Everybody Hurts: Only The Rich Won On Election Day, Says R.E.M.'s Mike Mills
11/11/2004
The Ottawa Citizen

Crushed, disappointed and devastated.
That's how R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills describes his reaction to last week's U.S. presidential election. Mills and his bandmates Michael Stipe and Peter Buck worked tirelessly to convince voters to oust GeorgeW. Bush. Along with acts such as Bruce Springsteen, Dixie Chicks and Pearl Jam, R.E.M. was part of the Vote for Change tour, which hit battleground states in the weeks leading up to Nov. 2.

"I'm very disappointed in America, to be quite frank with you," Mills said during a phone interview Tuesday. "It was pretty crushing. Not just for myself, but so many people put so much effort into trying to get John Kerry elected that I felt bad for all of them, and I felt bad for the people of the United States of America.

"I think they allowed themselves to be blinded by this fear of terrorism, and they voted against their best interests."

He is still struggling to find a glimmer of hope for Americans facing the next four years.

"I think it's going to be really bad," Mills says. "For rich white guys, it's going to be great. For everybody else, it's not going to be so good. I think the deficit is going to be so enormous that people can't even comprehend how big it's going to be. I mean, you can't cut taxes and pay for this war."

Still, a thoughtful band like R.E.M. is unlikely to turn into an aggressive mess like Gwar to vent their frustrations. On a theatre tour of North America to promote the understated, and widely underrated, new disc Around the Sun, it appears the best way to cope is to dig into the music.

What makes their concerts special, Mills says, is the spark between musicians. The core trio is touring with extra personnel, including the Posies' Ken Stringfellow and Minus 5/Young Fresh Fellows frontman Scott McCaughey.

"There's a certain chemistry that occurs when this particular batch of musicians gets on stage together," he says, "and the thing that makes it work is the energy between the audience and musicians."

Through the music, they're determined to prove it's not the end of the world. And if it is, they feel fine, to paraphrase the old R.E.M. hit.

"We knew that if we lost we were going to have to eliminate the sadness by putting on a rock show, and just reminding people that the world must go on," Mills says. "Nothing's over. There's no permeation of the atmosphere by sadness or anything like that. You have to move on and you have to celebrate life, which is what we're doing."

In Canada, R.E.M. is playing smaller Canadian markets for the first time since the early days, and isn't averse to moving into arenas, such as tonight's concert at the Ottawa Civic Centre. Other stops include London, Toronto, Montreal, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver.

R.E.M.'s Canadian tour kicked off in London this week on an unusual note. On Monday, the night before the first concert, the band members had a rare night on the town. They ended up in a bar jamming with a London-based freeform art-noise group called Nihilist Spasm. "It was nothing but improvisation," Mills says. "You just get up there and start making noise. That was huge fun for us since we don't really do that on stage. We're not the most improvisational of bands. The thing that keeps it fresh for us is that we do change the set every night."

The freeform approach brings to mind the legend of their last performance in Ottawa 19 years ago. During a 1985 Barrymore's show, the story goes, the band played five or six of their own songs, then chucked the setlist to run through cover songs, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Creedence Clearwater Revival, and even a version of Moon River, according to one second-hand report.

"It was not unusual for us to do that," chuckles Mills. "We always busted out a few covers, but I seem to recall that night, for some reason, we just went a little crazy and decided to play a whole bunch of weird stuff."