Man, I gotta tell ya, it took me a lot of work to track this one down.

I think I read about this in Rolling Stone, oh, about 20 years ago (wow, I feel old).  R.E.M. had taken to covering “Midnight Blue,” by Foreigner’s Lou Gramm, in concert.  While it seems like an odd choice, Michael Stipe pointed out, quite correctly, that it was a terrific song.

I looked for it for years, and finally, through the magic of the Internet, I found it through an R.E.M. web ring.

Why did I do this?  Because this is the sort of thing record geeks do.  At least this record geek.

This performance is from a November 5, 1987, concert at the Circle Pavilion at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

It interpolates bits of “Heartbreak Beat” by the Psychedelic Furs and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2.  I bet it was a blast live.

Yeah, it doesn’t sound all that great, but I’m happy to have it at all.

Here’s the criminally underappreciated original.  I heard this over the PA at Walgreen’s the other day and it immediately put a smile on my face.  That’s probably what triggered me to take another stab at finding the R.E.M. version.

You can hear it sans ’80s video but with better sound here.

According to Wikipedia, Lou Gramm has left Foreigner (again) and is recording an album of Christian music with his brothers as The Lou Gramm Band.  R.E.M. has not been heard from since “E-Bow the Letter,” although there seem to be some imposters running about.

Back in 1986, before men were allowed to cry or women were allowed to wear trousers, people used to dress their emotional effusion behind synthesisers, dual-layered harmonies and echo-reverb.  Though the music of the 80s may sound overly felicitous, or even crass in its gushing, a closer inspection leads us to think that, behind the specious happiness of the booming economies and abundance of the times, people’s hearts were still breaking, some went without and yet others had little in between.

As a child of the 80s I still feel that tingle down my spine when I hear the wail of a guitar against a synthesised wall of noise.  I know it’s not cool to say that, but it’s true.  When I hear those empty keys of those piano melodies like soliloquy it transports me back to the solipsism of childhood bedrooms in front of old TV shows or the crackle and fuzz of a tape player.  Most 80s music seemed to have a nostalgia for the future and, now that we’re living in it, that nostalgia can only be for some sort of dream world. We went off track somewhere.

The Hits 5 compilation is one that we used to have when I was a kid. It was released in 1986, meaning that I must have been around four when it came out.  We had it on tape and used to listen to it in the car on long journeys.  I can remember listening to it on my first tape player, thinking that this is what the world was really like. Though this isn’t the full compilation (I couldn’t find all the tracks on the Internet), it has enough to give you the general gist of the thing and maybe help you remember a thing or two about where you might have come from.

Track List

1. The Bangles – Walk Like An Egyptian

2. Don Johnson – Heartbeat

3. Paul Young – Wonderland

4. Bruce Hornsby – The Way It Is

5. NIck Camen – Each Time You Break My Heart

6. Paul Simon – You Can Call Me Al

7. Eurhytmics – Thorn In My Side

8. The Stranglers – Always The Sun

9. The Pretenders – Don’t Get Me Wrong

10.  Dead or Alive – Brand New Lover

11. Haywoode – Roses

12. Cyndi Lauper – True Colours

13. Peter Cetera – Glory Of Love

14. Pyschedelic Furs – Heartbreak Beat

15. George Michael – A Different Corner

16. Red Box – For America

17. The The – Infected

18. Robert Palmer – Addicted To Love

Download. Part 1. Part 2.

to take me to the eighties

they know me there

i know their voices

the one hit wonders

the cult classics

and this pounding rhythm in my head

the psychedelic furs

bring rhythm to my life

and my heartbreak beat pounds on.