“So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)” – R.E.M.
(Words/music: Billy Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe, available on Reckoning, I.R.S. 1984)
The story goes that I never slept an entire night as a baby until my brother was born in October of 1984. At that point, Pete took the crib and I moved to a bed and I started sleeping. For those first eighteen months, my mom would sit up with me in the rocking chair in their living room and watch TV. MTV was one of her favorites, probably because there was little else on overnight in those early days of cable, and thus even to this day claims familiarity with anything MTV played, no matter how weird or obscure, from 1983 to 1984.
Fast forward roughly a decade and a half – I’m still watching MTV late at night (usually by choice, often through tapes of 120 Minutes the following morning) and I’ve started scouring through R.E.M.’s fairly expansive back catalog. This includes finding a used copy of the Succumbs VHS in order to see all of the band’s videos. Each video carried an element of familiarity (after all, I knew these songs as well as I knew anything at that age), but the visuals – often surreal, often extremely dated – were a new experience to absorb. Except for the video for “So. Central Rain” – for whatever reason, the silhouettes of the band members behind a shaggy-haired Stipe seemed strangely familiar. It wasn’t until a few years later that I arranged all of the pieces in a way best described as unlikely and apocryphal.
Still, it’s worth asking – did I recognize the “So. Central Rain” video from those late nights as a baby? Was it possible that my first memory, even if I couldn’t associate it with a time, was of a music video?
I’ll be reasonable – this is wishful thinking at best. However, the facts all align: I was already a year old when the single came out in May 1984, and if I really slept as rarely as my mom tells me, chances are we saw this video a few times during those late nights. A decade later, in the time between New Adventures in Hi-Fi and Up, I grew to love the band, starting a life-long love and borderline obsession with music. Is it possible that my tastes, whether specific points like R.E.M. or just general predilection for jangly, wordy, melancholy music goes back to the sounds and pictures that accompanied my newborn insomnia?
Chances are this is a case of my brain constructing memories where there are gaps, letting “what-if” gradually twist itself until theory becomes personal folklore and personal folklore becomes history. I accept the improbability of this chain of events and recognize that it’s just my mind playing tricks on me.
At the same time, a tiny part of me wants to believe this version of history. After all, how perfect would that be?
(On a historical note, Blender had a nice feature a few years ago that serves as a small oral history of the song, starting with its genesis from a weather report and including its performance on David Letterman’s Late Night before it had a title and the aforementioned video’s live vocal track. It’s certainly worth a read!)
More on R.E.M. : Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
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