YEAR
2007
INDUCTED BY
Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam)
CATEGORY
Performers
Out of the underground and into the arena.
R.E.M. is the indie band that went on to sell out stadiums; their arrival marked the beginning of alternative rock. They’re strange, poetic, guarded and mischievous—we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Bill Berry
Michael Stipe
Mike Mills
Peter Buck
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Anthony DeCurtis
For a while in the early eighties, it sometimes seemed that nothing in the world of music was as important R.E.M. Maybe even outside the world of music, too.
This was well before the band had enjoyed million-selling albums, huge radio hits, and groundbreaking videos. Devotion to R.E.M. was far less clinical and far more intimate than such quantitative measures.
Indeed, for years it seemed that everybody who loved R.E.M.’s music had personally met the members of the band, or at least seen them perform in the dingy new-wave clubs and out-of-the-way holes-in-the-wall the band played relentlessly.
