R.E.M.'s Mike Mills Merges Rock & Classical With Childhood Friend Robert McDuffie
Since R.E.M. disbanded in 2011, bassist Mike Mills has recorded and played with the all-star combo the Baseball Project and performed as part of an ensemble paying tribute to the cult-classic album Big Star’s Third. Yet he hadn’t released a project under his name, until now.
Due Oct. 14 is Concerto for Violin, Rock Band and String Orchestra by Mills and his childhood friend Robert McDuffie. As the title suggests, it’s a combination of rock with classical music that combines Mills’s pop and rock instincts with the majestic sounds of an orchestra and McDuffie’s acclaimed violin-playing.
Making the project even sweeter is that fact that it evolved out of a childhood friendship. “It’s pretty wonderful. We hung out a lot together in Macon, Georgia,” Mills says of his bond with McDuffie, which dates back to when they were just entering their teen years. “We were involved in the same church music groups, and his family and my family were friends.”
Yet, they went on their own paths when McDuffie left Macon to study music at Julliard in New York and Mills went off to attend the University of Georgia in Athens, where he would later form R.E.M. with his high school classmate, drummer Bill Berry, and fellow UGA students guitarist Peter Buck and singer Michael Stipe. “We sort of kept in touch long distance for a while and then we reconnected some years after that,” Mills says of McDuffie.
In between that time, Mills spent 31 years as a member of the influential band that brought college rock to the mainstream with such hits as “The One I Love,” “Losing My Religion,” “Man on the Moon,” and ”Everybody Hurts” and topped the album chart with such multimillion-selling titles as Out of Time and Monster.
McDuffie is no slouch, either. He’s a Grammy-nominated violinist who has appeared with such major orchestras around the world as the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Toronto and Montreal Symphonies, the Venice Baroque Orchestra, and several others. He’s also performed with former Allman Brothers Band members Gregg Allman and Chuck Leavell and runs the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings at Macon’s Mercer University, which offers conservatory-like instruction in a college environment.
A few years ago, McDuffie presented Mills with a challenge. “He came to me and said that he’d like me to write a half-hour concerto for rock band and violin. I was thinking, ‘Well, that would certainly take me out of my comfort zone,’ and I decided I would accept the challenge,” Mills recalls.
While Mills is primarily known as the bassist in R.E.M., his musical expertise extends far beyond that role. He also wrote songs, sang, and played keyboards in the band and was instrumental in the band’s use of strings on some of its classic recordings. “I wrote the strings on ‘Feeling Gravitys Pull’ [from 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction]. We had some violins and cellos here and there in some of the early records. I did the strings on ‘Losing My Religion.’ I sort of wrote the parts and then they were arranged by Mark Bingham. It’s always been something I’ve enjoyed, since I grew up with classical music and R.E.M. was sort of the band that liked to have other dimensions rather than just straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll.”
As Mills explains, he was brought up with an open mind and eclectic musical tastes. “Growing up in the South, you get a lot of music floating around you. There’s country, there’s blues, there’s black gospel and white gospel, and top 40 radio, of course,” he says. “And since my parents are very musical, my dad played a lot of jazz and classical records, so I heard a lot of that around the house.” In high school Mills wanted to play electric bass in the jazz band, but to play in that ensemble, students also had to be in the concert band, in which he played tuba, and the marching band, where he opted for the sousaphone.
He brought that musical experience to this project. Mills took his time working on the compositions. “There was no real rush, of course, until the end when I finished the last two pieces,” he says. “I worked really slowly for about a year and a half on the other four. You never know when inspiration is going to hit, so I waited until I had the pieces I thought were right for it and finished it up a few months ago.”
Mills is optimistic this collection and tour will help bring classical music to a new audience. “That’s certainly one of the hopes we have,” he says. “It has already shown a lot of people that the distance between the two genres may not be as wide as people think. We would love it if anybody came away from this with a greater appreciation of classic music or if any classical aficionados came away with what rock music can do.”
Although the bulk of the music on the album is new, composed by Mills with assistance from composer/producer David Mallamud, the set does include a version of “Nightswimming,” the beautiful piano-based track that was one of the highlights on R.E.M.’s 1992 album Automatic for the People. “Bobbie wanted to include it and I said fine,” Mills explains. “It works beautifully in this arrangement.” (The strings on R.E.M.’s version of the song were arranged by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.) Other highlights include the hard-charging opener “Pour It Like You Mean It,” the delicately beautiful “Stardancers Waltz,” and the celebratory “You Can Go Home Again.” Beside the Mills’s compositions, the album includes John Adams’s “Road Movies” and Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3.
Along with Mills on piano, bass, and guitar, and McDuffie on violin, the album features former Drive-By Truckers member John Neff and William Tonks on guitars and Patrick Ferguson of Five Eight on drums and percussion. “They’re all guys from Athens that I have known for years,” Mills says. “It’s great to show the world that Athens still has a lot of great musicians.” The rock combo is backed by the McDuffie Center Strings Ensemble conducted by Ward Stare. Also featured on the album is noted pianist Elizabeth Pridgen.
Prior to recording the album in September at Tree Sound Studios in Norcross, Georgia, Mills and McDuffie took the concerto to the stage with three different concerts. In June, in Toronto, they performed with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. They also performed it that same month in Rome at the Rome Chamber Music Festival, which is run by McDuffie. “The chamber music version is much different in that it’s all acoustic instruments and much fewer strings, only five string players in addition to Bobby, plus a piano,” Mills says. “It’s a lot of fun, but it’s somewhat different than the straightahead rock version.” In Aspen, in August, they did the rock version with a string section featuring students from the Aspen Music School.
On Oct. 20, Mills, McDuffie, and company will launch a 14-date tour in Miami, backed by Chicago’s acclaimed 15-piece Fifth House Ensemble chamber orchestra. While the trek includes stops in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago, there are no New York and Los Angeles dates scheduled as yet. “We’ll have to see,” Mills says. “I think a lot of venues weren’t sure whether to book it or not. It’s gone very well every time we’ve played it and we really appreciate the venues that did take the chance on playing it. Hopefully, if it goes as well as we think, there will be more tours and more places.”
Aside from former bandmate Buck — who has released three albums of garage rock on vinyl only — while collaborating with numerous other artists, Mills has been the most active former member of R.E.M. “It was Bobby’s imagination and enthusiasm that got this thing going for me,” Mills says, “but you can see one of the things that made R.E.M. as good a band as we were was the various influences that we all brought into the project, and you can see some of those manifest themselves now.”
