by Bob Mehr
In 1965 the Westerbergs moved nearby to 4126 Garfield Avenue—a stately four-bedroom, three-level, prairie-style home with a wrought-iron fence. “My dad couldn’t really afford it,” said Paul. “But people would see the car and the house and go, ‘Aha, your dad’s rich.’ I used to be embarrassed by that.”
Mary Lou had instigated the move—her younger sister Peggy had married well, to a man rumored, only half-jokingly, to be mob-connected. (This same “uncle” later gave Paul amps and PAs from various nightclubs he was involved in.) “There was pressure for my dad,” recalled Paul. “I think my mom was always pressing him, ’cause her younger sister had this and had that. So he tried to keep up, got a bigger house. When really all he wanted was to play golf and drink beer.”
In the late ’60s, Hal became head salesman at Anoka’s Main Motors—only to return to Warren (later renamed Anderson) Cadillac within a few years. “They demoted him to, like, floor salesman,” said Paul. “Then the seventies hit, with the oil and gas shortage, and he’s stuck pushing these big cars. That’s when times got a little funky.”
Hal had already lost a chunk of money chasing his golf dreams when his daughter Julie went to work selling investment property in Arizona—an operation fronted by singer Pat Boone—and he decided to invest. “Basically my dad bought a fucking hunk of desert,” Paul said. “He got hornswoggled.” By the early seventies, Mary Lou was forced to get a job at a bank while Paul was in high school—“Probably to pay for my Catholic school education, which I’d end up throwing down the drain.”
The Westerbergs and Philipps had always been big boozing families: “My cousins, my aunts, uncles, whichever side of the family,” said Paul, “whenever they got together, they’d break out the liquor.” For Hal, though, it was more than a social lubricant: “Like a junkie who needs it just to get straight,” said Paul, “he’d have a couple quick belts when he got home. And then would drink until he’d go to sleep. But then every morning he was fairly chipper and ready to go.”
Hal’s problem was spoken of fairly openly. “My mom would say that on a regular basis: ‘Such is life with an alcoholic,’” said Paul. “Not that she was teetotal by any means, but she could function without it.” There was no violence in the house (apart from once when Hal disciplined Paul for “bugging my sister . . . he knocked me down and felt bad right away”), but his parents’ moods and emotions vacillated. “My dad was depressed. My mother was anxious,” said Paul. “A swell combination there.”
When Paul was thirteen, one of his older sisters dared him to drink a glass of vodka. As he absorbed the drink’s effects, his world changed. “What I felt was immediate release from all anxiety,” he said. “I’d found the elixir of life that makes you calm and fearless. I think that’s the alcoholic trigger. I started at thirteen, and I kept it up. It was in our genes.”
From a young age, Paul Westerberg had a mind that seemed to work differently.
“It probably has to do with all the blows I took to the head,” he would say, only half-joking.
When he was twenty months old, his sister Anne accidentally whacked him in the noggin with a baseball bat: “Just as my right cerebral cortex was forming,” he said. At nine, swinging on a rope in a junkyard, he fell and cut the left side of his head badly; he was left with a permanently pointy Spock-like ear. “That probably impaired my hearing too—as well as knocking all the math, language, and reasoning out of me.”
In school he sometimes had trouble making sense of words. “I don’t know if you’d classify it as dyslexia,” he said. “But even now, if you wake me up in the morning and have me read something, I turn some of the letters backwards. It forced another part of my brain to grow stronger.”
Much of the memorable inverted imagery in Westerberg’s songs would come from a real place in his mind. “I really do think the opposite of what I’m told. If [someone says,] ‘White sheet rain,’ I think, Black blanket sun. Musically too, I think the opposite of what makes sense sometimes.” Schoolwork became a constant struggle. “I had to work really hard just to be an average student.”
What came naturally was music. Paul never took formal lessons, but he could fiddle with the piano in the house, and his mother would lullaby him with “Hello Mary Lou” and “Come On-a My House.” “I thought my mom wrote those,” he said.
The proximity to his musician uncles also stoked his interest. “We’d go to my Uncle Bob’s at Christmas, and he would play the piano. When it really got good was when the other uncle, Paul, would come over and crack out his trombone and they’d actually play jazz,” he said. “That was pretty exciting to hear in somebody’s living room.”
The Beatles arrived when Paul was five, especially for his older sisters, who watched Ed Sullivan with their friends. “They’re all squealing, ‘Oh, Paul’s so cute!’ It definitely perked me up. Whatever they would’ve looked at—if it’d been Tab Hunter—I probably would have dug that. Fortunately, it was the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” His older brother Phil hipped him to folk and blues music. Inevitably, Bob Dylan had a formative impact; early on, Westerberg wrote “a vague rip of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ called ‘Mr. Tonic Guy’ or ‘Mr. Tonic Man.’”
Westerberg also absorbed early-seventies AM pop radio, putting a pair of transistor radios to his ears in bed each night. His friend Tommy Byrne’s stepfather owned a bowling alley and would hand over discarded jukebox 45s. “It was pop music, bubblegum,” he recalled, “whatever was a hit in 1970–71”: “Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again” by the Fortunes, “Temptation Eyes” by the Grass Roots, the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There,” the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You,” even silly novelties like Daddy Dewdrop’s “Chick-A-Boom (Don’t Ya Jes’ Love It).”
He bought his first real records in 1972, picking up Seventh Sojourn by the Moody Blues, mostly to impress his sisters. He also got Never a Dull Moment, the fourth solo LP by Rod Stewart, the laddish, raspy-throated singer for the Faces. Paul would stare at the unusual album cover—Stewart looking bored and deflated, sitting in an armchair—and wear the record out, absorbing its raw, beautiful folk songs and loose-limbed rock numbers. Later, for a couple of days before a session, Paul would shout at the top of his lungs to get Stewart’s huskiness into his voice.
He also fell for the glam rock coming from the United Kingdom circa 1972. “I was a Slade fan all the way. That was, for that one year, year and a half, my favorite thing,” he said. “Parents thought it was asinine. I thought it was exciting.”
Paul was a small kid—and his mother had enrolled him in school earlier than normal—but still played baseball through eighth grade, though the glasses he was prescribed at age nine made it hard to see the ball. “I was always pretty fast. My reflexes were very good. But I was mostly a tenacious benchwarmer. By the time I was ten, I was absorbed in listening to rock-and-roll and trying to get a guitar for years until I got one.” He’d initially wanted to play drums. “My mother’s words of wisdom were: ‘Some musicians can get one girl, but remember: a guitar player always has his pick.’ How right she was.”
He bought his first guitar, a cheap Harmony Sovereign acoustic, off his sister when he was twelve, for $10: “Mowed the lawn about ten times to get it. The neck had gotten so bowed I couldn’t even play a chord. But that was very good. It was almost like exercising with weights on your leg.”
Westerberg wasn’t a natural performer. “If I sang, I’d do it from underneath the table,” he said. “One time, I played a little song for my mom and dad on the guitar, something that I told them I wrote for them, for their anniversary. They looked really embarrassed. That was the last time I ever did that.” Mostly, he devoted himself almost secretly to the instrument. “My plan was to learn the thing and pull it out one day and wow them.”
By the early seventies, Phil Westerberg had become something of a tear-away, often in trouble with the law. “He was the total black sheep of the family—in jail about five times,” said Paul. “He didn’t really do an
ything bad. He did stupid things. He definitely ran with some criminal dopes. One time he came home with the bullet holes in his car, all beat up.”
During this period, Paul said, he and his younger sister, Mary, “went under the radar. That was ‘the great distraction’ for my parents. I saw my mom go from happy, when I was young, to very hand-wringing in my early teens. I used to get that ‘don’t turn out like your brother’ shit. I heard that more often than I think was necessary.”
He also heard the music Phil sometimes made. “My brother had friends who were musicians, and I used to hang when they would come home drunk late at night and I would sit and watch them,” he said. “I was taught some shit from a few of his buddies—they were into everything from Zeppelin to bluegrass. So I got a crash course on everything from mandolins to guitar solos.”
Paul would spend years practicing undisturbed. “The guitar became my companion.”
CHAPTER 3
In January of 1974, Anita Stinson and her children arrived from Florida with little more than the clothes on their backs to a freezing Minnesota winter. “I remember how devastated me and Bobby were,” said Lonnie Stinson. “We were sad to leave our friends so suddenly. It was so cold. We didn’t have clothes for that. And we didn’t have money to buy clothes.” They headed to the house of Anita’s mother, Virginia, where the kids were given generation-old hand-me-downs, supplemented with items from Goodwill.
Showing a resilience that would mark his character going forward, seven-year-old Tommy adapted best. “The first thing I remember was waking up for school and walking outside and there was snow up to my shoulders,” he said. “I’d never even seen snow. I remember embracing it.” The move, said Anita, “was the most traumatic for Bobby. As difficult as the situation in Florida was, that’s where his friends were.”
They’d barely been in Minneapolis a couple weeks when Bob, then fifteen, tried to run away back to Florida, hitchhiking all the way to the Iowa border before the cops picked him up. Anita’s brother Gene retrieved him. Years later, in counseling, Bob would admit murderous impulses toward Nick; it’s possible he’d gone to seek revenge.
For the first time in a decade, Bob and Lonnie visited their father, Neil Stinson. It went awkwardly: Neil was still cold and uncommunicative toward his only son. “When they left, Neil gave Lonnie a hug and kiss good-bye,” said Anita. “Bobby wanted a hug and kiss. Neil wanted no part of it. Bobby didn’t go back to see him.”
Bob enrolled in ninth grade at Folwell Junior High and quickly began skipping class, attending forty-one days and missing forty-eight during his first semester. His grades had been average in Florida. In Minneapolis they plummeted: Fs across the board, except for music, where he earned a D. The only bright spot during this period was Kim Jensen, one of Lonnie’s friends—a pretty redhead Bob began dating. She liked the fact that he could play guitar.
After a few months at her mother’s house, Anita rented the upper half of a duplex on Eighteenth Avenue. Bob set up shop in the attic, blasting his stereo and hanging black-light posters. He got a part-time job cooking at Pizza Shack on Lake Street and began to frequent the nearby Suneson Music Center. The owner, Roger Suneson, hosted weekend picking parties and numbered big-name country stars—Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Dave Dudley—among his clientele. Suneson’s musical bent is probably the reason Bob began playing a Fender Telecaster, a model popular with country players, and he soon amassed several other guitars.
When Bob wasn’t playing in his attic, he’d cruise around Uptown Minneapolis exploring, much as he’d walked the canyons and beaches of California and Florida. The Stinsons’ place was near railroad tracks that he’d walk along while ditching school, alone with his thoughts.
Adult supervision was scarce: Anita worked as a waitress at the Uptown Bar on Hennepin Avenue, a beer joint–cum–private dancer club owned by pharmacist-businessman Frank Toonen. “As a waitress, you would have to dance with the customers,” said Anita. “It floored me. I said, ‘I’m not dancing with that drunk.’ They said: ‘That’s part of your job.’”
After finishing her day shifts, she’d stay on and drink through happy hour. She began seeing an engineer and fellow drinker named Doug McLean. “Doug was mean,” recalled Lonnie. “He was not as harmful as Nick, but he was a jerk. We’d be home alone. It was almost like we had our own apartment.”
Anita and Doug quickly got serious, and she finally decided to file for divorce from Neil Stinson in order to marry McLean. This did not sit well with her oldest son. “Bob’s impression of any man was going to be negative,” said Anita.
Later, Bob would tell a social worker that he “gets so angry at Mr. McLean that he would like to beat him up with a baseball bat.” Such threats carried a real weight: Bob may have been a child emotionally, but he’d quickly grown into a strapping five-foot-nine and 160 pounds.
His behavior was becoming disturbing. In the summer of 1974, he got angry at Lonnie and a group of friends and shut himself in his room. The kids wanted him to come out, but he didn’t want to face them, so he jumped out of the second-floor window to escape. Another time he jumped off a railroad bridge onto a moving train. He avoided serious injury both times.
Early that September, Kim broke up with Bob. He was devastated at losing the one good thing to happen to him in Minneapolis. “He didn’t have the coping skills to get through that grieving and pain,” said Lonnie.
There is some suggestion in Bob’s welfare report that he may have tried to commit suicide during this period and was hospitalized as a result. Those portions are largely redacted; neither Anita nor Lonnie recalled any specific incident. What is clear, however, is that Bob was cutting himself with a razor, “playing tic-tac-toe on his arms.”
In October, he began to turn violent toward his siblings. He hit Tommy and chased him around the house with a butcher knife. Bob insisted he was only “playing around.” He also threatened Lonnie and tore up her yearbook, then tried to set fire to the bathroom. Anita told Bob’s assigned social worker that he “showed no emotion except anger” and never cried. The welfare report noted that Bob had also smashed all of his guitars: “[He] takes his anger out on himself as well as others.”
Something needed to be done. On October 15, Anita took him to the St. Joseph’s Boys’ Home, dropping him off there with no real explanation. Bob thought he was being punished for skipping school. It would later transpire that the decision was largely Doug McLean’s. “If you were my kid, I would have done this a long time ago,” he told Bob on the drive to the home. In fact, McLean had contacted a caseworker he knew there personally.
Bob was left at St. Joseph’s for a week with no contact with his family. Scared and confused, he was assigned to a welfare agent from Hennepin County’s family counseling service named Margarette Appleby.
She contacted the family, and after some back and forth, Anita finally agreed to bring Bob home. Appleby conducted counseling sessions with him and his mother, and things seemed to improve for a time. But after a few months the erratic behavior came back.
In February 1975, Bob got into a fight with Tommy and threatened to burn the house down. Around that time, Doug McLean moved in—he and Anita would marry in April—and promptly got into a physical altercation with Bob, throwing him against a wall. Bob ran away for several days.
“Mr. McLean has a fiery temper of his own, says Bobby hasn’t given him a chance and Bobby baits him,” noted Appleby in her case log. McLean told Appleby: “The only way you can trust [Bob] is to hold a gun on him twenty-four hours a day.” He wanted Bob sent away permanently, committed to the St. Cloud Children’s Home, a teen mental health facility run by the Catholic Charities, until he was eighteen, then to enlist him in the military.
Finally, Lonnie was compelled to tell Anita the real reason her brother had become so out of control and antagonistic. In front of Appleby, Bob’s fourteen-year-old sister revealed to her mother everything Nick Griffin had done—the years of sexual, physical, and mental abu
se.
Anita was dumbfounded. “For me, at that age I needed to know she believed me, and the way she responded told me she didn’t,” Lonnie said. “She was in shock. But I took it as she didn’t believe me.”
“I think I believed her,” said Anita. “But I was like ‘Why did you wait to tell me until now?’” Anita had been a victim of Nick’s abuse herself, but Lonnie’s revelations were beyond anything she’d ever considered. Suddenly, all the disconnected clues made sense.
Margarette Appleby asked Anita if the family wanted to prosecute Nick. “I remember that social worker saying, ‘We have a statute of limitations of seven years, so you’ll have to make a decision,’” said Lonnie.
Still reeling from the revelations, the last thing Anita wanted to do was be forced to go back to Florida, or have her kids ever face Nick in court. “I didn’t want my children to ever see him again,” she said. Nick Griffin’s name would never be uttered in the Stinson house again, except at the end of a stream of damnations and curses.
For Bob, living under the same roof as Doug McLean seemed untenable. The next few months saw more calm broken by spasms of anger and violence between Bob and McLean or his siblings, followed by more self-destructive behavior. At Appleby’s urging, Bob was finally examined by a psychiatrist named Dr. Joel Finkelstein. The specific findings of his examination are unknown, but he did recommend that Bob be placed in a residential treatment center.
In the spring of 1975, Bob was sent to the St. Cloud Children’s Home. Anita resisted, but McLean on one side and Appleby on the other were pushing. “That was the last thing he needed, in my opinion, to be separated from the family,” said Anita.
St. Cloud was an unsecured facility, and Bob ran away four times in just a couple months, hitchhiking across the state for days at a time. He’d also started drinking for the first time and was beginning to steal: shoplifting food from a grocery store, breaking into his grandmother Virginia’s house and taking cash. Then he’d turn himself in to the Minneapolis police.
