Fact #90144

At the time, with its highest Billboard position of 85 being seven notches lower than the preceding Radio Free Europe, So. Central Rain could have been viewed as a failure, but it’s easy to see now that this was the song that told America R.E.M.was here to stay.

It began its path into rock history on 11 June 1983, when R.E.M.were in Los Angeles for a gig at the Palace Theater, supporting the Human League.

The sun was shining on Southern California but, as the band’s guitarist Peter Buck recalls, “We were all trying to ring home to speak to our families and friends, but the phones were all out, and the weather forecast was for heavy rain in the South Central region. “ It soon became obvious that Athens, Georgia was in the grip of torrential rains that were rapidly turning to floods.

As yet, however, there was no title. “The floods were just the starting point for Michael’s lyric, and I started on the music, quite separately, later that summer in Athens,” says Buck, adding with evident pride that, “It has tons of chords in it, changes key three times, and yet it sounds like something you could strum round a camp fire."

Buck had come up with a chord sequence he liked but didn’t actually hear Stipe’s lyric until late September when the band spent some time in Athens’ Stitchcraft warehouse demo-ing a bunch of tracks that included the music for what would become So. Central Rain.

At that point, the track started out with what Buck dismisses as “a kind of wishy-washy strum”, and it would remain that way until co-producer Don Dixon suggested something better several months later.

Immediately, they began rehearsing the song to include it in their fall tour because, says Buck, “It felt strong, really emotional, and good to play. We hadn’t decided it would be a single, but we knew it would go on the next album.”

The band’s lawyer/manager Bertis Downs clearly recalls the impact it had on him when he heard its first public performance, at Legion Field, Athens, on 3 October. “It was an open air show, and I immediately loved the song. Those kind of mid-tempo, folky, melodic songs is something they’re particularly good at, and it was hearing So. Central Rain that confirmed for me that this wasn’t any one hit wonder kind of band. I knew they weren’t going to have any trouble coming up with great songs for their second album.”

Just three days later, R.E.M.made its affection for the song more than evident when they made their national tv debut on NBC’s David Letterman Show. “David was a fan,” notes Buck, “and when he asked what we wanted to play, we chose Radio Free Europe and So. Central Rain, even though the song still didn’t have a title.”

Legend has it that this bold decision threw the band’s label, IRS, into a state of shock by creating a surge of demand for a record that didn’t yet exist. “Did it?” asks Buck. “I don’t know. We didn’t care.”

Bertis Downs, however, dismisses the story. “People considered it brave to play a song that was so new and unfamiliar to them on a major tv show, but the idea that it caused problems for the record company is, I think, a myth that’s grown up over time. We were just glad at that time to get any exposure at all.”

Come early December, R.E.M.were in Reflection Studios, recording finished tracks for Reckoning, and it was here that So. Central Rain evolved its final form. “Mitch Easter and Don Dixon had the idea that the intro was weak, which it was,” recalls Buck. “They came in early one day and I think it was Don who took a little guitar hook out of the chorus and stuck it on the front of the song. In those days, you physically had to cut the tapes up and splice them back in to a new position, so it wasn’t as simple as it is now. When we came in, they played it to us and we went, ‘Wow! That’s great!’”

The new intro was crucial to the the song’s initial impact, and it wasn’t the only contribution made by the production team. Mitch Easter recalls that, in the early versions of the track, drummer Bill Berry “played every other snare beat. When we got finished, we thought, ‘It needs something.’ So we had him hit beats in other spots. Just by coincidence, there was some reverb on that channel, so you get this alternating reverb beat and non-reverb beat. I thought that worked very well.”

Even so, Buck was not 100% happy with the track. “I think I felt that the little riff at the chorus should have come out a bit more but I heard it on the radio recently, and now it sounds fine to me.”

On 16 January 1984, the last day of working in Reflections, the band used the location to film a video for So. Central Rain which, once again, illustrated just how unorthodox R.E.M.really was. “Michael would never lip-synch a vocal. We played a recording of the track, and the rest of us faked it, but Michael insisted on singing a new vocal to make it more real for him.”

By now it seems that IRS was beginning to realise that rather than seeing the band’s quirky ways as a hindrance, it was better to accentuate the positive. “We did a big publicity thing,” records the label’s promo man Keith Altomare, “to promote the fact that we had this really cool band that was breaking tradition by not lip-synching.”

Reckoning was released on April 9, 1984, with So. Central Rain extracted as a single a month later, its title slightly amended to S. Central Rain (I’m Sorry), because, in Buck’s words, “The record company people told us that we had to have the main chorus line in the title because radio programmers were so stupid that unless you did that, they wouldn’t know which song it was.”

Once it was out in the public domain, another ongoing R.E.M.trait became evident - the enigma not just of what Michael Stipe is singing about, but what words he is singing. Stipe is unrepentant, “I never purposely tried to make any song indecipherable or slur the words. I’ve been accused of that. I just sing a song the way I think it should be sung. Something like So. Central Rain, to me is so clear. I couldn’t use better diction and (have) been able to sing the song.”

It’s fairly obvious that “city on the river” is Athens, which stands on the Oconee, but what exactly is Michael so repeatedly and gut-wrenchingly sorry about? “I never asked him,” says Buck. Maybe there are indeed, as they say in all the best sci-fi movies, some things that man is not meant to know.

Johnny Black