Jeremy L. Berg

The “My Top 3” series is your chance to get to know some of my personal favorites.  Today, on a lighter note, I share my favorite 3 bands.  These are not necessarily my vote for the BEST bands of all time.  I would have to place The Beatles, Led Zepellin, Elvis Presley and many others on that list.  These are my personal favorites who have had the greatest impact on my musical tastes — primarily during my high school and college days where I bought a lot of CDs, played a lot of guitar and went to a lot of concerts.  Here they are:

#3 – U2. Bono, the Edge and the other boys from Ireland were an acquired taste for me. It didn’t make sense why I like them at the time. I think I was impressed with their longevity, classiness, unique sound driven by the Edge’s “helicopter guitar” as we called it. Over the years I would grow to love their convictions as artists and Bono’s growing forthrightness about his Christian faith.  These guys have been in the spotlight for decades and have avoided the scandals and illicit behavior that brings the downfall of so many pop stars.  I was fortunate to score free tickets to their Popmart Tour in 1998.  It was fun to be part of the hype and see them live on stage — but the Metro Dome was the worst concert venue possible for sound quality.  Just awful.  I’m impressed with their latest albums and they keep growing more mature and classy as entertainers.  They are the real deal and easily fall in my top 10 bands of all time.

#2 – Dave Matthews Band. Ok, DMB isn’t in the same category as U2.  They are not legendary yet — though time will tell if they can reach those heights.  They are in my top 3 because of the sheer enjoyment they brought to my passion for music as I was learning the guitar in high school.  I am proud to be one of the original discoverers of DMB before they made it big.  I swear I found them before they MTV did. There was nothing like Under the Table and Dreaming out there in the early 90s.  Where did this alternative rock band with South African acoustic guitarist, jazz saxophone/clarinet, crazy violinist and world-class jazz drummer come from?  John Popper from Blues Traveler played harmonica on their first radio hit single “What Would You Say” and because they were hitting it big at the same time I actually mixed the two bands up for a week or so.  Oops.

But I will go on record saying that their second album release Crash is by far my favorite album of all time.  Seriously.  From start to finish, there is some amazing musicianship taking place. As a beginning guitarist and lover of acoustic, rhythmic guitar riffs I couldn’t get enough of tacks like Two Step, Lie in Our Graves, Tripping Billies, What Would You Say and perhaps the best 15 minutes of continuous music #41 flowing into Say Goodbye. I liked their 3rd album Before These Crowded Streets but slowly grew disappointed from that point forward as they seemed to grow more mainstream, more studio-ized and less of a grassroots jam-band.  Dave’s signature acoustic riffs became more and more electric and saw them as “selling out” to the mainstream.  I haven’t listened to DMB for years now.  But I enjoy putting on Crash every now and then to take me back to many good memories of high school.

#1 – R.E.M. I was in 8th grade.  I loved music and my good friend and I were invited to our first major stadium concert with a group of older students. I still don’t quite know how we were invited.  But we saw R.E.M.’s Monster Tour at Target Center. Overnight I became a fanatic.  The concert was epic.  Classic hits like Stand, End of the World As We Know It, One I Love, Man on the Moon, Everybody Hurts, Losing My Religion and others were combined with the edgy, distorted new sound of Monster.  It was the best of all worlds.  Clean acoustic and electric, then some heavy buzzing distorted rock, then some ballads with pop harmonies and Michael Stipe’s unmistakable vocals filling the stadium.  But the concert didn’t even capture the sound that would eventually win me over as a crazy R.E.M. groupie.  A local radio station (KQRS?) was playing their entire library of R.E.M from A-Z for that whole day and night.  I was immediately hooked on the lesser known early 80s R.E.M. material.  My parents belonged to BMG music club and I immediately ordered their first 10 albums for my 15th birthday.  Still one of my best gifts ever!

Many people today still have never been treated to their early sound of their 1981 5-song single debut Chronic Town with “Gardening at Night” followed by first full release”Murmur” (1983) featuring hit song “Radio Free Europe” and then Reckoning (1984) with “Don’t Go Back to Rocktown” and “So. Central Rain”.  It’s hard to describe this early 80s hipster rock sound carried by Stipe and Mills’ Beach Boys inspired harmonies and Peter Buck’s hypnotic finger picking on clean electric.  It’s clean.  It’s catchy.  And you can’t help tap your foot and bob your head.  It’s clearly original and to this day is hard to classify.  I was told some call R.E.M. the Father’s of Alternative Rock — back in the day before it was a definable genre but a label give to a sound that just couldn’t be easily pinned down.  Through the years they have remained difficult to define and always innovative and changing.  I thoroughly enjoyed all of their albums (each a unique listening experience with many shifts in sound through the decades) up until drummer Bill Barry left the band around 1997.  I have not enjoyed any of their albums since then — though I finally heard a taste of the old R.E.M. in their 2008 “Accelerate” release.

At the end of the day, R.E.M. is still my favorite band of all time — and one of America’s top 10.  I have recently begun collecting their vinyl collection for fun. Today their 1981 “Chronic Town” showed up in the mail.  Check out a video from a very young R.E.M playing first song receiving radio play “Gardening at Night.”  Does it get any better than this?!