R.E.M.: The Peter Buck Tapes

So, how are you spending your summer?

Now that school's out--I was teaching a couple courses last semester, but I'm off 'til January--my current project is organizing/sifting through all the live music and other bootlegs I accumulated back in my tape/CDR-trading days. I've been ripping some shows to my digital library (something I started a few years back but never finished), and purging some of the lower quality recordings that are taking up space but aren't worth holding onto.

Mostly it's just giving me an excuse to listen to a lot of stuff I haven't heard in awhile (if ever).

Currently I'm working my way through a ton of R.E.M. boots. I'm starting out with the really early stuff--including a great boot called The Peter Buck Tapes, a selection of soundboard recordings (apparently hand-picked by Buck) from the band's 1981 gigs at Tyrone's in Athens, Georgia. I have a few different complete shows from this era (and I wrote about another early Tyrone's boot previously), but this is a fun way to hit the highlights. There's a mix of the songs the band dropped before they got to the recording studio--usually for good reason, though they're fun enough party tracks (and I do wish we had studio versions of some of these)--as well as primal versions of songs that'd show up on the first few records with a bit more polish. The band had been together for about a year by this time, and they were already pretty tight, but the performances are still raw and energetic.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with early R.E.M., this one is actually available on the Internet Archive, and you can play or download it here.

Partial set from 1981:

How my library is shaping up: