Rolling Stone rides the tour bus with Radiohead across America

As Radiohead's tour bus came into New York for the last night of their North American tour, a tollbooth collector held up cassettes of OK Computer and Pablo Honey for autographs. The bus drove on. Jonny Greenwood deadpanned. Apparently we've made it.¹

Matt Hendrickson spent several weeks of the sold-out tour with the band for his feature in Rolling Stone's 16 October issue. OK Computer entered the Billboard chart at number 21 and slipped from there. Pablo Honey sold nearly 800,000 copies on the back of “Creep”, and The Bends half that. Ed O'Brien says everyone told them a second Bends would sell six or seven million. The one thing you don't want to say to us is what we should do, because we'll kick against that and do exactly the opposite.¹

In Los Angeles the band played “Electioneering” on The Tonight Show and the Wiltern Theatre the next evening. Michael Stipe threw them a party in West Hollywood afterwards. By Philadelphia, O'Brien was calling the previous night in Boston the best gig of the tour so far.

At the Electric Factory, Yorke let the crowd sing the second verse of “Creep”. He admits he sometimes has to justify still playing it. Sometimes it's karaoke, and I enjoy hamming it up, but some days it really means something to me.¹