The Buck stops here

"I was really happy with the last one, but as good as it is, it did have the feel of different people coming in on different days recording different things. But this time around, it tended to be groups of us who went in and recorded. Not every single one of us could go in on every single day; there were a couple of things that were recorded when I was in Hawaii. But I was mostly there, and so was everybody else."

The entire gang is participating in Tuatara's latest tour; only Berlin, touring with Los Lobos, will miss a handful of dates. The venues on the jaunt are generally smaller than those R.E.M. has seen during the '90s, but Buck doesn't mind. For him, one stage is as good as the next. "I'm glad that I've gotten a chance to play at places for a huge amount of people," he says. "It's a weird and different thing, and I like it a lot. But there's something to be said for playing a club.

"We played in Chapel Hill on the last tour, and there was a guy who was really drunk in front of me. He was yelling, and in a big place, I probably wouldn't have noticed that he was being an asshole. But there, he was right in front of me, so I went, 'Hey, you, I don't know where you think you are, but I can hear you. Now shut up. Turn your ass around and go to the back of the room if you want to yell.' Well, he left for a while, but then he came back to the front of the stage and he yelled at me, and I yelled at him. But after the show we talked for a while, and I bought him a drink, which was a cool thing I couldn't have done in a 20,000-seater."

This enthusiasm extends to the forthcoming R.E.M. album, which is set for release in late October. The recording sessions, which took place mainly in San Francisco, found Stipe, Mills, and Buck working in the studio without departed drummer Berry for the first time. Attempting to fill in for him were several Tuatara principals. According to Buck, "Mike and I play percussion, and we hired Barrett to be a studio drummer, vibes player, bass player, and percussionist. Scott McCaughey plays bass, guitar, and percussion; Mike plays most of the keyboards; and I play a lot of bass. There's not a lot of guitar on the record, actually. It's kind of out there, but in a good way."

A sneak preview of the "new" Berry-less R.E.M. can be found on a sampler CD accompanying the new Oxford American magazine, published by John Grisham and available only in the South. (There are only 50,000 copies of the magazine-with-CD available.) The drum-free track, "Why Not Smile," is organ-and-feedback heavy and does indeed sound a bit like Tuatara. But the as-yet-untitled full-length album "isn't really that influenced by Tuatara," Buck insists. "It's more influenced by the fact that a founding member--one of my brothers, for lack of a better word--decided that he couldn't do it anymore. And that's OK--I'm totally fine with that. In one way, it's a drag, because Bill is gone, but it's also completely liberating. Bill didn't want to do it, so now we're going to find a different way to be this band. And the music we made doesn't sound like anything we've ever done--and it doesn't sound that much like stuff that anyone else has ever done.