enjoys an enviable freedom as a musician these days.
As the co-founder and lead guitarist for the Grammy-winning, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inhabiting band R.E.M., he influenced generations of musicians with his clean, Byrdsian riffs and unflappable stage presence.
But now that R.E.M. is done, Buck can do whatever he wants. And he wants to be on the road — but only when he feels like it.
“I’m just kind of hopping in and out of things I want to do in New York or places like Denver, where I have some friends,” said Buck, 57, over the phone recently. “I didn’t want to be on tour for five to six weeks, so I’m only doing some of the Baseball Project shows.”
, which headlines on Aug. 15 and will perform before the Colorado Rockies game on Aug. 16 with and the Minus 5, is Buck’s current gig, a supergroup that includes buddies Scott McCaughey (the Young Fresh Fellows), Mike Mills (R.E.M.) and Steve Wynn and Linda Pitmon of Dream Syndicate.
The band’s third album of baseball-centric alt-rock/Americana () was released in March to positive reviews, sporting song titles such as “Stats,” “Box Scores” and “The Babe.”
And although Buck isn’t a huge baseball fan himself, he appreciates the relatively low-key trappings of playing with a club band, as opposed to headlining stadiums and amphitheaters as he did in R.E.M.
“I enjoy doing smaller places and I like actually seeing the audience,” Buck said. “I’m not in charge, don’t have to do the set lists and they’re not my songs. So by and large itap enjoyable to just show and up and go with it. There’s less pressure than doing these really big songs that are important to me to get across. Plus we’re friends and we hang out a lot anyway, so we might as well make music.”
Buck has known most of the band members of the Baseball Project for at least three decades, leading to an effortless rapport in the studio and on stage that comes through in Baseball Project tracks such as their plucky, Ramones-indebted cover of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Buck admires his musical friends’ obsession with the sport — its distinctly American lore, its endless stats and debates — but also feels the music is self-contained, despite the subject matter.
“Scott and Steve kind of treat the baseball players like Old West gunfighters. Itap more about the legends and stories than baseball itself, because it really encompasses a lot of what America was in the 1920s and ’30s,” he said. “I have a lot of friends in England who like the records but don’t know anything about baseball.”
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John Wenzel is an A&E reporter and critic for . Follow him .
