the last book I ever read (Begin the Begin: R.E.M.’s Early Years by Robert Dean Lurie, excerpt ten)

from Begin the Begin: R.E.M.’S Early Years by Robert Dean Lurie:

By mid-1986, it’s quite likely that Peter Buck was itching to get back on the road. In the short span of time he’d been home, he had been forced to deal not only with the end of his relationship with Ann but also with the death of his father, with whom he’d had a somewhat problematic relationship, at least when it came to discussions of his career. Whereas the parents of Stipe and Mills had been tremendously supportive of R.E.M. from the beginning, Buck’s parents had not hidden their disappointment at their son’s chose occupation. Buck’s father ultimately came around to a kind of bemused pride at R.E.M.’s success, but the way he chose to express this to his son proved hurtful. “We weren’t really close in a lot of ways,” Buck later told an interviewer. “The last thing he said to me before he died was, ‘Make sure you make a million, because there’s nothing else on earth that you are able to do.’ He was trying to kind of say ‘Stick with it,’ but he was saying it in the nastiest possible way.”