“Living Well is the Best Revenge (Live)” – R.E.M.
(Words/music: Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe, available on Live at the Olympia, Warner Brothers 2009)

Earlier today, Yahoo! Sports Kelly Dwyer wrote an unexpected treatise on fandom.  I encourage you to read his post not only if you’re a sports fan, but if you’re a passionate fan of anything.  Dwyer, a life-long Chicago Bulls fan, looked back at his obsessive fanaticism during the end of the Bulls’ dynasty and subsequent recession into mediocrity.  His advice is to maintain joy even in the most critical moments.  “Nothing’s guaranteed save for the joy you create,” Dwyer writes, and the more I thought about what he wrote, the more it made sense beyond the world of sports.  Even if there aren’t championships to win or lose in music (and let’s be honest, the Grammy’s or Billboard #1s aren’t equivalents), there’s the same gamut of emotions when a favorite band missteps or disappears, whether it’s betrayal or disappointment or depression.  To be a fan is to open yourself up to heartbreak as much as it’s to open yourself up to euphoria.

As a fan, I have the longest and strongest allegiances to R.E.M..  They were one of the first bands I obsessed over, and remain the band I return to the most often.  They are the most played band on my Last.fm profile by several hundred plays.  Over the past decade and a half, I’ve seen the band’s popularity recede and return gently.  Their output over this period runs the gamut from surprisingly charming to crushingly disappointing, to the point where I started to write the band off around the middle of the last decade.  This is what made 2008’s Accelerate such an important album – one that revived my faith in the band and brought me back to long-forgotten corners of their back catalogue.

When the band toured in support of the album in 2008, I bought tickets to three different shows, none of which were in my home state.  I ventured to Massachusetts and came within 30 feet of the stage.  I braved a torrential downpour and near-brush with lightning in Long Island.  I took several days off from work to take the train down to Philadelphia and even bought scalped tickets just to move up a couple dozen rows.  Despite the time and money invested, I didn’t question my decision because deep down, I knew the fleeting nature of this moment.  Somewhere deep in my brain I knew that the band might never sound this good again (and the jury’s out on that, hopefully I’m wrong), but rather than dwell on the tour as the band’s swan song, I wanted to be in the house for every possible second I could.  To this day, I have notebook pages full of thoughts from these shows, dozens of blurry pictures, and archived downloads of every bootleg I could find.  I’m even on YouTube ruining a perfectly good video of “Begin the Begin” by singing along too close to the camera.  All of these artifacts bring me back to the sheer joy of seeing one of my favorite bands perhaps at their best moment during my fandom.

“Joy” is the operative word here, and it’s the key to being a fan.  As Dwyer suggests, there will always be imperfections (not to mention the lingering feeling that what goes up must come back down).  These are valid parts of fandom yet shouldn’t preclude the reason for being a fan in the first place.  In reference to these moments, Dwyer says, “So make them work for you. Don’t ever let up, and question everything, but make them work.”  It’s easier said than done, especially when disappointment sets in.  Still, I’m brought back to the end of Michael Stipe’s speech accepting R.E.M.’s enshrinement in the rock and roll hall of fame.  Stipe shares that his grandmother interpreted the band’s name as an acronym for “remember every moment,” and I can’t think of a better definition of fandom than that.

More on R.E.M.: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm