In the mid-Nineties, Nathan December saw the world as a touring guitarist for R.E.M. A few years later, he pivoted to doing lighting on Hollywood movies like ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Thor.’ He tells us about his wild ride.
too. The run that they had from the mid-Eighties through the late Nineties was absolutely insane.We all think that. And yet, having hung around with them, they are completely organic. They make decisions in their own camp. I can totally see them going, like, “We don’t want to tour right now.” They spent about eight years on the road. They were like, “We just don’t want to do that.” I can’t think of many bands that stop touring at that station in their career. I mean, the Beatles, obviously.
They invited me out to New York for an audition. I knew they were looking at three people, but I don’t know who the other two were. To this day, I don’t know.First I went down to the “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” video shoot to meet them since they were all in L.A. They did that at some warehouse. I went down to meet them there at like midnight. You have to understand, I’m a fanatic. I’m barely able to control my bowels. I’m freaking out.
The p.a. kid picked me up Friday morning and took me to their rehearsal place. One of the techs was like, “They’re all in the kitchen. They want to see you in there.” I was like, “What the fuck?” I went in the kitchen and it’s Jefferson Holt and [R.E.M. co-manager] Bertis Downs. They were like, “We want to welcome you to the tour.”
I’m going to say this, and I don’t want it to be misconstrued, but I couldn’t wait. It wasn’t overwhelming. It’s what I picture when a minor-league player that trips around minor-league baseball for ten years finally gets to go up to the Yankees. That’s what you’ve been waiting to do. I wasn’t like, “Jeez, I hope I don’t fuck this up.” There was none of that. I was like, “Let’s go. Let’s do this.” And everyone else was overwhelmed for me, like my friends and family at the time.
That tour touched all of my heartstring venues, period. Budokan, Madison Square Garden, Slane Castle. It was insane. At Budokan, I sat in my dressing room and played Cheap Trick songs on my guitar to warm up for an hour. It drove everyone nuts. I was like, “You gotta play Cheap Trick at Budokan, come on!”
I said, “I just want to say something. Not for nothing, but I’m the one here who is the closest to the people in those seats as far as watching you and loving you and stuff. If I went to see you and you didn’t play that song, especially if it was my first time seeing you, it would break my heart.” The beautiful thing was they didn’t do some crazy Bon Jovi schedule where it was like five on, one off. It was a pretty humane schedule since they were grown-ups and they knew how to do it. It would be two shows on, one off. You got to see a little bit of the countries that we were in. They are cultured guys. It wasn’t just like going to McDonald’s and doing your laundry. There were always interesting things afoot on days off because of the company that they kept.
The best thing that we did when we resumed the tour after Bill’s aneurysm, the gatefold page of the program for the tour was Bill’s cranial X-ray. It was such a knowing little wink to everything they’d been through. It was such an R.E.M. thing to put this brain X-ray in the midst of all this photography. They just rolled with it. They just kept getting surgeries.Yeah. Peter was nervous. I remember on the last night of the tour I had him sign the back of one of my guitars.
It was half for documenting the live shows. But they write all the time. We were putting new songs in the set. We played six songs fromYou’re on the vast majority of the songs. That must have been fun. “Radio Free Europe” was a complete impromptu thing. It was like being 17 in a band again. We huddled at the side of the stage and went, “What the fuck are we going to play?” We had played everything. It was either Mills or me that floated it out. Somebody wanted to do “Radio Free Europe.” They were like, “Do you know it? Do you know it?” Then we just went out there and played it. Mike and I are doing backups together. He looks at me and goes, “You do know it!” I went.
I was kidding. We knew each other. I was delighted. I loved their music. The only thing that was disconcerting for me was that, for me, the Goo Goo Dolls were sort of this pop-punk band that used to play in shorts and t-shirts and jeans and stuff. Right when I joined is when they turned the corner and John Rzeznik got pulled into the machine and it became pants and velvet shirts. I was like, “What the fuck? I thought we were going to be like Soul Asylum.
Yeah. There was one time when we were first doing it, before Dave Schulz joined on keyboards, when we were still doing promo for “Iris.” We went on MTV with Carson Daly. We played “Iris” and I’m playing mandolin and slide and all this shit. They go to break and the guys were like, “Come onto the couch with us.” Carson Daly winds up asking questions about who I am as he’s interviewing them. It’s kind of cool, whatever.
You think there’s no such thing as a song that gets too big, but this might be one. If a song defines you and overshadows everything else in your catalog, you can be in trouble. It was a lot of noise-derived atmospheric stuff. They were sampling a lot. I just played on a lot of different songs, and they used bits and pieces of what they wanted to use.“Fantasize” was the one that we all did with her when R.E.M. was in the studio.I had a publishing deal after R.E.M. with a publishing company, Rondo Music, for a year.
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