Fables of years spent on the road. Decadent tales of groupies and drugs and arrogance and misspent lives near the top. You won’t find any of that here, although a friend of the band’s claims a magazine once approached him to write this type of expose on the members of R.E.M., a rock band so nearly perfect in integrity and beliefs that it’s sometimes difficult for cynics to believe that anything this refreshing could possibly be “real.”

R.E.M.’s rise has been one of the more classic (and classier) rock stories of the 1980s. In the grand tradition of the ’60s garage bands, R.E.M. formed five years ago in Athens, Georgia to just have fun, as well as an artistic outlet. “We weren’t thinking about making records or even playing in a club,” says singer Michael Stipe. “It just kind of happened. It’s just really been an interesting series of mistakes.”