R.E.M. were hardly short of potential hit songs on their mega-selling 1992 record Automatic For The People. Their eighth record is one of the most rustic and languid efforts of the Athens, Georgia quartet’s career, its homespun twang, stirring strings and sparse acoustic strums allowing their way with an indelible melody to really come to the fore.
Drive, Everybody Hurts, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, Sweetness Follows, Nightswimming – this was R.E.M. in the midst of a majestic imperial phase. But the record, which arrived only a year after their other mega-selling classic Out Of Time, very nearly came to completion without one of its most famous tracks.
The band were in the final stages of making the album, mixing it at Bad Animal Studios in Seattle, but the song that would become Man On The Moon was still lacking vocal. Guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry had completed their work on the track and loved what they’d done. Frontman Michael Stipe was having a bit of a mental block about what he might do when it came to singing on it, though. Instead, he thought it was fine as it was.
“We’d been leaning on Michael very heavily for some time trying to finish it,” Mills told NME a few years ago. “He was like, ‘Oh, it’s an instrumental’ and we were like, ‘It is not an instrumental – you need to finish it because it’s a story that needs to be told’.”
Realising he wasn’t going to get away with this instrumental campaign he was trying to push – and let’s be honest, its traditional verse-chorus-verse structure and the fact it’s simply crying out for a vocal would’ve made it one of the weirdest instrumentals ever – Stipe chucked a copy of the recording into his Walkman and went for a stroll.
“I went walking around downtown Seattle and came up with this little lyric,” he told MTV’s Benjamin Wagner in 1999. “I went back to the studio, put it down, sang it, mixed it that night, and the next morning we had to send the tape to the record company to be mastered. And that was Man On The Moon.”
Quite what Stipe encountered on his little dander that provoked such a crystallised, evocative lyric who knows, but the singer was obviously taken back to his youth, his mind cast back to All The Young Dudes stars Mott The Hoople and comic maverick Andy Kaufman, two cultural forces of the mid-70s that had meant a lot to the 15-year-old Stipe.
As he pulled at that thread, a song about conspiracies in the air at the that time began to take shape in his head. “What the song is about is some crackpot theories of the 1970s,” he said, “the most primary being that NASA and the US military and the government conspired to fake the 1969 moon walk; that, in fact, what we were watching on television was a stage set in some secret place in the Arizona desert.
Second, that Elvis Presley was still alive. And then, in 1984 when Andy Kaufman, Elvis impersonator and prankster extraordinaire, died, the rumour began that he had faked his own death. That’s what Man On The Moon is about.”
Stipe first encountered Kaufman watching Saturday Night Live in 1975 and was immediately enraptured by his chaotic surrealism. “At 15 years old, inexperienced, naïve as shit, I was like, ‘This guy is completely brilliant, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before’,” he said. “I followed his career until his death and, obviously I guess, beyond his death. He galvanised a nation in three and a half minutes on live television.”
Being in Seattle also influenced the vocal in other ways, with the “yeah, yeah, yeah”’s that are present at the end of each line in the verses part of a competition Stipe had with Nirvana, then breaking big off the back of Nevermind’s release the year before. Stipe had become friends with the trio and had noted that Kurt Cobain had written a number of songs with the word “yeah” in them. He saw it as a challenge.
“I told Kurt that I was going to write a song that had more “yeahs” in it than anything he’d written,” Stipe said. He managed it too. “I think there’s 54 “yeahs” in the song,” he added, triumphantly.
Released as a single in November 1992, Man On The Moon went on to become one of R.E.M.’s biggest songs and all-time anthems, its impact prompting the 1999 biopic about Andy Kaufman that used the name of the song as its title and starred Jim Carrey. R.E.M. would have involvement in that film, writing the soundtrack and penning a sort of sequel to Man On The Moon (the song) in its lead song, their 1999 single The Great Beyond. Man On The Moon, the song that almost never was, had taken on a life of its own.
