R.E.M. - UIC Pavilion, Chicago, IL, 11-5-1987 | Albums That Should Exist

 

R.E.M. - UIC Pavilion, Chicago, IL, 11-5-1987

Paul Says : Here's a concert I'm very happy to present. It's a full R.E.M. concert bootleg, with the vast majority of it having excellent soundboard quality. It's something that hasn't been publicly available with this quality until last month (as I write this in January 2026). This is exciting, because quality concert recordings from this time period are few and far between. I'm pretty certain this is the best sounding full concert boot from the band's 1987 tour.

This is another R.E.M. where I have to thank Lil Panda, who alerted me to this, as well as Rob, who runs the dB's Repercussion music blog. According to liner notes by Rob (which I've included in the download zip), Buren Fowler, the band's guitar tech and second guitarist for live performances, got a copy of the soundboard from this concert. He later gave a copy to Patton Biddle (Pat the Wiz), the band's sound tech. Many, many years later, that got passed to Rob, who recently posted it at his music blog.

However, there was one unfortunate aspect: the last six songs were missing. However, I looked around, and to my very pleasant surprise, I found a pretty good audience bootleg of the concert. So I used that source to finish off the last six songs. I then made some edits to those six songs to help bring the sound quality up to the standard of the rest. I ran those songs through the MVSEP program to wipe out the crowd noise during the music in those songs. Then I ran them through MVSEP again to boost the lead vocals, since that was low relative to the instruments. Those songs still don't sound as good as the rest, but it's not a glaring difference. 

Also, there was some sonic damage in a short section of "The One I Love," so I patched that up. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in its title.

I'm particularly happy to find a good source for those six songs, because one of them was a cover of "Midnight Blue." This was a Top Five hit by Lou Gramm, lead singer of Foreigner, earlier in 1987. One wouldn't have expected R.E.M. to cover a "corporate rock" song like that, but they simply thought it was a good song, and covered it at least 13 times in 1987. I'm pretty sure this is the best sounding version. 

The songs "Superman," "Strange," "Harpers," and "Ghost Rider" also are covers. R.E.M. performed covers of literally hundreds of songs in the 1980s. But unfortunately that went way down in the 1990s and after, when they decided to concentrate more on their original songs. 

This album is an hour and 43 minutes long. 

01 Finest Worksong 
02 These Days 
03 Moral Kiosk 
04 Welcome to the Occupation 
05 Disturbance at the Heron House 
06 Exhuming McCarthy 
07 Orange Crush
08 Feeling Gravitys Pull 
09 The Flowers of Guatemala 
10 I Believe 
11 Sitting Still 
12 Driver 8
13 Superman
14 Pretty Persuasion 
15 Oddfellows Local 151 
16 talk 
17 It's the End of the World as We Know It [And I Feel Fine] 
18 Begin the Begin 
19 Strange 
20 King of Birds 
21 Pop Song '89 
22 Auctioneer [Another Engine]
23 Swan Swan H
24 talk 
25 The One I Love [Edit] 
26 Harpers 
27 Midnight Blue 
28 Ghost Riders 
29 1,000,000 

[all songs R.E.M.] 

Paul notes: There were surprisingly few good color photos of the band in concert in 1987, or even around 1987. But I found a photo of a ticket stub from this exact concert, so I decided to use that, as a change of pace. I squished the image horizontally a little bit to get all the text I wanted to fit.

REM The One I Love 1987