John Michael Stipe (/ˈstaɪp/; born January 4, 1960) is an American singer, songwriter and artist, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of alternative rock band R.E.M.
Possessing a distinctive voice, Stipe has been noted for the "mumbling" style of his early career. Since the mid-1980s, Stipe has sung in "wailing, keening, arching vocal figures" that R.E.M. biographer David Buckley compared to Celtic folk artists and Muslimmuezzin.[2] He was in charge of R.E.M.'s visual aspect, often selecting album artwork and directing many of the band's music videos. Outside the music industry, he owns and runs two film production studios, C-00 and Single Cell Pictures.
As a member of R.E.M., Stipe was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. As a singer-songwriter, Stipe influenced a wide range of artists, including Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Thom Yorke of Radiohead.[3]Bono of U2 has described his voice as "extraordinary",[4][5] and Yorke told The Guardian that Stipe is his favorite lyricist, saying "I loved the way he would take an emotion and then take a step back from it and in doing so make it so much more powerful".[6]
At age 14, Stipe was turned on to punk rock by an article in Creem magazine by Lisa Robinson on the CBGB scene. The article featured a photo of Patti Smith, whom Stipe came to idolize. He remembers buying her debut album, Horses, the day it came out. “Since then, I never looked back.”[16]
Career
Boat Of
In the early 1980s, Stipe played in the group Boat Of with Tom Smith, who would later found the groups Peach of Immortality and To Live and Shave in LA. Also in Boat Of were Carol Levy and Mike Green.[17][18][19]
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While attending the University of Georgia in Athens, Stipe frequented the Wuxtry record shop, where he met store clerk Peter Buck in 1980.[20] "He was a striking-looking guy and he also bought weird records, which not everyone in the store did," Buck recalled. The two became friends; they eventually decided to form a band[21] and started writing music together,[22] although at the time Stipe was also in a local group named Gangster.[23] Buck and Stipe were soon joined by Bill Berry and Mike Mills, and named themselves R.E.M., a name Stipe selected at random from a dictionary.[24] Stipe was the youngest member of the band.
All four members of R.E.M. dropped out of school in 1980 to focus on the new band.[25] Stipe was the last to do so. The band issued its debut single, "Radio Free Europe," on Hib-Tone; it was a college radio success. The band signed to I.R.S. Records for the release of the Chronic TownEP one year later. In 1983, R.E.M. released its debut album, Murmur, which was acclaimed by critics. Stipe's vocals and lyrics received particular attention from listeners.[2]Murmur went on to win the Rolling Stone Critics Poll Album of the Year over Michael Jackson's Thriller. Their second album, Reckoning, followed in 1984.
In 1985, R.E.M. traveled to England to record their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, a difficult process that brought the band to the verge of a break up.[26] After the album was released, relationships in the band remained tense. Gaining weight and acting eccentrically (such as by shaving his hair into a monk's tonsure), Stipe later identified himself as suffering from depression and exhaustion during this period, saying "I was well on my way to losing my mind."[27][28]
They toured in Canada and throughout Europe that year; Stipe had bleached his hair blond during this time.[29][30]
Bill Berry left R.E.M. in 1997, and the other members continued as a three-piece. R.E.M. disbanded amicably in 2011. Stipe confirmed in 2021 that they had no plans to reunite.[31]
Projects
In September 1983, a few months after the release of R.E.M.'s debut album, Stipe participated in a low-budget, forty-five-minute Super-8 film called Just Like a Movie, shot in Athens by New York Rocker magazine photographer Laura Levine, who was a friend of the band. Those with acting roles in the film included Levine, Stipe, his sister Lynda, Matthew Sweet (who formed a short-lived duo, Community Trolls, with Michael Stipe),[32] and R.E.M.'s Bill Berry.[33] The film remains unreleased.
In the period 1990–92 Stipe was involved with the band Chickasaw Mudd Puppies. He co-produced and featured on their two albums: White Dirt (1990) and 8 Track Stomp (1991).[34]
Stipe had planned a collaboration with friend Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, in 1994, partly in an attempt to lure Cobain away from his home and his drug addiction. However, they did not manage to compose or record anything before Cobain's death. Stipe was chosen as the godfather of Cobain and Courtney Love's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. R.E.M. recorded the song "Let Me In" from the 1994 album Monster in tribute to Cobain.[35] In 2023, Stipe would officiate the younger Cobain's wedding to Riley Hawk.[36]
Stipe was once very close to fellow alternative rock singer Natalie Merchant and has recorded a few songs with her, including one titled "Photograph," which appeared on a pro-choice benefit album titled Born to Choose, and they appeared live with Peter Gabriel singing Gabriel's single "Red Rain" at the 1996 VH1 Honors and a few other times.[37]
Stipe and Tori Amos became friends in the mid-1990s and recorded a duet in 1994 called "It Might Hurt a Bit" for the Don Juan DeMarco motion picture soundtrack. Both Stipe and Amos decided not to release it.
Stipe inducted the American grunge band Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 10, 2014.[43] He debuted his first solo composition at Moogfest in 2017.[44] Later that year, he performed with Fischerspooner on the new song "Have Fun Tonight" from their 2018 album, Sir.[45] Stipe released the solo song "Future, If Future" on March 24, 2018,[46] followed by "Your Capricious Soul" on October 5, 2019.[47] "Drive to the Ocean" was released for his 60th birthday on January 4, 2020.[48]
Photography has long been a passion for Stipe and he has been carrying a camera with him since his teenage years when he photographed shows featuring Ramones, The Runaways and Queen.[49] In 2018, Stipe released a book of his photography entitled Volume 1,[50] which featured 35 photographs of such celebrities as River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.[49] A second volume with Douglas Coupland, Our Interference Times: A Visual Record, was released in 2019.[51]
Stipe began recording his first solo album at Electric Lady Studios in New York City in 2023, writing and producing "synth-infused, poppy" songs with longtime collaborator Andy LeMaster.[53]
In early 1987, Stipe and Jim McKay co-founded C-00 Films,[20] a mixed-media company that was "designed to channel its founder's creative talents towards the creation and promotion of alternative film works."[54] Stipe and his producing partner, Sandy Stern, have served as executive producers on films including Being John Malkovich, Velvet Goldmine, and Man on the Moon.[55] He was also credited as a producer of the 2004 film Saved![56]
In 1998, he worked on Single Cell Pictures, a film production company that released several arthouse/indie movies.
Stipe has made a number of acting appearances on film and on television. Stipe appeared in an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete as an ice cream man named Captain Scrummy.
Stipe expressed solidarity with the people of the Gaza Strip during the 2023 Israel–Hamas war. He signed an October 2023 open letter of artists to President Joe Biden urging a ceasefire in Gaza.[64]
Personal life
Stipe is vegetarian and owned a vegetarian restaurant, the Grit, in Athens, Georgia.[20] He lives with his long-term partner, photographer Thomas Dozol, in New York and Berlin.[65][66]
In 1983, Stipe met fellow musician Natalie Merchant of the band 10,000 Maniacs; the two started a friendship, and eventually had a romantic relationship for a period of time.[67]
With the success of the albums Out of Time (1991) and Automatic for the People (1992), R.E.M. became mainstream music stars. Around 1992, rumors that Stipe had contracted HIV began to circulate. He responded with the following:
Not that I can tell. I wore a hat that said "White House Stop AIDS." I'm skinny. I've always been skinny, except in 1985 when I looked like Marlon Brando, the last time I shaved my head. I was really sick then. Eating
potatoes. I think AIDS hysteria would obviously and naturally extend to people who are media figures and anybody of indecipherable or unpronounced sexuality. Anybody who looks gaunt, for whatever reason. Anybody who is associated, for whatever reason – whether it's a hat, or the way I carry myself – as being queer-friendly.[68]
In 1994, with questions remaining, Stipe described himself as "an equal opportunity lech," and said he did not define himself as gay, straight or bisexual, but that he was attracted to, and had relationships with, both men and women. In 1995, he appeared on the cover of Out magazine. Stipe described himself as a "queer artist" in Time in 2001 and revealed that he had been in a relationship with "an amazing man" for three years at that point.[69] Stipe reiterated this in a 2004 interview with Butt magazine. When asked if he ever declares himself as gay, Stipe stated, "I don't. I think there's a line drawn between gay and queer, and for me, queer describes something that's more inclusive of the grey areas."[70]
In 1999, author Douglas A. Martin published a novel, Outline of My Lover, in which the narrator has a six-year romantic relationship with the unnamed lead singer of a successful Athens, Georgia-based, rock band; the book was widely speculated, and later confirmed by its author, to have been a roman à clef based on a real relationship between Martin and Stipe.[71][72] The two had previously collaborated on two books, both in 1998: The Haiku Year (for which the two had both contributed haikus)[73] and Martin's book of poetry Servicing the Salamander (for which Stipe took the cover photograph).
Musical style
Stipe with R.E.M. performing at Langerado, 2008
Stipe has a baritone vocal range.[74] His role in the songwriting process for R.E.M. was to write lyrics and devise melodies.[75] While each member was given an equal vote in the songwriting process, Peter Buck has conceded that Stipe, as the band's lyricist, could rarely be persuaded to follow an idea he did not favor.[76] Stipe sings in "wailing, keening, arching vocal figures" that R.E.M. biographer David Buckley compared to Celtic folk artists and Muslimmuezzin.[2] Stipe often harmonizes with Mills in songs; in the chorus for "Stand", Mills and Stipe alternate singing lyrics, creating a dialogue.[77] Early articles about the band focused on Stipe's singing style (described as "mumbling" by The Washington Post), which often rendered his lyrics indecipherable.[78] Stipe commented in 1984, "It's just the way I sing. If I tried to control it, it would be pretty false."[79]
Stipe has earned recognition from the music industry for his unique voice. Bono remarked in 2003 that Stipe has an "extraordinary voice," adding "I often tell him I think he's a crooner, and he doesn't like that very much. But it is sort of one part some sort of Bing Crosby '50s laid-back crooner, and one part Dolly Parton."[4] In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Stipe at number 152 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.[80]
Stipe insisted that many of his early lyrics were "nonsense," saying in a 1994 online chat, "You all know there aren't words, per se, to a lot of the early stuff. I can't even remember them." In truth, many early R.E.M. songs had definite lyrics that Stipe wrote with care.[81] Stipe explained in 1984 that when he started writing lyrics they were like "simple pictures," but after a year he grew tired of the approach and "started experimenting with lyrics that didn't make exact linear sense, and it's just gone from there."[79] In the mid-1980s, as Stipe's pronunciation while singing became clearer, the band decided that its lyrics should convey ideas on a more literal level.[82] Mills explained, "After you've made three records and you've written several songs and they've gotten better and better lyrically the next step would be to have somebody question you and say, are you saying anything? And Michael had the confidence at that point to say yes...."[83] After what Stipe has referred to as "The Dark Ages of American Politics" [The Reagan/Bush Years], R.E.M. incorporated more politically oriented concerns into his lyrics on Document and Green. "Our political activism and the content of the songs was just a reaction to where we were, and what we were surrounded by, which was just abject horror," Stipe said later. "In 1987 and '88 there was nothing to do but be active."[84] While Stipe continued to write songs with political subject matter like "Ignoreland" and "Final Straw," later albums have focused on other topics. Automatic for the People dealt with "mortality and dying. Pretty turgid stuff," according to Stipe;[68]Monster, meanwhile, critiqued love and mass culture,[84] and Reveal dipped into mysticism.
With Our Favorite Band: "Dreamin' of Eternity" Saturday Nights ... Sunday Mornings (1987)
With 10,000 Maniacs: "A Campfire Song" on In My Tribe (1987); "To Sir, with Love" and "Candy Everybody Wants" on Few & Far Between EP (1993)
With Warren Zevon: "Bad Karma" on Sentimental Hygiene (1987) (Berry, Buck, and Mills of R.E.M. served as Zevon's primary backing band on the record as well)
^Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. "Artist Biography". AllMusic. Retrieved January 1, 2015. Stipe, whose on-stage behavior was always slightly strange, entered his most bizarre phase, as he put on weight, dyed his hair bleached blonde, and wore countless layers of clothing.
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