by Bob Mehr
TROUBLE BOYS
Copyright © 2016 by Bob Mehr
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.
Designed by Jack Lenzo
Set in ten point Janson by The Perseus Books Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mehr, Bob.
Trouble boys: the true story of the Replacements / Bob Mehr.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-306-82203-2 (e-book: alk. paper) 1.Replacements (Musical group) 2.Rock musicians--United States--Biography. I. Title.
ML421.R47M43 2015
782.42166092’2--dc23
[B]
2015026791
First Da Capo Press edition 2016
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Bob and Joey Stinson
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: JAIL, DEATH, OR JANITOR
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART II: A BAND FOR OUR TIME
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
PART III: DREAMS AND GAMES
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
PART IV: THE LAST
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Mates.
We controlled rage with humor, struck the wrong chords 1st to acquaint ourselves with disaster, to ease the inevitability of our next return. Our next assault.
Baring all, as an offsetting pose then . . . HIT, SCREAM, JUMP, CRASH as one.
Quicksilver morons. We love it, so we stop. Why? Because soon we won’t and this way it won’t hurt as much.
Afraid? Terrified. Out numbered. Retreat? “They’ll kill us” never enters our mind.
We load and on 4 we charge laughing. The enemy babble: “I don’t believe my eyes”; “What the fuck?”; “This is a trick.”
Bang we land in their trench: “Gotta light?” Hey, what do you guys think you’re doing?
“See ya!”
They aim at our backs as we fall over each other. The bullets always missed.
PAUL WESTERBERG,
LETTER TO AUTHOR, 2012
INTRODUCTION
February 22, 1995, McDivitt-Hauge Funeral Home, South Minneapolis
The family made sure his sleeves were rolled up so everyone could see the tattoos.
He’d gotten them as a kid, after being locked up in the cursed halls of the Red Wing State Training School. His left arm said LUV HER—for Kim, his first girlfriend, who’d broken his heart. On his right arm was a mystery: his initials, with three arrows shooting in different directions. He never told anyone what the arrows symbolized, though friends would tease him that they represented the three things he cared about most in life: music, beer, and drugs.
For several days, local newspapers had reported the basic facts: Bob Stinson, former “lunatic guitarist” of the Replacements, found dead in his Uptown apartment. He’d founded the group, then been fired from it in 1986, when he couldn’t “curb his out-of-control lifestyle.” A couple of stories hinted at his troubled background: broken home, in and out of juvenile institutions, long-standing addiction problems, recent diagnosis as bipolar.
A syringe had been discovered near where he lay in his apartment. Given his history, everyone assumed he’d expired from an overdose, or even committed suicide. Later, the coroner’s final report would contradict the initial suspicions—not an OD but organ failure. Just thirty-five, Bob Stinson died of natural causes, his body and heart simply worn out. He’d gone to sleep and never awoke.
“When he died, he had a turntable in front of him, a bunch of records . . . a Yes record might’ve been playing, I think,” said his brother, Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson. “That’s the way he would want to go. He’d put a hunk of vinyl on and sit and listen and study. He was probably going, ‘Fucking A—this is great.’”
The tone of the subsequent outpouring—memorials and obituaries in Rolling Stone and SPIN, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times—was revealing. Nine years after Bob’s firing, and four since the group’s breakup, the Replacements were suddenly spoken of in reverential terms. They had become “legends” without ever really becoming stars, an epitaph as unlikely as their beginnings.
They had come together as the children of war veterans and alcoholics, from families steeped in mental illness and abuse, products of Midwestern recalcitrance and repression. “That held the bond in a peculiar way,” said front man Paul Westerberg. “We hit it off in ways that normal guys don’t. We understood each other.”
Back when they got their first little flush of fame, Westerberg would say, as a cockeyed boast, that they were losers, that there wasn’t a high school diploma or a driver’s license among them. They’d never had any clear-eyed ambition or direction. They got as far as they did only because they hungered: for attention, for love, for sanction, for volume, for chaos.
The band’s music filled the funeral chapel that day, an insolent soundtrack for a send-off. Bob’s mother, Anita Stinson, had asked Peter Jesperson—the man who’d discovered the group and been their closest ally—to make a tape of their early albums. He felt funny about a song like “Fuck School” blaring in a mortuary, but you don’t deny a grieving family’s request.
One by one, the surviving Replacements arrived: Paul, Tommy, drummer Chris Mars, and guitarist Slim Dunlap. This was the reunion none of them had wan
ted and all of them had feared. And there was Bob, still the center of attention, lying in his casket. When Westerberg walked in, “Johnny’s Gonna Die” was playing. It hit him square in the face.
Johnny always takes more than he needs
Knows a couple chords, knows a couple leads
He’d written those lines about the doomed ex–New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders after seeing him looking wasted and sounding brilliant at a concert back in 1980.
And everybody tells me that Johnny is hot
Johnny needs somethin’, what he ain’t got
“Bob picked up guitar, learned how to play a few rock songs, and then just beat the shit out of the thing for all the frustrations in his life,” noted Westerberg. “He was a lot like Thunders. In his hands the guitar didn’t scream; it cried for help, practically. We used to say Johnny made a guitar sound like an animal in pain. Bob had that too.”
Two hundred or so mourners filled the pews. Bob’s acoustic guitar leaned against the casket. In a quiet corner the Replacements gathered with Jesperson. The air was heavy for a moment. The group had fired Peter, then Bob, then Chris, and they’d sniped at one another in the press and in song lyrics. All of that was forgotten now.
“They say death brings you together,” said Mars. “I hadn’t seen Tommy for a long time, and I hadn’t really seen Paul for a long time. We were talkin’, shootin’ the shit for a bit. But it was bathed in this sad, sad thing.” Mars had done an etching for the cover of the memorial program: a Stratocaster with wings.
Bob’s mother had asked Jesperson to deliver the eulogy, but Peter demurred—he didn’t think he could get through it. The duty went to local musician–turned–rock writer Jim Walsh, who’d known the group since its early days. He spoke of Stinson’s great appetite for life and noted how un-Bob-like the occasion felt: “He would’ve laughed at us in our suits today, the pomp and circumstance. He would’ve wanted to know where the beer was.” Babes in Toyland drummer Lori Barbero, one of Bob’s close friends, sobbed through a reading of the Lord’s Prayer. Afterwards, people stood up and told “Bob stories,” among them the young musicians he’d worked with after the Replacements.
Ray Reigstad had played with Bob for five years in Static Taxi, the band that had given Stinson new life after the heartbreak of his Replacements exit. (“That was like his new family,” said Barbero. “They were all like brothers, and they treated him really wonderfully. It covered up the sore spot.”) “It was the only time I was ever laughing and crying at the same time in my life,” said Reigstad. Mike Leonard, who shared an apartment and a group, the Bleeding Hearts, with Bob for several years before his passing, recalled, “It was such a rock-and-roll funeral. Every musician that knew him was there paying their respects.”
Anita Stinson sat stoically through it all. She’d been gripped by terror when she got the call about Bob a few nights earlier. “Then that passed. I don’t think I got sad until, I bet, a month after the funeral . . . before the sadness and missing Bobby really hit me,” she said. As she accepted condolences and sympathy, heard and felt the stories’ emotion, a peculiar pride seized her: “As hard as Bobby had it, he did amazing things. He was loved by a lot of people.”
Bob’s sister Lonnie would remember “sadness, because you’d always hoped for more for him,” she said. “And guilt, especially because of the way we were raised, what happened to us as kids, and feeling like I could’ve made a difference, or changed him somehow. And yet . . . there was relief that maybe his torture is over.”
“The one thing I know when he died, and that was pretty immediate, was that he was safer,” said Tommy. “He had a hard fucking time. He had a hard existence, just trying to be a human.”
Up front, near the casket, was Bob’s ex-wife Carleen and their six-year-old son, Joey. Bob’s only child was a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, unable to walk or talk. “But Joe was always very receptive to Bob, and he loved taking Joe around,” said Carleen. “When Joe saw his dad at the funeral, he just reached out for his hand like he always did. He squeezed that great big hand of his. And when he didn’t squeeze back, he knew his dad was gone.”
A few rows behind, Paul Westerberg hung his head and wiped away tears. “I went downstairs for a cigarette, ’cause I couldn’t bear it,” he said. Westerberg had been vilified when Bob had been fired from the band; the pall was especially heavy now.
As he stood smoking, a couple girls who’d known Bob in his final days approached him. “They made a point to come down and talk to me. They said, ‘Bob loved you. Whenever he asked you for anything, he said you always gave it to him.’ For those girls to seek me out and tell me that . . . I was like, ‘Let the world think I’m a villain as long as I know what Bob thought and felt.’
“I knew we didn’t hate each other. We were close and I loved him. He was Tommy’s brother, but he was my brother too. And when he died, it all made us feel that much more vulnerable.”
As the service concluded, Paul called to Carleen. He leaned in and whispered to her in a broken voice: “We were just kids. We didn’t know shit. We were . . . just kids.”
PART I Jail, Death, or Janitor
[We were] miscreants who had no other choice, had no other road out. We were one of the few, the chosen, you know? It’s either this or . . . jail, death, or janitor.
PAUL WESTERBERG
CHAPTER 1
Bob Stinson had dangerous bloodlines. His mother, Anita, came from Excelsior, Minnesota, a dozen miles outside of Minneapolis on Lake Minnetonka. Her father, Ernest Martin Hafner, was the first mystery in the family. “All I know is he left home when he was fifteen and started riding the rails,” said Anita.
Hafner spent time in the Navy and then settled near Lake Minnetonka, where he met his wife, Virginia Lebens, born 1919 in Shakopee. Her family was Dutch and Polish, and big drinkers. “I have a family genealogy that traces to the 1840s or something,” said Anita. “And every single relation was a drunk.”
Virginia Lebens also battled mental health issues, problems that would intensify among later generations of the family. Two of Bob Stinson’s cousins would commit suicide by hanging, one at the age of ten, the other at seventeen.
Ernest and Virginia had seven kids. Anita was the second oldest, born April 3, 1942, following big brother Tom and ahead of Mary, Eugene, Rosie, and twins Ronnie and Rita. Ernest was superintendent of the Water and Sewer Department of Excelsior; despite his fancy title, the Hafners led a modest existence. “Dad tried to feed seven of us on his little salary,” said Anita. “We weren’t poor, but it wasn’t easy, I’m sure.”
Anita was a fourteen-year-old eighth-grader when she met Neil Stinson at a dance. Some fifty years after the fact, she had difficulty recalling their initial spark: “Beats the bejeebers out of me. Can’t help you there.”
Granite-jawed, black eyes, dark crew cut, Neil wasn’t bad-looking—the strong, silent type. He was an introverted high school dropout; he was also functionally illiterate.
Neil’s family history was no less complicated than the Hafners’. Born in 1939 and raised in Mound, Minnesota, Neil was the fifth child of ten. His father disappeared early; his mother was such a severe alcoholic that the state eventually took her children away. Some were adopted, and some were put in foster care; those who were of age, or close, were left to fend for themselves.
After running away from foster homes a couple times, Neil moved in with his older sister Ruthie. Her husband, a roofer, taught him the trade, and Neil Stinson remained a roofer the rest of his life. His only other interests were hunting, fishing, and drinking.
Neil and Anita started going steady. “I was still in Catholic school then—I used to skip catechism class on Monday nights to meet him,” she said. In the spring of 1959, she got pregnant. “My family being Catholic, they didn’t talk about s-e-x. I hardly knew what was going on.” She quit Minnetonka High and accepted Neil’s shotgun marriage proposal.
On December 17, 1959, she went into labor. Since neithe
r Excelsior nor Mound had a hospital, the baby was delivered one town over in Waconia. “Neil drove me there, then he left and got drunk with my brother for three days,” said Anita. “The only thing I remember is they put a mask on my face and when I woke up it was three days later and I had a kid. Then they tell you, ‘Now you have to nurse him.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Her firstborn son, Robert Neil Stinson, had blond hair, blue eyes, and a sweet disposition. “Bob was a prince, just a prince,” said Anita. A couple months later, Anita was pregnant again. In November 1960, she gave birth to a daughter, Lonnie. “Because we were so close in age, me and Bobby were almost like twins,” said Lonnie. “We were real close growing up.”
Not yet eighteen, Anita struggled to care for her young ones. “I was a child, trying to raise two children. It was overwhelming,” she said. What little social life she had revolved around drinking. “My parents took Bobby and Lonnie and said, ‘It’s time you got drunk.’ So that’s what I did. I was drunk for two days. That was the culture.” Over time Anita, too, became an alcoholic.
Despite the children, their marriage was soon failing. Neil was a heavy drinker and tightfisted. He was also emotionally distant, particularly toward his son. When Bob was three, Anita said, “Neil was outside working on his car and Bobby went to be around him. Neil literally picked him up by the britches and ran him back into the house and told me: ‘Take care of this kid.’ I thought, That’s your son too. There was no feeling there. Poor Bobby, it started young with him, when he was first rejected. I don’t know why that scene sticks in my mind so much, but it does. It’s still difficult. When I saw the way that was going, how Neil was, it just led me to think: I gotta get out of this mess.”
The couple separated in 1963. Anita got a job waitressing at Skippers Café in Excelsior. “Neil wouldn’t give me any money for child support,” she said. “We went to court over that. Being a roofer, he was making fairly good money. The judge asked him what he did with it. He said: ‘I pay for groceries and rent, and I pay for my drinking and it’s gone.’”
