30 Years Ago Today – R.E.M. Release ‘Lifes Rich Pageant’ (Watch “Begin The Begin” Live ’86)

30 years ago today (7/28/86), R.E.M. released their fourth studio album Lifes Rich Pageant.The now classic album featuring bushy unibrow drummer Bill Berry on the cover became the band’s most commercially successful album in the U.S., peaking at #2 and featured the single “Fall on Me.” Featuring ecologically conscious material (“Cuyahoga”). Life’s Rich Pageant represented a willful, if careful, nod to the mainstream in collaboration with producer Don German and  this is the record R.E.M. began to make itself more clear, not just in Michael Stipe’s markedly more prominent vocals, but in the mechanics of the band as well. Watch R.E.M. perform “Begin the Begin” off Lifes Rich Pageant live in Dekalb, IL from 1986.

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