Michael Stipe joins to talk about his remarkable life, photography practice, and career as the lead singer and lyricist for the band R.E.M.
Debbie Millman:
When Michael Stipe was the lead singer and lyricist for the band R.E.M, it was clear he had talents and interests beyond music. He was deeply involved in crafting the album covers and other aspects of the band’s visual identity. In 1998, he published his first photo book, and in recent years, he’s published several more books of photography. His latest is an untitled book of Portraits and Still Lives. The making of which was complicated in interesting ways by COVID. He joins me now to talk about his practice of photography and about his career as a musician and an artist. Michael Stipe, welcome to Design Matters.
Michael Stipe:
Thank you, Debbie. How’s it going? It’s so nice to see you.
Debbie Millman:
So nice to see you too. Michael, I understand that the best kiss of your life was with Allen Ginsberg.
Michael Stipe:
Well, that was, that was a question there for The Guardian or The Independent [crosstalk 00:00:59].
Debbie Millman:
It was for UK paper, for sure.
Michael Stipe:
One of the UK papers. They think that Americans have no sense of humor or sense of irony. I work extra hard to create ridiculous responses to their questions.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, so it wasn’t really true?
Michael Stipe:
Well, it was a very memorable kiss. Allen’s kiss, yes. We were working together. We worked several years with Tibet House out of New York City. There was a yearly benefit, an annual it to support Tibet House. I got involved through Patti Smith and through Philip Glass. And Allen was always there up until his death. Allen was standing side of stage when I was introduced as the magnificently talented and irresistible Michael Stipe. I got up and I did my thing, couple songs, walked off stage into the arms of Allen Ginsburg who grabbed me by shoulders, planted a kiss squarely on my mouth and said, “Irresistible.”
Michael Stipe:
I mean, the guy was this massive hero of mine from the age of 17. And here he is kissing me on the mouth and calling me irresistible. It was quite memorable and funny.
Debbie Millman:
That actually sounds really yummy. If you want me to be honest, I think that sounds really yummy. Michael, you were born in Georgia and that is also where your grandparents are from, but your family traveled a great deal while you were growing up, your dad was in the army. Where were some of the other places that you lived?
Michael Stipe:
It seems like I have this very particular memory that’s super specific to the time that we spent in Germany, outside of Frankfurt in a place called Hanau. Hanau was where, during World War II, they told everyone in Frankfurt to turn off their lights and they told everyone in Hanau to turn on their lights. So, Hanau was bombed to shut and then it became an army base after the war. That’s where my father was stationed in 1966 and ’67, I believe. I spent the Summer of Love there, I remember.
Michael Stipe:
But I have these very distinct, almost hour by hour memories of that time. I’m speaking to you actually from Athens, Georgia, which is where my family live and where my former band was based. I kept a home here that I bought when I was 25-years-old. I come back for holidays to visit family, but I wound up spending actually a huge part of the pandemic here. Why am I talking about that? You mentioned my grandparents.
Michael Stipe:
Well, interestingly, they’re not all from Georgia. My grandmother was born on a reservation in North Carolina called black mountain. She was actually born on black mountain. My grandfather is from South Carolina. My maternal grandmother is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And my pappy, who is my maternal grandfather, was actually born in Alabama, I think. But they all settled, for one reason or another, into Georgia. And that’s where, when my parents met each other, that’s where they were, here in Georgia.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned some of your memories. I read about a unique memory that you have of your childhood. One, when you were four years old and upon looking at a light bulb, you decided you wanted to become the filament. The only way you thought you could do that was to bite into the light bulb, which you did. And your father and uncle found you trying to eat the bulb and ultimately tried to pull the pieces out of your mouth and then tried to put the light back together with glue to make sure you hadn’t swallowed it. I thought that was a really unique memory and sort of the beginnings of a baby artist right there.
Michael Stipe:
Wow, that’s beautiful. Thank you. I can actually move back a couple of years. I think I was for when that happened. I distinctly remember them being horrified at my attempt to become the filament. What’s interesting me, as an adult, what’s interesting is that I really meant it. I wanted to be the thing that lights up. I didn’t understand that, of course, I’m made of very different materials than the filament of a flashlight light bulb and that, that wasn’t going to happen, at least on this particular plane of existence, but I did try.
Michael Stipe:
A few years before that, and again, my mother and I were talking about this the other day, because she said, “Honey, you were so, so, so sick.” I contracted pneumonia and strep throat and then it turned to scarlet fever. That was the second memory that I had, my first memory being my sister’s birth when I was two years old. Then two months later, right before my third birthday, I had this terrible fever.
Michael Stipe:
William Burroughs told Patti Smith that they were both members of the Scarlet fever club. It boils your brain. It makes your synapses connect in a different way, according to William. Maybe we’re exaggerating a bit, I hope so, but if someone can exaggerate my second memory in life, I would hope that it would be William Burroughs. I had scarlet fever and so, maybe the idea that I could, at four years old, turn myself into the fulfillment was not so outrageous.
Debbie Millman:
Was it at that moment that you felt it was important that you actually light up a room?
Michael Stipe:
I was called Mike Stipe, the shining light, when my name was Mike. That was my nickname in kindergarten and in first grade. Now, that was also in Germany. Again, I remember virtually every day of it. I was a slow learner in many regards, so I was learning how to read and write. Then I was left handed. My mother made the decision that with … You are, too.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Michael Stipe:
My mother made the decision that they would not try to change me to … The idea that all people should be right-handed. So, she allowed me to be lefthanded, but I wasn’t learning at the same rate as other kids. I was in third grade before I learned how to read a clock. It was this abstract concept, the round thing with the arms, I couldn’t connect that to the passage of time.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It wasn’t totally years later that there were digital clocks that … I’m always so sad when people rely on digital clocks, because I think there is something kind of wonderful about the idea of reading time as if that’s something that could be ever static.
Michael Stipe:
One of my first sculpture pieces, going back to, I guess it was 2006 or 2007, is an exact replica in cardboard of my first digital alarm clock, which also played music. So, it was this combination of kind of the future along with being able to listen to the radio. Two things that for me are profoundly important. My dream scape pretty much exists in this post apocalyptic future that’s got a lot of water, no Kevin Costner, but a lot of water, but it’s not terrifying. Everything’s held together by Scotch tape and staples, but it’s not a terrifying place. It’s actually quite welcoming.
Michael Stipe:
But how did I get into that now, Debbie? I have to say, I’m drinking my first cup of tea in a month. I haven’t had caffeine in over a month. I’m going very slow with the caffeine here. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but you might have to remind me why we’re going in different directions.
Debbie Millman:
Not a problem. I don’t mind doing that at all. Do you keep track of your dreams? Do you write them down when you wake up and analyze them?
Michael Stipe:
I’d like to say yes, but I don’t. No, I don’t. The ones that I need to remember, I remember. And then some of them, like last night’s stream, I’d really rather just let go of. The only thing I write on paper is my schedule and pop lyrics, everything else. Pop lyrics, even kind of wind up more on the computer these days than on paper. I don’t like my handwriting. I find it distracting and imperfect and I can write something brilliant. But if it’s a bad handwriting day, I’ll just throw it away or I’ll disregard the idea equally.
Michael Stipe:
I learned this with lyric writing, pop lyric writing. I can write something really bad. And if it’s a good handwriting day, I’ll think that it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and it isn’t, you know.
Debbie Millman:
How do you come to whether or not you’re having a good or bad handwriting day? What are the criteria to create a good handwriting day?
Michael Stipe:
I look at it and it’s either appealing to me or it’s mortifying. It’s more often than not, mortifying.
Debbie Millman:
So, you have no control over the output.
Michael Stipe:
No. I don’t think that has to do with being lefthanded. I don’t know if you have a similar problem, but I do smear things a lot. So, there’s a lot of smearing that happens. I used to write kind of sideways upside down, but that was really painful. I think a lot of lefthanded people have that same. I also walk into doors a lot. Do you?
Debbie Millman:
Yes. It’s very funny. Terry Teachout, the theater critic for The Wall Street Journal and also a playwright and dramaturge, once told me that he falls a lot. He’s also lefthanded, and he said that he’s been told that lefthanded people see the world backwards and that’s why we often have spatial issues. I have a lot of spatial issues. So, yeah, I trip and fall and bang into things all the time.
Michael Stipe:
Yeah, me too. Me too. I’m really bad that way.
Debbie Millman:
Are you able to write mirror backwards? A lot of left handed people can do that without even realizing they can do it.
Michael Stipe:
Until I was in the seventh grade. And then I had a teacher who pulled me aside and she had gotten tired of … She would grade my papers by holding them up to a light bulb and grade the back of them. I wrote exact mirror image until …
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, me too.
Michael Stipe:
What is seventh grade? I was 12-years-old. Yeah. But she said, and this is probably almost a direct quote, she said, “Your brain is like two fish that are going to flip flop if you continue doing this.” I could visualize that and it terrified me, so I stopped doing it.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, well, I bet you could still do it. I don’t think it’s something you can unlearn. I actually think the opposite. I think that there’s something kind of wonderful about flipping back and forth, left brain, right brain. And it’s never flip flopped in a way that felt like a fish.
Michael Stipe:
It’s really good in meetings because I can read, when people have papers on their desk, I can read everything upside down. Is it upside down and backwards? It looks backwards. But yeah, I’m able to read-
Debbie Millman:
Just mirror backwards. Yeah, like da Vinci.
Michael Stipe:
Exactly. Well, I did think, and this is really an exclusive Debbie. I wouldn’t say this to many people, but for a moment, as a young, I’m going to place myself at 11, I thought that I was the reincarnation of Leonard da Vinci.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I love that.
Michael Stipe:
Because he had really bad hair and he wrote mirror backwards. I was like, okay, I’ve got bad hair and I write mirror backwards.
Debbie Millman:
It works for me. You first started reading about the club CBGBs when you were 13 in the magazine, I believe it’s called Rock Scene. That is also when you made your first recording. I understand your sister had one of those old school, audio tape recorders. And one day, when everyone had left, you locked yourself in the den in the basement, turned the machine on record and screamed for 10 minutes.
Michael Stipe:
All this is true, but it was a Cream Magazine. I can picture her bedroom and sitting on the corner of her bed with this … It’s like a secretary’s early cassette recorder, and what I would not give to have that tape today. I would really-
Debbie Millman:
That was my next question.
Michael Stipe:
I’d put a disco back beat on it and it would be in my mind anyway. The greatest hit single of all time. Yeah, that was my first recording, but I was 15 in detention, and this was in a different place. This was now, we were now in Collinsville, Illinois outside of East St. Louis. I was in detention in high school and I found, under my desk, a Cream Magazine with an article written by Lisa Robinson about the CBGB scene and how, compared to the popular music of the time, it was like watching an old movie on a black and white TV with static and noise, versus the kind of technicolor, cinematic music that was popular on the radio at the time.
Michael Stipe:
And she was drawing this obvious parallel to the more energetic and chaotic scene that was happening around groups like the Ramones, Blondie Television, Patti Smith Group, etc, at CBGB. And comparing it to what was on the radio, which at the time, was really uninteresting and boring.
Debbie Millman:
You were originally a fan of The Archies, I believe.
Michael Stipe:
I love The Archies. I have an older sister, but she wasn’t into music. My parents were not really into music that much, and so what I had was pop radio in Texas mostly. The formulative radio listening years for me were in Texas up until the age of 13. That’s when we moved outside of St. Louis and I was teased mercilessly for my accent, which was, had been at the time, was a Georgia, south Georgia accent, run through … And now, keep in mind, grandmother from North Carolina, grandfather from South Carolina, grandmother from Mississippi, grandfather from Alabama, they all grew up in Washington D.C., or Washington, as my grandmother would call it, and then south Georgia.
Michael Stipe:
Run that through Texas and run it through Germany. Plopped out at the age of 13 in a little kind of white flight drug-addled town outside of east St. Louis and I was teased mercilessly for my accent. Because I had really long eyelashes. I was a little faggy, but I was more just really a nerd. They called me the Maybelline cowboy and it was extremely painful. I wasn’t really deeply bullied until those years, but that’s when the bullying really began.
Michael Stipe:
I changed my accent very quickly. I took some play school scissors and I chopped my eyelashes off. I tried to fit in. It didn’t work. So, I got a very early lesson in trying to fit in, recognizing that, that’s not working and deciding to kind of be yourself. That led us on what I think is a pretty spectacular path.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about how you accidentally got a subscription to the village voice.
Michael Stipe:
Well, younger listeners would not remember this, but for a dime, you could get subscriptions to 12 magazines for a year if you just subscribe to some Random House kind of thing. I don’t know what it was. It was in the back of all magazines in newspapers, I mean the comic books rather. My sister, she got like red book for my mom. I don’t know, life magazine and all the magazines of the early ’70s, late ’60s. And The Village Voice seemed interesting to her, so we got a year subscription to The Village Voice.
Michael Stipe:
That introduced me to this whole other universe, of course, of New York culture. That played a really heavy and important role in my embracing punk rock at the age of 15 and recognizing that, that was my tribe and that’s where I was comfortable. Of course, there was no one around me who acknowledged or even knew about what was happening with punk rock and with the punk rock scene. I was really, really on my own. I mean, I made mimeographs at school that said, Tom Verlaine, Tom Verlaine was the founder of the band, Television.
Michael Stipe:
Tom Verlaine is God. I went to school early one day and I put up these posters, these mimeograph posters all over school. I almost shut the school down because the English teacher said, “Clearly someone is referring to the French poet Paul Verlaine. So they got that wrong, but how dare they blasphemy our Lord and savior by referring to a French poet as God.” There was this whole like investigation to find out who blasphemied the school. It was me, and it was Tom Verlaine from the band, Television, but nobody had any idea. Anyway, that was me at the age of 15. I was a little bit of a scamp, I guess.
Debbie Millman:
Did anybody ever find out it was you?
Michael Stipe:
They never did. There are other secrets from that era that probably are not repeatable on your podcast.
Debbie Millman:
I’m thinking back to my first introduction to The Village Voice, which kind of happened around the time I first, it was around 1980, ’82, when I first graduated college. I was already familiar with your work in R.E.M, but I came to Manhattan after going to school in Albany, New York. My dad had lived in the village while I was growing up, but I didn’t spend a lot of time there. Found this newspaper and thought it was sort of like a primer to the world.
Debbie Millman:
At the time, I was really, really afraid of coming out. I was afraid of the judgment. When I was doing a lot of my research on your background and your history, I was reading about how you grappled with your thoughts about coming out back in the early 80s. I read it out loud to Roxanne because I thought, she’s 14 years younger than me, and that’s a big difference in the world of coming out.
Debbie Millman:
I’m like, see, this is what Michael was feeling at that time. That’s exactly what I felt, like suddenly you’re going to be judged. It might affect everybody around you. You were really scared about what it would mean to your band-mates and how the world would treat the band. It was such a different time. I mean, we’re so lucky now that the world has changed to the degree it has, although it certainly has so much more to go. But reading what you were going through really helped her understand why it took me so long to come out. So, thank you.
Michael Stipe:
You’re welcome. I mean, my band-mates and everyone around me knew my sexuality all along. We lived together. They couldn’t ignore or disregard who was coming up into my room and leaving the next morning. Yeah, it was … I turned 20 years old in 1980. I think that LGBTQIA+, if I can use today’s terms and apply that to the late ’70s, that liberation, that moment should have happened in the late ’70s following civil rights and following the women’s liberation movement. That was a movement that was, in our country, certainly not just diminished, but squashed completely by the advent of aids, and of course the Reagan administration, and Reagan and Bush senior taking over the whole of the 1980s and into the early ’90s.
Michael Stipe:
It took a revolution and shifted it by a good 20 years, which is, I think why, when it finally did happen, it happened so quickly, that a lot of people’s heads are still spinning, trying to figure out where they are or who they are within it. Not only within the straight community, but also within, as we call it, the element LMNOPs, all of us. Trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in. This is something I really love about the 21st century. From the moment I did start speaking about my sexuality publicly, and for me, it was more a matter of privacy than anything else, but I just felt like I’d given so much of myself as a public figure and as a pop star to the public.
Michael Stipe:
I wanted to keep something to myself. Of course, I chose the wrong thing to keep. I now recognize how powerful it is to have people, like ourselves, in the public eye, and that, that’s profoundly important to people who are struggling with their own situations. But anyway …
Debbie Millman:
But I also think, you had already been bullied, and I think, once you’re bullied, once you feel damaged by who you are, it’s very hard to keep putting it out there because of the pain that you’ve already experienced and the you’re afraid you’re going to still feel.
Michael Stipe:
Well, the people I surrounded myself with as a 20 year old were people that understood who I was and they had no problem with that. In fact, I think it was encouraged that I be exactly who I am, because the result of that is, is that we were not your typical pop band at all. We were never really a rock band, although we use some of those sounds, but my being a part of it just radically shifted the focus of the band completely.
Michael Stipe:
I think those guys acknowledge and recognize, when I say those guys, Peter, Mike, and Bill, of course, former band-mates, but then also the people around us. It was clear that we were very, very different. Part of that I think really had to do with my sexuality and my identity and how that placed me in a very different sphere than most of what normal pop culture would offer you.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I do now, in addition to the podcast, is teach. I teach undergrads seniors at the School of Visual Arts. One of the things that I talk to them about is their hopes and dreams and what they want to be and what they want to do in their lives. I find really tragically that they’re already at 18, 19, 20, 21, beginning to think about what they can’t do, as opposed to what they can. They start limiting the possibilities of their life before they even try to make anything possible.
Debbie Millman:
I was really, really struck by something that I read that you said. You said that your greatest achievement has been deciding what you wanted to do at 15 and against all odds doing it. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what gave you the sense back then that it could be done.
Michael Stipe:
Delighted. Interesting that you talk about kids today using a process of negation to try to figure out who they are and how kind of sad and upsetting that is. My band or my former band, R.E.M, we used a process of negation quite regularly to figure out what we did not want to be. Not only as public figures, but as songwriters, the way that we dressed ourselves, the way we presented ourselves, the way we talked to the press, we knew all the embarrassing and fucked up tropes. So, we used a process of negation to figure out how to not be those horrible idiot cliches.
Michael Stipe:
I think we did a pretty good job of it over the course of 32 years. But going back to when I was 15, yeah, I mean, it was unbelievably naive of me to think that when I read these articles about the punk rock scene as a 15 year old, I read them, and what these people were saying over and over again were that we’re not special, we’re not particularly talented. We’re normal people. Anybody can do this. Anybody can be pick up a guitar. Anybody can grab a microphone and start to sing.
Michael Stipe:
I took it quite literal when they said anyone can do this. I was like, okay, that’s me, that’s what I’m going to do. It was an insane teenage dream that became an even more insane adult reality being the singer of a band. I became the singer because I didn’t know how to play an instrument. I didn’t know I had a voice when I was 18 years old or 15 years old or 19 when I started R.E.M. I certainly didn’t know I had this voice. I like my voice a lot. I think I’ve become a very good singer with a very distinct voice, but I didn’t know that at that age. I just knew that, that’s what I wanted to do.
Michael Stipe:
But then learning that you have to, not only have the audacity to present yourself publicly, but also that you have to have something behind that, there’s got to be at least a modicum of talent. I didn’t know you had to write songs. I didn’t know what a bass guitar was until we started our second album. I couldn’t identify the bass guitar sounds from the guitar sounds. I didn’t know that the one with four strings made all the low notes and the one with six strings made all the high notes. I mean, that’s how naive I was about music.
Michael Stipe:
And you could hear it in the early stuff. I mean, it’s quite … They’re beautiful. I’m not disregarding those recordings at all. They are, for some people, quite magical. But I hear, and I acknowledge a band and within myself, an artist learning how to, not crawl publicly, learning how to be a toddler publicly, learning how to poop his diapers a few times. Then if we can carry this a little further, I finally take the training wheels off the bike and I’m actually a songwriter and a lyricist.
Michael Stipe:
I wrote a song last night, Debbie, I’m so excited. I took this crazy moment at a house party in London, maybe 15 years ago with a bunch of friends dancing. And this thing that came out of my mouth, to a great friend of mine on the dance floor, and I always remember this phrase, well, it presented itself at two o’clock this morning with a song written on a Moog synthesizer in 2018, pre pandemic, that has been sitting around in the studio.
Michael Stipe:
Last night they came together and created this what … I’m going to go in tonight and see if there’s anything to it. But I woke up real excited that this insane phrase from 15 years ago, London house party has found its way into a song written on a Moog in 2018, and in 2021, boom, here it is. We’ll see. Hopefully, it’ll wind up on what is I’m certain to be solo record that’s going to be coming out probably within the next year. Hopefully. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that it took you the better part of your 20s to recognize that insecurities are actually a superpower and something that you could utilize to allow your better work to come forward. You also realized that you didn’t have to be snippy and cynical. And you’ve said that quote, “Cold ass bitch was a coat I put on to protect myself and I realized I can take that coat off now.” Which I love. How did you come to that realization? How did you get to that point where you could throw off that coat?
Michael Stipe:
Yeah. Wow. I mean, I can’t believe that quote came out of my mouth, but it did. Anyone who knows the band from earlier days, I would come onto stage wearing four or five layers of clothing and usually a hat and maybe some glasses. As I got heated up during the performance, I would take them off. By the end of the evening, by the end of the performance, I was down to a t-shirt or down to my jeans, no shirt at all. I always felt the need to protect myself and to layer myself from the world at large.
Michael Stipe:
I was born a very shy person. I’m not anymore because I had to learn how to not be. The part of that, Debbie, that I find interesting is that I was really moving on instinct. Instinct was telling me that the things that are embedded into me and a part of who I am, the very part of my DNA that allows that insecurity, allows that vulnerability, part of it being queer, part of it being bullied, if you will, as a child, part of it being from a family that had this nomadic paratactic crazy, pick up and move every couple of years lifestyle, and having to really be fiercely independent or independent within a very tight family unit of two sisters and a mother and father.
Michael Stipe:
All of this created, I guess, an instinct that allowed me to, without acknowledging it and without having the language to describe it to myself, allowed me to use that insecurity and that vulnerability to create the persona that became who I am, and that gets into a whole other philosophical or deeply psychological, I guess, arena that we don’t need to go into. We become who we want to become and then we create who we want to become, and then we become them.
Michael Stipe:
But I didn’t have the language to recognize that until much, much later. When I did, I had established myself enough that it didn’t knock me backwards or throw me off my game. It simply allowed me to look at the earlier work and not disregard it so easily, and to acknowledge, wow, I did do stuff that was incredibly ballsy and incredibly courageous. I just didn’t see it as such, and I still don’t think of myself, I still have, what is it? Imposter syndrome. I always think that the next song or the next photo book is going to be the one where everyone and realizes that I’m a big fake. That, in its own regard, can be a great power, super power.
Michael Stipe:
I’m a little bit quoting Greta Thunberg who referred to, when she became a public figure through her activism, and then was being mocked by the world’s media, how embarrassing are we as Americans, but being mock for her voice, acknowledged publicly that her being on the spectrum, her being autistic was what she regarded as a superpower. I was like, whoa, hang on a second. Here’s a teenage girl telling me that this thing that we’ve thought of my whole life as something that’s a disability, she regards as a superpower. I have the superpowers within my vulnerability and my insecurities, and I’ve actually employed those throughout my entire adult life and with the work that I’ve presented as a public figure, as a pop star, as a singer songwriter, as an artist, as a photographer, etc.
Michael Stipe:
Wow. Thank you Greta Thunberg for allowing me to see myself a little more clearly. I’m sometimes embarrassed that it feels like I start every sentence with the word, I. I feel a little navel-gazey, but part of being a pop store allows you to not only acknowledge that the ego that it takes to get up on a stage and think that what you have to say, or sing, or present is valuable to someone beyond yourself. Also comes hand in hand with the humility of stepping back and recognizing that, if you start to believe your own myth, you’re screwed and the work that you do is vastly unimportant.
Michael Stipe:
You are really, really human, and that humanity, I think this sounds insane to me coming out of my mouth, but that humility combined with that ego is what I think, that friction can create beautiful work, whether it’s in a writer, performance artists and dancers, or in something as rigid as opera or ballet, or in something as freeform as my idea, theoretically, of what punk rock means.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It’s interesting, in spending time researching a lot of the things that you were a part of and talked about and wrote about through the eighties till now. I was very aware of your awareness of the sort of tides as they go back and forth between acceptance and reverence and people then getting upset about the very things that they used to be excited about and how you have to temper how you consider what you mean to them by what you mean, sort of internally, and hold onto that in some way.
Michael Stipe:
Wow. Can you expand that?
Debbie Millman:
If that makes sense.
Michael Stipe:
No, can you expand that a little bit more? I’m really intrigued.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I remember you were talking about one of the albums that you released not being as popular as some of the bigger, more sort of stadium albums. I have stacks and stacks of your work.
Michael Stipe:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
The very, very early work appealed to a certain type of people. The later more stadium work I’m talking about, losing my religion and sort of the world of that super duper heavy, popular music that people … All the out of time, time. Then when you have something that might be smaller or less appreciated by the masses, it’s still work that has meaning. And if you start to, and I talk to Roxanne about this all the time, if you start to measure your value and worth by the amount of books that are sold, or the amount of albums that are sold, or the amount of downloads, or the amount of streams, you put your whole life in control of something that isn’t you.
Michael Stipe:
You’re also competing, and I can’t possibly compete with my past and I have no desire to, nor with whoever the pop stars of 2021 or 2022. I have no desire to even try to compete with that. I read an article, I think it was in The Guardian about Damon Albarn from the band Blur. He’s someone who I deeply admire. The point that they were making is, the writer was saying, here’s someone who had success and then did something quite unusual, which is didn’t try to continue having this success upon success, upon success on a mass scale, but spent the next 20 years doing exactly what he wanted to do, experimenting with different types of music and musicians and different ways of presenting music and performance together through stage, and theater, and what-have-you.
Michael Stipe:
He’s someone who I deeply admire, one. But it also, I was like, oh, wow. I wish I had done that the way he did that. It’s a day later, I’m thinking about what I have done. I’ve done okay. I think I’ve presented some pretty interesting things in the past decade, certainly since the band disbanded. It’s not at all I’m looking at the span of my life and I’m looking at time remaining, and I want to do a whole lot more.
Michael Stipe:
I actually thought about this yesterday as well at my age, I’m 61 now, and I look great. But at 61, most people are thinking about retiring. As an artist, I can’t retire. Even the thought of that is ridiculous. I look at my heroes, whether it’s Leonard Cohen, certainly Patti Smith, Edmund White, people that continue working until the end of their lives. Not because they want to, not because they’re having to pay the bills, not because they have some fragile ego that has to be supported by this desire to be appreciated from outside. No, it’s because you have to do it. It’s really not a choice.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I feel the same way. I just turned 60 and feel, while I do feel time in a way that I really haven’t before, I mean, it’s been escalating since I turned 50, but I also am more urgent in thinking, if not now, when? It reminds me of when I … I interviewed David Lee Roth two years ago when we were talking about 1984, and I asked him how it felt to be, at that moment in time, the most popular dude on the planet, the biggest album, the biggest tour, the biggest music video, everything that there was.
Michael Stipe:
Biggest hero.
Debbie Millman:
And his surprise … Yeah. I’ve talked about this at length. I asked him what it felt like, and he paused and he was extremely thoughtful, and he said, “You have to be really careful when you get to the top of the tallest mountain, because it’s always cold, you’re usually alone, and there’s only one direction.” I’ve suddenly felt really comforted by the idea that you can sort of slowly walk up the mountain, and maybe, if you’re lucky, not peak until the day before you die.
Michael Stipe:
Wow. I wouldn’t have expected that from David Lee. Roth. That’s incredible.
Debbie Millman:
I know, I love that. He said that. It really was extraordinary. All that being said, I do want to talk to you about a couple of your early pieces, only because they mean so much to me and sort of the formation of who I am. I’m going to be really selfish and I just want to ask you about a couple of songs because, had I thought at the time that 30 years later I’d be talking to you about these songs, I would’ve just said, Debbie, you never have to worry about anything again, because everything’s going to just be fine.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about Harborcoat. Harborcoat is one of my all time favorite songs. If somebody said, “Debbie, write down top 10 songs of your life,” it would be Harborcoat. Not only is it one of my favorite songs of all time, but there’s a line in it that I use sort of to describe a moment in time. At first, when the album first came out, I’m talking about the album, Murmur.
Michael Stipe:
It’s on Murmur. Yeah [crosstalk 00:36:32].
Debbie Millman:
I’m sorry, Reckoning. I’m going to say that again.
Michael Stipe:
Oh Reckoning, came out in 1984, right?
Debbie Millman:
Right. Reckoning came out … Yeah.
Michael Stipe:
[crosstalk 00:36:40].
Debbie Millman:
Yep. I have it, both the album and the CD. That’s how much I love this. I also have all the sort of digital versions of it because it’s just easier to listen to music that way, but I would never ever give these up. So, these are all the first pressings. You didn’t include the lyrics at the time. You had to really, really listen. People would argue, what does this mean? What does that mean? What is he saying here? What is he saying there? I want to talk to you about that in a second, but I want to ask you about this line. I spent my whole life waiting to ask you this, “There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads react.”
Michael Stipe:
If you’re asking me where that came from, I have no idea. I think it’s that instinct that we were talking about. I was a fan of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. I was very familiar with the cut up technique that they had employed through their own work. Mostly through the bands that were coming up with R.E.M through the Athens Georgia scene, specifically Pylon and The B-52’s, the idea of taking these random thoughts and ideas and throwing them together in a kind of Brion Gysin, William Burroughs mashup was kind of common.
Michael Stipe:
What does that mean? I mean, was 24. I was already kind of a pop star. The band had already gotten named the record of the year over Michael Jackson’s Thriller with our first album, which sold 40,000 copies at the time. Was that The Village Voice or?
Debbie Millman:
New York Times. New York Times rated it the number one album of the year.
Michael Stipe:
Over Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I mean, we were living, at the time, when we were York, which was a lot of the time on 44th Street at the Iroquois Hotel. It’s where James Dean lived when he was studying acting in New York. We were in his room, we were told. [Samo 00:38:31] used to go into the … He would tag the elevator, it was the [inaudible 00:38:38] elevator in New York City.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.
Michael Stipe:
But Samo was of course, [crosstalk 00:38:41]. I mean, it was just this moment, there was all this stuff was happening around us, but I would pick phrases out of the air and just throw them into the songs and not think twice about it. Where that came from, I have no idea, Debbie, but it sure does sound good. It means something to me most certainly. That’s the line in the song actually. You’re at the peak of the mountain right now. You pick the very best line in that song to focus on. Maybe we’ll get tattoos together at some point, but I think having a tattoo of my own lyric on my body would be a little creepy. I’d get a tramp stamp across the back so I’d never have to …
Debbie Millman:
Well, and now I use it. I use it as a way to explain what it means to cut off your nose to spite your face.
Michael Stipe:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
Which is so much more poetic.
Michael Stipe:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
My last question about that particular song, and then I’ll leave you alone about it, just as I said, it’s my life playlist. What is a Harborcoat?
Michael Stipe:
Well, to me, actually that line for me is about like, everything seems to be going right, but there’s something niggling, there’s something that’s irritating. There’s something that’s not quite on. And what is that? What you need to investigate, you need to step back, you need to look again and figure out, what doesn’t feel exactly? That’s when you have to change things slightly, maybe to just shift them incrementally.
Michael Stipe:
But Harborcoat, no idea. I mean, again, I was walking on stage in probably four or five layers of clothing. After the first song, the coat would come off, usually an overcoat. Actually, the hat would come off, and then a shirt, and then a jacket, and then a shirt, and then another shirt, and then I’d be down to a t-shirt at the time. Later, when I realized that sex sells, I would strip down to my bare body and sometimes shave my chest, because it looked better from a distance, depending on how big the venues were. But I was a skinny little thing back then. Yeah, I mean I was wearing the coat. I was literally embodying my own lyric. I was protecting myself.
Debbie Millman:
The other thing about the early albums, they are pop albums, and one could also call them rock albums, but you have a lot of love songs, Perfect Circle, Talk About the Passion. There are so many love songs that are almost like Trojan horses in these pop albums.
Michael Stipe:
In a way because I intentionally did not write love songs. I don’t think I used the word love in a song until our seventh or eighth album maybe. I mean, it was way, way, way, way-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, but Perfect Circle is one of the great love songs of all time really.
Michael Stipe:
Thank you. It’s such a sad song to me.
Debbie Millman:
I know, but that’s what I love about it. Why were you so opposed to having the lyrics on the sleeves?
Michael Stipe:
I sang using my voice as an instrument. Again, that’s something I picked up from Vanessa Briscoe from Pylon, I think talked about her voice as an instrument. I, again, very quite literally and naively, I said, “Oh, okay. My voice is an instrument too. That’s how I’ll use it. The early stuff, Murmur particularly, it’s like Sigur Ros, or This Mort Coil Elizabeth Fraser. People that …
Debbie Millman:
Cocteau Twins.
Michael Stipe:
Cocteau Twins are creating languages or are just singing nonsense without narrative. The narrative is within the emotion and the feeling of the voice. I was doing that without even knowing what I was doing. I was just throwing words out that … They didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t need that. It had my spirit and my soul and my energy and my charisma, whatever was there at the age of 22, all wrapped up in it, and that was enough. But it was around the time of Reckoning, the second album, and certainly by the third album, that I realized I couldn’t do this forever.
Michael Stipe:
The stuff that worked live for me wasn’t particularly working on record. I needed to sharpen my storytelling and I needed to start writing about something. At that same time, we were starting to travel the world and we were becoming politicized by again, the Reagan era, US intervention in Central America, cruise missiles in Europe. We were representative of America wherever we went. People were like, “What the fuck are you doing? What are you allowing your government to do in your name?” And we were like, “Excuse me, what?” We became quite activist and politicized simply by traveling the world and seeing who we were and what we represented from a distance and through other people’s eyes.
Michael Stipe:
The first lyric I wrote down was World Leader Pretend. That was on green, which was our fifth, sixth album. Sixth album, I think, and it was nine years after the band started. I didn’t feel secure in my abilities as a lyricist. They didn’t read well to me. You know what happened? I read the lyrics of a band that I really admired as a young man before I heard the song and the lyrics were not very good. It completely changed how I listened to the song. It felt like it stole the magic of music and the magic of a human emotional voice away from me as a listener and as a fan. I think I was … I’m putting this together as we speak, Debbie. I’m not kidding. I don’t think about this stuff. I haven’t heard Harborcoat since I was 27-years-old, but …
Debbie Millman:
Sorry. Sorry.
Michael Stipe:
That’s okay. No, I’m going to go listen to it after we’re done talking. I’m interested to hear … There’s also a song called Nine to Nine on one of those records.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Michael Stipe:
I want to hear that too. I have no idea what it’s about, but anyway, World Leader Pretend was the first song. I lifted that basically from Leonard Cohen. It’s using a military terminology to describe very, very profound, deep and upsetting emotions. The guy in the song is really eating himself alive and questioning his positions, questioning what he’s doing to himself. But I thought that, that was a really, for me, a watermark moment. So, I allowed that lyric to be in the packaging of the album. That was 1989.
Michael Stipe:
It wasn’t until losing my religion, which was 1991 that I allowed lip syncing in a video because it seemed fake to me. It wasn’t until after, I think Bill Barry left the group in 1996 that I started including all the lyrics just because I was like, okay, I’ve done that. I’m a really good lyricist now. When I’m good, I’m great. When I’m bad, I’m not mediocre, but I’m just bad. So, that’s okay. That’s something to be proud of. And I included all the lyrics, for better or worse.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about your current work. I’m going to ask you one last question about the older work, and that really has to do with a competition that I read that you had with Kurt Cobain to see who could write a song with the most yeah, yeah, yeahs.
Michael Stipe:
Kurt and I didn’t have a literal competition with each other. I said to self I’m going to write a song with more yeahs in it than any Nirvana song ever written. And it was only after the song was written that I said, “Hey, Kurt, guess what I’ve done?” We had a laugh about it, I think. But that song was written in Seattle on a Walkman, walking around the block of the studio that we were working at. Peter Buck had moved there, bought a house, started a family, and Kurt and Courtney bought the house next door. They literally shared a fence. It was an incredible moment for us as a band to find these people that were a little bit younger, but really our contemporaries and moving into their ascendants with a similar attempt at grace and style that we had carried the whole time that we were doing what we were doing as a band, as R.E.M.
Debbie Millman:
Well, in 2011, after countless awards, becoming one of the world’s most successful and respected bands of all time, selling over 85 million albums, you-
Michael Stipe:
More.
Debbie Millman:
More.
Michael Stipe:
More. It’s always more. They always-
Debbie Millman:
Always more.
Michael Stipe:
[crosstalk 00:46:37] the Americans-
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. 185 trillion.
Michael Stipe:
I always think over a hundred million. That’s that’s what I say.
Debbie Millman:
Over a hundred million. Yeah. Because when you see these things on wherever, it’s always like that moment in time. It’s like, again, that time thing. It’s like that moment.
Michael Stipe:
I’m actually teasing. It’s fun.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I love-
Michael Stipe:
We sold a lot of records.
Debbie Millman:
A lot of records.
Michael Stipe:
In 2011, we disbanded. We …
Debbie Millman:
Without any acrimony, without anger, you still make and record music, but you do so many other things now. You have a number of really beautiful books that I want to talk to you about. In 2018, along with Jonathan Berger, you published Michael Stipe: Volume 1, which is a collection of 35 photographs, combining intimate moments with images of people like Kurt Cobain and Patti Smith, as well as photos that you’ve also collected of people like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Roy Chon, and lots of others. You’ve said that photography is your primary way of keeping a diary. Is it true you have over 50,000 photos in your collections?
Michael Stipe:
There’s a lot more. And if I turn the camera, we’re speaking on Zoom for your podcasters, we see each other, but I can turn just slightly. Do you see that mountain right there?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Michael Stipe:
That’s about 50,000 negatives, and that’s just in this studio. I have three studios. This one, that’s stuff that we’ve actually gone through and digitized. So, those are secure in more than one medium now, but 50,000 doesn’t begin to touch it. I use photography as a way of remembering where I was and who I was with and as a way of sparking my memory. Patti Smith writes everything down. I just don’t write things down. I’m not very good at that. I never have been. I’m really good with taking a picture, and that will spark all kinds of memories, down to, what was the meal? What were we eating? Who was at the end of the table, who I maybe didn’t talk to, but they were still present, they were still there in this incredible moment?
Michael Stipe:
I’ve had this extraordinary life surrounded by and meeting incredible, incredible people. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve seen so many things I’ve been in so many places that people dream of. Even talking about it, I’m in shock that, that’s my life. That’s something that I am able to participate in. It’s so thrilling and so exciting. Those pictures are a way for me to remember that and a way to reflect back and have a diary, keep a journal. That’s my journal.
Debbie Millman:
I believe one of your first cameras was one your father had gotten you from Vietnam.
Michael Stipe:
He bought it in Korea and it was a Nikon FM2. It was stolen when I was 21 years old, along with a lot of weed and a jar full of pennies, but his insurance covered it and he got another FM2, which I have to this day. Yeah, I used it when I was 14 years old. That was when he first loaned it to me and I started taking pictures as a 14 year old. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I discovered music. So, photography is really my first love in terms of mediums. In that first book that you mentioned, Volume I, Jonathan Berger went through about, I think it was 35,000, 50,000 of the images that I had on my computer and he picked the 35 or 34 images that he thought represented me as a visual artist.
Michael Stipe:
In a way of presenting me, not as a pop star with a hobby, but as someone who’s been actually doing this all along to a larger audience. I’m very grateful to him for the experience of putting that book together and actually having to take a step back and look at myself and my life through someone else’s eyes. It was really exciting to see the choices that he made.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I think is so interesting about your books is that they work on a whole slew of different levels. There are books of photography, so obviously they include photographs which could work on their own on a wall somewhere. But then they’re also talking to each other. They’re communicating throughout. There is, in all of your books, a very specific linear narrative that changes from looking at one individual piece on a wall to communicating in multiple ways just by the virtue of the way that they’re ordered and the way they show up and the size of the photo in the book. How involved are you in the actual layout and the design of these books?
Michael Stipe:
With music and with R.E.M, we always thought that the first song on a record is a really important way of introducing someone into a world of here’s a universe that you may not have explored before and here’s our version of a different type of reality. That first song is really important, the first notes. I employed that recently on the Velvet Underground cover version that I did of Sunday Morning for Todd Haynes’s documentary about the Velvet Underground. I did it with Hal Willner, my dear friend who died recently of COVID.
Michael Stipe:
It was the last thing that Hal and I did together. But I wanted, knowing that it was going to be the first song on the album, I wanted to introduce the album in a way that would acknowledge that there’s no way that anyone can ever copy or mimic the brilliance of the Velvet Underground’s first album, but we can present variations on what those songs mean to different types of artists and musicians. So, I opened it with this long keening held clarinet note that for me, I stole from Gershwin, from George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
Michael Stipe:
But I presented that to the musician and said, “This is what I want. I want it to hold for way too long and then we’ll bring the song in underneath it and allow that to be the introduction to the album.” With the books, I’m doing the same thing. If you look at the beginning of each book, there is something that … In the second book, you’re literally, the first image is a window that’s blackened and it’s inviting you into this unknown place. That book is quite, I think, accomplished, the first book as well, the Jonathan Berger book. The third book with Tilda Swinton on the cover is my pandemic book.
Michael Stipe:
It is a little bit like me in third grade, not being able to read the clock quite right. It’s a little stunted. It started as something that was quite tight in terms of the idea that I had for what the book was going to be. It became something very different under the madness that became my COVID year of 2020. I went a little bit cuckoo, like I think a bunch of us did, and that is well represented in the book. You need a little bit of a legend to get through it. Now, the book does come with a QR code with me audio describing.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s a little podcast.
Michael Stipe:
[crosstalk 00:53:33].
Debbie Millman:
If you scan the QR codes, you … No, it’s in a good way. For our listeners, if you scan the QR codes on various pages, they lead you to audio recordings of Michael talking about why he included the photographs and thinking about the narrative arc, the placement, which is super important. It’s a real sort of multi-layered experience that I think is really interesting for the format.
Michael Stipe:
It helps unravel the puzzle and it shows my intention. My intention as an … No, I hate the word artist, but as an artist, my intention is always, always to not have anyone feel left out. I want every single person that encounters anything that I do to feel smart when they walk away from it, to feel like they get it. They understand it on some level, whether it’s visual, whether it’s emotional, hopefully whether it’s a deeper understanding of themselves or a deeper understanding of something that’s outside of what they might expect from a former pop star.
Michael Stipe:
I want everyone to feel smarter when they come away from this. Even if they just go, “Wow, that’s a really pretty picture of Tilda Swinton. Isn’t she a magnificent creature?” Well, yes, she is. She also represents a ton of stuff that this book explores, and that’s why she’s on the cover. But anyway, I want everyone to step away feeling smarter. One of my great heroes is Dolly Parton, and I think she’s really good at describing her intention behind her work, the same way everyone should feel lifted by and a part of what the piece is.
Debbie Millman:
The thing that I like so much about the books though, is that they, while they are really inclusive, I don’t think that they would exclude anybody, they have different ways in. In terms of your brand new book, that to me feels more like a play, a play with different parts. You’re going through it. There are very distinct emotions that you experience, whether you’re looking at, whether you’re looking at photographs, I think there’s something kind of almost installationy about it. Whereas, our interference times feels much more conceptual. It’s much more abstract. It feels like you’re diving into an experience. A lot of the photographs feel like they’re surrounding you, whereas in Still Life, portrait Still Life, you feel like you’re going into something, if that makes any sense.
Michael Stipe:
You completely nailed it. My mouth is hanging open. I can’t believe that you just said what you said about the new book, because all the work that I’m doing right now is actually from … If you can picture two things, Uncle Vanya and the film Birdman. A lot of it is coming from a proscenium stage using language of the theater, and conceptually using all these ideas of being either an actor or someone on the side who’s watching, who’s a significant and important part of the production, but not in the public eye.
Michael Stipe:
I’m using all these, and God knows there’s tropes., there’s layer upon layer, upon layer of stuff around that. But that’s what I’m using, not only in this book, but it in all the work that I’m doing right now in the studio. And you just nailed it on the head with no provocation at all. I’m super-
Debbie Millman:
So good.
Michael Stipe:
That’s super exciting to me, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Well, I’m really loving the work and I think especially, portrait Still Life feels like it needs to be it explored materially, if that makes sense, sort of in a location.
Michael Stipe:
Thank you. It will be in Milan, fall of ’22, at the ICA Milano, the Institute of Contemporary Art. They’re doing my first giant exhibition of my work and it’s going to flow on these three books. The vases that are in the book, which are real vases that were photographed, made by the ceramicist, Caroline Wallner, and the books, which are real books. But in that language that we were just speaking of, of the theater, they’re photographed to look like a digital image of a book rather than a real book itself.
Michael Stipe:
So, what you’re looking at is a real image that looks like a fake image. And if you look closely, you just get a little shadow here and there and you realize that the background of the books, the edges of the books are not exactly the same from one picture to the other. They are real and so they’re going to be a part of it. Some of them represent people who are no longer with us on this plane, the ghost images, the ghost books. And some of them represent people that are with us, but it’s all people who, for one reason or another, last year, in trying to put together a book of portraits of people who I found to be immensely courageous and vulnerable at the same time, and using that vulnerability to allow a humanity into their work or into the way that they presented themselves as public figures, or as people in my lives.
Michael Stipe:
Or as people that are not public figures, but were pushed into the public sphere through one incident or another, black lives matter having a huge amount to do with it. All those people found their way into my consciousness in pandemic 2020, and therefore into this book. It’s a little bit of my shout out song. My best friend called it that, the James Brown shout out song to everyone in 2020 who caught my eye and touched my heart.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s a beautiful book. I think you also rekindled an interest that you had in fonts and designed some of the fonts yourself for the book.
Michael Stipe:
Speaking of design. I mean, there are two things that … The one thing on earth that horrifies me more than anything is injustice. When I see injustice, I become … I see red. I just become furious. The second thing after injustice that bugs me, makes me crazy is bad design.
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. Yeah, let’s just talk quickly I just want to ask you about the fonts, because you did design the fonts, right?
Michael Stipe:
Well, I pulled them from the 1970s. That’s the era that I was a teenager and all these things, like all these important things like discovering my own sexuality, deciding to embrace that within myself, discovering punk rock and the idea of being a pop star and being a public figure, embracing that. All of the fonts that were happening in the ’70s, that’s my sweet spot. Had I not found music or photography, I think I would’ve been a very failed graphic artist or graphic designer. I explored that in this book under lockdown.
Michael Stipe:
I pulled fonts that reminded me of the 1970s and spoke to me as such. Then I used them in books that again look like, either computer generated images of books or they look like really trashy collages, which was of course intentional, but I cut and pasted my version of these heroic and vulnerable people into books and then re-photograph them for my book.
Debbie Millman:
Michael, it has been an absolute honor talking with you today. Thank you so much for joining me on Design Matters.
Michael Stipe:
Thank you. That was awesome.
Debbie Millman:
Michael Stipe’s latest book is an untitled book of Portraits and Still Lives. You can find out more about him and see a lot more of his work on michaelstipe.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.