It Seemed So Cool - Maybe Not

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It Seemed So Cool - Maybe Not

Postby Marsbar » Tue Dec 03, 2013 9:58 pm

Kids plucked from no where to sudden fame. The naked kid on the Nirvana Album - the kid on the Boy U2 Album. And then there's the kid who starred in video that made him famous. Did any of us ever hope that would happen? Well here's the story of Noah Ray, the kid from the R.E.M. video for The End Of The World...

R.E.M.: The Hall
Video takes local kid's life for a turn

By Jim Thompson

Four minutes.

That's all it took to send Noah Ray from white trash kid to despised white trash kid at Cedar Shoals High School - the running time for the video of R.E.M's "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)."

"It was catastrophic, honestly," Ray said in a recent interview on the making of the video for the song, which appeared on R.E.M.'s 1987 album "Document."

The video, directed by Jim Herbert, featured Ray rifling through the random contents of a broken-down rural home.

"I got picked on. It was a lot of negative attention," Ray remembered.

Ray's starring role in the video - which, of course, landed him on MTV - somehow turned the rigid hierarchy of high school inside out, or upside down, or sideways, or something.

"I was a poor white trash kid in high school, and all of a sudden, I had more popularity than the popular kids," Ray said. "Popular kids don't like to lose their popularity, especially to white trashy kids. It just made it rough."

"It's a small town," Ray continued, "and back then, R.E.M. was it."

Starring in the video "definitely attached me to that in a huge way," he said.

Ray had been in Athens just a couple of years before winding up on the "End" video. He'd moved into town from Spartanburg, S.C., and gotten involved with a local skateboarding team that also included longtime Athens music scene presence Michael Lachowski. Lachowski knew Herbert and suggested Ray for the video.

Setting up for the shoot began at 5 a.m. Eight hours later, Ray's work - with only informal direction from Herbert - was finished.

"The only thing in the beginning that I was really made aware of was that Jim had seen some kind of TV special on dream therapy, and there was a child who had lost a brother in Vietnam who kept having a dream where he was holding his brother's picture in an old house," Ray said. "He'd give me guidelines, like telling me to rifle through stuff - not like a director in a movie sense. He just wanted to get me in front of the camera, and then focus on images. Most of it was people making suggestions, like 'Oh, yeah, this would be cool.'"

Because he'd come to Athens from Spartanburg, Ray hadn't really heard about R.E.M. And as far as his own musical tastes two decades ago, Ray said, "If it wasn't KISS or The Ramones, I wasn't aware of it."

He would eventually quit high school, although he says his experience after starring in the video wasn't really a factor in that decision. It was just that he'd "kinda had enough" of school, he said.

"I've been doing anything and everything since," he said. "I've been doing some remodeling jobs, some roofing."

But that's just his day job.

While his role in the R.E.M. video didn't really have anything to do with his own music career, Ray is fronting Music Hates You, a band good enough to earn Best Punk/Hardcore Band and Best Live Band honors in the local 2006 Flagpole Magazine Music Awards.

"My musical career began the first time I saw KISS, when I was 4 years old," he said. "I've always played music or been involved in (it) one way or another, ever since I was 12 or 13 years old. Music Hates You was the one that was really worth trying to stick together."

Despite the name, as it turns out.

"A lot of people in this town really despised us for that name. People really, really detested it for a while," Ray said. "But there's an ethos behind it, like how many rock stars are dead now, giving their lives to this burning creativity that just eats them up. Or, it's like getting a song stuck in your head every day that you just hate. Music's an idea, it's not a person or anything."

Whether Music Hates You is an idea whose time has come is something Ray and the band are willing to wait to find out.

"We play a lot out of town," he said. "We save our money, and record our own stuff. When somebody likes it, and wants us to do more, we will. We're doing all the things we know how to do.

"We would love to make a career out of it. Hopefully, it becomes that, but there's about 15,000 people in town who want a career in music. But if it's either that or painting houses, I think I'll go with the music."

Whatever happens for Ray and Music Hates You, his role in the R.E.M. video is likely always to be a footnote to his musical career.

"Years ago, VH-1 called me for one of those 'Pop-Up Video' things," Ray said. And just last August, a blurb in the alternative newspaper Creative Loafing on an Atlanta appearance by Music Hates You included these lines: "Remember that sexy boy in R.E.M.'s 'It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" video? Well that's Noah Ray, and he's all grown up and fronting a volatile punk band. A thoroughly engaging, Athens-based metallic onslaught of aggressive musical behavior. In other words, don't expect any easygoing twee-heads."

Still, even if the R.E.M. connection remains a trivia question on Music Hates You's trajectory to wherever the band goes, they will take something from the band that put Athens on the map as a music and arts community, according to Ray.

"The thing we take from R.E.M. is this: You don't ever see a 'Behind The Music' where Michael Stipe says, 'You know, Peter Buck was an asshole.'

"... There's a lot of short careers, a lot of burn-out cases in music. Then you have R.E.M, which seems to be bulletproof from all that."
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Re: It Seemed So Cool - Maybe Not

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