A Tale of Two REMs

We will resume (someday...) our tour through the REM catalog, but I heard a great story recently that I thought I'd share:

Back around 1980, there was an up-and-coming post-punk group called REM. They had some local success and were about to begin their commercial recording career. A familiar tale, right, until you find out that these four young musicians were from Washington D.C. Turns out that there was another group going around calling themselves REM as well. Some genius promoter set up a showdown whereby the two REMs battled for their name - winner keeps the name AND gets to rename the loser.

Confident that these hicks from Georgia weren't going to amount to much, the D.C. REM went first, powering out their typical post-punk alt-funk. Take that, country boys! When the art school dropouts from Athens took the stage, the local crowd was unimpressed. Then the one in the back with the monobrow snapped the snare four times, and REM South thundered into "Radio Free Europe".

Almost immediately, the D.C. guys knew they had been bested, and accepted their fate. REM graciously gave the artists formerly known as REM a fairly decent name: Egoslavia. The rest is history. REM went on to fame and fortune, and Egoslavia... well, didn't. But here's an interesting postscript: the bass player for Egoslavia went on to become the editor-in-chief for "Wired" magazine.