by Bob Mehr
“We felt the backlash from all the other groups and all the other wannabes,” said Westerberg, “because we were being courted by the crown prince of pop or something.”
One particularly disgruntled figure was Bob Mould, singer-guitarist of Hüsker Dü. The demo for the fledgling St. Paul hardcore trio—which also featured drummer Grant Hart and bassist Greg Norton—had been turned down by Twin/Tone just a few months earlier. One night at the Longhorn, as the Replacements finished their set, Mould found Jesperson at the bar. “Well, Peter,” Mould said peevishly, “I guess now that you’re involved, the red carpet’s just going to roll out for these guys.”
“I was probably annoyed at him,” said Mould. “Like ‘What about our demos? What about our tape?’ But it was one of the best things that could’ve happened at the time. There’s nothing like being spurned by the cutest label in town to make you really suck it up and do it on your own terms. That’s pretty much what happened. We ended up starting our own label, pressed up a single, and started touring until we found sympathetic ears outside of Minneapolis.” Twin/Tone’s rejection of the Hüskers and its support of the Replacements would fundamentally determine the paths of both bands, as well as color a friendship and competition between them that would grow intense over the next few years.
As in any other scene, if the Replacements met with resentment in some quarters in Minneapolis, it was because there was a hierarchy, a pecking order. “There was a sense of ‘Who are these young guys coming in? They’re gonna have to pay their dues,’” said Terry Katzman.
The Replacements were neither patient nor respectful about such formalities. The way Westerberg figured it, he’d been kicking around for five years paying his dues on the kegger circuit; the way Bob saw it, he’d been paying them his whole life. “They try to tell me that I should learn / They told me it’s best I wait my turn,” Westerberg would sing in “Shiftless When Idle.” “I can’t wait forever / I can’t wait that long.” Or as he offered more bluntly during an early interview: “Where was it written, where was it said, that you had to play in a bar for eight years before you made a record?”
But the Twin Cities indie rock world was an especially insular community. To many of its denizens, the Replacements seemed to have simply materialized, fully formed, out of thin air. “They did come out of nowhere,” said Katzman. “In that sense, they were total outsiders.”
It was a notion—like so much else that was established in that first year—that would come to define the Replacements moving forward. They were outsiders among their peers in Minneapolis and would remain so later on as they rose in the national ranks and eventually joined the major-label world. “The way things rolled out, we were always outsiders,” said Westerberg, “even among the other outsiders.”
After a couple of shows, Peter Jesperson was chomping at the bit to sign and record the Replacements. Twin/Tone’s Charley Hallman supported the move—though, as time would go on, he would become more of a silent partner in the company. It was really the label’s other principal, Paul Stark, who needed convincing. Stark didn’t want to commit to doing an LP with the band, cautioning Jesperson that they should test the waters with a single first.
If Stark was dubious about the Replacements’ readiness, they erased any doubts as they confidently blasted through more than a dozen songs during a demo/audition session for him at Blackberry Way on July 21. “I remember [Stark] sitting there with his poker face,” said Jesperson, “before finally cracking a smile and saying, ‘You’re right, we’re talking an album here.’”
From the first, Stark’s relationship with the Replacements was a complex proposition. Perhaps this was inevitable: compared to Jesperson’s wholehearted support, the enthusiasm of anyone else for the band was certainly going to seem tepid.
With the Suburbs, Stark had served as the band’s supporter, adviser, and friend. “With the Replacements, I had to take the other role,” he said. “I was the bad cop, the principal at the school that the kids were always trying to cheat. They were always trying to do something to go against the rules—that’s the way their nature was.”
Though he was only twenty-eight, Stark seemed far older. His detached, deliberate manner—described as “Spocklike” by many—was an easy subject for ridicule. The Suburbs had nicknamed him “Fish Finder” after he’d once told them he enjoyed taking a boat out on the lakes armed with a sonar device because he could more easily “find fish” that way. Stark’s rock-and-roll bona fides were always a question mark as well. Curtiss A recalled recording with him and asking for a maraca sound like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Stark was vexed: “What exactly is a ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’?”
Almost immediately, Stark mistrusted Westerberg—a “manipulator from the word go,” in his opinion. “I wrote Paul off the second time I ever met him,” said Stark. “This guy will not be a friend of mine. I wouldn’t want to trust him with anything I cared about, wouldn’t want my daughter going out with him.” Even still, Stark conceded, “he’s probably a genius and can probably sell some records.”
The antipathy was mutual. Westerberg—who likely had some clinical degree of oppositional defiant disorder—tended to view anyone in a position of authority or power with extreme hostility. It also didn’t help their relationship that Stark was a forward-thinking tech-head, while Westerberg was a die-hard Luddite, even in his late teens. It was also clear to Westerberg that, despite Jesperson’s equal piece of Twin/Tone, it was Stark who ultimately controlled the company purse strings and, as a result, its key decisions. Their mutual suspicion would prove a major stumbling block when it came time for the Replacements to sign a formal contract the following year. “I decided early on the Replacements were going to be Peter’s deal,” said Stark. “It’s best if he’s the one in between the band and the label. Because I was destined to make decisions that they weren’t going to like.”
Still, Stark was intuitive. He’d immediately grasped the fact—well before the starry-eyed Jesperson—that the Replacements were going to be a handful, professionally and personally.
“I thought they were so dysfunctional that it should be amplified, that it should almost be encouraged,” said Stark. “Peter had the opposite view; he wanted to mold them into a little bit more of a polished band. I felt that if you reined them in, what would you have? You’d have a mediocre band at best, with a good songwriter, who wouldn’t amount to anything. I thought the only chance the band had was to amplify the dysfunction . . . though they would go far beyond my imagination in being dysfunctional.”
Thanks in large part to Peter Jesperson’s sponsorship, the Replacements began getting immediate interest from local writers and critics. The band’s timing was fortuitous, as the Twin Cities press corps was exploding.
By 1980, the region boasted four daily newspapers (the Minneapolis Star, the Tribune, the St. Paul Dispatch, and the Pioneer Press), two alternative papers (Sweet Potato and the Twin Cities Reader), and a college paper (the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Daily). The overall circulation of these publications was massive, and their arts section alums included key critics such as Jon Bream, Tim Carr, and Debby Miller.
At the daily Star, pop critic Bream had the inside scoop on the Twin Cities’ brightest new light, Warner Bros.–signed R&B singer Prince, because he was close with Prince’s manager, Owen Husney. But the coverage of the burgeoning indie rock scene in town was led by the alternative press. Marty Keller was a Minnesota Daily alum who’d become music editor of the newly founded monthly-cum-biweekly Sweet Potato in 1979. Keller started giving significant ink to the new wave of bands, including the Replacements.
“The first time I heard their name was from [freelance writer] P. D. Larson. He’d been played their tape by Peter, who said they were best thing he’d ever heard,” said Keller. “But Peter was the biggest music fan in the world, he’s got a million ‘best things’ he’s ever heard. So I kinda took it in stride.”
Still, Keller assigned Larson the job of f
ollowing the band around and writing a story on them, which would land on Sweet Potato’s cover the following February. “It was the first, or one of the first, local music covers Sweet Potato did,” recalled Larson. “The idea was to find somebody, a band that’s up and coming, and write about them as they developed. The Suburbs and Curtiss A had been going for a while, so the Replacements were an obvious choice.”
With their aesthetic, the Replacements were ideally suited to become a darling of the critics—an identity they would maintain throughout their career. “There was a certain un-prepossession about them,” said the Suicide Commandos’ Chris Osgood. “They didn’t seem to be posturing. That’s why I think Paul resonated so much with some of the local rock writers. And also because he was writing about feelings, fundamentally.”
The first published piece on the Replacements, a one-page feature that ran in the local music monthly Trax, would appear in August 1980, barely three weeks after their Longhorn debut. “Four white punks out of South Minneapolis who play music their lead vocalist Paul Westerberg calls ‘dirt’,” wrote author Christopher Farrell, who, in somewhat purple prose, would capture the band in its embryonic glory:
The brothers Stinson, Tom on bass, Bob on guitar, are Laurel and Hardy in contrast. Bob the taller and heavier by far while Tom, whose real age is guarded in confidentiality, is nonstop leap-and-jump. . . . Tom plays wise kid, walks up to the mike in between songs snarls one-worders: “Rowdy?”
Chris Mars drums loud, fast and hard, the back against which the rest of the band play foreground. Lead vocalist Paul Westerberg points his jaw at the ceiling, his attitude in the lights, so poised for a new kid, his voice beguiling by strength and native purity unsullied by bad habits.
It’s still too early to tell how all of this will work itself out, but the talent is unmistakably there in the raw, as everyone in the room senses . . . they’re just getting into the good. Destiny is the stranger.
A couple of months later, Mike Hoeger published a piece on the Replacements in the Minnesota Daily. (It was actually a three-part profile of new bands that included the Dads and Ben Day Dots.) Hoeger noted how the Replacements charged into their sets “with the urgency of an escaped convict” and observed Tommy’s preshow habit of walking around wearing five-pound weights around his ankles as a warm-up in order to be able to leap higher during the set.
Hoeger also chronicled the band’s formation, recounting how Westerberg had strategically edged out the group’s other members to become their front man. “He joined us and just sort of took over,” noted Chris Mars. Though it remained buried in the background for the next decade, Mars would never quite forget the fact that he himself, prior to Westerberg’s arrival, had been the band’s chief songwriter and creative force.
When Hoeger asked about their career aspirations, Westerberg articulated a prescient vision of the Replacements’ future: “We’d like to become famous without being professional,” he said. “Maybe like a giant cult.”
“There’s a Norwegian word that a lot of Minnesotans know: Jantelagen,” said Hoeger. “It pretty much means, ‘don’t brag’ or ‘don’t have big aspirations.’ That whole Minnesota thing of being humble, I think that’s really reflected in Paul, his whole self-deprecating humor and attitude. But at the same time, you knew deep down that he thought the Replacements could rock out better than anybody else, that they were something special.”
Hoeger asked Westerberg to write out the lyrics to a couple of the songs he wanted to quote in his piece: “Shutup” and “Careless.”
“What was funny was that he signed them and misspelled his own name—he wrote ‘Paul Westeberg,’ without the r. And he misspelled a couple other words, real easy words,” said Hoeger. “So I wondered: is he drunk or high, or was he just kinda doing that on purpose to mess with me a little bit?
“I came to realize later Paul was much smarter than he ever let on. He claimed that he didn’t read reviews or books, and played up the fact that he didn’t graduate from high school. He liked to make you think he was a bit of a bumpkin. But it was obvious he had a drive, an ambitious drive, early on. Even the story he told about kicking out the Replacements’ other lead singers. There was a sense of his own modest destiny that the other band members just didn’t have.”
In his Trax feature on the band, Christopher Farrell noted that the Replacements seemed “to be writing a new song every day, the amount of material they have assembled in just four months is a bit staggering.”
The running joke for a time was that Paul Westerberg wrote songs more often than other people went to the bathroom. From the beginning of 1980 to the fall of that year, he penned roughly fifty songs—a fairly impressive number considering he’d only written a couple tunes prior to meeting the Stinson brothers and Chris Mars.
This prolific output was the result, Westerberg would observe much later, of a prolonged manic phase. “My mania tends to come quicker and leave faster now, but at this time, I was around . . . twenty-one, [and] it came out of five years playing in basement groups that were going nowhere, and realizing that I had to grab this by the horns.”
Westerberg would generally come up with rough ideas, then jam away in his parents’ basement or sometimes make rudimentary recordings on his brother Phil’s boombox. He’d seize on a name or hook line that spurred him on. “I like stuff that isn’t vague, where it says it all in the title,” he said, noting the “action titles” of songs like “Kick Your Door Down” and “We’ll Get Drunk.”
Thematically, he drew on what he knew firsthand: his teenage attempts at getting high, hitching rides, picking up girls, and finding thrills, while facing the bleak future of a dropout-janitor. Writing with a lyrical economy and mordant wit, it was as if Westerberg, critic David Ayers observed, “set out to pants every tyrannical force of Midwestern-American Catholic middle class adolescence: boredom/desire, ambition/sloth, isolation/inebriation, rejection, reproach and sheer terror.”
The abundance of new material also came from Westerberg’s uncanny ability to absorb sounds and records he heard and synthesize them into new riffs, melodies, and songs. Ever since he picked up the guitar, Westerberg had been a musical sponge. “He could hear the new Vibrators record and be able to play ‘Sweet Sweet Heart’ after listening to it just once,” recalled his sometime playing partner Steve Skibbe. “He had that kind of natural thing, so it didn’t come as a surprise to me that he could turn that talent into cranking out quality songs.”
Lou Santacroce remembered one occasion that summer when Westerberg came into Oar Folk with enough money to buy just one record. “He had to decide between some pop record and the new LP by the Damned,” said Santacroce. “A few days later he came up with this new song that sounded like the Damned, and he said, ‘Well, that would’ve come out a lot different if I’d bought the other album.’”
Crucially, during this period, Westerberg also dialed back his musicality in order to better serve the group. “Paul made himself fit into the Replacements, both writing and playing in the early days, ’cause he always had all of the chops that he ever displayed when he was sixteen,” said Skibbe. “He could play pretty much anything you wanted and play it well.”
Westerberg decided that the musical technique he’d picked up during years of self-study had no place in the Replacements’ world. “It was the catharsis of knowing all these chords and runs and riffs that I’d worked on and sat and learned, and suddenly I was freed from that,” he said. “You don’t need that. You just need a brutal rhythm and something they can sing along to. And it was like ‘Whew.’ All that shit got shoved in the closet.”
Mostly, Westerberg knew he had to deliver the kind of material the band would respond to. “He had to write something that we would play,” said Tommy Stinson. “That was the part that was key, I can tell you.”
The rest of the Replacements would listen and rehearse Westerberg’s new songs, then pass judgment. Some would make it into the live sets for a period. But numerous tunes�
�little-heard gems like “Excuse Me” and “Looks Like My Old Girl” or fun throwaway show fillers like “Off Your Pants” and “Mistake”—were eventually winnowed out and forgotten. For every three or four songs Westerberg presented to the band, one or two might stick; the others would be discarded—and still others were never even considered. “I bet you there’s a lot of stuff that we didn’t even get to hear,” said Tommy, “that he’s still got in his basement.”
Despite their age and outward appearance, the Stinsons and Mars were a fairly sophisticated, innately musical bunch. “We actually played a little bit too well for our own good at first,” said Westerberg. From a strategic standpoint—to promulgate a “loser” mythos, which would come to serve as both shield and sword—Westerberg decided it would be more to their benefit to play up their “inability” as musicians.
It was a subject that became fodder for songs, as in the self-effacing verse of “Shutup” where a spastic Westerberg confesses that “Tommy’s too young / Bob, he’s too drunk / I can only shout one note / Chris needs a watch to keep time. . . . ”
On “I Hate Music”—“it’s got too many notes,” as Westerberg would declaim—the notion was further explored via a violently chugging stop-start rhythm. The concept and music came together spontaneously during a rehearsal in the basement.
“One of the standing jokes in the band is that we’re not musicians, and we’re sorta proud of that in that we don’t wanna be,” said Westerberg. “It’s like, we can try to play music and try to play it tight, but we just don’t have any fun. One day Chris said, ‘I hate fuckin’ music,’ . . . and Tommy went dadadada on the bass, and we all came in, and it was done in five minutes.” (The song would be one of two on their debut LP, along with the similarly ferocious “Rattlesnake,” that would be co-credited as a band composition.)
The song also included the lyric “I hate my father; one day I won’t.” Among a batch of songs brimming with teen angst, ennui, and petulance, it was a jarringly insightful, unusually mature observation.
