Details
The source for the title of the album is based on an English idiom. Its use is very old, but R.E.M.'s use is, according to Peter Buck, from the 1964 film A Shot in the Dark, minus the apostrophe:
- Inspector Clouseau opens car door and falls into a fountain.
- Maria: "You should get out of these clothes immediately. You'll catch your death of pneumonia, you will."
- Clouseau: "Yes, I probably will. But it's all part of life's rich pageant, you know?"
The missing apostrophe in the title is deliberate. Nearly all contractions used by R.E.M. lack apostrophes, though "life's" in this case is a possessive.
The cover of the album depicts drummer Bill Berry on the upper part of the cover and a pair of bison, signifying an environmental theme, on the lower part. It also alludes to Buffalo Bill.
With R.E.M.'s fan base beginning to grow beyond its college rock boundaries, Lifes Rich Pageant proved to be at the time the band's most commercially successful album in the U.S., peaking at #21 on the Billboard charts and scoring them their first gold record. In the UK, the album managed a #43 peak.
Slant Magazine listed the album at #52 on its list of "Best Albums of 1980s" saying "Lifes Rich Pageant stands as a nearly seamless transition between the band's formative period and their commercial dominance."
The ecologically-conscious "Fall on Me" (a personal favorite of frontman Michael Stipe) and a cover of The Clique's "Superman", sung by bassist Mike Mills, were the only singles released from the album (the single version of the latter removed the sample from one of the Godzilla movies that began the album version).
Another ecologically-minded song, "Cuyahoga", refers to the once heavily polluted Cuyahoga River that flows into Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio. The song includes the lyric we burned the river down, which refers to the several occasions (most famously in 1969) when the river actually caught fire.
At the end of "Just a Touch" Michael Stipe can be heard screaming the line "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young", quoting longtime influence Patti Smith's live cover version of The Who's "My Generation" as recorded as the B-side of her 1976 single "Gloria" and more recent as a bonus track on some CD re-issues of her album Horses.
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