Mike Mills is the bass guitar player of the band R.E.M. He was born on December 17, 1958 in Orange County, California but moved with his family to Macon, Georgia in the early '60s. The son of a dramatic tenor and a piano teacher, he developed a love of music at an early age. He met and formed a band with drummer Bill Berry in high school. They met Peter Buck and Michael Stipe after starting at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Mills' skills extend to bass, acoustic guitar, piano, organ, pump organ, sousaphone, accordian and backing-, and occasionally lead vocals (to date, he has supplied the lead vocals to three R.E.M. album songs: "Superman", "Near Wild Heaven" and "Texarkana". He has also written several R.E.M. songs, including "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville", "Leaving New York", "Be Mine", "Electrolite", "Nightswimming", and "At My Most Beautiful".
Mills was also a member of the band Hindu Love Gods (band) alongside the other members of R.E.M. (minus Michael Stipe), with Warren Zevon on lead vocals. Only one, self-titled, album by the group was ever released, in 1990.
Mills was arrested for indecent exposure in Athens in the early 1980s, known in R.E.M. lore as "the watertower incident".
"Mike Mills" is also the title of a song by the French electronic band Air in their CD, Talkie Walkie, although this is in reference to Mike Mills, the director and graphic designer, rather than to the R.E.M. bassist.
R.E.M.
Bill Berry - Peter Buck - Mike Mills - Michael Stipe
Additional musicians: Nathan December - Buren Fowler - Peter Holsapple - Barrett Martin - Scott McCaughey - Bill Rieflin - Ken Stringfellow - Joey Waronker
Management and producers: Joe Boyd - Don Dixon - Bertis Downs, IV - Mitch Easter - Don Gehman - Jefferson Holt - Scott Litt - Pat McCarthy
Discography
Albums: Chronic Town (EP) - Murmur - Reckoning - Fables of the Reconstruction - Lifes Rich Pageant - Document - Green - Out of Time - Automatic for the People - Monster - New Adventures in Hi-Fi - Up - Reveal - Around the Sun
Compilations: Dead Letter Office - Eponymous - R.E.M.: Singles Collected - The Best of R.E.M. - In the Attic - In Time
Videos: Succumbs - Pop Screen - Tourfilm - This Film Is On - Parallel - Road Movie - Perfect Square - In View
Thumbsucker (2005)
