Quotes About Mike Mills
Peter Buck
“The main ingredients of R.E.M. are Michael’s strange sense of melody and Mike Mills’s sturdy bass lines. There’s nothing unconventional about our song structures and to that extent R.E.M. is hardly esoteric.”
“When we first met Mike, he was so drunk, he was hanging on to this bar and weaving. Michael said: ‘No way am I gonna be in a band with him.’”
On writing songs while working at Wuxtry:
“They have two stores in town and one is pretty big, but I’d be working at the one that’s not the busiest store. Mike would come by with a 12-pack, and we’d sit and drink beer all afternoon and play guitar. My boss was real cool, he’d say, ‘Okay, just don’t get so drunk that you can’t run the cash register.’ “
“I do have my front porch, and Mike will come over every now and again with an acoustic guitar and sit on the porch and drink wine or something. We just sit on the porch swing and play guitars.”
“In the old days, If I was gone for a year it meant I ate nothing but cheese sandwiches or the deli tray and slept on the floor of someone’s house or in the van or shared a room or, even worse, a bed with Mike Mills.”
“I just figured that you’d meet the right people, the you’d get in a band, then you’d make the good music, and people would come and see it. I didn’t realise that lots of people spend their entire lives trying to find the right combination and it doesn’t work. I didn’t realise until about a year later that, ‘Gee, this is kind of special.’ We never even tried anyone out. We were two separate camps. We basically walked in and said, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’, picked up our instruments, and two days later we were a band.”
“Mike Mills, especially in the early days, was a much better instrumentalist than I was, so it was natural he would come up with the melodies and harmonies and I played the chords.”
On recording Murmur:
“Mike and Bill in particular are really great musicians. I wrote a lot of the songs so I could play the guitar parts perfectly well but Jimi Hendrix it wasn’t. I remember at one point Don Dixon suggesting I do a little guitar solo. I just said, ‘I don’t do guitar solos.’ And he said, ‘All four of you guys solo all the time, it just happens to fit together! Mike’s bass lines are all solos!’ He had a point. What we did wasn’t playing over each other, it was about interlocking.”
“Whenever we sound check, Mike and I try to outdo each other.”
On their most bizarre gig:
“Bill, Mike and I backed up a stripper once, that was pretty cool. Her tape didn’t work. It was at a fraternity party. So we did like six Freddie King songs in a row. She was like naked for an hour. People were throwing money at her. We’d stop and she’d say, ‘Keep going’, because the bills were piling up on the stage where she was spreadeagled.”
On recording the first Hindu Love Gods single:
“Bryan Cook is just a friend of ours. [...] We were doing a demo with Warren [Zevon] and he had 15 minutes off and said ‘Let’s cut a record’ so we called Bryan and said ‘come on over and we’ll do two of the songs we did live’ and we did those two. ['Gonna Have a Good Time' and 'Narrator'] He was kinda bemused, Mike Mills was standing over his shoulder yelling out the chord changes.”
“We have a rule of no. If we can’t make up our minds, then we don’t do it. It has to be all four in one direction. If one person really thinks that something is wrong and is passionate a bout it, even if we think he is wrong, we agree with him. Like on the new record [Out Of Time], we were playing with something where there’s a little sample in it. I like when people sample records. Mike Mills is against it. He really hates the idea. So we’re gonna make samples of our own stuff to use, because he feels real strongly that it’s wrong.”
On fighting with his bandmates:
It’s just like any marriage. It’s when you don’t talk about stuff that things get bad. Me and Mike have wrestled on the ground before. We’ve thrown things at each other and cursed and broken things. But I argue less with the three of them than I do with my parents.
On making the record The Jewel Thief with Nikki Sudden:
“At that point, Bill and Mike and I had been playing together for 12 years. And that was right after the ’89 tour. So we had literally played together 350 days a year for the last 11 years. We were rehearsing at that time to do, I guess, Out of Time. So, you know, we were in REALLY good shape. There was NO rust. Nikki would show us a song; we’d kind of go through the chords and play it twice.”
“With Warners we signed a contract with the five of us (including Jefferson) and we provide them with services. We provide songs for records, videos, live performances, but there’s no guarantee that we’re all going to appear on the record. We gave them a verbal agreement that most of us would play on the records – and we will, we enjoy doing that – but if we all agree that R.E.M.’s going to make a record and it’s going to be Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, that’d be fine. I doubt we’ll ever do that, because we’re all arrogant and want to have our own input.”
On Automatic for the People:
“That album was kind of like, dare I say, The White Album. It was a weird record. We didn’t do a whole lot of playing together. We never played ‘Sweetness Follows’ or ‘Nightswimming’ as a band. Bill and I aren’t even on ‘Nightswimming.’ I’m not on ‘Find The River.’ Mike’s not on ‘Sweetness Follows.’ Bill wrote ‘Everybody Hurts’ and he’s hardly on it.”
“‘Nightswimming’ is the only song we’ve ever written where the words came first. During the mixing stage of Out of Time, Michael came to us with a complete set of lyrics and suggested that we might want to put them to music. Being competitive bastards that we are, Mike and I started auditioning chord changes and tunes for Michael. The two tunes of mine that Michael rejected eventually became ‘Drive’ and ‘Try Not to Breathe.’ Mike had a piano instrumental that he played to Michael. He listened once, nodded his head to hear it again, and on the second pass he sang the lyrics. It was ‘Nightswimming,’ exactly like the record we would record a year later. I was standing in the corner dumbfounded.”
On recording New Adventures in Hi-Fi:
Most of the latest R.E.M. songs were written last year on tour, following a plan that was hatched during the promotional interviews for Monster. They would talk to journalists, two by two: Berry & Buck, Mills & Stipe. The first pair began to tell interviewers that they were going to record the next R.E.M. live on the road, in the manner of Neil Young’s Time Fades Away. Half an hour later, the same interviewers would ask Mike and Michael about it. “And then they’d say to us,” Peter Buck remembers, ‘What’s all this shit about us doing some kind of live record?’ “
On the band nearly splitting up in 1998:
“Did we row? No. We’re not really shouty types. I tend to get pissed off, then Michael gets upset, and Mike’s like, ‘Well I don’t know.’ We’d just go in circles.”
On “At My Most Beautiful” from Up:
“Obviously, this is our tribute to the Beach Boys. Mike told me that when he and Bill Berry lived in Macon, they would cruise the city, singing along with a Beach Boys eight-track. He said it really stretched their upper ranges. Until the day Bill quit, they could still hit those notes.
The bass part on this is probably my favourite line that Mike has ever come up with. When we play it live, I play bass. I feel like such a pro, up on stage playing this super cool part.”
On “Animal” from In Time:
“It was recorded in about 15 minutes. Within a couple of weeks from first hearing it, Michael had written and sung the vocals (including that creepy robot backing vocal). Mike then out on his Arabic-type vocal, I added lead guitar and it was finished. Now all I have to do is convince the guys everything should be done this quickly. Who knows? It could happen.”
“‘Mike and Michael travel a lot more than me. So I sometimes get these 4am phone calls from the other side of the world. I have to remind them that I’ve got to get the kids off to school in two hours’ time.”
“I think Mike’d be satisfied if we did a record every two years and toured for three months. And Michael doesn’t want to tour as much, but I think he foresees it going on for a long time. And I foresee the possibility of it going on for a while, but also, I can see myself walking away from it. But not today.”
Michael Stipe
“When I first saw Mike Mills, he was wearing bell-bottoms, and he had a stupid haircut, and he looked like the nerdiest nerd of all nerds. I said there was no way I’d be in a band with him, because he looked terrible! Obviously I’ve eaten my words.”
On which actors he’d choose to play R.E.M. members:
“For me, well, it would have to be… no it couldn’t be… he’s a jerk… but hold on… it would have to be a jerk to play me. I would choose Red Skelton. Joan Collins would be Peter Buck. I think I should be played by Jacquieline Bissett in my younger life, when they aribrushed my face and everything. Mike Mills would be played by Sally Fields and Billy Berry, Bo, would be Sarah Bernhardt. Oh and we’d have Jodie Foster as our manager – that’s essential!”
“We live completely different lives. The fact that we can make it work keeps us together. I mean, Mike Mills plays golf. That’s something you won’t ever see me do.”
On “Find The River”:
“I do love that song. Mike and I, when we wrote it, would drive around Miami in a convertible at three in the morning, and sing along to it. No words, just singing, both of us doing these climbing harmonics. It was so much fun to… cure yourself in that way.”
On visiting new cities and countries:
“Both Mike and Pete are much smarter than I am and better read. I’m jealous of that. Mike’d know about this place, the history of the city. Same thing with Peter…”
“Peter and Mike are encyclopaedic in their knowledge of music history: this is what breaks up bands and this is what makes bands start sucking. Here’s how we can avoid these obvious pitfalls. Preserve your sanity and enable yourself to do it for a while and not suck or sell out.”
“One of the things that has stood between us as co-writers and also as friends – it has become a huge issue – is the different ways that we work. Peter works really fast. He’s in the moment, but he’s superprepared. He wants to record the songs as fast as possible, once, and be done and walk away. Mike shows up and he creates in the moment. And I often show up in the studio with ideas, but nothing completed. I take the longest to finish my part. So you have three people who are trying to work with each other, but none of us work in the same way.”
On the band nearly breaking up in 1998:
“I wound up figuring out something that I had never been able to figure out before, which was: who am I after R.E.M.? I now know, and I’m OK with it. I’m just not a whole lot without them. I’ve got a nice voice and good cheekbones, but without those guys writing songs with me, I don’t know that anyone would ever hear what I have to say.”
“Mike and Peter are great musicians but there are things they simply can’t do. Most great musicians are technically not the very best. We all have to learn to live with our limits and develop something new within the borders – that’s where the real chances are.”
“I just have a huge amount of respect and love for those guys. I can’t think of anybody I’d rather work with than Peter and Mike. I know that sounds cheesy, but I think what we do has a significance greater than anything I could do with anyone else.”
On cancelling the U.K. shows in 2005 when Mike Mills was hospitalised with an ear infection:
“We’re not a band that cancels shows left and right. In Sheffield, Mike held out until the last possible moment because he didn’t want to disappoint the fans. But 45 minutes before we were due on stage I looked at him and realised there was no way he could go on. He could barely stand, let alone play. It was a hangover from the flu he picked up while we were in Europe. So we sent him to the hospital instead. He was heartbroken.”
Stipe “outs” his bandmates in 2008:
“R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Peter Buck have announced today, after years of awkward speculation, that they are heterosexual, or straight. I am happy for my bandmates and congratulate their candidness and their courage at making this bold statement. I stand beside them as always and I’m proud of their strength of character in this difficult, but liberating, decision to come forward. I can say on their behalf that they’re relieved to acknowledge their real selves publicly. Mike Mills said, and I quote: It was time to step out of the fog, fag, fog, fag… the fog of uncertainty and into the light of light.“
On making Accelerate:
“We went to the most obvious place, which was to do really fast songs that were really short. Peter did what he does, I did what I do, and Mike did what he does, so we kind of trimmed the fat, if you will, and got down to the very basics that make each of us musicians. And so what you’re left with is this type of material performed with Peter doing… a couple of times in the past ten years, I’ve said to him, ‘I want that thing again.’ Just for the longest time I said, ‘Stop doing that,’ to Peter. Or, Mike would be like, ‘The vocal is really great as it is, and it’s coming from an articulated place conceptually, so I don’t think it really needs background vocals.’ So he wouldn’t do background vocals. Or, I would say, ‘Yeah, I think it stands alone.’ Or whatever. So anyway, we threw our cards on the table and did what comes naturally when we’ve got a more broken-down palette of colors to work with.”
On “Living Well Is The Best Revenge”:
“Mike [Mills] and I laughed when I told him that I had managed to rhyme ‘apostle’ with ‘nostril.’ Not a rhyme for present-day American radio.”
Bill Berry
“I hated Mike from the first time I saw him, ’cause he had the same kind of nerd appeal that he has now, and I was just starting to experiment with drugs and stuff. He was everything I despised: great student, got along with teachers, didn’t smoke cigarettes or smoke pot.”
“It’s amazing how little we’ve changed over the years. I think we all still weight the same. Peter is still cynical. Mike is still a huge sports fan. And Michael still eats seeds and weeds and stuff.”
The Sidekicks
Bill Rieflin on his favourite song to play live:
“‘Harborcoat’ is fun if only because I get to laugh as Mike struggles with his really fast bass part.”
Scott McCaughey on Baseball Project’s song “Yankee Flipper”:
“That’s actually a true story. It’s all my recollection along with help from the other parties involved of an evening in New York with Jack [McDowell] and Dennis [Diken] from the Smithereens, who’s an old friend of mine, and Mike Mills and I. We had this accidental night on the town that apparently didn’t end real well for Jack. The next game was the one where he got shelled and then he flipped off the crowd as he was being taken out of the game. Then Mike and I were always like, ‘Oh shit, was that our fault?’ We always felt bad about it so that’s why writing the song was sort of my sharing a little bit of the blame with him.”
Scott McCaughey on Fantasy Baseball:
“Mike Mills had been trying to get me to join for years because he’s in all sorts of leagues and I always said I couldn’t because I’d spend too much time with it. It has come true. I spend way, way too much time on it. Mike is in our league too and he’s in four other leagues as well and I still don’t think he spends as much time on it as I do in the one league that I’m in.”
May 10th, 2012 at 10:56 pm
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