If you ask him, Michael Shannon will tell you he doesn’t entirely approve of the turn his career has taken. At the age of 50, the prolific actor, twi
If you ask him, Michael Shannon will tell you he doesn’t entirely approve of the turn his career has taken. At the age of 50, the prolific actor, twice nominated for an Academy Award, finds himself the singer in an R.E.M. cover band. And loving every minute of it, much to his dismay.
On February 14, Shannon will begin his second tour inside of a year devoted to R.E.M. It will take him to more than a dozen cities in the US. Interest in the shows has been so high, with some tickets for a stop in Athens, Georgia, on the secondary market going for north of $600, that dates have been added in England as well. Yet on the eve of the tour, Shannon sounds almost wistful. “One of my least favorite things on Earth,” he tells me, “is actors who have bands. So I’m joining a club I wouldn’t want to be a member of, as Woody Allen [quoting Groucho Marx] would say.”
What makes the project more than just a vanity gig, or some A-lister’s whim, is the depth of seriousness Shannon brings to it, as well as the quality of musicians behind him. The band is led by Jason Narducy, a versatile singer and guitarist from the Chicago suburb of Evanston who has played in groups like Superchunk and with Bob Mould. Joining him are a host of other accomplished musical artists, such as John Stirratt of Wilco, on bass, and Jon Wurster, who once recorded with R.E.M., on drums.
With Shannon’s brooding intensity and unexpectedly powerful vocals at the center, the group offers vibrant recreations of the early songs of R.E.M., from the time before “Losing My Religion” or “Everybody Hurts,” when the band was the underground darling of college radio. The performances can be mesmerizing, not only to those of us who consider ourselves longstanding, diehard enthusiasts of R.E.M., but to those who were actually in the original band itself.
“To a songwriter,” Michael Stipe, the singer for R.E.M., tells me, “to have someone interpret your work is the greatest possible compliment. To go into a studio and cover a song, okay, that’s incredibly flattering, and it’s not altogether difficult. There’s a little bit of wizardry and magic that happens in a studio, and anyone can make something sound good. To take it on tour? That’s fucking balls.”
Stipe was on hand last year when Shannon and Narducy stopped at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, R.E.M.’s hometown. He was not alone: The other members of the quartet, Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills, were also in attendance. I watched the performance from a spot near the front of the stage, next to the soundboard, and I can tell you it felt less like a concert than a revival, a gathering of the faithful. Some of this had to do with the location: Few names are as significant in R.E.M. lore as the 40 Watt, a club the band has been playing at since the spring of 1980. It was also because none of us could be sure that what we were witnessing would happen again. Berry had left the group in 1997, and the other members of R.E.M. called it quits in 2011. This was the first time the four of them had appeared together in public in more than a decade.
Throughout the evening, Berry, Buck, and Mills came onstage to join Shannon and Narducy on songs like “Perfect Circle” and “Pretty Persuasion.” “They’re better than we were,” Mills joked, but sounded like he meant it, relishing our outrage at such a heresy. After playing the whole of Murmur, R.E.M.’s 1983 debut record, Shannon and Narducy went through more than a dozen other songs. At one point, I glanced over and caught the chief of the 40 Watt’s security detail closing his eyes and mouthing the words to “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars),” an concealed track off Chronic Town, the EP R.E.M. released before Murmur.
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