1
A few things that make perfect sense in retrospect, after everything he’s done and the way he did it:
Of course the teenage Michael Stipe was a Rocky Horror Picture Show guy.
Of course he was one of the cultists who attended the satiric horror-slash-musical movie’s weekly midnight showings at the Varsity Theater, right there among St. Louis’s other young outsiders, the arty and theatrical and socially dispossessed, the glams and nerds and punks. Anyone an adolescent jock of the late 1970s might refer to, with a derisive snort, as a fag.
And it goes without saying that the young Stipe dressed for the showings in the most outlandish fashion, dolled up as the film’s main hero/villain, the sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, clad in a leather jacket, bustier, stockings, and one of his mom’s strands of pearls, with dark red lipstick and extremely heavy and artfully applied mascara.
And also a button featuring the male/female logo of the lightly transgressive ’70s rock band Blue Öyster Cult.
A TV news crew came to see the Rocky Horror gang that spring, to report a feature story about the bizarre goings-on taking place at the university district theater’s midnight screenings each week. Who knew there could be all these kids dressed up and dancing around, week after week, chorusing key lines of dialogue back at the screen in perfect synchrony, singing along to the songs, leaping to their feet to do the Time Warp again, and again?
Mike Stipe, a senior at Collinsville High School, was in the thick of it, and when the TV news showed up, lights, camera, and all, he beelined right over to see what was going on.
A bunch of kids were standing there, as people do when a portal to fame slides open, but the reporter was focused on one young woman who was excitedly explaining why she was about to see the movie for the sixty-first time. The reporter, expert at drollery, was making gentle but pointed sport of her. “Devotion has its limits,” he was saying. “Sixty is enough. But one more time?”
Mike Stipe was eighteen years old and already impatient. He wasn’t going to be a bystander to this. Not when The Rocky Horror Picture Show was being discussed. So he spoke up. Interrupted interviewer and interviewee in mid-discourse, and grasped the moment.
“This is an excellent movie. It really is,” Mike declared. “And we’re all quite normal, really.”
The reporter was incredulous. How, he wondered, gesturing to the be-dragged, bewigged gaggle of teens, could they even begin to seem normal?
Mike mused for a moment. What were the usual signifiers for standard-issue St. Louis teens? Well, nearly every lunkhead patrolling the hallway at school came wearing the same T-shirts for the same mainstream rock radio station, so . . . He spoke in quick bursts, thinking aloud about how a normal-seeming teen would behave:
“Show up . . . tomorrow afternoon . . . dressed up in our little KSHE pig shirts and our blue jeans.”
Around him, a burst of knowing laughter as the reporter continued. “That’d be normal?”
Mike, amid more laughs: “I guess . . . for the normal St. Louis KSHE fan, yes, it would.”
The laughter, gaining force, became something else: applause.
They applauded him. Or maybe they were applauding themselves.
Mike’s eyes shifted away from the TV reporter to focus on something else. Something that wasn’t visible yet but was out there, somewhere. Maybe closer than it seemed.
2
Many years later, nearing the end of yet another concert in front of yet another packed hall, Michael Stipe noticed a pair of school-aged boys standing in front of his stage. His band had just finished one song and he was about to set up the next, but first he pointed into the crowd. “Kiddo! Hey, kiddo, come on up. You too. Come on up.”
R.E.M. was taping a show for the Austin City Limits public television series. The stage was low, and the boys, one about eleven years old, the other maybe thirteen, came bouncing up the stairs to stand there and beam excitedly at the singer. After asking their names (Simon and Elliott), Michael shook their hands and asked if they were seeing their first R.E.M. concert. They both said yes, so he asked what they thought. The smaller boy, Simon, who was not the least bit shy in front of a thousand concertgoers, a bank of television cameras, and the millions of viewers watching from afar, didn’t hesitate. “I think you’re awesome,” he declared, and Elliott agreed. “That just about sums it up.” This was in 2008, nearly thirty years into a career that had elevated him far above an ordinary person’s experience of life and hero worship. But the singer seemed not just surprised but actually a little stunned by the boys’ compliments. His eyes sparkled, and he laughed. “I like you guys a lot!” he said, taking a moment to shake both their hands one more time. The boys hopped back down into the crowd and he stood at the microphone, still giggling with happiness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I feel awesome.”
Everyone carries their childhood with them throughout their adult lives, and though being part of a military family meant being perpetually on the move, Michael recalled his earliest years as extraordinarily warm and fulfilling. Asked in 2001 where he first felt like he really belonged, he didn’t hesitate: as a child. “My entire childhood,” he said, “I felt I really belonged to a strong family.”
Born on January 4, 1960, John Michael Stipe was the son of John Wesley Mobley Stipe Jr., a rising officer in the U.S. Army, and the former Marianne Hatch, both from small towns in Georgia.
John, a square-jawed young man, came from Augusta, Georgia, and attended North Georgia College, a military institution where he regularly made the dean’s list while earning degrees in physics and mathematics. Ambitious and energetic, he also played intramural sports and served in straight-arrow organizations including the Scabbard and Blade military honor society, the Forensic Senate, the Officer’s Club, the NCO Club, the Radio Club, and the Physics Club. John was still a student at North Georgia College when he met Marianne Hatch, a schoolmate who came from Hapeville, Georgia, a small town just south of Atlanta. The couple married in 1956 and settled in Decatur, Georgia, near Bainbridge Air Base, where John went to flight school. There John learned how to pilot helicopters and used his math skills to help compute the ebb and flow of goods and weaponry in the Army’s supply chain. Cyndy, the couple’s first child, arrived in 1958. Michael came two years later, and the baby of the family, Lynda, was born in 1962, just before John was assigned to a new post on a base in Texas.
From there the Stipe family rotated from one military base to the next as John’s career grew and his duties expanded. From Texas to Alabama to Germany and then back to Texas, where Marianne and the children lived while John served in Vietnam, flying reconnaissance missions in search of enemy positions. The helicopters flew low over the jungle, and when they located the Vietcong embattlements, the air outside the plastic bubble encasing Major Stipe and his crew would erupt with bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-aircraft weapons. Recon helicopter squads faced near-daily battle, were often hit, and regularly got shot down. The pilots who survived the six months of hazardous duty usually went home or switched to less dangerous duty as soon as possible. A few found something transcendent in battle: the heightened consciousness of living on the edge of death. When Major Stipe’s hitch in recon was over, he signed up for six more months at the front.
At home in Texas, Marianne and her young kids focused on their days. Breakfasts, school bells, classes, picture books, episodes of the animated Stone Age sitcom The Flintstones, the comic adventures of the pretend-gone-real pop band the Monkees, and whatever cartoons they could catch after school. Being close in age, and by necessity, Cyndy, Mike, and Lynda were one another’s best playmates. When Cyndy got a transistor radio around her tenth birthday, in 1967, they all tuned in to the Top 40 and country stations that crackled across the Texas airwaves. At seven years old, Mike fixed on the poppier songs: “Sugar, Sugar,” as performed by the Archies, a group of musicians masquerading as characters from the Archie comics, along with the hits of the Monkees and the songs performed on the Banana Splits Saturday morning show.
The country music they heard was nearly as cartoonish, the airwaves overflowing with the likes of Johnny Cash’s oddball “A Boy Named Sue,” Merle Haggard’s grumbling hippie takedown “Okie from Muskogee,” and Tammy Wynette’s pre-feminist anthem “Stand by Your Man.” A chorus of oddball voices, serious and silly, celebratory and mournful, all of them blowing around the heads of children whose family was defined by the absence of a father whose days they couldn’t imagine.
Major Stipe’s tour of duty ended in 1972 and he received a new assignment at an army base near St. Louis, Missouri. This time the family moved off-base, buying a home in the suburban town of Collinsville, Illinois, just fifteen miles from the center of St. Louis. The house, a split-level, four-bedroom home at 408 Camelot Drive, stood on a street of midcentury homes not far from Interstate 55. It had a long, sloping front lawn and a backyard separated by a short fence from the Town & Country pool, a neighborhood club that was a magnet for Collinsville youth in the warmer months. Mike was thirteen years old when they got there, an incoming eighth grader in a new town with a new school full of unfamiliar kids and a dad he had barely seen since he was a grade schooler.
To connect with his son and help him meet other boys in their new home, John Stipe signed them both up for the Boy Scouts, Mike as a Tenderfoot Scout and John as the troop’s scoutmaster. Bill Dorman, who befriended Mike when both of their troops were at scout camp in Missouri, was struck instantly by the Stipes, father and son. Dorman recalls the elder Stipe, by then a lieutenant colonel in the Army, as a near caricature of a military man. From the broad-brimmed cavalry hat that accentuated his six-foot-four frame to his prominent mustache, the pipe in his mouth, and the red flight suit he always wore, he looked as though he’d just stepped out of a helicopter. When Dorman saw Apocalypse Now a few years later, he wondered if Robert Duvall’s character, the bluff warrior Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, with his broad-brimmed cavalry hat and hyper-macho posture, had been based on Lieutenant Colonel Stipe, who was a ringer in every way except for the bluster. On the rare occasion when the elder Stipe did speak, he did it so quietly you’d miss it if you weren’t right next to him.
Copyright © 2024 by Peter Ames Carlin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
