R.E.M.
Friday’s
Greensboro, N.C.
Jan. 22, 1982
soundboard recording (‘File Under Kudzu’ boot CD rip, revised Jan. 2026)
remtorrent
LINEAGE: online download of flac files (File Under Kudzu bootleg CD rip) > Audacity 3.7 for Mac for normalization & DC offset, re-tracking, removing dead spots, fades, tagging > flac
NO EQ, COMPRESSION or DIGITAL FILTERING
00 stage entrance
01 Gardening at Night
02 9-9
03 Windout
04 (unknown, untitled)
05 There She Goes Again
06 Sitting Still
07 That Beat
08 Pretty Persuasion
09 Mystery to Me
10 Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)
11 Ages of You (fades in)
12 Catapult*
13 Shaking Through
14 Laughing
15 tuning, announcements
16 Romance
17 Ghost Riders In the Sky
18 Permanent Vacation
19 1,000,000
20 Wolves, Lower
21 Radio Free Europe (fades out)
*live debut
Bill Berry - drums, backing vocals
Peter Buck - guitar
Mike Mills - bass, backing vocals
Michael Stipe - lead vocals
Comment:
As received, this was a startlingly clear and crisp recording, well suited to a knock-you-off-your-chair performance by R.E.M. The debut single and Chronic Town EP were out, but Murmur had not yet been recorded. This performance marks the live debut of Catapult (already sounding fully formed and nearly ready for the studio), best-ever cover of Ghost Riders In the Sky, and a one-off song with no title. Regarding the latter, my guess is that music and words from the mystery song (track 04) eventually made their way into the songs Romance and Talk About the Passion--explaining why it was never performed again. If I were to rank best R.E.M. performances from the early 1980s, this would easily make my top 5. January 1982 found the band barnstorming its way through Georgia and N.C., with many more gigs and states to follow in the ensuing months.
I can find no indication any version of this performance was ever on the tracker--but it’s by a tough-to-search artist, so I may well be wrong about that!
R.E.M. also played Friday's on Nov. 6, 1981, and a soundboard-sourced recording circulates.
The only source I know for this performance is the bootleg CD File Under Kudzu, my starting point for this revision. If anyone offers awards for worthy bootlegs, this one should be nominated. Great choice of performance, extraordinary sound quality, and nice packaging (see image scans from Discogs in the download folder). There's one flaw: the date and location are listed incorrectly. Someone ripped the tracks from the silver CD and shared them online years ago. My archive doesn’t tell me the exact source, but I presume it was from some website or other.
Identified by some fans as an excellent audience recording, I contend this is a soundboard recording that can fool you into thinking it’s an audie. At times, you’ll hear some robust yet not overpowering crowd noise captured by the onstage mics--but the crowd is never louder than the band. It’s worth keeping in mind the performance took place in a pizza joint with a stage at one end, so some degree of crowd noise was inevitable. Given the fact that Peter or Mike complains to the sound tech mid-show that the house PA mix is “muddy” despite the recording’s crystal-clear instrumental separation, most evidence points to a soundboard. My ears suggest it's from the master or at most a first-generation copy. Your ears will be the final judge.
I can't claim this is necessarily a sonic upgrade compared to other versions. In light of how amazing the performance and recording already were, I was looking for an excuse to share it. A light revision and re-tracking job is my justification, and I feel this is a better listening experience than previous versions. I created new artwork-—this one deserves VIR (Very Imp’t Recording) treatment.
For context, here's Peter Buck from an interview by David Fricke in 1990 (from R.E.M. The Rolling Stone Files):
“There was a place in Greensboro, North Carolina, called Friday’s. It was a pizza parlor, and the guy had bands play. It was an L-shaped room; you could see through the bar to the ovens, with the guy with the long stick with pizzas on it, and see us, too. He’d charge a dollar, we’d get 150 people in there, and we’d get the door. People would let us sleep on the floor. There were clubs like that in every city.”
Rob-in-Brevard
Jan. 2026
********end original text ffp omitted********
22 January 1982
Friday's,
Greensboro, NC
set 1:
01. Gardening At Night
02. 9-9
03. Windout
04. Unknown
05. There She Goes Again
06. Sitting Still
07. That Beat
08. Pretty Persuasion
09. Mystery To Me
10. Carnival Of Sorts (Boxcars)
set 2:
11. Ages Of You
12. Catapult
13. Shaking Through
14. Laughing
15. Romance
16. Ghostriders In The Sky
17. Permanent Vacation
18. 1,000,000
19. Wolves, Lower
20. Radio Free Europe (fades out)
Grade: A
soundboard, very nice.
Notes:
-Shaking Through is introduces as 'A little swing number from the 40's'
-MS plugs some of the bands that he likes/will be playing soon after Shaking Through
-MS sings a few lines of Ghostriders In The Sky
-1,000,000 introduced as 'A big hit'
Timeline notes: The unknown song sounds to me like a cross between Talk About The Passion and Romance, with a bit of Pilgrimage thrown in. I've seen some lists claiming it's either an early version of Talk About The Passion or Pilgrimage, but personally I think it sounds nothing like them and is a song in its own right. This show can be found on the CD bootleg 'File Under Kudzu'. This show is listed on that boot as being at the 40 Watt Club in Athens in January 1983, however this is the correct date and location