NEW ADVENTURES IN HI-FI

Armed with a Rickenbacker and a Fender Twin, Peter Buck helped R.E.M. put alternative rock on the map. Producer Mitch Easter reveals the genius behind the jangle pop.

- JOE BOSSO

Before it was alternative rock, it was post-punk, and before that it was garage rock. For a brief period in the early ’80s, however, the preferred nomenclature was college rock, and the undisputed kings of the scene were R.E.M.

“Sometimes terms can be such funny things,” says Mitch Easter, the North Carolina–based producer and musician who guided the sessions for R.E.M.’s first four recordings. “College rock — we never took that one seriously. We just thought, Oh, college stations are playing the music? That’s good. It wasn’t something we really bothered ourselves with.”

By 1980, Easter was already something of a happening music figure in and around his hometown of Winston-Salem. He had played guitar in a number of local bands, some of them featuring his childhood pal Chris Stamey, who would go on to achieve indie success as a member of the dB’s and as a solo performer. That same year, Easter eyed a move into production, so he converted his parents’ garage into a small recording space and dubbed it the Drive-In Studio, offering super-low rates as an enticement to young talent.

“I had 16 tracks,” Easter recalls. “It was the beginning of the indie studio scene, and a lot of small places only had eight tracks, which is perfectly legit. But I wanted to leapfrog that and go into what I considered to be big-time pro recording. We had a simple console, a handful of microphones and two compressors, and I also had a two-inch 3M tape machine from a studio in Atlanta. The Drive-In was pretty new when R.E.M. came in. I had recorded three or four bands there by then, but I was still puttering around and getting it figured out.”