(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
There comes a definitive moment in the life of every artist when they are, for the first time, exposed to the unlimited artistic expression that they are capable of achieving. In the life of REM songwriter and titan of alternative rock, Michael Stipe, that moment came at the hands of punk progenitor, Patti Smith.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that Smith was the one who first set Stipe on his path to musical greatness, given the sheer breadth of her influence over the world of musical misfits, outcasts, and punks. From the sticky floors and rat-infested walls of New York’s CBGB club, Smith became one of the earliest and most endearingly abrasive voices in the blossoming punk scene of the mid-1970s, with albums like Horses and a litany of expectedly chaotic live performances making her a true trailblazer of the movement.
For somebody like Stipe, growing up in Georgia, the distant sounds of CBGBs might as well have been multiple universes away. A teenager of the punk years, he arrived just a little bit too late to fully take advantage of the age of safety pinned nihilism, but that didn’t stop him from immersing his young ears in every scrap of the scene that managed to hit the wider airwaves. Inevitably, then, Horses was a huge album for Michael Stipe during his younger years.
As the veteran songwriter revealed to Rolling Stone back in 2021 – not that it was ever in doubt anyway – Patti Smith was the catalyst for his earliest musical dreams, and the track ‘Birdland’ was particularly impactful. “That was the song that I just said, ‘what the fuck is this?’ And I never looked back,” he declared. “I decided I would dedicate myself to art and to music. I was going to be a singer in a band.”
“It didn’t occur to me that I would have to (A) be able to write lyrics, (B) be able to sing, (C) be able to stand onstage and perform in front of people,” Stipe continued, though he managed to pick up each of those skills pretty sharpish after formulating REM during his college days in 1980. Still, without ‘Birdland’, he might never have attempted at all, and the world of American alternative rock would sound very different as a result.
Sonically, ‘Birdland’ certainly stood out, both on the Horses tracklisting and within the short, sharp CBGB scene. A largely improvisational nine-minute jaunt into Smith’s jazz influences, albeit blended with the raw power of her punk prowess, the song was reportedly inspired by a book on the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, penned by his son and detailing the intense grief following his father’s passing.
In other words, the song is an unlikely punk anthem, but one which sounded unlike anything else being performed at that time in the mid-1970s, much less recorded and released unto an unsuspecting audience.
For Stipe, that otherworldly quality proved to be the spark that opened his mind up to an endless number of artistic possibilities. Aside from anything else, it perfectly captured the DIY ethos of punk; that kind of ‘if we can do it, so can you’ attitude that spawned countless revolutionary outfits in its wake.
Particularly during their earlier years, REM dedicated themselves to that punk attitude almost entirely, attempting to emulate the levels of originality and artistic intrigue which ‘Birdland’ had provided a young Michael Stipe with years prior.
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