With the temperature finally feeling appropriate for the month — a hopeful indication I can leave behind the art of sweating while standing still for another season (along with “corralling my swimsuit muffin” or “hoping the Cubs might make the playoffs”) — thought I’d stop in and heat things up again a bit with a band from the land o’ lakes — which aside from giving us a bounty of delicious butter also gave us one of my all-time favorite bands. The band is the beloved Replacements, the land is Minnesota, and the timeframe is the late 70s.
The band’s origin story is almost as mythic as their eventual excess — janitor Paul Westerberg walks by a house every night in Minneapolis on his walk home where he hears an almighty ruckus being raised in the basement. Said ruckus is courtesy of guitarist Bob Stinson, drummer Chris Mars, and an 11 year old bassist, Stinson’s brother Tommy. The threesome are wailing away making rock music so loud you could hear them several blocks away (hence Westerberg’s initial echolocation, drawn to the “sheer volume and the wild thunder,” he said.) Westerberg listens from the bushes, likes what he hears night after night, and eventually meets and joins the band, taking their songs (and their unhinged alcoholic antics) to new heights over the course of the next decade.
That part of the story is legendary, too. Upon joining Westerberg shifts the band’s sound to incorporate the high energy punk vibe beginning to explode in the early 80s before abandoning that later in the decade for a more heartfelt indie sound. Along the way the band gives notoriously raucous shows, consumes more alcohol than the entire European continent the past six centuries, and flirts time and again with becoming superstars. Unfortunately, they never quite get there — despite almost single-handedly being responsible for a huge chunk of the 90s’ alternative scene (and writing a string of incredible, timeless anthems), outside of music critics and misanthropic kids like myself, most people have never heard of these guys. (As Westerberg says, the band was always “five years ahead and ten years behind.”)
The reason why was the final part of the legend. My understanding as I grew up listening to them was that the band was never really supported by their labels and that was why they’d never broken through. (Remember this was the 90s when labels were evil and a band’s signing to a major one could immediately torpedo their standing for having “sold out,” so the whims of the labels still had enormous sway.) Forget that the band were raging alcoholics and unrepentant rebels with severe authority issues. The band was constantly being pressured by the label to produce singles, forcing them to over-polish their albums in that single-minded quest, while never promoting them the way they should have — that’s why these guys weren’t household names.
Unfortunately the portrait journalist Bob Mehr paints in his outstanding Trouble Boys – The True Story of the Replacements places much more of the blame on the boys from butterville. What Mehr lays out in his book is not a case of criminal neglect on the part of the labels, but rather a gut-wrenching pattern of self-sabotage — one fueled by alcohol, insecurity, and adolescent instincts — often in the face of incredibly supportive producers, promoters, and labels. Seemingly any time one of these entities gives the band an option to break in a bigger way — whether by crossing into television via music videos (remember how all powerful these used to be at the time) or by reaching a bigger audience via radio shows, in-store promotions, or opening for bigger acts on tour — the band’s response is to act out by either playing terribly, showing up late/leaving early/not going at all, and/or telling the person/audience to go fuck themselves (literally or figuratively). Often it was all of the above.
Time and again in Mehr’s book he recounts performances packed with key industry people or sitdowns with potential benefactors that the band recognizes for what they are — golden opportunities to potentially achieve that elusive fame and recognition — and then immediately goes about destroying. Seeing it in this light is heartbreaking — not only because it dooms an amazing band to a life of relative obscurity, but moreso because a sizeable portion of it seems fueled by their worst instincts (ie the booze, depression, and authority issues acquired from their difficult formative years), things that could have been corrected/changed if they’d acknowledged/accepted them in time.
Unfortunately that was not to be, though. Those demons ultimately drove the band apart (they disbanded in 1991 after the “traveling wake” in support of their seventh album, All Shook Down), broke the brother-like bond among several of the members (Bob Stinson was famously fired from the band he formed, Mars was booted several years later, and even the Gutter Twins, Westerberg and Tommy, still don’t speak for years at a time), and led one of them to an early grave. (Bob Stinson died in 1995 after years of drug and alcohol abuse.) All of which somehow makes you love the band even more — the legend of the mistreated misfits certainly was enough to win many fans’ hearts (along with those amazing songs), but knowing the intricacies of their histories and faults makes you pull for them even harder; makes you wish they’d gotten the help they needed before the flaws became fatal; and makes you appreciate the songs they made in spite of those deficiencies even more.
Mehr’s book is full of fantastic details — from Westerberg’s chronic consumption of clam chowder in the band’s early years to some of the band’s lesser known drunken antics (which while often self-defeating could also at times just be hilarious, like their Keystone Kops effort to steal the master tapes back from their label’s offices, when they spray painted their new tour manager’s $3000 Armani suit bright yellow within minutes of meeting him, or when the Gutter Twins abruptly left a recording session and returned hours later with their faces covered in grease and parking cones on their heads.) There’s the interactions with legends of an earlier generation, which are a vintage cocktail of playful mischief and unnecessary antagonism in the face of open generosity. (The band pokes fun at one of Tom Petty’s hits, singing “Running Down the Drain” before insulting his audience and playing awfully when opening for him on tour, while doing much the same to Bob Dylan, yelling “Hey fucker! Those are two bucks!” when he tries to take one of their beers before ridiculing “Like a Rolling Stone” as he stands next to them during a studio visit.)
There’s the friendship (and rivalry) with contemporaries REM, who Westerberg would frustratingly watch slowly break and then become global superstars while his band continued to toil. (Saying essentially, “they’re as fucked up as we are!?”) There’s tons of stories about their knife’s edge gigs — sometimes glorious concentrations of attitude and energy, sometimes inglorious episodes of drunken destruction. There’s the times they switch instruments mid-set or switch outfits before encores (or on SNL). There’s the times they destroyed buses or vans (or studios or hotel rooms or stages or waiting rooms…) Or the time they all shaved their eyebrows.
One passage distills everything down to the band’s essence — it’s from their time up in the woods trying to record their fifth album, Don’t Tell a Soul. It was at the height of their alcoholism and friction within the band, and the initial sessions hadn’t been going well as a result. Mehr (by way of Tommy) takes over from there — “Every night we’d go to one of the cottages and start playing ‘Dodge Knife.’ That’s like dodgeball, but with knives. It got…very troubling.” One night [guitarist Slim] Dunlap drunkenly spread cream cheese all over the raw pine walls of his cottage. According to [producer Tony] Berg, “They had car accidents, They trashed the studio. They trashed the living quarters. They were on medication that you would normally prescribe for horses and bears. They were just a mess.”
Ugly, funny, off-putting, endearing — they’re all wrapped up in the mix, and rarely do you get one in isolation — but that volatile blend yielded some of the best songs of the decade (and some of the best I’ve yet to hear). I still remember the first time I heard the band back in middle school. A girl I had a crush on gave me a tape one day in class with the band’s name and the word “Tim” on it. That being my name I had the characteristic adolescent rush of emotions — “Oh my gosh, she gave me a tape — does this mean she likes me too? Are we dating now? Should I make HER a tape? What should I put on it? OH MY GOD SHE PUT MY NAME ON THE TAAAAAPE!”
I rushed home to listen to it, not knowing it was simply the name of the album and NOT an indication of her undying love. Her lack of interest turned out not to matter, though, as what she gave me was infinitely better — an album I would listen to hundreds of times in the intervening years and a band I would love as I thought I might her (only for thirty years and counting now). Dan Baird, frontman for the Georgia Satellites (one of the band’s many partners in crime from its years on the road), spoke to the band’s special quality and how their quest for a hit and recognition (the one that was “an albatross around Westerberg’s neck” according to Mehr) missed the point. “You don’t get to choose. There are people who’ll tell me ‘Oh, you wrote “Hands”… that is such a cute song.’ And they’ll come up to Paul and talk about ten different songs: ‘That one broke my heart; this other one tore me up; that song hit me where I lived.’ Not many people get that kind of response.”
And that’s the truth — the vast majority of people may not know who the Replacements are. They may never have had a bunch of hits or been as famous as the blogosphere and critics thought they should be. But enough people know, and those who do tend to love this band — both the insouciant attitude and the heartbreaking earnestness, and the lasting impact each had — and be more than willing to share. One blog post and eight readers at a time.
Here’s the gateway — I’ve got the usual Spotify channel with some of my handpicked favorites, as well as this one, my day to day anthem. When Westerberg roars, “I’m so! I’m so! Unsatisfied!” at the end, it’s as perfect a distillation of my everyday feeling as I can muster. (And has been for decades.) So jump on in and enjoy the swim…
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We’ll throw in a freebie since I had the pleasure of seeing another beloved band, Built to Spill, on its 20th anniversary tour for its classic Keep it Like a Secret album last night. Doug was rolling with a different backing band (I didn’t recognize any of the guys actually), but had an extra guitar in the mix so was great to see him have a little extra room to ramble, rather than having to do guitars and vocals himself. This one in particular sounded great, so lean back, crank it up, and bliss out for a bit…
–BS