind you happen to be at the center of-like taking a portable hurricane with you wherever you go. There’s all this stuff going on around you that doesn’t make sense. You don’t really know where you are. You’re always kind of tired, always hungry, and you always have two more things to do than you have time for.
GW: Bill’s collapse from a brain aneurysm midway through the tour must have been terrifying. Did you realize how seriously ill he was at first?
BUCK: We’d all had the flu in Switzerland. In the middle of the set, Bill got up from the drums and said, “Man, I think I’m going to pass out. My head is really killing me.” The local doctor thought it was a migraine. But I had a bad feeling it was more than that. At 5 a.m. we checked him into the hospital and found out it was a brain aneurysm. God, we were all wandering around shell-shocked. There was this period before the operation where anything might’ve happened, and we couldn’t even go in to see him. Luckily we were in Switzerland, where they invented this particular operation. It went well, but afterwards there was another two week period of uncertainty where again, anything might have happened. I assumed the tour was over-if not the band. Then Bill started to recover, and he wanted to play a week later! The doctor said he could play in four weeks, but we waited six, just in case.
GW: You recorded this album with two extra guitarists, Nathan December and Scott McCaughey, who were part of your road band. Did that complicate or simplify things?
BUCK: It was great. If I wanted a heavier sound on a chorus, instead of waiting to overdub we could just say, “Okay, Nathan, you play this here; Scott, you handle that.” So it sounded more like a real record almost immediately. Plus those guys would phrase or accent things a little differently from me. The interplay of all six of us playing provided the dynamics, rather than another overdub. A lot of the tracks retain the song’s initial ideas. I didn’t spend a lot of time going back to the studio and worrying if we needed something extra.
Reconstruction Of The Fables
By Vic Garbarini
11.14.96
Guitar World
The Tortoise and the Hare. That’s the parable that best captures R.E.M.’s steady rise to their position as the most revered alternative rockers in the world. During the Eighties, they grasped that the essence of the punk ideal is to truly be yourself. And so, while everybody else looked around for somebody to tell them who they were and what to play, R.E.M. shrugged and carried on being folk-punks from Athens. If Neil Young is the godfather of the current music scene, Peter Buck and company have become the alternative scene’s mature-but-hip older brothers. No less a personage than Kurt Cobain once marveled at how R.E.M. “handled their success like saints.” It’s common knowledge among their peers that they constantly re-invent themselves musically-and that they are the most decent and sane four guys you’re likely to meet in the music business.
Peter Buck agreed to sit down with Guitar World for his most extensive interview ever, to document, album by album, R.E.M.’s entire recording career.
Murmur (I.R.S, 1983)
GUITAR WORLD: Was the sense of mystery that surrounded Murmur an intentional ploy meant to enable people to bring their own sensibility into the songs?
PETER BUCK: When I started writing with Michael it was obvious that he was a very oblique writer. I liked the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot of explanation. The [legendary Western] director John Ford said something once about people enjoying a message much more if they can find it for themselves. And Murmur is such a lyrically impenetrable record that no one is probably going to ever get all that stuff. I don’t get it all-and some of it isn’t even there to get. Certain bits are just words that sound good strung together.
GW: Musically, the songs are pretty dense and complex. As a guitarist, how did you approach combining folk, rock and punk in your playing?
BUCK: We had this picture in our heads of this danceable record with folky elements. The songs are pretty complicated. There’s lots of chords and they do move around a lot. In those days, if it didn’t have three different bridges and a separate A and B section before the chorus, it just wasn’t any good. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a great player, but I felt I had to put in all those extra chords. “West of the Fields” is a perfect example-there must be 15 chords in that song. So we wanted no lead guitar, and no heavy punk-just a fast, weird folk rock record with tons of overdubs. Every song has 20 guitars on it, most of them doing the same thing.
GW: Meanwhile, the official alternative line at the time was, “Do what you want-so long as you just play the same three chords over and over again really fast.”
BUCK: There are always going to be certain cultural or musical signifiers in punk, like going chromatically from E to F and being loud and irreverent and whatever, that some people think will automatically make you rebellious and cool. And there’s a place for that in the world. But I don’t really need it. Maybe we had one song that continued in the same key from beginning to end. But I like to change from major to minor, or to go from D to F#7. And the point is there are no rules, you can put any chords anywhere you want to, as long as the melody makes them valid.
GW: I remember how much flak you got from the politically correct alternative crowd for the music, lyrics-everything.
BUCK: That’s true; we were considered incredibly unhip when we went to New York. On those early tours, a lot of people really got it and thought we were amazing, and a lot of other people looked at us like we were insane. And to top it all off, we had long hair. People would come up to us and go [whispers], “Jeez, I don’t know if you guys heard, but you’ve got to have short hair now&hellipand, uh, you need to buy some clothes with zippers. And what’s this folk-rock stuff all about?”
GW: It’s funny-for many people, a new movement is just another herd to join. And most herds eventually head over a cliff.
BUCK: Yeah, we’d watch these synth bands come to America and play to 4,000 people a night, and we’d still be playing clubs to 350. But I’d think, “Our records are going to be around a lot longer than these guys.” And they are.
Reckoning (IRS, 1984)
GW: Reckoning was a typical second-album: just go back to your roots and knock it out quickly.
BUCK: True. We wrote the whole album in two weeks between tours.
GW: During this period you must have been the only alternative guitarist using a Rickenbacker. Were you inspired by the Beatles and Byrds in that choice?
BUCK: No, it was just serendipity. My Telecaster got stolen, and I went to Chick Piano in Athens, which is run by this nice family, and they had three used guitars. I pulled out the Rickenbacker because it had this great neck. After I got that guitar, suddenly everything seemed to come together, soundwise.
Fables of the Reconstruction (I.R.S., 1985)
GW: Fables was considered a bit of a failed experiment at the time it was released. Do you still feel that way?
BUCK: Fables. “Boy, those guys, what were they thinking of?” [laughs] We’d been on tour constantly for four-and-a-half years, we had two days to rehearse, we had 22 songs, and we had no idea what we were doing. It was a chaotic experience. We were in England. It was cold, we were almost broke, we had to walk in the winter rain to the tube [subway] station every day, and it was miserable.
But in retrospect, I really like that album because it’s totally out there, really weird. But we threw away half the songs and literally lost one we recorded with a horn section. It could have been the single, but we simply couldn’t find it. Still don’t know where it is. That’s how out of our heads we were. Then we couldn’t decide on a mix. Bill just got fed up and went home. But that record went to a lot of places and tried a lot of things we hadn’t attempted before. If we’d been less worn out and communicating more, maybe we could have made a better record.
GW: And yet out of that chaos came “Driver 8,” the song that almost defines mid-period R.E.M. It also started this fascination you have with rocking out over Em and Am.
BUCK: You’re exactly right. And the funny thing was, we kept trying to rearrange it. We did one version with a really heavy guitar that we felt didn’t cut it. Then we actually tried it with acoustic guitar and banjo, with Bill playing bass. Finally we hit on what you hear on the record. About those chords, I do come back to them on songs like “The One I Love,” “Losing My Religion” and “Bang and Blame,” among others. I can’t think of any band I like that hasn’t used them: The Beatles, Elvis Costello-Neil Young pretty much uses them on every song. Part of why they feel right, especially the Em, is that you’re only fretting two strings. So you have all those open strings resonating, making a real nice harmonic overlay that you don’t get with a barre chord.
Lifes Rich Pagaent (I.R.S, 1986)
GW: Pageant seemed like your Revolver. It’s as if you went from black and white to technicolor, musically speaking. Everything sounded richer and fuller.
BUCK: Well, every producer we’d worked with till then had come from our background. They were basically guys into Sixties garage rock. Then we got Don Gehman, who was much more involved in creating dynamic rock tracks with people like John Mellencamp, and thinking about the radio. I think he was a little frustrated that we wouldn’t go for the jugular in the commercial sense, but I learned a lot from him about how natural room reverb affects the kick drum and the guitar sound. Before then, I’d always just close-miked, because that’s what we did live. Don would work for an hour on my guitar tone, mike it five different ways, and then mix it down. I was like, “Cool, I didn’t know you could do that!”
Document (I.R.S., 1987)
GW: Document was a major turning point for the band. Two hit singles, a harder-edged sound, political messages-and lots of snobs claiming you’d sold out because they could finally hear the terrific rhythm section.
BUCK: You have to just shrug that kind of thing off. It happens to every band. Hopefully, the same people who were turned off by our success went on to support some new band they could claim as their own. There’s always gonna be one guy that’s gonna claim to be that much more punk than you, because you did this or you didn’t do that.
GW: “The One I Love” proved you could marry the folk tradition to a rock structure as intensely as any band around.
BUCK: It is set up a lot like an old Appalachian folk song. But yeah, I’d gotten a Les Paul and a Marshall amp and I cranked it up to 11. But a folk song would have gone from Em to D and then to an Am and C, for instance. Instead, I added those G, D and C suspendeds that took it somewhere else. I also decided to slide up on the B string in the main figure rather than bend.
GW: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” has probably become the best known song of your Eighties output. It’s been part of the soundtracks of three movies, including Independence Day. It’s very much a cranked-up nod to another folk tradition, like Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”
BUCK: Right, except Chuck Berry did it first with “Too Much Monkey Business.” It probably has its roots in the old medicine shows, where some guy would go through town singing about what’s in the bottles he’s selling.
Document was sort of a political concept record, this surreal attempt to embrace and reflect the chaos that was going on in America in 1987 under Ronald Reagan. There were these weird moralists condemning everybody while Reagan made jokes about threatening to bomb Russia. So Michael tried to express that in these dreamlike, frantic verses which matched me going from G to Cmaj7, a much more open, floating chord than a plain C. We still play it as the last song of the night.
Green (Warner Bros., 1988)
GW: Green was your first album for Warner Bros., and as such must have been burdened by high expectations. Yet “You Are the Everything” and “Stand” are like going from the sublime to the absurd.
BUCK: You couldn’t get farther apart than those two songs. It was the first time we could stay at home in Athens and write for four months. The untitled song and “You Are the Everything” were the first things we wrote. “Orange Crush” had been written at a soundcheck-you can usually tell a song that was written at soundcheck because it only has one or two chords and the verse is often the same as the chorus. I’m doing a lot of noise, including E and G chord harmonics on the twelfth and seventh frets.
“Stand” originated when I came up with this dumb riff, the only time I ever approached a I-IV-V chord progression. Then Mike said, “Man, I’ve got this kind of Beck, Bogert and Appice bass line that can go in there!” It was getting silly, so we played it through and modulated up. Then we did it again, and we did one more modulation up, a full step, and we were just howling with laughter. Michael fell over when he heard it and came up with some cool lyrics. I knew this was the rare R.E.M. song that did not need a bridge. So I went out and bought a wah wah pedal, and having never played one before just plugged it in and did the solo flat off-which just pushed it into total absurdity. Then they told us, “Hey guys, this is the hit.” “Huh? Well, okay.”
Out Of Time (Warner Bros., 1991)
GW: So now we come to your “reclusive period.” Why the semi-acoustic approach of “Losing My Religion”? Did you have any sense that the song would resonate so deeply with people around the world?
BUCK: “Losing” was my favorite song on the album, but I was amazed when they told us it was “going all the way.” I said, “Great, all the way where?” It’s probably the only Number One song you’ll ever hear written on a mandolin. I think the sound changed because at home we had the opportunity to experiment with switching instruments. I was playing a lot of mandolin, Bill was on bass, Mike was exploring more keyboards and acoustic guitar. I didn’t really know how to play mandolin, so I just bought one and worked out some chords. Mine are different, more modal than the ones in the instruction books. The mandolin is basically strung like a violin, or an upside down bass. I got a few beers and recorded some stuff on a boom box while watching a baseball game. The next day I listened to it and what became “Losing My Religion” was on there, pretty much note for note. Michael came up with the title, which he said was an old Southern saying meaning “I’m at my wit’s end.” I figured he’d made it up. Then, a year later in New Orleans this friend introduces me to his grandmother who said she used to hear that phrase all the time in the Twenties and Thirties, and it meant just what Michael said it did. It didn’t need a bridge or a solo, so I did a kind of breakdown. It reminds me of the kind of thing Fleetwood Mac did at the end of “Chain,” a song we used to fool around with at soundcheck.
GW: Michael has called “Shiny Happy People” an “abortion.” Is it really that bad?
BUCK: If we wrote a one-dimensional song on every album and it was a huge hit, it would be massively embarrassing. In fact, we wrote this in ten minutes, and Michael put some tongue-in-cheek lyrics on it. And I’ve got to say, there are some bands that go an entire career without having one very happy song-ironic or not.
Automatic for the People (Warner Bros., 1992)
GW: Automatic was an incredible refinement of the semi-acoustic approach you took on “Losing My Religion.” You added touches with the electric that made the songs much more emotionally and musically complex. BUCK: It’s our most successful record, in terms of really maintaining a mood all the way through. I did begin using things like feedback, slide and noise to add more dimensions to certain songs. Noise is a signifier, it has its own tonal quality
GW: Did Bill Berry really create the verse to “Man on the Moon” by falling out of his chair?
BUCK: That’s literally true. He was strumming this C chord and, as he leaned over to get his beer on the amp, he moved his hand, sliding the C up to the third fret. We played that verse forever and, while Michael created this surreal idea of heaven, eventually cobbled together the chorus and bridge. I overdubbed the slide part in a couple of passes. I grew up in Georgia, so even touching a slide after Duane Allman is almost sacrilegious. I compose almost all my solos-I’d be lost jamming on a I-IV-V. Let’s just say I utilized a piece of glass to get some sounds out of the guitar.
Monster (Warner Bros., 1994)
GW: Even though they were meant to be straight-ahead rockers, there was something musically skewed about songs like “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Bang and Blame,” like old blues songs that skipped beats. Was that intentional?
BUCK: Mike came up with the chords to “Kenneth,” and I helped him rearrange them. It was weird, because I really couldn’t get a handle on it at first. It’s so circular, I couldn’t tell the A from the B section, and Michael was asking, “Where do I sing on this one?” Then we simplified it, chopped out a couple of parts, including a bridge, and as we accented the chords the pieces began to fall into place. It slows down at the end. The truth is, Mike [Mills, bassist] slowed down the pace and we all followed, and then I noticed he looked strange. It turned out he had appendicitis and we had to rush him to the hospital. So we never wound up redoing it. What a year!
New Adventures In Hi-Fi (Warner Bros., 1996)
GW: It’s very unusual that you recorded virtually all of your new album on tour, during soundchecks. How difficult was this, compared to working in the studio- and why did you attempt it at all?
BUCK: It was easier than you might guess, because we didn’t have to think about it. Every day, we’d play this set of songs at soundcheck and then we were done. And naturally, the songs would go through incremental changes day by day. As for why-Bill and I, in particular, feel that as a band we tend to work in the studio to the point where some of us often think a song is finished, and the others don’t. Sometimes we wind up smoothing things out too much. I wanted to be involved in a recording process where there wasn’t any chance of doing that.
We didn’t want to make your typical live album with audience applause, either. I also wanted to keep myself busy on tour, and this way I had an hour and a half to look forward to at soundcheck where we’d be doing something creative and refreshing-making our next album.
GW: I get the sense you were after that edgy sense of disorientation, chaos and boredom that one feels on the road…
BUCK: Right, because that’s what the essence of a tour really is. It’s not sightseeing and eating nice food and all that. It’s this chaotic whirlwind you happen to be at the center of-like taking a portable hurricane with you wherever you go. There’s all this stuff going on around you that doesn’t make sense. You don’t really know where you are. You’re always kind of tired, always hungry, and you always have two more things to do than you have time for.
GW: Bill’s collapse from a brain aneurysm midway through the tour must have been terrifying. Did you realize how seriously ill he was at first?
BUCK: We’d all had the flu in Switzerland. In the middle of the set, Bill got up from the drums and said, “Man, I think I’m going to pass out. My head is really killing me.” The local doctor thought it was a migraine. But I had a bad feeling it was more than that. At 5 a.m. we checked him into the hospital and found out it was a brain aneurysm. God, we were all wandering around shell-shocked. There was this period before the operation where anything might’ve happened, and we couldn’t even go in to see him. Luckily we were in Switzerland, where they invented this particular operation. It went well, but afterwards there was another two week period of uncertainty where again, anything might have happened. I assumed the tour was over-if not the band. Then Bill started to recover, and he wanted to play a week later! The doctor said he could play in four weeks, but we waited six, just in case.
GW: You recorded this album with two extra guitarists, Nathan December and Scott McCaughey, who were part of your road band. Did that complicate or simplify things?
BUCK: It was great. If I wanted a heavier sound on a chorus, instead of waiting to overdub we could just say, “Okay, Nathan, you play this here; Scott, you handle that.” So it sounded more like a real record almost immediately. Plus those guys would phrase or accent things a little differently from me. The interplay of all six of us playing provided the dynamics, rather than another overdub. A lot of the tracks retain the song’s initial ideas. I didn’t spend a lot of time going back to the studio and worrying if we needed something extra.
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