“I love records that intrigue me, that keep me guessing. Rock ‘n’ roll’s basically all about mystery.”
Peter Buck, 1986
In the final week of 1977, a young college student started working for a local record shop in Georgia. Wuxtry Records, an independent store operating in the college town of Athens, had just opened the previous year. In 1978, they would open a second location in nearby Decatur. Peter Buck, who was already thinking of dropping out, would eventually work in both.
A longtime audiophile, he became obsessed with obscure recordings by long forgotten artists of the past. Two years into his tenure, a young guy walked in with two beautiful women on his arms flipping through the racks. Buck thought he was just a ladykiller. But he later found out it was the man’s sisters.
Michael Stipe was a frequent customer of Wuxtry’s. Buck struck up a friendship with him and made sure to set aside some cool stuff he thought his new pal would like. They eventually talked about forming a band together.
One of the old 45s Buck was intrigued by was Sugar On Sunday, a 1969 single by a short-lived Texas band called The Clique. It reached as high as #22 on the Billboard Hot 100. It would be their only radio hit and they didn’t even write it. It was a cover of a Tommy James & The Shondells song, originally an album cut from their 1968 release, Crimson & Clover.
When Buck flipped it over, he ended up preferring the B-Side. Now a full-time member of R.E.M. with Stipe, Mike Mills and the bassist’s former bully, drummer Bill Berry, he was actively looking for songs that would make decent covers for live shows. He gave Mills a copy. They planned to work out their own arrangement.
But as the band was starting to write its own material, their priorities shifted. Beyond live performances and the occasional B-side for their eventual IRS singles, the idea of remaking old songs was mostly abandoned.
As the band’s critical reputation grew through the first half of the 80s, one important thing kept eluding them. What was it going to take to get them on mainstream radio? Already fixtures on college stations, most Top 40 and rock listeners didn’t know who they were. Yes, their low-budget videos were getting limited airplay on MTV and MuchMusic and yeah, they did Late Night With David Letterman. But there was no undeniable breakthrough. It also didn’t help that their independent record label IRS didn’t have the greatest distribution system. Their singles and albums weren’t as widely available as they should’ve been.
After releasing three studio records in three years, R.E.M. went to work on the fourth. Lifes Rich Pagent (there’s no apostrophe because Stipe hates them, apparently), the title taken from an Inspector Clouseau line from the second Pink Panther movie, A Shot In The Dark, was mainly a leftovers album. Most of the material was comprised of discarded, unused tracks from earlier album sessions.
While rehearsing in their Athens headquarters on Clayton St., Stipe noticed Mills & Buck fiddling around with a song he didn’t recognize. But he liked what he was hearing. A little short on original songs for the new record, a cover would be one less space to fill.
“Michael didn’t know the words,” Buck later said as recounted in the 1997 book It Crawled From The South: An REM Companion, “so we said, ‘Mike [Mills], you sing lead and Michael [Stipe], you sing exactly what he sings a couple of seconds afterwards.”
(I Am) Superman, that old Clique B-Side, would mark the first time a cover would appear on an REM release. Despite being excluded from all but two of their greatest hits packages (it only surfaced on the IRS releases Singles Collected and the double-disc version of And I Feel Fine…), little did anyone know the remarkable longevity it would go on to enjoy.
On March 8, 1986, during their first ever gig christening the new 40 Watt Club in Athens, the band debuted their new cover. They would continue playing it on numerous shows throughout the rest of the year and into 1987.
Unlisted as the 12th and final track on Pagent (after the original plan for it to be its own B-side was cancelled), the song would also be released as a single on November 3, 1986, three months after the album. The sleeve cover for the 45 features a sketch of an unknown baby, credited to a mysterious Kaleb, a curious Superman reference. On the back cover, it announces the song’s inclusion on the album without noting its unlisted status.
The song begins most unusually. A toy starts screaming in Japanese before Buck kicks in with that catchy hook. When the band toured Japan two years earlier, they picked up a talking Godzilla doll, the kind that you pull with a cord in order to activate its voice. It became a mascot of sorts for a time, often resting on a guitar amp.
Because the movie Godzilla only let out that now iconic scream, the words are actually from a breathless, unknown journalist warning his fellow citizens of the impending danger. This is what he’s saying in English:
“This is a special news report. Godzilla has been sighted in Tokyo Bay. The attack on it by the Self-Defense Force has been useless. He is heading towards the city. AAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!!!”
For the most part, R.E.M doesn’t deviate too much from The Clique’s original. Although Buck’s opening lick offers a few more notes than the B-Side’s single-chord introduction, therefore actually improving it, the basic arrangement is roughly the same, even the little instrumental break before the last set of words. (Both cuts feature a prominent organ during that section.) Only the ending is different. The Clique fades out while R.E.M. stops cold with Buck’s final strum ringing out.
Randy Shaw’s nasally vocals are far more ghostly and buried, but unlike R.E.M.’s remake there is no delayed echo response to every line of the chorus, just direct harmonizing on the last two words of each (“what’s happening” and “do anything”). For the verses, The Clique have the chorus sung at the exact same time resulting in a cluttered feel, making some of the words difficult to ascertain unless you already know them. R.E.M. wisely dropped this distractingly layered approach. In their version, you just hear Mills going high and Stipe going low as they harmonize the verses. Still, you can see why Buck liked the song so much. Despite its creepy stalker lyrics, fairly typical of the era (think The Who’s I Can See For Miles), it’s undeniably hooky.
(I Am) Superman would be slotted in as the last song on Lifes Rich Pagent (it’s track 6 on the “Supper Side” of the LP version) but it was deliberately unlisted on the album’s back cover. (The label side of the actual CD does list it, as does the vinyl edition, simply as Superman, in this case as track 12.) A quick perusal of the liner notes explains something peculiar about the outside track listing.
Right under Swan Swan H is a mysterious “+” sign followed by “___________________”.
When you flip open to the first panel of the liner notes on the left, the first thing you’ll note in capital letters is this:
“ALL SONGS BERRY BUCK MILLS STIPE.”
But right under all the publishing information you’ll see not everything on the album is an original composition. You’ll see “EXCEPT” in slightly smaller block letters followed by that same plus sign and now a much longer line right underneath them.
In the middle of the panel, just below the snail mail information and the gag about a “cricket machine” museum exhibit, you’ll learn who actually wrote Superman. (The label side of the CD itself reprints the same information.)
Alan Zekley, who preferred to be called by his middle name Gary, was a California native who pitched songs he wrote to bands he hoped to produce. (He had his own solo single, Other Towns, Other Girls in 1963.) After writing Superman with Mitch Bottler, Zekley ultimately convinced the members of The Clique to record it.
Eight seconds of silence separates Swan Swan H, the last credited song and this hidden cover tune. According to Peter Buck, as recounted in It Crawled From The South, it just made sense to put some distance between the two:
“Here’s this record and you’ve gone through it and the songs are pretty varied and kinda serious, and there’s this joyous end. It’s kinda dumb and enjoyable. I love it!”
When promoting Lifes Rich Pagent during press interviews at the time, there was a hope on the part of the band to meet the surviving members of The Clique. Unfortunately, they were not so easy to track down now.
But Chuck Fieldman, an entertainment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, managed to locate Zekley through the publisher of the song R.E.M. was about to make famous. Long out of the music business (according to this, his last credit appears to be from 1974), The Clique’s former producer was found working for Texas Instruments in Los Angeles.
Thrilled to bits that this rising college rock band was covering one of his old forgotten songs, he was very eager to meet them. He saw Martha Quinn on MTV talking it up and was already hearing the song on the radio.
As a surprise, having caught the earliest flight he could, he traveled from California to the other side of the country for their first face-to-face encounter backstage before a gig. So happy to see him, the band wanted to return their appreciation by giving him a chance to shine in a way he never had before.
On October 26, less than two weeks before the 45 would appear in stores, R.E.M. played a show in the college town of De Kalb, Illinois. Just before they played Superman that night, Zekley was introduced by Mike Mills and brought out on stage. A bootleg video of the moment posted on YouTube shows an overjoyed Zekley singing back-up with Michael Stipe, enthusiastically dancing on the spot and banging a tambourine with a great deal of delight.
He had so much fun, he came back to do it all over again on November 6 during a show at the Felt Forum in New York City, three days after the Superman single became available for purchase.
Seizing an opportunity, IRS Records rushed out a press release entitled “‘Superman’ Writer Comes Forward, Joins R.E.M. On Stage” where Zekley offers high praise for R.E.M.’s cover:
“They did it the way I did it. They did the hell out of it. It speaks to me.”
Radio broadcasters agreed. Well, at least the ones programming rock stations. While it never cracked Billboard’s Hot 100 (Fall On Me, the first single from Lifes Rich Pagent, at least hit 94), R.E.M.’s version of Superman would be added to numerous playlists in North America. As a result, it peaked at #17 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
And while those same stations played Fall On Me far more often (before The One I Love, it was their highest charting single climbing into the Top 5), (I Am) Superman has had a surprisingly long shelf life long after its original unveiling.
In Tempus, Anyone?, the fourteenth episode of the third season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman which first aired in 1996, near the half hour mark, the song is heard for just over two minutes. Unfortunately, a knock-off version was substituted for the DVD box set.
Almost fourteen and a half minutes into Dynamic Duets, the seventh episode of the fourth season of Glee which debuted in 2012, romantic rivals Ryder and Jake, dressed as fake Supermen named Mega Studs, compete for the affection of a clearly flattered Marley while doing a slightly sped up redo of the song during a rehearsal for sectionals. Superman comes to an abrupt end 82 seconds later when a fed up Jake slugs the guy he’ll inevitably make peace with right in the kisser. (With a newfound confidence, near the end of the episode, Marley asks out Jake who maybe didn’t blow it after all.)
In the final scene of Superdad, the eighth episode of The Jim Gaffigan Show which aired in 2015, R.E.M.’s cover of Superman plays just as the comedian accidentally locks himself out of his apartment after taking out the garbage in his underwear.
Superman has also become an unlikely jock jam, especially during playoff games on TV. On May 10, 2003, the song was played in the XCEL Center during the first Overtime of Game 1 of the Conference Final Series between the Minnesota Wild and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. (The Ducks finally scored the only goal of the game in the second overtime in what became the first of four straight victories.)
On June 17, 2008, after Kobe Bryant drained a succession of three-pointers during Game 6 of the NBA Finals between his Los Angeles Lakers and their longtime rivals the Boston Celtics, Superman was played as the TV outro music going into a commercial break. (It was all for naught. The Celtics easily won 131-92, securing their 17th championship.)
Although there was no official video for the track, YouTube is loaded with tributes. One clip pairs the song with scenes from the disappointing Superman Returns, doubling as an unofficial trailer. Another incorporates various clips from numerous Superman shows and movies, including the vintage noirish Max Fleischer cartoons and shots of the best Man Of Steel Christopher Reeve.
Lifes Rich Pagent would be R.E.M.’s most successful IRS album until the release of Document in 1987 when they scored their first legitimate Top 10 single on Billboard. The following year, they made the jump to Warner Bros., released numerous multi-platinum blockbusters and never looked back.
As for Gary Zekley, tragically, he would not get to fully enjoy all the tributes and commercial uses of his once ignored song. He died of a heart attack in 1996. He was only 53.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, October 7, 2022
4:00 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 
The History Of The Mystery Track – R.E.M. Covers The Clique
“I love records that intrigue me, that keep me guessing. Rock ‘n’ roll’s basically all about mystery.”
Peter Buck, 1986
In the final week of 1977, a young college student started working for a local record shop in Georgia. Wuxtry Records, an independent store operating in the college town of Athens, had just opened the previous year. In 1978, they would open a second location in nearby Decatur. Peter Buck, who was already thinking of dropping out, would eventually work in both.
A longtime audiophile, he became obsessed with obscure recordings by long forgotten artists of the past. Two years into his tenure, a young guy walked in with two beautiful women on his arms flipping through the racks. Buck thought he was just a ladykiller. But he later found out it was the man’s sisters.
Michael Stipe was a frequent customer of Wuxtry’s. Buck struck up a friendship with him and made sure to set aside some cool stuff he thought his new pal would like. They eventually talked about forming a band together.
One of the old 45s Buck was intrigued by was Sugar On Sunday, a 1969 single by a short-lived Texas band called The Clique. It reached as high as #22 on the Billboard Hot 100. It would be their only radio hit and they didn’t even write it. It was a cover of a Tommy James & The Shondells song, originally an album cut from their 1968 release, Crimson & Clover.
When Buck flipped it over, he ended up preferring the B-Side. Now a full-time member of R.E.M. with Stipe, Mike Mills and the bassist’s former bully, drummer Bill Berry, he was actively looking for songs that would make decent covers for live shows. He gave Mills a copy. They planned to work out their own arrangement.
But as the band was starting to write its own material, their priorities shifted. Beyond live performances and the occasional B-side for their eventual IRS singles, the idea of remaking old songs was mostly abandoned.
As the band’s critical reputation grew through the first half of the 80s, one important thing kept eluding them. What was it going to take to get them on mainstream radio? Already fixtures on college stations, most Top 40 and rock listeners didn’t know who they were. Yes, their low-budget videos were getting limited airplay on MTV and MuchMusic and yeah, they did Late Night With David Letterman. But there was no undeniable breakthrough. It also didn’t help that their independent record label IRS didn’t have the greatest distribution system. Their singles and albums weren’t as widely available as they should’ve been.
After releasing three studio records in three years, R.E.M. went to work on the fourth. Lifes Rich Pagent (there’s no apostrophe because Stipe hates them, apparently), the title taken from an Inspector Clouseau line from the second Pink Panther movie, A Shot In The Dark, was mainly a leftovers album. Most of the material was comprised of discarded, unused tracks from earlier album sessions.
While rehearsing in their Athens headquarters on Clayton St., Stipe noticed Mills & Buck fiddling around with a song he didn’t recognize. But he liked what he was hearing. A little short on original songs for the new record, a cover would be one less space to fill.
“Michael didn’t know the words,” Buck later said as recounted in the 1997 book It Crawled From The South: An REM Companion, “so we said, ‘Mike [Mills], you sing lead and Michael [Stipe], you sing exactly what he sings a couple of seconds afterwards.”
(I Am) Superman, that old Clique B-Side, would mark the first time a cover would appear on an REM release. Despite being excluded from all but two of their greatest hits packages (it only surfaced on the IRS releases Singles Collected and the double-disc version of And I Feel Fine…), little did anyone know the remarkable longevity it would go on to enjoy.
On March 8, 1986, during their first ever gig christening the new 40 Watt Club in Athens, the band debuted their new cover. They would continue playing it on numerous shows throughout the rest of the year and into 1987.
Unlisted as the 12th and final track on Pagent (after the original plan for it to be its own B-side was cancelled), the song would also be released as a single on November 3, 1986, three months after the album. The sleeve cover for the 45 features a sketch of an unknown baby, credited to a mysterious Kaleb, a curious Superman reference. On the back cover, it announces the song’s inclusion on the album without noting its unlisted status.
The song begins most unusually. A toy starts screaming in Japanese before Buck kicks in with that catchy hook. When the band toured Japan two years earlier, they picked up a talking Godzilla doll, the kind that you pull with a cord in order to activate its voice. It became a mascot of sorts for a time, often resting on a guitar amp.
Because the movie Godzilla only let out that now iconic scream, the words are actually from a breathless, unknown journalist warning his fellow citizens of the impending danger. This is what he’s saying in English:
“This is a special news report. Godzilla has been sighted in Tokyo Bay. The attack on it by the Self-Defense Force has been useless. He is heading towards the city. AAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!!!”
For the most part, R.E.M doesn’t deviate too much from The Clique’s original. Although Buck’s opening lick offers a few more notes than the B-Side’s single-chord introduction, therefore actually improving it, the basic arrangement is roughly the same, even the little instrumental break before the last set of words. (Both cuts feature a prominent organ during that section.) Only the ending is different. The Clique fades out while R.E.M. stops cold with Buck’s final strum ringing out.
Randy Shaw’s nasally vocals are far more ghostly and buried, but unlike R.E.M.’s remake there is no delayed echo response to every line of the chorus, just direct harmonizing on the last two words of each (“what’s happening” and “do anything”). For the verses, The Clique have the chorus sung at the exact same time resulting in a cluttered feel, making some of the words difficult to ascertain unless you already know them. R.E.M. wisely dropped this distractingly layered approach. In their version, you just hear Mills going high and Stipe going low as they harmonize the verses. Still, you can see why Buck liked the song so much. Despite its creepy stalker lyrics, fairly typical of the era (think The Who’s I Can See For Miles), it’s undeniably hooky.
(I Am) Superman would be slotted in as the last song on Lifes Rich Pagent (it’s track 6 on the “Supper Side” of the LP version) but it was deliberately unlisted on the album’s back cover. (The label side of the actual CD does list it, as does the vinyl edition, simply as Superman, in this case as track 12.) A quick perusal of the liner notes explains something peculiar about the outside track listing.
Right under Swan Swan H is a mysterious “+” sign followed by “___________________”.
When you flip open to the first panel of the liner notes on the left, the first thing you’ll note in capital letters is this:
“ALL SONGS BERRY BUCK MILLS STIPE.”
But right under all the publishing information you’ll see not everything on the album is an original composition. You’ll see “EXCEPT” in slightly smaller block letters followed by that same plus sign and now a much longer line right underneath them.
In the middle of the panel, just below the snail mail information and the gag about a “cricket machine” museum exhibit, you’ll learn who actually wrote Superman. (The label side of the CD itself reprints the same information.)
Alan Zekley, who preferred to be called by his middle name Gary, was a California native who pitched songs he wrote to bands he hoped to produce. (He had his own solo single, Other Towns, Other Girls in 1963.) After writing Superman with Mitch Bottler, Zekley ultimately convinced the members of The Clique to record it.
Eight seconds of silence separates Swan Swan H, the last credited song and this hidden cover tune. According to Peter Buck, as recounted in It Crawled From The South, it just made sense to put some distance between the two:
“Here’s this record and you’ve gone through it and the songs are pretty varied and kinda serious, and there’s this joyous end. It’s kinda dumb and enjoyable. I love it!”
When promoting Lifes Rich Pagent during press interviews at the time, there was a hope on the part of the band to meet the surviving members of The Clique. Unfortunately, they were not so easy to track down now.
But Chuck Fieldman, an entertainment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, managed to locate Zekley through the publisher of the song R.E.M. was about to make famous. Long out of the music business (according to this, his last credit appears to be from 1974), The Clique’s former producer was found working for Texas Instruments in Los Angeles.
Thrilled to bits that this rising college rock band was covering one of his old forgotten songs, he was very eager to meet them. He saw Martha Quinn on MTV talking it up and was already hearing the song on the radio.
As a surprise, having caught the earliest flight he could, he traveled from California to the other side of the country for their first face-to-face encounter backstage before a gig. So happy to see him, the band wanted to return their appreciation by giving him a chance to shine in a way he never had before.
On October 26, less than two weeks before the 45 would appear in stores, R.E.M. played a show in the college town of De Kalb, Illinois. Just before they played Superman that night, Zekley was introduced by Mike Mills and brought out on stage. A bootleg video of the moment posted on YouTube shows an overjoyed Zekley singing back-up with Michael Stipe, enthusiastically dancing on the spot and banging a tambourine with a great deal of delight.
He had so much fun, he came back to do it all over again on November 6 during a show at the Felt Forum in New York City, three days after the Superman single became available for purchase.
Seizing an opportunity, IRS Records rushed out a press release entitled “‘Superman’ Writer Comes Forward, Joins R.E.M. On Stage” where Zekley offers high praise for R.E.M.’s cover:
“They did it the way I did it. They did the hell out of it. It speaks to me.”
Radio broadcasters agreed. Well, at least the ones programming rock stations. While it never cracked Billboard’s Hot 100 (Fall On Me, the first single from Lifes Rich Pagent, at least hit 94), R.E.M.’s version of Superman would be added to numerous playlists in North America. As a result, it peaked at #17 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
And while those same stations played Fall On Me far more often (before The One I Love, it was their highest charting single climbing into the Top 5), (I Am) Superman has had a surprisingly long shelf life long after its original unveiling.
In Tempus, Anyone?, the fourteenth episode of the third season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman which first aired in 1996, near the half hour mark, the song is heard for just over two minutes. Unfortunately, a knock-off version was substituted for the DVD box set.
Almost fourteen and a half minutes into Dynamic Duets, the seventh episode of the fourth season of Glee which debuted in 2012, romantic rivals Ryder and Jake, dressed as fake Supermen named Mega Studs, compete for the affection of a clearly flattered Marley while doing a slightly sped up redo of the song during a rehearsal for sectionals. Superman comes to an abrupt end 82 seconds later when a fed up Jake slugs the guy he’ll inevitably make peace with right in the kisser. (With a newfound confidence, near the end of the episode, Marley asks out Jake who maybe didn’t blow it after all.)
In the final scene of Superdad, the eighth episode of The Jim Gaffigan Show which aired in 2015, R.E.M.’s cover of Superman plays just as the comedian accidentally locks himself out of his apartment after taking out the garbage in his underwear.
Superman has also become an unlikely jock jam, especially during playoff games on TV. On May 10, 2003, the song was played in the XCEL Center during the first Overtime of Game 1 of the Conference Final Series between the Minnesota Wild and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. (The Ducks finally scored the only goal of the game in the second overtime in what became the first of four straight victories.)
On June 17, 2008, after Kobe Bryant drained a succession of three-pointers during Game 6 of the NBA Finals between his Los Angeles Lakers and their longtime rivals the Boston Celtics, Superman was played as the TV outro music going into a commercial break. (It was all for naught. The Celtics easily won 131-92, securing their 17th championship.)
Although there was no official video for the track, YouTube is loaded with tributes. One clip pairs the song with scenes from the disappointing Superman Returns, doubling as an unofficial trailer. Another incorporates various clips from numerous Superman shows and movies, including the vintage noirish Max Fleischer cartoons and shots of the best Man Of Steel Christopher Reeve.
Lifes Rich Pagent would be R.E.M.’s most successful IRS album until the release of Document in 1987 when they scored their first legitimate Top 10 single on Billboard. The following year, they made the jump to Warner Bros., released numerous multi-platinum blockbusters and never looked back.
As for Gary Zekley, tragically, he would not get to fully enjoy all the tributes and commercial uses of his once ignored song. He died of a heart attack in 1996. He was only 53.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, October 7, 2022
4:00 a.m.
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on October 7, 2022 at 4:00 am Comments (1)