The story is a sad one, told many times, the story of their life and trying times. As much as the musical climate of the times, REM are a product of geography, rooted in the landscape and traditions of the American South. In the same way that The Clash will always be intrinsically linked to London, The Doors to Los Angeles, or Joy Division to Manchester, REM could only have crawled from the South. Athens, Georgia is a college town. People come and go, some stay, some don’t. So it was back in 1980 when the four men that made…