R.E.M. - UIC Pavilion, Chicago, IL, 11-5-1987

Here's a concert I'm very happy to present. It's a full R.E.M. concert bootleg, with the vast majority of it having excellent soundboard quality. It's something that hasn't been publicly available with this quality until last month (as I write this in January 2026). This is exciting, because quality concert recordings from this time period are few and far between. I'm pretty certain this is the best sounding full concert boot from the band's 1987 tour.

This is another R.E.M. where I have to thank Lil Panda, who alerted me to this, as well as Rob, who runs the dB's Repercussion music blog. According to liner notes by Rob (which I've included in the download zip), Buren Fowler, the band's guitar tech and second guitarist for live performances, got a copy of the soundboard from this concert. He later gave a copy to Patton Biddle (Pat the Wiz), the band's sound tech. Many, many years later, that got passed to Rob, who recently posted it at his music blog.

However, there was one unfortunate aspect: the last six songs were missing. However, I looked around, and to my very pleasant surprise, I found a pretty good audience bootleg of the concert. So I used that source to finish off the last six songs. I then made some edits to those six songs to help bring the sound quality up to the standard of the rest. I ran those songs through the MVSEP program to wipe out the crowd noise during the music in those songs. Then I ran them through MVSEP again to boost the lead vocals, since that was low relative to the instruments. Those songs still don't sound as good as the rest, but it's not a glaring difference. 

Also, there was some sonic damage in a short section of "The One I Love," so I patched that up. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in its title.

I'm particularly happy to find a good source for those six songs, because one of them was a cover of "Midnight Blue." This was a Top Five hit by Lou Gramm, lead singer of Foreigner, earlier in 1987. One wouldn't have expected R.E.M. to cover a "corporate rock" song like that, but they simply thought it was a good song, and covered it at least 13 times in 1987. I'm pretty sure this is the best sounding version. 

The songs "Superman," "Strange," "Harpers," and "Ghost Rider" also are covers. R.E.M. performed covers of literally hundreds of songs in the 1980s. But unfortunately that went way down in the 1990s and after, when they decided to concentrate more on their original songs. 

This album is an hour and 43 minutes long. 

01 Finest Worksong (R.E.M.)
02 These Days (R.E.M.)
03 Moral Kiosk (R.E.M.)
04 Welcome to the Occupation (R.E.M.)
05 Disturbance at the Heron House (R.E.M.)
06 Exhuming McCarthy (R.E.M.)
07 Orange Crush (R.E.M.)
08 Feeling Gravitys Pull (R.E.M.)
09 The Flowers of Guatemala (R.E.M.)
10 I Believe (R.E.M.)
11 Sitting Still (R.E.M.)
12 Driver 8 (R.E.M.)
13 Superman (R.E.M.)
14 Pretty Persuasion (R.E.M.)
15 Oddfellows Local 151 (R.E.M.)
16 talk (R.E.M.)
17 It's the End of the World as We Know It [And I Feel Fine] (R.E.M.)
18 Begin the Begin (R.E.M.)
19 Strange (R.E.M.)
20 King of Birds (R.E.M.)
21 Pop Song '89 (R.E.M.)
22 Auctioneer [Another Engine] (R.E.M.)
23 Swan Swan H (R.E.M.)
24 talk (R.E.M.)
25 The One I Love [Edit] (R.E.M.)
26 Harpers (R.E.M.)
27 Midnight Blue (R.E.M.)
28 Ghost Riders (R.E.M.)
29 1,000,000 (R.E.M.)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/x1ov1ZCi

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/SKSi5w0EgD5PfVm/file

There were surprisingly few good color photos of the band in concert in 1987, or even around 1987. But I found a photo of a ticket stub from this exact concert, so I decided to use that, as a change of pace. I squished the image horizontally a little bit to get all the text I wanted to fit.

The Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe - Athens Music Festival, Winterville, GA, 9-25-1988

I'm particularly psyched to post this album. Until a few days ago (writing this in early January 2026), I had no idea this existed. I'm still kind of surprised that it exists, because it's very unique. For the entire duration of this (admittedly fairly short) concert, the Indigo Girls (Emily Saliers and Amy Ray) performed with Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M. I looked it up at a very comprehensive R.E.M. fan site, and this is the one and only time the two musical acts collaborated so extensively like this. Luckily for us, someone recorded it.

At the time of this concert in late 1988, R.E.M. had become big stars, thanks in part to their hit "The One I Love" from the year before. The Indigo Girls, by contrast, were just starting to make it. They released their debut album, "Strange Fire," in 1987. But it came out on a small record label and didn't get much notice at the time. Their next album, "Indigo Girls," would come out in early 1989 and would go double Platinum, meaning sales of over two million copies in the U.S. But that was still in the future.

Stipe and R.E.M. started out playing in small clubs in Athens, Georgia, and they kept ties to the area after becoming famous. The Indigo Girls also were largely based in Athens as their career gathered momentum. For instance, that's where they recorded their "Strange Fire" album. So Stipe became aware of them, and wanted to help them succeed. When their "Indigo Girls" album came out, Stipe had prominent vocals on the song "Kid Fears," and the other members of R.E.M. played on the song "Tried to Be True." This R.E.M. helped break that album.

Furthermore, both Stipe and the Indigo Girls almost never co-wrote songs with outsiders. But the three of them wrote the song "I'll Give You My Skin" together. It came out on a benefit album called "Tame Yourself" in 1991, as well as the Indigo Girls compilation album "Rarities" much later. 

Both "Kid Fears" and "I'll Give You My Skin" were performed at this concert. However, neither of those songs had been released yet, so this connection between Stipe and the Indigo Girls was probably a big surprise to most of the people in the audience.  

Furthermore, most of the other songs performed would have been a surprise to anyone in the audience who had all the R.E.M. and Indigo Girls albums released up until that point. In addition to the songs mentioned above, "Prince of Darkness" was the only other Indigo Girls original, and that one also wouldn't be released until the "Indigo Girls" album came out. Two R.E.M. songs were played as well, but they were obscure. "Hairshirt" came out on the band's "Green" album, but that album wouldn't be released until a couple of months after this concert. So did "Untitled (The Eleventh Untitled Song)." But that was a secret bonus track at the end of the album. It's actually be officially referred to by three different names in different sources, since the title isn't mentioned on the album at all. In addition to "Untitled" and "The Eleventh Untitled Song," it's also been known as "11."

So that means there wasn't a single original song performed here that had been officially released by either act at the time of this concert. But most of the songs, seven out of 11, were covers. Here's a quick list of the original artists for each of those songs:

Ain't No Sunshine - Bill Withers
First We Take Manhattan - Leonard Cohen
Midnight Train to Georgia - Gladys Knight & the Pips
Harpers - Hugo Largo
All Along the Watchtower - Bob Dylan
Dark Globe - Syd Barrett
Summertime - George Gershwin

What I like most about this concert is that it wasn't just a case of "I'll play my song and you play your song," like the Songwriters' Circle albums I've been posting recently. The three musicians (and it was just Stipe, Ray, and Saliers on stage, with acoustic guitars) genuinely collaborated on most of the songs. In early 1989, the Indigo Girls would be the opening act for a high profile R.E.M. tour. On most nights, Stipe would come out and add his vocals to "Kid Fears." But it was just that one song. They never collaborated in public like this before or since, at least as far as I know.

They played in front of a small audience, as you can hear in the recording. (It was a benefit for P.E.T.A. - the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, with a bunch of other local musical acts on the bill.) So we're lucky to get any recording of this at all, and it's only an audience boot. But it happens to be a very good sounding one. It may have come from the audio feed of a video, because one can find a video of this concert on YouTube.

However, the boot had one big problem: a constant level of hiss throughout the entire recording. Luckily for us, though, audio editing technology has come a long way in recent years. I used the "Denoise" option in the MVSEP program for all the songs. It worked like magic, completely wiping away the hiss. So this sounds much better than ever before, in my opinion, basically as good as a soundboard boot. 

Again, I just want to highlight how unique and special this concert was. I looked up Stipe's concert performance history at setlist.fm. Until today, as I write in 2026, he has never performed in concert as long as this without R.E.M. backing him up. That's true even with R.E.M. breaking up in 2011. He rarely performed without R.E.M. at all, and when he did, it was always for special occasions, like tribute concerts, where he sang a few songs at most. It's too bad these three people didn't perform together more often, because it's a really interesting combination.

This album is 53 minutes long. 

01 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
02 Ain't No Sunshine (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
03 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
04 First We Take Manhattan (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
05 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
06 Hairshirt (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
07 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
08 I'll Give You My Skin (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
09 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
10 Midnight Train to Georgia (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
11 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
12 Prince of Darkness (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
13 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
14 Untitled [The Eleventh Untitled Song] (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
15 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
16 Kid Fears (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
17 Harpers (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
18 talk (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
19 All Along the Watchtower (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
20 Dark Globe (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)
21 Summertime (Indigo Girls & Michael Stipe)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/VbdGARLv

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/k7QFujm0Kg5HsSD/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert, taken from a video of it I found on YouTube. I feel bad, because I was only able to include Michael Stipe and Emily Saliers, leaving out Amy Ray. I wanted to include all three. However, there were multiple cameras, and the one focusing on Stipe and Saliers had very different lighting and angle than another camera focusing on Saliers and Ray. Putting them together just didn't look right. 

R.E.M. - Oak Mountain Amphitheatre, Pelham, AL, 9-5-1986

Here's another great concert by R.E.M. Like the other one I posted a few days ago, this one only became publicly available in December 2025. The sound quality is excellent.

This concert first became available through Rob, who runs the dB's Repercussion music blog, at:

dbs-repercussion.blogspot.com 

It's an excellent blog, I recommend you check it out. I've included Rob's original notes to the recording. That explains how it was recorded and got into his hands. The bottom line is this is a soundboard. 

The only snag is that six songs are missing. Those include the first four songs: "These Days," "Begin the Begin," "1,000,000," and "The One I Love." Also missing are "Just a Touch" and "Femme Fatale" from the middle of the concert. (Specifically, they came after "Little America.")

This was the very first concert of the band's 1986 tour, which supported their recently released album "Lifes Rich Pageant," which had been released two months earlier. As a result, many of the songs were performed in public for the first time: "These Days," "Begin the Begin," "The One I Love," "Cuyahoga," "The Flowers of Guatemala," "I Believe," "Superman," "Strange," and "Lightnin' Hopkins." (Too bad that the first three of those aren't included here.) It's interesting that two of those songs, "The One I Love" and "Lightnin' Hopkins," wouldn't be released until the band's next album, "Document," in 1987.

Rob has this to say about this recording: "It is the finest-sounding 1986 live recording [from the band] now in circulation, and the first concert-length soundboard recording to emerge so far." 

This album is an hour and 22 minutes long.

01 Cuyahoga (R.E.M.)
02 talk (R.E.M.)
03 Fall on Me (R.E.M.)
04 Shaking Through (R.E.M.)
05 The Flowers of Guatemala (R.E.M.)
06 Driver 8 (R.E.M.)
07 talk (R.E.M.)
08 I Believe (R.E.M.)
09 talk (R.E.M.)
10 Swan Swan H (R.E.M.)
11 talk (R.E.M.)
12 Can't Get There from Here (R.E.M.)
13 7 Chinese Bros (R.E.M.)
14 talk (R.E.M.)
15 Superman (R.E.M.)
16 talk (R.E.M.)
17 Pretty Persuasion (R.E.M.)
18 Little America (R.E.M.)
19 Feeling Gravitys Pull (R.E.M.)
20 Strange (R.E.M.)
21 So. Central Rain [I'm Sorry] (R.E.M.)
22 Auctioneer [Another Engine] (R.E.M.)
23 Lightnin' Hopkins (R.E.M.)
24 Old Man Kensey (R.E.M.)
25 Life and How to Live It (R.E.M.)
26 talk (R.E.M.)
27 Time Was (R.E.M.)
28 Second Guessing (R.E.M.)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/h3FSNBaC

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/XI9TOlV8nbNdMRZ/file

The cover of the band's lead singer Michael Stipe is from a concert at the Northern Illinois University Arena in DeKalb, Illinois, on October 26, 1986.

R.E.M. - B&L Warehouse, Athens, GA, 4-24-1981

Here's a really interesting, great sounding concert recording by a very early version of R.E.M. This was so early in their career that they hadn't even released their first single yet. ("Radio Free Europe" would come out as a single in July.) This concert was available as a middling sounding audience boot for a long time. But apparently it was only a few weeks ago when a high-quality soundboard version emerged. That probably makes this the best sounding concert recording from this very early era for the band.

This was sent to me by musical associate Lil Panda. He got it from Rob, who is the person who runs the dB's Repercussion music blog. It's an excellent blog, and one I've mentioned before, but here's the link if you're not aware of it:

https://dbs-repercussion.blogspot.com/

Anyway, Rob wrote some notes about this concert, which I've included in the download zip file. In those notes, he mentions this: "T. Patton Biddle (aka Pat the Wiz) of Athens, GA, is the source for this recording. He was the sound tech for many of R.E.M.'s shows in and around Athens in the early 1980s. This comes from a first-generation analog copy of the master reel, recorded by Pat as he ran sound for R.E.M.'s opening set." So thanks to Lil Panda, Rob, and Pat the Wiz!

This contains all the songs the band performed. (It was a short set, since they were the opening act for XTC.) Unfortunately though, the taper didn't start taping until about a minute into the first song, "Radio Free Europe," and he ran out of tape after about a minute and a half of the last song, "Gardening at Night." So I found different early live versions of those two songs (from a concert in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1982), and used those to fill in the missing portions. I had to make some changes to get them to fit. It was especially noticeable that this version of "Radio Free Europe" was much faster than the 1982 one. Anyway, that's why those two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

When I first saw the song list to this concert, I was confused, because I didn't recognize about half of the songs. It turns out the band played some pretty obscure songs, all originals. Four of the songs here remain officially unreleased: "Body Count," "Dangerous Times," "Hey Hey Nadine," and "That Beat." Three more are rarities from the "Dead Letter Office" compilation album: "All the Right Friends," "Burning Down," and "Windout." Another, "Gardening at Night," is from the band's early EP "Chronic Town." That just leaves four songs from the "Murmur" album, which would be released in 1983, and the "Reckoning" album, which would be released in 1984.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Radio Free Europe [Edit] (R.E.M.)
02 Burning Down (R.E.M.)
03 Dangerous Times (R.E.M.)
04 All the Right Friends (R.E.M.)
05 Shaking Through (R.E.M.)
06 Body Count (R.E.M.)
07 talk (R.E.M.)
08 Pretty Persuasion (R.E.M.)
09 [Don't Go Back To] Rockville (R.E.M.)
10 Hey Hey Nadine (R.E.M.)
11 talk (R.E.M.)
12 That Beat (R.E.M.)
13 Sitting Still (R.E.M.)
14 talk (R.E.M.)
15 9-9 (R.E.M.)
16 Windout (R.E.M.)
17 Gardening at Night [Edit] (R.E.M.)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/EvPkci2i

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/xOZB57vKBuvuc2r/file

The cover image is from an advertisement for this exact concert. When I came across it, I saw that it was close to square (I widened it a bit), so I thought it would make a good cover. The only change is that the concert actually featured XTC and R.E.M., with XTC the headlining act. So I erased XTC and made R.E.M. larger to fill in the difference.

R.E.M. - VH-1 Storytellers, Grand Ballroom, Manhattan Center, New York City, 10-23-1998

Once again, it's time for another "VH-1 Storytellers" episode. This time, it's the band R.E.M. Luckily, this one happens to be twice as long as the usual episodes.

In 1998, R.E.M. released the album "Up." It was their first as a trio, since drummer Bill Berry retired. It was considered a relative commercial and critical disappointment compared to their previous albums. For instance, it only went gold in the U.S. (meaning sales of 500,000 or more) while their previous six albums went platinum (sales of a million or more) or multi-platinum.

A bunch of the songs performed were from the new album: "Daysleeper," "Sad Professor," "I'm Not Over You," "The Apologist," "Suspicion," "Parakeet," "Walk Unafraid," and "At My Most Beautiful." That's eight out of the 15 songs performed.

I found an audio bootleg of this, which as I mentioned above is twice the usual length of these episodes. I don't know if it's a soundboard bootleg that was leaked of the full performance, or it was a double episode, which happened very occasionally for the show. Either way, the sound is excellent. However, the lead vocals were low in the mix, so I boosted them using the UVR5 audio editing program.

As usual for the show, the first song started halfway through. That's strong evidence that this was a double episode, because it wouldn't make sense that a bootleg would cut the first song off in that same way. In any case, I found a BBC version of that song, "Electrolite," from 1998, and used that to fill in this missing part. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in the title.

This album is an hour and 26 minutes long.

01 Electrolite [Edit] (R.E.M.)
02 talk (R.E.M.)
03 Daysleeper (R.E.M.)
04 talk (R.E.M.)
05 Losing My Religion (R.E.M.)
06 talk (R.E.M.)
07 Perfect Circle (R.E.M.)
08 talk (R.E.M.)
09 Sad Professor (R.E.M.)
10 talk (R.E.M.)
11 Fall on Me (R.E.M.)
12 I'm Not Over You (R.E.M.)
13 talk (R.E.M.)
14 The Apologist (R.E.M.)
15 talk (R.E.M.)
16 Man on the Moon (R.E.M.)
17 talk (R.E.M.)
18 New Test Leper (R.E.M.)
19 talk (R.E.M.)
20 Parakeet (R.E.M.)
21 talk (R.E.M.)
22 [Don't Go Back To] Rockville (R.E.M.)
23 talk (R.E.M.)
24 Suspicion (R.E.M.)
25 talk (R.E.M.)
26 Walk Unafraid (R.E.M.)
27 talk (R.E.M.)
28 At My Most Beautiful (R.E.M.)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17172260/REEEM1998StrytllrsGrndBllromMnhttanCntrNwYrkC__10-23-1998_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/wg6tXRSB

The cover image is a screenshot I took from this exact concert. I upgraded the detail using the Krea AI program.

R.E.M. - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: Rock City, Nottingham, Britain, 11-21-1984

I would like to post what R.E.M. did for the BBC. I still haven't fully tackled that because it's tricky. Although a lot of it has been officially released, there's some that hasn't. However, I do have Volume 1 ready to go, and I figure I should post it sooner rather than later because it's a significant improvement over what's on the official version.

This concert has been included in the official release "R.E.M. at the BBC." However, they only included part of the concert. Probably that's because only that portion was actually broadcast on the BBC at the time. But in this case, there are bootleg versions of the full concert with soundboard quality. So I've used the official version where possible and the unreleased version for the rest, although in fact the two versions have the same sound quality, in my opinion. In case you're curious, these are the unreleased tracks: 1, 2, 12, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 31.

There was another big problem. On both versions, the vocals of lead vocalist Michael Stipe were way down in the mix. It's well known that in the early years of R.E.M., for whatever reason, Stipe didn't like for his lyrics to be easily understood. I figure he deliberately had his voice turned down as part of his effort to obscure what he was singing. So for all the songs, I boosted the vocals dramatically. It's still hard to make out the lyrics due to his mumbling and slurring, but at least it's not as bad as before.

Most of the songs are originals, but there are a few interesting covers, such as "After Hours" by the Velvet Underground, "20th Century Boy" by T. Rex, "See No Evil" by Television, and "Moon River" by Henry Mancini.

This album is an hour and 28 minutes long.

01 talk (R.E.M.)
02 Harborcoat (R.E.M.)
03 Second Guessing (R.E.M.)
04 Hyena (R.E.M.)
05 talk (R.E.M.)
06 Talk about the Passion (R.E.M.)
07 West of the Fields (R.E.M.)
08 [Don't Go Back To] Rockville (R.E.M.)
09 Auctioneer (R.E.M.)
10 So. Central Rain [I'm Sorry] (R.E.M.)
11 talk (R.E.M.)
12 Sitting Still (R.E.M.)
13 Old Man Kensey (R.E.M.)
14 talk (R.E.M.)
15 Gardening st Night (R.E.M.)
16 9-9 - Hey Diddle Diddle - Feeling Gravity's Pull (R.E.M.)
17 Windout (R.E.M.)
18 Driver 8 (R.E.M.)
19 Pretty Persuasion (R.E.M.)
20 Radio Free Europe (R.E.M.)
21 Little America (R.E.M.)
22 Wendell Gee (R.E.M.)
23 1,000,000 (R.E.M.)
24 talk (R.E.M.)
25 20th Century Boy (R.E.M.)
26 Just a Touch (R.E.M.)
27 talk (R.E.M.)
28 We Walk - After Hours (R.E.M.)
29 See No Evil (R.E.M.)
30 Carnival of Sorts [Boxcars] (R.E.M.)
31 Moon River (R.E.M.)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16003459/REeeM_1984_BBSessonsVolum1RckCtyNttinghmBrtain__11-21-1984_atse.zip.html

The cover photo only features singer Michael Stipe. It's from a concert in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1984. I actually have another album posted here that's the full concert from there.

R.E.M. - Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ, 6-9-1984

Here's a very nice R.E.M. concert I just came across, so it goes to the top of my pile of albums to post.

I was looking for R.E.M. BBC material as part of my larger BBC project. I didn't find anything really good from the band's very early years, but this is of similar excellent sound quality, despite being officially unreleased. That's because it's the audio to an MTV show called "Rock Influences: Folk Rock." One nice thing about it is that it has a couple of guest stars at the end: Roger McGuinn of the Byrds and John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful. I suppose that ties in with the name of the TV show, since those are folk rock stars who influenced R.E.M.

Nearly all the songs come from a pristine soundboard bootleg. However, the three songs at the end with guests McGuinn and Sebastian do not. But that's okay, because I found a YouTube video of the show that includes them as well, and the sound quality of those tracks are also excellent. The one snag is that there's no intro to those (and I imagine there was some kind of reaction when the guests came on stage), and the applause was quickly cut off after each song. For those three songs, I patched in more applause from other songs earlier in the show, so hopefully that sounds normal. But if anyone has a different bootleg with the intros to those last songs, please let me know.

By the way, one more thing regarding those songs with the guests. The Byrds song "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" was basically sung by McGuinn, with R.E.M. chiming in on backing vocals. That's the same case with Sebastian singing "Do You Believe in Magic." But for the final song, "Gloria," R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe sang it. McGuinn was on stage, as can be seen in the YouTube video, but he just helped with backing vocals and strummed along with his guitar.

The songs "Hyena," "Old Man Kensey," and "Driver 8" were played in public for the first time in this concert.

This concert is an hour and ten minutes long.

01 talk (R.E.M.)
02 Pale Blue Eyes (R.E.M.)
03 Second Guessing (R.E.M.)
04 Hyena (R.E.M.)
05 Letter Never Sent (R.E.M.)
06 Harborcoat (R.E.M.)
07 talk (R.E.M.)
08 Seven Chinese Brothers (R.E.M.)
09 talk (R.E.M.)
10 Pretty Persuasion (R.E.M.)
11 So. Central Rain (R.E.M.)
12 Gardening at Night (R.E.M.)
13 9-9 (R.E.M.)
14 Windout (R.E.M.)
15 Old Man Kensey (R.E.M.)
16 Sitting Still (R.E.M.)
17 talk (R.E.M.)
18 Driver 8 (R.E.M.)
19 Carnival of Sorts [Boxcars] (R.E.M.)
20 talk (R.E.M.)
21 Radio Free Europe (R.E.M.)
22 Little America (R.E.M.)
23 So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (R.E.M. & Roger McGuinn)
24 Do You Believe in Magic (R.E.M. & John Sebastian)
25 Gloria (R.E.M. with Roger McGuinn)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16697045/REEEM1984_CapitlTheatrePssaicNJ__6-9-1984_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is a bit low res. That's because it's a screenshot I took from the YouTube video of this exact concert.

R.E.M. - Acoustic, KCRW Studios, Santa Monica, CA, 4-3-1991

In early 1991, "R.E.M." released the album "Out of Time." It was a huge hit, reaching number one in both the US and Britain, and eventually selling around 20 million copies worldwide. Rather than go on a traditional tour though, the band only about 20 promotional performances, with some of them just playing a song or two. Most of these were acoustic in nature, though with light drumming. This culminated in a concert for MTV Unplugged. That was eventually released as half of the official live album "Unplugged: The Complete 1991 and 2001 Sessions." Furthermore, the 25th anniversary deluxe edition of "Out of Time" contains a concert at the Mountain Stage in West Virginia that's very similar to the Unplugged one.

I explain all that to give context to what this is. This is another acoustic concert from that short promotional tour. As such, the set list is similar to both the Unplugged and Mountain Stage ones, but there are differences. One key difference is that both of those shows were in front of audiences. This was done in a radio station studio, and if anyone was there, they didn't clap. So the sound is a little cleaner. Even though this is a bootleg, the sound is excellent, just as good as either of those two officially released shows.

One fun aspect of this show is that the band was clearly having fun winging their way through some odd songs. Several of these are just short snippets of covers, such as "Tusk," "Jackson," and "Radio Ethiopia," because they tried doing those and realized they couldn't get far. They do some other covers more successfully with "Love Is All Around" and "Spooky." 

One bummer though is that there is no banter between songs at all. In fact, the ends of the songs are usually cut off a couple of seconds early. I did a little editing to fade the songs out in a way so the abrupt endings aren't so noticeable. But note that it's not a big problem, since it's literally just a matter or a second or two in most cases. Still, if anyone has a more complete version with the banter between songs, please let me know so I can post that here.

R.E.M. did a similar show for "2 Meter Sessie" in the Netherlands. I found three songs on that that they didn't play at the main KCRW show here, so I've added them as quasi-bonus tracks at the end. The sound quality is equally good on that.

To summarize, if you have the "Unplugged" album, this isn't that different. But still, it's a fun listen, and it's cleaner without the audience clapping. The KCRW portion is 43 minutes long. If you add in the extra songs, the album is 56 minutes long.

01 World Leader Pretend (R.E.M.)
02 Half a World Away (R.E.M.)
03 Disturbance at the Heron House (R.E.M.)
04 Radio Song (R.E.M.)
05 Low (R.E.M.)
06 Love Is All Around (R.E.M.)
07 Tusk (R.E.M.)
08 Losing My Religion (R.E.M.)
09 Bandwagon (R.E.M.)
10 Endgame (R.E.M.)
11 Jackson (R.E.M.)
12 Swan Swan H (R.E.M.)
13 Spooky (R.E.M.)
14 Radio Ethiopia (R.E.M.)
15 Fall on Me (R.E.M.)
16 You Are Everything (R.E.M.)
17 Fretless (R.E.M.)
18 Belong (R.E.M.)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16697040/REEEM1991_AcoustcKCRWStdiosSntaMnicaCA__4-3-1991_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes from the Mountain Stage concert that I mentioned above.

R.E.M. - Chronic Town - Expanded Version (1982)

I must say I'm not a huge R.E.M. fan, so I don't plan on posting a bunch of their stuff here. But I do really like a lot of their songs. I actually think some of the best material they ever did came on their EP "Chronic Town," released in 1982, a year before their first album, "Murmur." So I've expanded that EP to a full album, using other songs from that time period. I think if this had been released as an album, it would be considered one of their very best.

The "Chronic Town" EP only contains five songs, but all of them are very solid. (I selected a different vocal mix for "Gardening at Night," but the difference is minor.) That totals 20 minutes.

To fill out the rest of the album, I next turned to other material released prior to "Murmur." All I know of is their first single, "Radio Free Europe," and its two B-sides, which was their very first release of any kind, back in 1981.

The song "Radio Free Europe" was rerecorded in 1983 and put on that year's album "Murmur." It's that 1983 version that became a minor hit single and still gets played on the radio today. Personally, I prefer the 1983 version. But the band members actually much prefer the original 1981 version, after initially disliking it. In the liner notes to the 1988 compilation "Eponymous," the band even said the original "crushes the other one like a grape." In any case, they're both interesting, and since the 1983 version is widely available on "Murmur" and elsewhere, I've only included the original version.

The rest of the songs here weren't released at the time but came out later. One, "Romance," was redone a few years later for the "Eponymous" compilation, but this is the still unreleased 1982 version. "All the Right Friends" is from 1983, but I've included it here because it was in their setlist as far back as 1981. I want everything here to be from 1982 or earlier, but I used the 1983 version because it has the best sound.

I've included another 1983 song as a kind of bonus track, "Tainted Obligations." It's a strange and very obscure one, because it's not exactly an R.E.M. song, even though lead singer Michael Stipe sings it. It was done by a side project called the "Community Trolls," which was essentially just the duet of Stipe and Matthew Sweet. This is pretty interesting to me because Sweet was a musical nobody at the time, having just started his musical career. He wouldn't hit it big until 1981. But he was living in Athens, Georgia, at the time R.E.M. was starting to make waves, and apparently Stipe saw something in him. They didn't really do much except for this one song, but it's a good one. It wasn't released until many years later.

I've also included an acoustic version of "Gardening at Night" as a bonus track. I don't know when it was recorded, but I'm guessing 1982.

I think this is an excellent album, even if you're only a casual R.E.M. fan. They have a youthful, punky energy that you don't hear so much with their later material. Even the weaker songs are carried along by their enthusiasm.

01 Radio Free Europe (R.E.M.)
02 Sitting Still (R.E.M.)
03 There She Goes Again (R.E.M.)
04 White Tornado [Instrumental] (R.E.M.)
05 Wolves, Lower (R.E.M.)
06 Gardening at Night [Different Vocal Mix] (R.E.M.)
07 Carnival of Sorts [Box Cars] (R.E.M.)
08 1,000,000 (R.E.M.)
09 Stumble (R.E.M.)
10 Romance (R.E.M.)
11 Ages of You (R.E.M.)
12 All the Right Friends (R.E.M.)
13 Tainted Obligations (Community Trolls [Michael Stipe & Matthew Sweet])

Gardening at Night [Acoustic Version] (R.E.M.)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16697042/REEEM1982_ChroniTwnExpnded_atse.zip.html

The cover art is simply the cover for the EP, unchanged.