Interview with John Hunter – Writer of Maps and Legends: The Story of R.E.M. – Part 1
by Killian Laher

No More Workhorse caught up with author John Hunter about his self-published R.E.M. book for a lengthy chat about his book and the band that inspired it.

No More Workhorse: How did you get started in your writing career?

John Hunter: I was an English major when I was at the University of Georgia in the 1980s, but I don’t really have a background as an author. I had sent this book to Craig Rosen, who wrote R.E.M. Inside Out about all their songs, and he was amazed that I’d never written a book before. People had told me that I should write a book. Writing this book about R.E.M. is something that I’d always sort of dreamt about doing but never did. I got married five or six years ago for the first time, and that gave some structure and stability to my life that allowed me to tackle this project. About halfway through it, I got really sick of it and stopped for a month or two. And then I thought, I’ve sunk so much time and effort into this already that I need to finish it.

NMW: R.E.M. are split up more than ten years, so why now?

JH: Well as I said, this is something I had thought about for ten or fifteen years. So it’s not like I had the idea recently, it’s something I had thought about doing forever. And then I got married at age 49 and that gave me some focus and structure that maybe I hadn’t had before. This is not why I wrote it, but waiting so long gave me time to address their solo careers, in particular Peter Buck’s solo career, which I don’t think any previous biographer had done.

There have been some very good biographies of the band. David Buckley wrote a great one called Fiction, but his unfortunately ended in 2003. He wrote it a few years before they broke up. So even though I think his book is wonderful, it stops before the end of the story. The other big biography that I really admire is Tony Fletcher’s Perfect Circle. Very well written, very thorough, a lot of research. I think he’s revised that book twice, and his latest edition ended with them breaking up with Collapse Into Now (2011 album). The two things I wanted to tackle that I think have not been dealt with fully were their lives and careers and bands before R.E.M., when they were teenagers and young men. Also what they’ve done after R.E.M. broke up. I hope I added some coverage to that.

NMW: What was your introduction to R.E.M.? Were you there at the very start?

JH: I was born in 1968. My birthday is the same as Michael Stipe’s January 4th, I’m exactly eight years younger than him. I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was on that borderline between the baby boom and Generation X. I think the baby boom technically ended in 1964, and I was born in 1968. My mum was a bit of a hippie. The culture was inescapable when I was a kid, even in the early eighties. I was a weird kid, into music, bookish. I had this sense, I think was common to a lot of people of the so-called Generation X in America, that this sort of amazing thing had happened in the 60s with the Beatles and the Stones and the Byrds and all that. And I just missed it. I hated a lot of that nostalgia for the 60s, but at the same time, I was also very aware that this incredible thing had happened.

When Murmur and Reckoning came along I was 15 or 16, and the local radio station played them. The ‘real’ radio station, not the college station, because they had this huge North Carolina connection. They’d recorded the albums in Charlotte, North Carolina. So they got on the ‘real’ radio right away, and I heard them and I saw them for the first time at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, when I was 16. In hindsight, looking back on that, I think they were at a peak then. But also I was 16, so I was super impressionable. That was really life-changing to see them. In 1984, when I was 16, I started going to clubs to see bands like the Replacements and Husker Du.

I got swept up in all of the indie rock that was happening at that time. I had a good friend whose father had gone to the University of Georgia. My friend Hal Hammond was going down to University of Georgia to visit it because his father had gone there. So I tagged along with him, I went to the University of Georgia in part because I wanted to get away from home, and in part because of the draw of R.E.M. who are from there. My friend Jay Coyle moved to Athens from Rochester, New York because he was so fascinated with R.E.M.  Certainly to some degree, I did that as well. I was one of that second wave of people who moved there because there seemed to be this happening music scene there.

I was there in college from 1986 to 1991. I played in a band for two or three years. We put out a single, played the 40 Watt, and did a lot of that stuff. Of course, we never really accomplished much, but I was kind of on the periphery of the music scene and didn’t know the guys in R.E.M., but would see them around town, knew people and knew them, that kind of thing. So kind of on the fringes of that and saw some of that stuff happen as it happened.

NMW: Did the book take long to put together?

JH: I was working full time, 40 to 60 hours a week, so I had to learn how to steal time. The pandemic came along and I got nine months off because everything shut down. And that was obviously a tragedy. But for me, it was a bit of a sabbatical where I really had been working on the book long enough that I knew this was like a golden opportunity to try to really forge ahead on. I got laid off from my job here in America because everything shut. Not trying to say that the pandemic was a good thing, but for me to finish this book, it was, to be blunt.

NMW: Did you make any contact with the band?

JH: As I said, I lived there (Athens) in the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s and played in a band, played at the 40 Watt, knew Peter Buck’s wife, Barrie (Greene), who booked the 40 Watt. I knew David Bell, who worked in the R.E.M. office and when I was starting to write the book in 2018, I called him, he gave me Bertis Downs’s number, and I called Bertis and spoke to him for about 15 minutes on the phone, told him I was thinking about writing this book. He told me they had what he calls a policy of ‘benign neglect’. In the past, Peter Buck and Mike Mills had spoken to David Buckley and Tony Fletcher. But from what he told me and what other people I know who have contacted them lately have been told the same thing, which is that R.E.M. are through talking to biographers. They’re not going to stop you from writing a book, but they’re not going to cooperate with you either. That’s what I was told.

Having been told that, and this was my first book, so it’s not like I was an established author. So when Bertis Downs got this phone call, he had no reason to believe I would actually do it. I don’t really blame them for not cooperating with me. But since they didn’t, I tried to just read and watch every interview they’d ever given, and then try to take all of that information and piece it together into a coherent narrative. In some chapters of my book, there might be Peter Buck talking about some incident with two quotes, one he gave in 1984 and one he gave in 2008. I read all of it and tried as best I could to piece it into a coherent, linear narrative.

I think, more so than most bands, they have been able to write their own story and dictate the terms of how they’re covered. I’m not sure talking to them would have added anything because they’ve got a story that they’ve told pretty consistently over the decades, and I don’t think they’re going to deviate from that. I don’t think me being given access to them really would have changed anything. I don’t think any of them would have dropped some bombshell revelation.

For a long time, they had this pose that ‘this was all just an accident’. We played this birthday party. Then we needed to pay for Kathleen’s (O’Brien) beer keg, so we reluctantly agreed to play at the 40 Watt. And then wouldn’t you know it, somehow we accidentally got a gig in North Carolina… all the way to we accidentally got a record contract, accidentally opened for the Police! I don’t think that’s true. I think if you’ve read the book, I think Michael Stipe decided he wanted to be a rock star at 16 and had a real plan and goal to do that.

Another thing I talk about in the book was there was this sort of ideology in the 80s that I was very aware of, having been there, that for whatever reason, whereas the Beatles could say, “we wanted to go to the toppermost of the poppermost”, and they were very upfront that they wanted to become world famous. In the 80s, R.E.M. and their peers were ‘not allowed’ to say that.  Of course they were driven. Of course this was their life’s work. Of course they wanted to be on TV and to play big concerts and sell a million records, but they weren’t allowed to say that. I guess that was the vestiges of the punk movement. Not just R.E.M., but the Replacements, Husker Du. Nirvana would be the classic example of that, where they benefited from the legwork that R.E.M., Husker Du and the Replacements had done in the eighties. They go pretty quickly from indie rock bands to selling 10 million records. Kurt Cobain never quite knew what to do with that, because in that alternative scene he came out of, you weren’t allowed to do that. Of course, he too wanted to be a rock star, but he had to pretend like he didn’t want to be one. That created all sorts of problems for him personally.

NMW: Peter Buck doesn’t come out of the book that well, does he?

JH: Well, I would say yes and no. I quoted my friend Jay Coyle in the book as saying ‘I never worship those guys as men. I worship the way that their music made me feel’. I don’t really see a contradiction. I could sit here and tell you honestly and truly that Peter Buck is a hero of mine. More so than most people who’ve achieved the success that he’s achieved, I think he achieved it on his own terms. I think he handled his success and fame better than most people would have, probably better than I would have if that had happened to me! Jeff Walls from Guadalcanal Diary said about his experience touring with R.E.M. in 1986 that it takes massive egos to achieve what R.E.M. achieved. Jeff Walls didn’t know if he could do that. He said most people who achieve what R.E.M. achieved have something that’s driving them from their childhood.

If you look at so many people who are famous rock stars, from John Lennon to Bono to Peter Buck, most of them have something like that in their childhood that sort of drives them to say, ‘I’ll show you’. Usually to their father. I think all four of those guys either had an absent father or had a very volatile relationship with their father. I think in the case of Tom Petty and Peter Buck and Bono, to some extent, their father didn’t take their interest in rock ‘n’ roll music or music very seriously. There’s also a generation gap from that World War II generation versus their children in the sixties and seventies.

Peter Buck talks about growing up in California in the late 50s, and the early 60s. He said the place he grew up in was like that movie The Ice Storm, except nobody had the energy to have affairs! It looked like all the adults around him hated their lives, hated everything about 1950s middle-class America. I think it’s pretty clear that Peter Buck had a chip on his shoulder against his dad, and against society. He was clearly incredibly intelligent and talented in so many ways. But what drove him was this sort of anger at ‘square society’ and his parents, and that drove him to achieve what he achieved with R.E.M., which is incredible. But it also had an uglier side with his temper, which I touch on in the chapter about the air rage incident. I try to argue that the air-rage incident was not just an isolated bad day that he had, but it was part of a larger pattern of behaviour that lasted for decades. Having said all that, is he a hero of mine? Yes. I think sort of the anger that drove him was sort of a double-edged sword. It pushed him to do all these incredible things, but also, pretty clearly there was a temper there that flared up a lot.

The Interview continues in Part 2 next week…