by Bob Mehr
Usually in the company of Dave Zilka, and sometimes John Zika, Paul began playing after school in ad hoc formations at people’s houses in South Minneapolis and Richfield, or for parties with the parents away. Often they would end up at the home of Holy Angels freshman Jeff Johnson, a guitarist. “Mainly ’cause my parents didn’t care if we smoked cigarettes,” said Johnson.
Bassist Bruno Pellagalli would round out the quartet, but they never found a lead singer. “Teenagers are notoriously terrified of singing,” said Johnson. Occasionally, Zika sat in on harmonica. The material was typical: Stones, Faces, Chuck Berry. Westerberg had picked up on Django Reinhardt through his brother and would bring his records to rehearsal. “We weren’t strictly a rock-and-roll band,” said Johnson.
Despite being relatively quiet, Westerberg turned heads with his playing. “He had developed his own style by seventeen,” said Johnson. “The soloing, the leads—he wasn’t trying to sound like Eric Clapton or Duane Allman, or even Ronnie Wood. He was playing what he heard in his own mind.”
In late 1975, Zilka landed them a real show at a roadhouse in rural Ramsey—Westerberg’s first ever “professional” gig. The pay was free beer, plus a bonus of amphetamines. “We called ’em sod farmers, the people who lived out there,” said Zilka. “This place we played was rough. We got up onstage and started playing Stones tunes, and they didn’t like it very much. It was pretty comical.”
Westerberg and his pals spent their weekends playing music or hopping the fence of Lakewood Cemetery, a burial ground for Minneapolis’s rich and famous. “We’d smoke dope and sit by the big huge monuments,” said Westerberg. “I used to try to think of band names by looking at the gravestones.”
Paul was a romantic. “I liked girls from day one. I had crushes from first grade on.” Though he was a fairly cute adolescent, puberty had turned him awkward and bulbous-featured. “He just had a hard time communicating with girls,” said Zilka. Instead, Westerberg and his buddies took drugs and went to rock shows. His first real concert, on February 14, 1975, was “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” which teamed bluesman James Cotton with rock headliner Johnny Winter at the Metropolitan Sports Center.
“That was my baptism,” said Westerberg. “Cotton played that big sixty-four-reed harp, and this was back in the days of ‘Let’s blow their heads off with the PA.’ Man, to hear a harp that loud, that skillfully played, that just went right to my gut. It was almost a letdown when Johnny Winter came on later.”
At a Foghat show in 1976 at the Civic Center, Paul bought some PCP-laced marijuana in the parking lot. “It frightens me now how foolishly we took stuff,” he said. “God only knows what it was.” (The incident would inspire his song “I Bought a Headache.”)
Paul’s most visceral concert experience was Rod Stewart and the Faces at the Minneapolis Auditorium in November 1975. The Brit-rockers were a wild and wooly bunch: they cranked their amps, drank heavily—even had a bar and bartender onstage—and played a heavy percentage of cover songs. “No other redoubtable band gets that close—physically or spiritually—to its audience and lets the crowd get that close to it,” wrote Minneapolis Star critic Jon Bream of the concert.
“When they came on, we charged right up to the stage,” recalled Westerberg. “The excitement and the fun of the Faces . . . it was almost sexual. Virgins that we were, it was the closest thing to sex we’d experienced. In no time flat, I had a chick bouncing up and down on my shoulders.”
Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, it was the band’s final show: Ron Wood joined the Rolling Stones, and Rod Stewart decided to pursue his solo career full-time. But, for Westerberg, seeing the Faces was the start of formulating a concrete vision of his own future: “It was the most fun I’d had doing anything, being that close to a real rock-and-roll band that was so fucking deafeningly loud.”
In 1976 Westerberg crossed paths with another aspiring guitarist named Jef Jodell, a sharp, opinionated Richfield High student who glimpsed him playing a keg party. “The place was pretty packed: eighty or a hundred people in this suburban basement,” said Jodell. “Paul and these guys played instrumental versions of, like, ‘Freebird.’ I felt like we could be this brilliant guitar team.” Over the next few years, they’d often jam in Westerberg’s parents’ basement. “His mom was very tolerant of us playing,” said Jodell. “Once or twice she even brought us down cookies. But it was very clear, there was going to be no band stuff in the house when the old man was around.”
They eventually formed a semiregular band, with Jodell’s older brother Jack singing, bassists John Stegner and Paul Bolin, and drummer Wade Whipps. There was no consistent name—everything from Rain to Cunning Stunts. Their final gig was played as Neighborhood Threat, from a song on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot.
Their handful of shows, mostly in 1977, took place in basements and at backyard parties. They played lots of early Beatles numbers. “You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Paul Westerberg play ‘All My Loving,’” said Jodell. “It makes those speed metal guys look like amateurs. Paul could spit that out like you wouldn’t believe.”
Sometimes onstage they would slip in one of Jack Jodell’s prog-oriented originals. Later on, they performed a number Westerberg had written called “Tarnished.” It was a spindly, picky instrumental that owed a debt to Wishbone Ash’s “Blowin’ Free.”
Mostly they played a grab bag of classic rock covers—Cream, Jethro Tull, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith—but also more elaborate numbers like Al Stewart’s “Apple Cider Reconstitution.” “We bit off a lot of material we had no business trying,” said Jodell. “We tried to concentrate on roots rock, but the bass player and drummer and my brother kept going towards that [prog-rock] stuff.”
For the better part of four years, Westerberg had been trying to perfect his skills on the guitar, to inject a level of precision into his playing. He figured that kind of dedication would lead him somewhere special. Instead, he found himself playing Al Stewart songs in a basement in Richfield. “Paul was growing frustrated,” said Jodell. “His thinking was: ‘I would rather be good at something simple than so-so at something complex.’”
Westerberg recalled his Holy Angels schoolmate and sometime bandmate Paul Bolin as the proverbial rock snob. “In his bedroom he had issues of the NME and Creem stacked floor to ceiling, an insane stereo system, and the best weed,” he said.
Bolin lived with his divorced mother in Richfield. “My mom was gone a lot, so I pretty much did whatever I wanted,” said Bolin. “I had disposable income to buy albums, so I admit that I was something of a gospel-spreader in my crowd for new music.”
Bolin shopped at the city’s best record store, Oar Folkjokeopus, in South Minneapolis. Though he was mostly a fan of progressive rock bands like Yes, Bolin had been reading the fevered coverage of the United Kingdom’s burgeoning punk rock movement. Oar Folk’s manager, Peter Jesperson, urged Bolin to preorder the first Sex Pistols single, which Oar Folk was having shipped from England in late 1976.
Not long after, Westerberg and some friends were over at Bolin’s house when he played them the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK.”
“I shat myself,” recalled Westerberg on hearing the band for the first time. “I thought: This is my music. The drumming, you could tell, was not Fancy Dan–type shit. It struck me right in the heart. The song was barely over before I’d gone home and cut my hair off and smashed my records. I’d already heard the Ramones. But hearing Lydon’s voice made me think, Forget these guitar solos I’ve been trying to play. I’m gonna lead a fucking band. Real rock-and-roll is not complicated.”
Paul explored the Damned and the other English punks, then worked back to their American antecedents, particularly the New York Dolls. Johnny Thunders’s guttersnipe guitar and David Johansen’s gravelly yowl provided another touchstone. “I was supposed to graduate high school in ’77, the spring of that year. [Punk] made me think, Fuck this school shit. Fuck everything.”
Though he was only a couple of m
onths away from a diploma, Westerberg stopped going to class. The elders at Holy Angels gave him opportunities to get his degree. “But by then I’d already made up my mind. It was also the rebellion factor: ‘Fuck ’em. I’m gonna stop before the finish line and not cross it.’”
Toward the end of his school days, Westerberg’s English teacher took him aside and offered a bit of advice. “He said, ‘Do what you know how to do.’ Hell, why didn’t you tell me that four years ago? What I really know how to do is play a G chord with the hammer on and the hammer off. I’m gonna do that.”
Westerberg started seeing a lot less of John Zika in 1977. Zika had transferred to Richfield High briefly, before moving on to a vocational tech school to get his GED. He began working as a janitor, then as a cab driver, and would busk in downtown Minneapolis. Sometimes he and Westerberg played together near the Mississippi River.
The mythos of the Big River drew Zika in even further. He began working as a deckhand on a river barge. Though he dreamed of walking in the footsteps of the itinerant blues and jazz musicians he admired, it wasn’t quite that romantic. “He’d be on the barge a month or two at a time,” said his older sister, Mary Rose Zika. “In some ways it was probably the worst thing he could’ve done because you’re alone with your thoughts.”
By the fall of 1977, Zika’s thoughts had increasingly turned to suicide. He’d just had a breakup, and his moods had grown darker. “My parents tried to get him to see somebody and get on medication,” said Mary Rose. “But he was not willing to do it.”
Zika was back in Minneapolis that Thanksgiving. Staying with his family for the holidays, he seemed unusually happy. “I didn’t realize that he had sunk that low at all,” said his younger sister, Maggie.
Sometime on Thursday, December 1, John walked into his parents’ basement. A few hours later, his older brother Mike came home and discovered his body. “He blew his brains out on his mother’s carpet,” Westerberg would recall, haltingly, many years later.
Gill Brothers Chapel in Richfield was packed with his friends and classmates, all of them dazed. Given the nature of Zika’s death, his passing was “shrouded in mystery,” said Paul. He thought about reaching out to Zika’s sister Maggie, to his family, but he couldn’t bring himself to attend the funeral. Instead, Paul brooded about the hints that were there with Zika. “He’d play me Paul Butterfield’s ‘I Got a Mind to Give Up Living.’ He used to say it was his favorite song,” said Westerberg. “He’d make comments about ‘this shitty life.’ But we were moody teenagers; we all had a bit of that.”
Thoughts of suicide were not unknown to Westerberg. In 1975, as a confused, neglected fifteen-year-old, he had tried to overdose. “My sister was a nurse’s aide and had a closet full of sample narcotics. One afternoon I took a whole shitload,” he recalled. “I think my mom came home from work and I was lying on the bed unconscious. I remember seeing quadruple at nine o’clock at night, sitting at the kitchen table, with my dad shoving a banana in my face, saying, ‘Eat this, goddamn it.’
“The whole thing was probably the typical fears of adolescence: ‘Am I gay? Am I retarded? Do I fit in? What do I do, where do I go next?’ I don’t think I was really trying to kill myself. But John was . . . different.”
A couple weeks prior to Zika’s suicide, he’d played Westerberg Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, then gave him his copy. “It was his way of saying, ‘If you’re gonna play this rock-and-roll shit, it’s at least gotta be as good as this,’” said Westerberg. “To this day, around the holidays, I’ll listen to ‘Jungleland’ and I can’t help but think of him.”
In life, Zika had been Westerberg’s idol. In death, he would become his guiding spirit, the rock-and-roll ghost who would haunt his psyche. “When Zika killed himself, that was a big part of what changed me,” said Westerberg. “I believe that I took it as a passing of the torch.
“From then on, when in doubt, in my mind, musically, or whatever, I would think: What would John have done? My attitude changed too; I became a little more of a ‘fuck you’ type. It’s the classic thing: after he died, I took on a bit of his personality.”
CHAPTER 5
Tommy Stinson was just seven when his big brother disappeared into the state juvenile system. “He was completely out of the picture,” said Tommy. “I don’t even remember going and visiting him. Which is dark.”
Apart from some vicious spankings, Tommy had been spared the worst of Nick Griffin’s cruelty. But the facts would mark Tommy nevertheless—with survivor’s guilt, on the one hand, and a sense of his own indestructibility, on the other.
By the time Tommy was ten, he was the man of the house. Anita was bartending days at the Uptown, then drinking afterward. “Most of the time I would come home half in the bag,” she admitted. Lonnie was left to watch over Tommy and baby sister Lisa between high school classes and shifts at Arby’s.
Since the family’s midnight escape from Florida, Tommy’s childhood had been an unsettled blur. “By the time I was twelve years old, I’d lived in twelve different school districts and gone to twelve different goddamn schools,” he said. The constant turmoil took its toll on his education. “They held me back in fifth grade. They said it was because I was too young to go into the next grade. But the reality was, I was too stupid. No one wanted to come out and say, ‘You’re not smart enough.’”
Constantly being the new kid gave Tommy a peculiar strength: always precocious, he became cocky and quick to joke, laugh, accept a dare, or break a rule. To his family, however, he still seemed an innocent. He was his grandmother Virginia’s favorite; she’d take him on weekends and single him out for presents at Christmas: “She gave everyone else a five-dollar check. But me, she went and found gifts for.”
When the Stinsons moved to Thirty-Sixth and Bryant, Tommy became fast friends with Curtis Olson, a hyperactive neighbor. Each delivered newspapers, but they soon found more exciting, illegal uses of their time. Initially, it was kid stuff: vandalism, throwing rocks through windows. Then they shoplifted slot cars from Target. Tommy was pinched twice for theft before turning eleven. Both times he was slapped on the wrist and sent home by juvenile court.
Tommy and Curtis moved on to stealing bikes. One rainy night when he didn’t come home, Anita hysterically “called every police station, every hospital in town. And then here he comes walking in the door, looking up at me like nothing has happened. Of course, he’d been sitting in his friend’s garage tearing up bicycles that they’d stolen. I didn’t have a clue.”
Finally, Tommy and Curtis went on a spree at a nearby elementary school: “[We] took about ten bikes and stashed them.” Then they made their way into a church and stole a microphone. Finally, they returned to the school. “We had the audacity to walk across their playground at recess with wrenches sticking out of our back pockets.” A custodian began asking questions: “He dragged us into the office and we got arrested.”
Waiting outside the juvenile courtroom with his mother and grandmother, the judge tried to scare Tommy straight: “The way you’re headed right now,” he told him, “I will send you to a place out west, in Colorado, and I won’t let you come back until you’re twenty-one.” At that, Anita and Virginia burst into tears. “I felt like the worst person on the planet,” said Tommy. The judge decided to give him another chance. Still, he needed something in his life that would keep him occupied, off the criminal path. “Right after that,” he said, “is when Bob came home.”
When Bob Stinson and Robert Flemal settled into Bryant Avenue in the fall of 1977, they set up guitars, amps, and recording equipment in their second-story bedroom.
Like his brother, Tommy had always been fascinated by music. For years he kept a little transistor radio by his bed and would fall asleep to the sound of the local oldies station. He’d briefly taken up baritone sax in the grade school band and even learned to read a little music. He had a good ear for things, a natural sense of swing and rhythm (perhaps passed down from his drummer father).
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p; Music would become the bond between the Stinson brothers—though there was a distance between them initially. It seemed like a lifetime since the two had been under the same roof, and Tommy regarded Bob almost as a stranger at first: “Absolutely,” he said, “I didn’t really know him.”
Bob was aware of Tommy’s brushes with the law and took it upon himself to keep tabs. Tommy had stopped stealing, but he was aimless. Then one afternoon in the spring of 1978, the eleven-year-old was in Bob’s bedroom, looking at some of his brother’s equipment. He opened a case under the bed and found an old Sears Silvertone bass. He’d just set the instrument on his lap when Bob walked in. “Hey, you wanna learn how to play that?” Bob asked, and then showed him a few rudimentary blues figures.
“I was like, ‘Nah, this sucks. This is hurting my fingers,’” said Tommy. “Just getting my hands wrapped around the neck was hard enough. But he kept coaxing me. He was determined.”
Teaching Tommy how to play, Bob used both the carrot and the stick. “He started by offering to buy me a candy bar here or a Coke there to practice,” said Tommy. “Then I’d want to quit and he’d get pissed and would throw shit at me. I’d cry and say, ‘I’m telling Mom.’ So I upped the ante: ‘I want two Cokes and two candy bars.’ Then it got more painful and he’d get mad and throw a whole speaker cabinet at me.”
“When he was showing Tommy how to play bass, Bob would just punch him: ‘Get it right!’” said Flemal. “I was kinda shocked.”
The first four songs Tommy learned encapsulated Bob’s tastes perfectly: Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” Johnny Winter’s version of “Boney Maronie,” Rick Derringer’s “Rock and Roll, Hootchie Koo,” and Yes’s “Roundabout.” Bob was desperate to start a band. “He was insistent: ‘I need a bass player today, man,’” said Tommy. “Plus, I came a lot cheaper than most bass players.”
