by Bob Mehr
After another escape in May, the cops returned him to St. Cloud. Supervisors noted that he was still drunk when he arrived. He was assigned to the facility’s substance abuse treatment center—but ran away again. Eight days later, Bob turned up back at his family’s house. His mother and Appleby took him to the Juvenile Center in Minneapolis, where he faced a series of “absenting” charges, and a detention hearing was held.
Bob was sent to the Eastern Region Reception Center for Boys, where for the next few weeks he was observed and given a series of mental and behavioral evaluations. He showed average to below-grade ability in standardized reading and math tests and unwillingness to do his work. It was noted that Bob spent most of his time at the center disengaged, reading rock magazines. Asked about his goals, Bob said he planned to finish high school, but not to attend college: “His only vocational preference is to become a singer and make money.”
After several weeks, it was determined that he was “incorrigible.” A report recommended he be remanded to the State of Minnesota Commissioner of Corrections. Barring some dramatic change, he’d be in the state’s custody until he was twenty-one.
His next stop was Red Wing.
The State Training School at Red Wing had a notorious reputation as the San Quentin of “juvenile prisons.” Built in 1889, it was a foreboding, castlelike complex on the outskirts of the city of Red Wing, off Highway 61, an hour southeast of Minneapolis. For nearly a century it had been the place where Minnesotan kids guilty of any crime short of murder were sent.
By the time Bob Stinson arrived in the summer of 1975, Red Wing was no longer the draconian penal colony of legend. Beginning in the late sixties, the school’s programs were dramatically modernized, reflecting a more progressive approach to rehabilitating young men. It housed some 500 boys in a series of cottages spread across several hundred acres.
Bob was settled into Red Wing’s Harvard Cottage. Though it was a secured facility, he had no trouble finding his way out, running away again at the end of July, after just two weeks, then again in September. Both times he was caught and returned within a few hours. On his third attempt in October, he disappeared for eight days before being brought back in.
Bob actually told his counselors that he craved the structure that Red Wing provided. What he was escaping was the peer-based rehabilitation program in which he had been placed.
A pioneer in treating troubled youth, Harry Vorrath had created the Positive Peer Culture (PPC) program and implemented it in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Washington, DC, with considerable success. He was brought to Red Wing following a 1968 incident: over a hundred kids staged a mass runaway. PPC, Vorrath wrote in 1974, was “designed to ‘turn around’ a negative youth subculture and mobilize the power of the peer group in a productive manner . . . in group sessions and day-to-day activities.” Unlike most traditional treatment approaches, PPC did “not ask whether a person wants to receive help but whether he’d be willing to give help. As the person gives and becomes of value to others he increases his own feelings of worthiness and builds a positive self-concept.”
But Vorrath’s “positive caring behavior” system did not serve Bob well. “When discussing things he often grimaces or displays a nervous sort of smile, and this frequently leads to confrontations with his peers as they think he is laughing at them when he is not,” ran a report on Stinson from the summer of 1975. Rather than be a helpful force among his peers, Bob was more inclined to play the clown: “Bob will act foolish and get others to act foolish as well in an attempt to be accepted,” noted his group leader Michael Kilen.
What disturbed Bob most was having to his discuss his problems with the other boys: “He has only reluctantly told the life story and even then has made his difficulties appear relatively inconsequential.” Instead, he’d disappear into his room and obsessively practice guitar, deconstructing the playing on Johnny Winter’s Saints & Sinners or Yes’s Fragile with single-minded focus.
In recent decades, doctors and researchers have found that music therapy and its unique features can help emotionally disturbed children, particularly the survivors of sexual abuse. For Bob, those Johnny Winter and Yes licks were an essential self-therapy. The Red Wing counselors simply saw music as a distraction.
Twelve months in, it was clear to his counselors that Bob was making no appreciable progress at Red Wing. Nor was he ready to go back to his family. Instead, the authorities tried to place him in a Minneapolis group home where he might get more individualized attention.
To celebrate his release, Bob and several other boys gave themselves homemade tattoos. “Me and three other guys sat with a bottle of Indian ink and a sewing needle,” said Bob, who tattooed LUV HER—an homage to his ex, Kim Jensen—on his left forearm, and his initials, B.S., along with a trio of mysterious arrows, on his right.
In May 1976, Bob was formally granted parole from Red Wing and committed to Freeport West, on Twenty-Seventh Avenue in southeast Minneapolis. He was enrolled at the Portland Transitional School to ease his move back to high school. Bob also began one-on-one counseling sessions. More and more, his case file would acknowledge the guitar as a possible path to a more stable future.
“It has been suggested that Bob’s ability or potential ability be evaluated so that he can be encouraged or discouraged appropriately,” one progress report guardedly noted. “If he had some potential and maintains the interest, it would seem reasonable to arrange guitar lessons.”
Robert Flemal first laid eyes on Bob Stinson as he stood on the flat roof of the Freeport West house, wailing on guitar, eyes closed. That guy plays pretty good, thought Flemal. I hope he ends up being my roommate, so he can show me how to play.
Born in Michigan and raised in Bob’s hometown of Mound, Minnesota, Flemal had been a teenage truant and thief. “I got caught stealing a car,” he said. “My dad just said he was gonna let the state deal with me. So I ended up in Red Wing.” Late in the summer of 1976, Flemal was paroled to Freeport West. He and Bob would room together. “I felt there was a reason we were put together,” said Flemal. “We both needed music to keep us sane. Bob was like a twin brother. Our birthdays were only a few days apart.”
Stinson and Flemal were among a dozen kids living at Freeport, which required its residents to attend school, get jobs, and take part in loosely structured group activities. For a time, Bob and Robert both attended Marshall University High School. Flemal graduated; Bob dropped out. In the fall of 1976, Stinson got a dishwashing gig at Mama Rosa’s, an Italian joint in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota, and Flemal was soon working there too. “We started saving our money and spending it on musical instruments,” said Flemal.
Together they’d haggle deals at Suneson’s. “We could put down a hundred bucks on a seven-hundred-dollar guitar and [Roger Suneson] let us take it home,” said Flemal, who picked out a Gibson SG. “Before long we were playing up a storm.”
Bob would teach Flemal the rudiments and show him tricks. “He would take the needle and set it down on a record and learn a couple licks,” said Flemal. “And take it back and set it down again and learn more. He was really dedicated.”
Freeport was supposed to be a chemical-free group home, but, said Flemal, “we took acid, smoked pot, tripped on LSD. I remember getting some angel dust. I took a couple hits and it laid me out. Bob did it and he liked it. There was nothing he didn’t like, I don’t think.”
Flemal also recalled that Bob drank secretly and heavily. “There [were] mornings I couldn’t believe he was drinking first thing. I was like, ‘It’s way too early for that crap.’” Bob was busted several times at Freeport and forced to quit his job at Mama Rosa’s as punishment. He eventually got back on track and returned to the restaurant full-time.
Flemal and Stinson decided to start a band together. “None of us had any religion in our lives. Music was our religion,” said Flemal. Determined to get back home, Bob focused on convincing Freeport West’s counselors that he was ready for release. Part of
that meant a rapprochement with his family. He began counseling sessions with his mother.
There were dark, difficult moments together as Bob and his mother discussed the years of abuse at Nick Griffin’s hands. “During one of the counseling sessions at Freeport House, I asked Bobby, ‘How did you feel?’” recalled Anita. Bob replied, she said, “If I’d had a gun, I’d have blown his head off.”
Anita’s marriage to Doug McLean had been short-lived—another controlling alcoholic who lost his job and then lost the plot. With McLean gone, Anita agreed to take Bob back. “He seemed to be more independent,” said Anita. “He wanted to be part of the family, but only to a point.”
Bob asked his mother to let Flemal live with them. Flemal didn’t want to return to his own family in Mound. “I saw nothing to gain living back home and living under my dad’s rules,” he said. “I just wanted to have my hair long, play music, and nobody tell me what to do. And Anita, she was willing to take me in.”
Bob was paroled from Freeport in the summer of 1977 and quickly proved he’d changed. “Bob’s mother is thrilled because Bob is getting along fine at home with the family and fitting in very well,” noted Minnesota Department of Corrections agent J. Robinson.
That December, Robinson recommended a satisfactory discharge for Bob on his eighteenth birthday. “Bob has . . . not simply ‘not been caught’ or made superficial changes. His changes appear to be deep and integrated into his personality so are more likely to last.”
Robert Neil Stinson’s final juvenile report—case number 20937-A—also mentioned his new band. “He is still heavy into his music, has a group formed and hopes to perform when he feels good enough,” wrote Robinson. “Others say he is good enough already.”
CHAPTER 4
The Academy of the Holy Angels in Richfield, a first-tier suburb just south of South Minneapolis, had been an all-girls school for most of its first century. Founded in 1877 as an institution of learning for fledgling nuns, it became a private day school in 1931. It began admitting boys in 1972. Paul Westerberg was a member of the second class that included males. “I was a little hesitant to go ’cause it had been all-girls,” he said. “But that also meant there was gonna be a lot of chicks there.”
Most of the students were from Richfield, a solidly working- and middle-class area. Though none of his classmates’ families owned lake homes like the “cake eaters” of fancier enclaves like Edina, Westerberg still felt slightly disconnected from them. He was a city kid and they were suburbanites, even though the distinction was a matter of a couple miles.
Other than the standard Catholic school uniform—white shirts and brown slacks, no exceptions—Holy Angels offered a fairly liberal environment. The staff was mostly laypeople; there were just a handful of nuns left, and the only priest was the principal. When Westerberg arrived, the school had gone to a modular scheduling system that gave students long, leisurely gaps between classes on an open campus.
Holy Angels also accepted troubled kids from other schools, mostly alcohol and drug offenders. “They sent these users from the inner city to come hang out with us, thinking us good Catholic kids would rub off on them,” said Westerberg. “But they rubbed off on us.” Pot was easy to find, and students regularly toked up on the campus’s fringes.
Despite its laxity, Westerberg chafed at Holy Angels. His grades, good through junior high, fell dramatically. “I literally went from getting As in ninth grade to Bs in tenth, to Cs, Ds, and Fs by eleventh grade,” he said. “It was the worst four years of my life.” Westerberg’s academic struggles were partly due to worsening eyesight. “By the time I was fourteen, I couldn’t see the blackboard. And I didn’t want to wear my glasses.” It was also the chief reason he chose not to learn to drive: “I knew I’d be the first one to ram a car into a tree.”
Paul was convinced music was his destiny. “I learned about rock-and-roll secondhand through magazines,” he said. “I was weaned on critics. I read every issue of Creem, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy!—I never saw bands until I was [playing] in one.”
As a freshman, Westerberg won a radio call-in contest. “For the prize, you had a choice: they’d give you some albums or a couple hours of free recording time, and play your song on the air.” Westerberg chose the latter, taking the bus to a small downtown studio with his guitar. “I recorded an acoustic song, an instrumental that I made up. I put a little harmonica on top and a little mandolin, which I didn’t really know how to play, but I was very good at Brian Jonesing shit.” A week later the song made its debut on the station. “I listened with my sister and my mom and Diane Martini, the girl next door. Of course, they never played my thing again.”
The Harmony Sovereign acoustic that Paul bought off his sister had outlived its usefulness by the time he was fifteen. One day in his brother’s attic bedroom, Westerberg had a fit and smashed it—the first guitar he destroyed.
Though he’d learned to play in a folksy style, Paul jumped to an electric guitar—a used black Stratocaster he played through a battered forty-watt Carvin amplifier.
“I used to play really loud,” he said. “One day the woman down the block left a bunch of instructional books on the doorstep, rang the bell, and ran off. It was sort of a hint.” Paul took it: “I read enough and learned enough, about jazz even. I wanted to learn all that shit and then forget it and do my own thing.”
Though he was relatively small—a wiry five-foot-seven—Paul’s hands were perfectly suited for the instrument: he had long, thick fingers with unusually large fingertips. His deficiencies, however, would define his playing style: he had congenitally malformed pinkies that curved dramatically toward his fourth fingers, a condition known as clinodactyly. “I was born that way, though for years I thought my brother had broken them: ‘Look what Phil did to me!’”
Westerberg’s real limitation was his elbows. The ulnar nerves in both arms had been problematic from a young age and hampered his fretting flexibility. “Every time I bend my arm it hurts. So I had to find a guitar style where I didn’t have to move around so much,” he said. What he found was “more open-tuning stuff, where I wouldn’t have to change the fingers.”
Westerberg was a natural rhythm guitarist, with an unrelenting right hand. He copped his chunky playing style studying Keith Richards and Mick Taylor on records and in the 1973 concert film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones. “I went and saw that a bunch of times when it came out,” he recalled.
But he would ultimately stake his claim playing lead. “Alvin Lee [of Ten Years After] was a big influence. But to my ear, [Duane] Allman was the best. He had the feel that no other white guitarist had. It all came from Duane’s tone—every note sounded good. I think that’s where I learned, even if I couldn’t play flashy, at least make the handful of notes you play have a pleasing sound or texture to them. I spent the next few years learning to be a hot-shit player . . . until I realized that was nowhere.”
Like Westerberg, John Zika was the fourth child of five, and a strain of depression ran through his Czech-Irish family. Unlike Paul, Zika was an exceptional athlete, starring in baseball, football, and hockey; he was already being scouted in eighth grade. Popular and charismatic, he wasn’t the usual jock type. “He had a cerebral, artistic side,” said his friend and Holy Angels classmate Ben Welter, who recalled of Zika’s hockey playing, “On the ice, John worked out his demons in a way that no one else did. He would typically get in drop-the-gloves fights.”
In high school, Zika underwent a fairly dramatic change after Welter’s older brother, Vincent, committed suicide during John’s freshman year. By sophomore year, Zika had quit sports entirely. “He was more into writing music, writing poetry, and reading,” said Welter. At Holy Angels, Zika was suspended when he got caught with pot in his locker; soon after, said Welter, “he told his Spanish teacher . . . to fuck off, and walked out. Everyone was talking about it.”
Westerberg only knew Zika by reputation, but was in awe. “He was like James Dean. He stuck out by a
country mile from the rest of the kids. In the early seventies, we’re walking around in our platforms and bell-bottoms and he had straight leg jeans, plaid shirts, and a rope for a belt. I looked up to him.”
What really caught Westerberg’s attention was Zika’s infamous performance at Holy Angels’ annual talent contest: instead of presenting a little magic act or a polite folk number, Zika and another student named Braun performed an electric version of the old blues number “Rolling and Tumblin’.” “In the middle of the song, Braun put the guitar between two chairs, jumped up in the air, and smashed it, and John took his harp and threw it into the crowd,” said Westerberg. “Then he whips out another guitar and John whips out another harp and they keep playing. That was the most anti-authoritarian thing I’d ever seen in my life. He instantly became a legend among us outcasts.”
Not long after, Zika sought out Westerberg. “I remember the day he spoke to me. I was leaving school going for the bus,” he said. “The bus was starting to leave, and Zika appeared, came up behind me, and said, ‘Let’s catch this motherfucker.’ And I immediately started to run next to him. That was how we started running together.”
Zika was a blues purist — hated Led Zeppelin, loved Chess Records. He tried to press Paul into playing as a duo at the Artist’s Quarter, a South Minneapolis jazz club. “He fancied himself a man of the road. I was scared shitless: ‘Go play for people in a real bar? No way.’”
The two fell in with Holy Angels’ other would-be musicians, including drummer Dave Zilka, smoking weed near the giant oak trees on the campus’s periphery. Zilka was relatively chatty, while Westerberg and Zika would bond over their mutual disaffection from the world. “What drew Paul to John was that they were the same antisocial, introspective type of personality. They struck a chord there,” said Zilka. “But unlike Paul, John ended up having some demons that he couldn’t deal with.”
