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FROM INGLORIOUS beginnings playing a birthday party, R.E.M.'s independent first single "Radio Free Europe" was Robert Palmer's choice as 10th best single of 1981 in the New York Times and also wound up near the top of the Village Voice critics year-end poll.

IRS signed them last May, and a five-song, 12-inch EP, Chronic Town, followed. Now the band are working on their debut album. I spoke to lead singer Michael Stipe in a Kansas City kitchen on the band's most recent tour.

R.E.M. has probably achieved more success, more notoriety, based on one single than most any other American band in recent history. How did it come to now where you're signed to I.R.S., are major critical raves, and the rest of it?

It was a huge mistake on someone's part. I don't know... it seems like one or two of the right critics jumped on the single, and everyone else kind of followed suit. I know that all of them didn't like it. I think they just wanted to.

But how did it go from this band that had played just one birthday party?

The party was in a church that Peter and I lived in that was abandoned. It had a natural stage where, of course, the preacher used to stand. We invited a hundred people, and about 700 showed up. Among them was a guy who booked Tyrone's, which was the local club. The Brains, an Atlanta band, were playing there the next week, and they didn't have an opening band. So he figured he could get us real cheap.

Had you ever thought of it as being any kind of permanent band?

Oh no, not at all. Peter, the guitar player, was working at a record store in town that sells contraband records and promotional stuff, and I'd go in there and buy records. It turns out that I was buying all the records that he was saving for himself. We just kind of built up a rapport, 'cause it was obvious that we liked the same kind of music. He moved into the church, and they needed a roommate, so I moved in.

Had you known any of the other members?

No, I had never seen them before.

How did they come into all this?

We met them at a party. At the time, Peter and I were playing around with this guy on drums, and a guy who played bass and saxophone at the same time, which is a pretty amazing feat. Then they came over and we played a few things, said let's write a few songs, and we'll see what happens. There was never any grand plan behind any of it.

Had any of you played much previously?

No. Peter had never played before. I had a band in St. Louis, just a bad punk band, Bad Habits. We played like twice in public. Our big claim to fame was opening up for Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe. Mike and Bill had both played in country-club trios and marching bands, stuff like that, playing Glenn Miller's greatest hits or something. They've known each other for a long time. They're both from Macon. We were all rank amateurs, and still are to this day.

Did it help being from Athens?

Yeah, I'm afraid so, because of that band [the B-52s] we all know and love and who now live in New York, because they're very, very rich. By the time we had all moved there, those guys were already signed. They were already on their way out of town. Being from Athens helped because all the critics had this idea that Athens was lined with gold records, and that everybody down there walked around with funny hairdos. Of course it isn't like that at all. We are a lot different from most of the Athens bands. We don't have anything in common with them musically. We shop at the same supermarket, that's about it. We're about the only ones who went to New York on our own.

What were R.E.M. like in the beginning?

We were doing a few covers; we had written some songs of our own. I think we had three weeks of practice. We wrote, I guess, 10 or 12 songs in a week. Needless to say, they were pretty awful. We don't play them anymore. Seeing as how none of us had ever written a song before, it was quite an achievement. We were all so scared. Imagine four people who had never been in a band being thrown together. We were all so scared of what the other one would say, that everyone nodded their head in agreement to anything to came up. The earlier songs were incredibly fundamental, real simple, songs that you could write in five minutes. Most of them didn't have any words. I just got up and howled and hollered a lot.

Is R.E.M. trying to achieve more than just being a pop band?

I don't consider us a pop band. I never have.

What do you consider it?

It's not that we're so original. We're not doing anything new. I mean, everything's pretty much been done. But I can't really find a word that replaces it. The closest than any of us have come is "folk rock," and that's so indefinable in 1982 that it probably works. We're certainly more of a pop group than Pere Ubu, but in my camp Pere Ubu's an incredible pop band. We've changed musically a whole lot certainly from when we started playing. It seems like every time we go in and write a new song, we're changing, writing differently, and trying new things that we probably wouldn't even have thought of a year ago. It's not a conscious thing. We try real hard to write new material, because we get real tired of playing the same thing over and over. That's something we don't want to get stuck doing. To begin with, I can't think of myself doing this in five or ten years, but I would hate to think of myself five years from now singing a song that I had written six years ago. It wouldn't apply.

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