Songoftheday 8/24/18 - Smack crack bushwhacked, tie another one to the racks baby...
from the album Automatic For The People (1992)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 8
Today's song of the day comes from the alternative rock band R.E.M., whose first album of the 1990s, Out Of Time, had been their most successful to date, scoring two top ten pop hits in America with "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People". At the start of 1992, the band contributed a song to a tribute album to Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, and the result, "First We Take Manhattan", climbed to #11 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart. They then set out to record their eighth studio album, originally titled Star. Meant to be a harder-rocking affair, by the time the set was finished it would be their most brooding and intricately arranged record yet, and the one many fans and critics consider the group's best. Rechristened Automatic For The People, the album's lead single would be the epic and dark "Drive". Written by the band (Michael Stipe, Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills), who produced it with Scott Litt, the song would be a more difficult listen than the easily accessible singles from Out Of Time, but in the end more thoughprovoking. The string section, arranged by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Young, brings even more musical drama to the piece...
"Drive" became R.E.M.'s fifth top-40 pop hit in the U.S. in December of 1992. The song spent five weeks at #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock radio chart, as well as two weeks at #2 on their Mainstream Rock format tally. Internationally, the single made the top ten in Norway (#3), Ireland (#4), New Zealand (#5), and Canada (#7), and reached the top-40 in the UK (#11), Germany (#13), the Netherlands (#13), Belgium (#13), Sweden (#24), and Australia (#34). The Automatic For The People album was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 1994, losing Alternative Album to U2's Zooropa and Album of the Year to the Bodyguard soundtrack.
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Here's the band performing the singles "Everybody Hurts" and "Drive" on the MTV Music Awards in 1993, when their clip for "Man In The Moon" was nominated for six awards but they came home empty...
...and live in concert in Austin in 2008...
Lastly, a show in 2009...
Up tomorrow: 70s pop icon eulogizes a young boy gone too soon.
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