The story of R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe growing up in Collinsville, Illinois
Long before R.E.M. ever existed, guitarist Peter Buck vowed to never be in a rock n’ roll band and drummer Bill Berry instantly disliked schoolmate bassist Mike Mills. Singer Michael Stipe had a very negative first opinion of Mills when the bassist was falling-down drunk.
All a lot to overcome. But they did, and a few short years later, with only one album and an EP to their names, they appeared on Late Night With David Letterman. They were all so nervous that they started drinking beers backstage to try to calm themselves and when Berry saw Sophia Loren nearby, he almost threw up. Still, the band got to play a practically unheard-of two-song set, and Letterman and R.E.M. seemed to be on the same page of somehow knowing that all the early 80s commercialism and Ronald Reagan’s destructions of the social safety net were all a ridiculous joke and things needed to not stay the same, rules needed to be broken or avoided.
One of my older brothers is often recalling the times, several years before that Letterman appearance, he chatted with Stipe at St. Louis showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And right there in the start of the excellent new book The Name of This Band is R.E.M.: A Biography, by Peter Ames Carlin, a story is related about this:
“Of course the teenage Michael Stipe was a Rocky Horror Picture Show guy. Of course he was one of the cultists who attended the satiric horror-slash-musical movie’s weekly midnight showings at the Varsity Theater, right there among St. Louis’s other young outsiders, the arty and theatrical and socially dispossessed, the glams and nerds and punks. Anyone an adolescent jock of the late 1970s might refer to, with a derisive snort, as a fag. Mike Stipe, a senior at Collinsville High School, was in the thick of it, and when the TV news showed up, lights, camera, and all, he beelined right over to see what was going on.”
Collinsville was one of my high school’s main rivals—much like Granite City, known by many of us at Edwardsville High as a bunch of hardened stoners. But there were obviously gems in the rough, like Stipe, who weren’t the typical “KSHE Real Rock Radio lunkheads,” as Carlin writes.
Stipe made his stopover in the St. Louis suburbs on his childhood tour as the son of a military family. While his dad was off in Vietnam, the family was in Texas and little Mike remembers watching a lot of The Flintstones and The Monkees on TV and hearing “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies on the radio.
Upon his dad’s return from Vietnam, in 1972,
“the family moved off-base, buying a home in the suburban town of Collinsville, Illinois, just fifteen miles from the center of St. Louis. The house, a split-level, four-bedroom home at 408 Camelot Drive, stood on a street of midcentury homes not far from Interstate 55. It had a long, sloping front lawn and a backyard separated by a short fence from the Town & Country pool, a neighborhood club that was a magnet for Collinsville youth in the warmer months. Mike was thirteen years old when they got there, an incoming eighth grader in a new town with a new school full of unfamiliar kids and a dad he had barely seen since he was a grade schooler.”
He became friends with another slightly androgynous schoolmate. They would pour over albums and rock magazines with aspirations of becoming rock stars. His friend got a job at the Varsity, which attuned Stipe to the Rocky Horror parties, where he would dress up as Frank-N-Furter. His dad’s battlefield experience of having seen it all made it easy for him to allow his son to head out at night in a bra and fishnet stockings.
He would soon envision a life beyond St. Louis when his mom encouraged him to get a bunch of magazines through Publishers Clearinghouse. One of them was the Village Voice and he became mesmerized by all the art and music emanating from New York City. His friend’s name was Melanie Herrold and they would buy albums and sing along to them all the time. They loved punk but they also loved commercial rock n’ roll like The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Black Oak Arkansas. His friends were shocked when he was able to sing the falsetto at the end of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”
His first show was when he got recruited by classmates to perform in the Collinsville High talent show. The band finished second out of the four entries. Just as high school was ending and “things started to come together,” his dad decided to retire and move the family back to where he and his wife had come from, in rural Georgia.
Even though the move would be to just outside of Athens, where the University of Georgia is located:
“As sleepy as Collinsville was, he told his friend Michael Edson, at least it was next to St. Louis, a city with theaters, nightclubs, an actual cultural life. So Mike wouldn’t go. Instead he registered at Southern Illinois University, a commuter school in Edwardsville, about twenty minutes north of Collinsville. That was fine, John and Marianne said, as long as he found, and paid for, a place to live. Mike found a room in a house close to school rented by the members of the Laughing Heels, a punk band he’d met. Mike’s last few months in Collinsville were full of music, independence, and a slowly dawning understanding that it couldn’t last.”
His band was called the Bad Habits and they even opened for Rockpile at Mississippi Nights, with the night ending after the show when someone got stabbed by a beer bottle in a fight that broke out because a couple of guys’ girlfriends took a little too much liking to the singer Mike. He only managed to afford a semester at SIU—my undergrad Alma mater, incidentally—before having to move in with his parents in their “hippie cow town” that he hated.
But he didn’t hate it for long. He soon found that the art classes he was taking at Georgia were taking his mind off Collinsville, and he matured his name from Mike to Michael. He started to stand out in a crowd of misfits, with his Munsters lunchbox and green locks in his hair (plus many other divergent hair styles). His Georgia legend was beginning.