R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant reissue unearths some gems

listening to the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant didn’t spark the kind of nostalgia I perhaps expected, and if I think about it, that’s not a surprise.

Nostalgia comes from remembering the past. But with Lifes Rich Pageant, I’ve never allowed it to gather dust, to fall out of rotation. It might go a couple of months here or there, but it’s the R.E.M. album I come back to most often. That stems in part from the fact that it was the first I heard around the time of its release.  A stash of records left home one summer by a friend’s older college brother coupled with my box of Maxell XLIIs  meant that I discovered R.E.M. and a lot of other great music midway through high school, and never looked back.

One reason I return to this album again and again is that it is the most fun the band ever had. I love the three albums that precede it, and will readily admit that all three are artistically superior. But this one, particularly coming after the dour Fables of the Reconstruction, lets it all hang out.

So, with no real revelations to be had from the album itself, I looked instead to the disc of demos that accompanied it. There, one realizes that the album could have been very different.

I’ve always been a fan of the band’s earliest, pre-Chronic Town music. One of my favorite R.E.M. albums has always been the bootleg So Much Younger Then, which collects a dozen songs from an early set at Tyrone’s in Athens. I’ve since digitally collected several bootlegs that capture the same handful of shows, always hoping to discover one more early gem.

The band has let some of these songs leak out previously. “All the Right Friends” ended up on the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” “Mystery to Me” was on the band’s double-disc IRS Years best-of, and “Permanent Vacation” was on a live iTunes collection a few years back. But with this demo disc, the best contemporaneous collection of these songs is now available. Early staples like “Wait” and “Mystery to Me” can now be added to the official canon.

These songs were demoed for Lifes Rich Pageant but ultimately left by the wayside. Can’t say I blame the band. I could do without “Underneath the Bunker,” but that’s the only thing I’d ever think of leaving off the finished album.  I have advocated for the band to get Bill Berry back in the saddle and spend an afternoon cutting a fanclub-only release of those early tracks, but I’m confident the drips and drabs of these archival releases is the closest I’ll get to that.