REM 

Last Show of the Reconstruction Tour 

13 December 1985 - Park Center, Charlotte NC

support: The Minutemen

When I saw the 20th Anniversary series' finale I decided the time had arrived for me to rip and post this show.

0

0  The Minutemen

00c crowd

00d 'Feeling Gravity's Pull' intro

01  Feeling Gravity's Pull

02  Harborcoat

03  Pills

03b intro to 'M&L'

04  Maps And Legends

05  Sitting Still

06  Fall On Me

07  Green Grow The Rushes

07b 'Gringos' story

08  Hyena

09  So. Central Rain

10  Swan Swan H

 

11  Ghost Riders In The Sky

12  Can't Get There From Here

12b Mike thanks the Crew

13  Seven Chinese Brothers

14  Dream (All I Have To Do Is)

14b 'Caroline

 and Lenny' story

15  Auctioneer (Another Engine)

15b story of Kensey's Job

16  Old Man Kensey

17  Gardening At Night

18  9-9

lost:

Pretty Persuasion 

Little America

     encore 1:

Second Guessing 

Time After Time (Annelise) 

See No Evil (w/The Minutemen)

     encore 2:

Just A Touch 

Driver 8

 Life And How To Live It

TDK SA 90 -> MOTU 828MkII -> PowerBook G4 (AlBook) 1.25 -> flacs -> You

Comments:

"This is our last night; very seldom do I get to explain songs in such a manner as this."

There is another show claimed for the next night, in Augusta, but I choose to believe that this was actually the final show of the tour. My reason for believing this is three-fold. One is the quote from Michael Stipe which opens these comments. Another is that they appended "Re" in the obvious spot to the "End of Construction" road sign they pulled onstage at the close of the evening's performance. The third is that I seem to recall it being mentioned as the final show of the tour in issue #27 of The Bob which reviewed the show (although I cannot verify that as the Bob in question is in storage). 

My best friend and I attended this show the evening after our final exams our first semester in college. We borrowed a portable recorder from a friend for obvious reasons and came home from the show with a tape so poor that I never got my own copy of his tape of the encores and he never acquired a copy of my tape of the body of the show (being poor college students at the time we each recycled a cassette). As you will notice upon listening, the recording was so poor that when I asked to borrow his tape a couple of years (or months? it seemed a long time when I was in college) later to finally copy it, he was surprised by the request and explained that he'd again recycled the cassette - he considered the recording unlistenable. Perhaps the best indication of the quality of this recording is to note that I'd recorded the Hib-Tone single after the tape flip of side one and it, mildly crackly though it is, sounds dramatically better than what precedes.

I don't know the source of the online setlist for this show - it may come from The Bob or it may come from another recording of the show; if there is another recording extant, it nearly certainly sounds better. As I recall it two decades after my sole visit, the Park Center is an auditorium, with a long open floor and a balcony of seats around the edge. We very foolishly thought our recording purposes would be best served if we were seated and if our seats were directly facing the stage, which meant we were at the rear of the long, wide, open space with its hard(wood?) floors and high ceiling. To our ears, the sound was much better than when I saw them at the Omni in Atlanta on the Green tour, but to the recorder we'd borrowed the sound was boomy and muddy. To the cheap recorder with no high end which we'd borrowed, that is. To the cheap recorder which didn't completely erase the existing recording on the left channel of side two and which also didn't record the left channel of side two at full volume (perhaps this was an alignment issue?). Actually, there is too much high end on the recording; apparently the microphone didn't pick up anything past the upper mids while the recorder itself recording plenty of sound above that point; I decided to leave the hiss in the recording rather than use a high pass filter, though.

 I recommend the purchase of the aforementioned issue of The Bob, available at http://www.thebobmagazine.com/, as it contains a great article on R.E.M. including a review of the show from someone writing about it hours or days later rather than decades. It also includes a very cool flexi of R.E.M. performing Femme Fatale.