Yes, the R. E. M. dissolution was very polite and on good terms and they all found better things to do. But I never got the impression any of them were very spiteful people. They were apparently polite to Stephen Hague when he remixed “Catapult” and made it sound terrible, but there was no “finger pointing.” That being said they were recycling their old sound toward the end– Accelerate was a self conscious attempt to create something that sounded like it could have come out between 1986 and 1991. Aaaaaand…they couldn’t do it anymore.

I would agree that a reunion concert would have lots of deep cuts–R. E. M. notoriously hate some of their own hits, like “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People.” Stipe thinks the band’s best album is New Adventures In Hi-Fi and Peter Buck seems to care about the Dead Letter Office junk as much as any of their official albums (he used to work in a record store.)

Great that you just named the two Roxy Music studio albums that I never bothered to hear. Maybe I’ll get on that someday…but I’m really not wild about early 80s synth pop.