In 1983, in the blossoming music scene of Athens, Georgia, future rock stars Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet crossed paths and collaborated on a short-lived project known as Community Trolls. They wrote and recorded three songs together, one of which, "Tainted Obligation," would have a bit of history of its own before its official release in 2002.

Background

As a teenager in Lincoln, Nebraska Sweet was a big fan of Mitch Easter. Easter had produced R.E.M.'s first single, the Hib-Tone version of "Radio Free Europe"—Sweet especially loved its B-side, "Sitting Still"—so when R.E.M. performed at The Drumstick in Lincoln in September 1982, Sweet went to the show. At that point R.E.M. hadn't hit it big yet, so there was almost nobody at the concert. Sweet met the band and gave Michael Stipe a tape of songs he had been working on. They also put him in touch with Mitch Easter. Sweet had read about the Athens, Georgia music scene in punk and New Wave magazines, and learned more about it from talking to R.E.M., who were from Athens, but Easter also told Sweet about the city and helped persuade him to move there.

Meanwhile, Michael Stipe really liked Sweet's tape, and also played it for his sister Lynda Stipe. She invited Sweet to come open for her band Oh-OK in Athens. In the late spring of 1983, just before graduating from high school, he went down to Athens, and within a week was a member of Oh-OK, who recorded their E.P. Furthermore What that August with him onboard. While a member of Oh-OK, Sweet also found time to collaborate with Michael Stipe on the Community Trolls songs.

Songwriting

Sweet has described the duo's songwriting as follows:

[Stipe] was the real powerhouse behind it. I was pretty tentative in those days. We just sat around, Michael went through the little book he wrote lyrics in, with me just kind of strumming along behind.

"Tainted Obligation"

Sometime in the autumn of 1983, Stipe and Sweet recorded their three song demo, but only "Tainted Obligation" has been released from that session. Stipe plays accordion and sings lead vocals, and Sweet plays acoustic guitar and does harmony vocals. Rolling Stone describes the song as "enchanting" with "harmonies as pretty as you can imagine.

In 1986, "Tainted Obligation" was slated for, but was not ultimately released on, the Demon Records compilation album Don't Shoot, which featured such artists as John Doe, Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs, The Divine Horsemen and Clay Allison.

In the early 1990s, the song would surface as "Tainted Obligations" on R.E.M. bootlegs such as Stab It and Steer It and Wolves, Lower.

The song was finally released officially on the 2002 Matthew Sweet compilation To Understand: The Early Recordings of Matthew Sweet.

Live performances

The Stitchcraft

On September 30, 1983, Community Trolls played a set between two R.E.M. sets at the Stitchcraft in Athens, Georgia, performing five songs: "Six Stock Answers" (sometimes known as "6 Stock Answers For 74,000 Questions"), "My Roof Your Roof", "Pale Blue Eyes" (Lou Reed), "Tainted Obligation" and "Sweet Jane" (Lou Reed). Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Curtis Crowe may have performed with them.

"Six Stock Answers" and "My Roof Your Roof"

The R.E.M.-related website remchronicle notes that these songs, which appear on bootlegs of the Stitchcraft show, have never been officially released. The website R.E.M. Reconstruction of the Pop Songs 1980-2001, whose authors met Sweet and asked him about Community Trolls, credits Stipe and Sweet as the songs' co-writers.

"Six Stock Answers" was used in a low budget forty-five-minute Super-8 film called Just Like A Movie, shot in September 1983 in Athens by New York Rocker magazine photographer Laura Levine, a friend of the members of R.E.M. One scene in the film, a parody of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" sequence in D.A. Pennebaker's Bob Dylan documentary Dont Look Back, shows Michael Stipe wearing a skirt and tights flipping placards with the song's lyrics, "Six stock answers to 74,000 questions" repeated ad nauseam. Just Like a Movie's plot has two rival bands performing on the same night, leading up to the climax question of "Which band is everybody going to go see?" R.E.M. biographer Marcus Gray believes it is likely that the Stitchcraft show, including the Community Trolls' set, was used in the film and provided the answer to this question.

Other performances

Community Trolls' first performance was busking outside the 40 Watt Club in Athens, sometime in September 1983, and Peter Buck and Curtis Crowe may have played with them this time too. In addition, Sweet joined R.E.M. onstage on October 3 at the Legion Field in Athens to perform "Pale Blue Eyes"; Oh-OK was one of the opening acts for that show.

Post-Community Trolls

The Community Trolls collaboration lasted only this very short period of time, and then Sweet began his next project, The Buzz of Delight, as a side project from Oh-OK, while Stipe continued his work with R.E.M., who would soon find big success with their album Murmur.

Sweet began distancing himself from other people in the Athens, Georgia music scene and in 1984 quit Oh-OK; in 1985, he got a record deal with CBS Records and moved to New York City. Sweet was accused of selling out and using his Athens connections to get a record deal and leave. Sweet maintains that when he went to CBS he never claimed to have anything to do with Athens, so that nobody could say he used the town. He says that after months of living in Athens he realized things weren't as happy there as everyone pretended, and that there was backstabbing going on. In 1993 he said:

Things really turned dark there when R.E.M. got famous, because everyone wanted that fame so bad. Maybe I wanted it too, but I had this musical goal all of my own and wasn't going to go along with the way it was done there.

Everybody was telling him that he should be touring and building up a following before doing his record, like R.E.M. had done. However, more than making the record itself and becoming a rock star, Sweet's main motivation was to get money to buy studio gear.

R.E.M., for their part, held no hard feelings towards Sweet. Peter Buck has said, "The guy wanted to make records. I don't see anything wrong with that." Still, Sweet said in 1995 that he and the band were no longer very close, and when asked about the possibility of him touring with them, he replied he wasn't sure if the band would want to.

In 1996 or 1998, Sweet recorded with R.E.M.'s Mike Mills on the song "The Ballad of El Goodo," on the Big Star tribute Big Star Small World, which was finally released in 2006. Sweet sang vocals (and possibly played guitar), Mills played bass, and Jody Stephens played drums.

References

• Black, Johnny. Reveal: The Story of R.E.M. (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2004). ISBN 0-87930-776-5
• Gray, Marcus. It Crawled from the South—Rev. ed. (Da Capo Press, 1997). ISBN 0-306-80751-3
• Schinder, Scott. Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-A-Rama (New York: Delta, 1996). ISBN 0-385-31360-8

Notes

External links

• R.E.M. 1982 Concert Chronology. Gives information about R.E.M.'s performance at The Drumstick, where they would first meet Matthew Sweet, as well as a picture from the show.
• John Keane Studios Client List
• "Tainted Obligation" lyrics