The Alternative Number Ones: R.E.M.’s “Drive”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

The first thing that we see through the strobe-lit slo-mo black-and-white haze is a sea of hands. There's a terrifying mass of young people here, and they are in ecstasy, to the point where they stop being individual people and transform instead into an abstract impersonal whole. At first, we don't know why these kids are so excited. Maybe they're raving. Maybe they're at an especially fired-up youth service. Maybe they're crazy in the head. After 10 seconds, though, Michael Stipe's form comes tumbling into view, and the context snaps into focus. These kids are rocking and possibly also rolling, and their hands hold aloft Stipe, their golden idol.

Michael Stipe was not the first rock 'n' roll star to crowd-surf in a music video. By fall 1992, the act was already de rigeur, the type of youth activity that got parodied in commercials. Earlier that year, Eddie Vedder elevated the rock-star stage-dive to as-yet-untouched heights in the "Even Flow" video, plummeting from the rafters like New Jack in ECW. ("Even Flow" peaked at #21 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. Pearl Jam will eventually appear in this column.) But the crowd-surf meant something else when Michael Stipe was the one up there.

The grunge revolution, still in its relatively early stages in 1992, probably would've been impossible if R.E.M. hadn't been there first. Through the '80s and early '90s, R.E.M. were the single most important alternative rock band in America. They came into being at a time when notions of alternative and indie rock were just becoming their own things, and they ascended through the college-radio circuit to actual real-deal stardom, their pop-radio conquest serving as a proof-of-concept for the whole idea of the alternative rock youthquake. Grunge kids idolized them -- not just the fans, but also the musicians. Critics loved them. Radio programmers loved them. They accomplished the impossible, and in so doing, they made it possible. That sense of possibility lifted up scores of younger bands.

Automatic For The People, released in the heightened moments before the 1992 presidential election that swept the band's fellow Southern liberal Bill Clinton into power, was the first R.E.M. record of this new alt-rock age. Maybe the band's "Drive" video, with its heaving mass of abstracted kids, represents their reflection on that moment. Michael Stipe might float atop these kids, but he is not one of them. When he sings to the kids on "Drive," he addresses them as a distant and mysterious figure. His intentions are not clear, and neither is the level of his sincerity.

"Drive" is not an alternative rock song in the same way that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is an alternative rock song. R.E.M.'s track is quieter and more atmospheric, driven by acoustic guitars and strings and maybe an accordion. But both "Drive" and "Teen Spirit" share an implacable ominousness, a sense that the youthquake might not be all it's cracked up to be. In ways that the band might not have been able to articulate at the time, they tapped into a bleak emptiness during what felt like an exciting time. They understood something, and now we're still trying to understand "Drive."

R.E.M. wanted to make a rock album. That was the initial idea, anyway. They were still deep in the album cycle for 1991's Out Of Time, the LP that elevated them to true mega-platinum crossover pop stardom, when they started on it. On Out Of Time, R.E.M. went comparatively gentle, switching instruments around and drifting into serene chamber-folk. That's the record that cracked the VH1 code and put R.E.M. alongside U2 in the ranks of crossover alt-rock titans. R.E.M. decided not to tour behind Out Of Time, so they only took 18 months between meticulously crafted albums. But when the band got to work on the record that would become Automatic For The People, the songs that came out weren't rock, exactly. They were heavy, but they were a different kind of heavy.

The members of R.E.M. were all lifelong record-store nerds, and they understood that peak moments do not last. They figured that they had no chance at equalling the wild commercial success of "Losing My Religion" and Out Of Time, so they took that consideration off the table. Still, the band wrote new songs in the same way that they did when coming up with Out Of Time. All the non-Michael Stipe members got together all the time in their rehearsal studio, trying out new ideas. All of them were still living in Athens, where people tended not to bother them too much, so the process was easy. They liked writing without drums, so drummer Bill Berry switched over to bass, and everyone tried out different instruments.

One of the band's instrumental jams led to the track that became "Drive." They might've been trying to write faster rock songs, but "Drive" could've never been anything other than a smoky dirge. The song, especially in its original form, is a sparse little twinkle. It doesn't sound quite like anything that R.E.M. had made before, but it still has the band's chiming interplay at work. The guitars and bass sound like they're talking to each other, their melodies overlapping and building on each other. Eventually, they added more layers of sound. Peter Buck overdubbed crunching, dramatic power chords that don't arrive until late in the track, while motherfucking John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin arranged the song's swirling, bittersweet strings. It's fun to think that R.E.M. responded to the younger generation's '70s riff-rock fixations by getting one of the three surviving Zeppelin guys to help out on their record. (Jones arranged the strings for a bunch of Automatic For The People tracks.)

Once the band had the instrumental "Drive" track mapped out, Michael Stipe came in with his lyrics. As always, those lyrics are elliptical and evocative, and he doesn't like to get too concrete about what they mean. Instead, when he talks about the "Drive" lyrics, Stipe likes to throw weird shit out there. This one, for instance, was the first song that Stipe ever wrote on a computer, though it's hard to picture him hunching over a primitive Mac with a postage-stamp screen and typing out "smack, crack, shack-a-lack." If anything, that image just muddies the waters further.

But "Drive" leaves us plenty of clues. It's the first song on Automatic For The People, so both the track and album open with Stipe's heavily reverbed voice chanting, "Smack, crack, bushwhacked." When Stipe was campaigning for Michael Dukakis in 1988 -- Stipe loves doomed Democratic candidates -- he tried to turn the word "bushwhacked" into a catchphrase. The effort didn't work, and George H.W. Bush won, but Stipe brought it back for R.E.M.'s election-year album when Bush was back on the ballot. He also quoted heavily from David Essex's weird, oblique 1973 bubble-glam nugget "Rock On." In 1989, the soap-opera star Michael Damian had a #1 hit with a "Rock On" cover, so memories of that song still lingered in the 1992 cultural memory. I bet Stipe would claim that he'd never heard the Damian version, but it might've helped the world become more receptive to "Drive."

On "Rock On," David Essex combined spare, haunting psychedelic production with the kind of '50s sock-hop lingo that would've already been deeply outmoded by the time he recorded the song. "Rock On" sounds a bit like a sardonic meditation on the entire idea of youth culture, though I have no idea whether that's what Essex intended. On "Drive," Stipe quotes Essex's "hey kids, rock 'n' roll" lines, giving them another layer of remove. Stipe sings right to the kids, telling them that nobody tells them what to do or where to go. Maybe it's irony. Maybe it's detached admiration. Whatever the intention, Stipe sounds like someone who's observing a generational shift without quite taking part in it.

Stipe didn't really do interviews behind Automatic For The People, so it was mostly up to his more outgoing bandmates to provide context, and they weren't really interested. Instead, they continued to remind the world that R.E.M. are not a lyrics-first band. With "Drive," a casual listener can understand every word that Stipe sings, which wasn't the case with R.E.M.'s early records. Still the choice remains: You can get really into poetic analysis of whatever Stipe sings, or you can just let it wash over you. With "Drive," as with the other hits, most of us went with the second option.

With "Drive," that second option becomes easier because the song has no proper chorus. Certain phrases reappear several times, usually tweaked in one way or another, but there's no dramatic moment where the music rises and Stipe invites us to sing along. Instead, the track plays out as a fugue. Its structure is mostly evident only in the build -- the part where the distorted guitars come in, the part where the strings get loud and heavy, the part where Stipe sounds less like he's chanting and more like he's shouting. It's not catchy in the way past R.E.M. singles were, but it sucks you in anyway. While "Drive" is no jump-around song, it made sense to see Stipe crowd-surfing in the video -- partly because of the track's coiled intensity, partly because we were entering the era when kids would mosh to anything. My experience with alt-rock radio-station festivals begins in 1995, but by then, kids were moshing to the piped-in music between bands.

Years later, R.E.M. released their "Drive" demo. They had the song fully written before laying down the full studio version, but it feels incomplete without the heavy chords and the strings. R.E.M. recorded Automatic For The People over a bunch of different sessions, co-producing it with longtime collaborator Scott Litt, and they knew how to pull stadium-rock moves without letting them sound like stadium-rock moves. While they didn't tour behind Automatic, R.E.M. played one live show at Athens' 40 Watt Club, and they later released that night's live version of "Drive" on the Greenpeace benefit compilation Alternative NRG. That version shows that "Drive" would've functioned just fine as a more straightforward riff-rocker, but it doesn't have the same brooding churn as the final studio version.

For me, as for a lot of people, Automatic For The People is R.E.M.'s masterpiece. They went insular after blowing up, but their insular music turned out to be as grand and powerful as their most pop-leaning. The tracks on Automatic are purposeful but elliptical, and they speak to some eternal rock 'n' roll understanding. The record came out a month after my 13th birthday, and it's maybe the first time I can remember realizing that I was hearing a grand-scale statement right away. "Drive" isn't the best song from Automatic, but it makes a certain sense as the lead single. It's a throat-clearing, a table-setting. It establishes the mood that R.E.M. continue to explore for the rest of the LP. Also, R.E.M. didn't like the idea that they were fleecing the public by releasing upbeat, bouncy lead singles for morbid, textured albums. If the lead single was as morbid and textured as everything else, then nobody had to feel guilty.

"Drive" felt like a huge deal when it came out. The single arrived in September 1992, and it seemed to carry some mysterious power. Peter Care, who'd directed R.E.M.'s previous "Radio Song" clip, made the "Drive" video, and I think it might be R.E.M.'s best. It's kinetic and entrancing but also minimal, and it respects the stillness of the song even when it's showing Peter Buck, surrounded by kids, grinning loopily while being blasted with a firehose. When that video came on, I would stop talking and sit entranced for four and a half minutes. Bonus lore: Oliver Stone and the late River Phoenix both came to the video shoot, and they got into a fistfight in the band's trailer. Apparently, Phoenix handily won.

R.E.M. also contributed a montage, set to "Drive," that aired during a Rock The Vote TV special that I recorded on VHS and watched a bunch of times. (I was two presidential elections away from being able to vote, but the "rock" part got my attention.) Today, that montage seems as comically meaningless as a Crystal Pepsi commercial, but this was a time when you could attempt profound statements without worrying about people dunking on you online.

"Drive" was never going to be a slam-dunk pop hit like "Losing My Religion" -- though that one was was also pretty unlikely in retrospect. Still, "Drive" had a nice long stretch atop the Modern Rock chart, and it also went #2 on Mainstream Rock and crossed over to the Hot 100, where it peaked at #28. That's the highest chart position for any Automatic For The People song, though a couple of others came close. Right away, it seemed clear that Automatic wouldn't sell as well as Out Of Time, and this was probably what R.E.M. anticipated. Out Of Time was a #1 hit, while Automatic debuted at #2 and never got any higher -- not with Garth Brooks' The Chase sitting right there.

Still, Automatic For The People is full of great songs, and the album kept spinning off singles for a long time. R.E.M. never officially released the strident and purposeful "Ignoreland," the album's most upbeat track, as a single, but that song still made it up to #5 on the Modern Rock chart in December. (It's a 9.) Around the same time, America's critics voted Automatic For The People the year's third-best album on the Pazz & Jop poll. The only records ahead of it were fellow Georgia natives Arrested Development's 3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of... -- critics loved that one -- and Pavement's Slanted And Enchanted. On that year's singles ballot, "Drive" came in at #13 -- behind TLC's "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" and ahead of the six-way tie of Das EFX's "They Want EFX," k.d. lang's "Constant Craving," Prince's "Sexy MF," the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under The Bridge," Pete Rock & CL Smooth's "They Reminisce Over You (TROY)," and Wreckx-N-Effect's "Rump Shaker." Good songs! (Arrested Development topped the singles poll, too.)

R.E.M.'s first proper single after "Drive" was "Man On The Moon," which I remember hearing all the time but which didn't get past #2 on the Modern Rock chart. (It's a 9.) There are so many other great songs on that album, and many of them found their way into the cultural lexicon, but the other ones didn't do all that great on the Modern Rock chart. "Nightswimming," for instance, never made the chart. Neither did "Try Not To Breathe." You believe that shit? Instead, the only other Automatic tracks that made the chart were "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite," which only reached #24, and the almost shockingly straightforward anti-suicide ballad "Everybody Hurts," which was all over MTV but which stalled out at #21 at Modern Rock. Today, "Everybody Hurts" has more streams than any R.E.M. song not named "Losing My Religion." Al Green just covered it yesterday.

Once again, R.E.M. opted not to tour behind Automatic For The People. They were in a groove, and they wanted to stay there. Still, Automatic kept selling. Within a few years, Automatic was quadruple platinum, just like Out Of Time before it. Just like Out Of Time, Automatic also got nominated for Album Of The Year at the Grammys. (It lost to the Bodyguard soundtrack.) R.E.M. might've assumed that their imperial moment was already over, but they were wrong. Before the Automatic For The People album cycle was complete, R.E.M. even made the top 10 on the Modern Rock chart with an Automatic outtake. Their song "Photograph" featured backup vocals from the band's friend Natalie Merchant, and it popped up on the 1993 benefit compilation Born To Choose and peaked at #9. (It's a 7. Merchant's band 10,000 Maniacs will appear in this column very soon.)

Even without touring between albums, R.E.M. still took a while to make their Automatic For The People follow-up. Eventually, the band reemerged with the fuzzed-up rock record that they'd intended to make in the first place. We'll see them in this column again.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: In 2007, before I worked for the site, Stereogum put together a free-download compilation called Drive XV: A Tribute To Automatic For The People. A bunch of that era's indie blog-rock types -- the Wrens, Dr. Dog, Blitzen Trapper, You Say Party! We Say Die! -- covered every song on Automatic For The People and then some. Here's the Veils' contemplative take on "Drive":

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's the acoustic "Drive" cover that the aforementioned Eddie Vedder recorded for the soundtrack of the 2021 Sean Penn movie Flag Day:

(As a solo artist, Eddie Vedder's highest-charting Modern Rock song is 2007's "Hard Sun," which peaked at #13. Vedder will eventually appear in this column as a member of Pearl Jam.)

THE 10s: Bob Mould reemerged from the wreckage of Hüsker Dü and his underperforming early solo records with the fired-up and melodic power trio Sugar. One of their earliest singles, the dizzy-dazed shimmy-stomp howler "Helpless," peaked at #5 behind "Drive." And now you'll find, as time goes by, it's a 10.

The Screaming Trees' soaringly catchy bubblegrunge fuzzblaster "Nearly Lost You," a towering highlight of the big-deal Singles soundtrack, also peaked at #5 behind "Drive." Did you hear the distant cry calling out that it's a 10?