R.E.M. never had a chance to be a secret. Though some of the band’s earliest fans would later bemoan its globe-straddling success, in the way of all connoisseurs who get to an eventually popular thing first, the band was always big relative to its station. Within weeks of its now fabled first performance in 1980 at a friend’s birthday party in an old, deconsecrated church in Athens, Georgia, the quartet was drawing larger-than-average crowds at some of the music-rich college town’s hippest venues. By the end of 1981, the New York Times had listed “Radio Free Europe” as one of the year’s best songs, when that single was all the group had released. And in 1983, Rolling Stone – hardly the pulse of the counterculture by that time – was honoring “Murmur,” the band’s first full-length effort, as the best album of the year, beating out such fringe releases as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the Police’s “Synchronicity.”
