Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Hal Westerberg had never been particularly thrilled about his son’s musical ambitions. But whatever adolescent fear and loathing Paul had once held toward his father was long gone. “I disliked him more when I was thirteen or fourteen,” he said. “By the time I was nineteen, I actually sorta dug him.” As Paul pursued his rock-and-roll fantasy, he could empathize with Hal’s frustrations about his own dashed dreams as a younger man. “And he sorta got what I was doing too,” said Westerberg, “and why it was important to me.”

  Beyond his band and family, Westerberg was finding inspiration for songs wherever he looked.

  At the end of July, ex–New York Doll and Heartbreaker Johnny Thunders came to Minneapolis to play with his new band Gang War, a short-lived team-up with Wayne Kramer. The former MC5 guitarist, who’d done a spell in federal prison on a drug trafficking charge, was trying to keep straight, but playing with Thunders undid those plans. Hitting the road, Gang War soon became a drug-fueled carnival. “The tours became utter nightmares,” recalled Kramer. “If Johnny wasn’t sick with too much drugs, he was sick from not enough drugs.”

  Gang War was scheduled for a pair of shows: one at the 7th St Entry, and then a concert the following night in First Avenue’s main room. Westerberg and the Replacements desperately wanted to open, but were beat out for the gig by Hüsker Dü and Bob Mould. “I had such a personal investment with Thunders, one of my guitar heroes, I think I went to Steve McClellan and pleaded my case,” said Mould. “I must’ve made a good case.”

  Mould became Thunders’s “de facto babysitter” during his stay in Minneapolis. The task proved a major undertaking as Thunders became dope-sick, moaning that Kramer had stolen his supply of heroin.

  Thunders ordered Mould to fetch him some Dilaudid, or painkillers, anything to get him straight. Eventually, someone scored enough cocaine that Thunders was able to make it onstage for the main-room show.

  Out in the crowd, Westerberg and Chris Mars stood waiting for Thunders eagerly. “Kramer came out and said, ‘Guess who’s not ready?’” recalled Westerberg. “Then Johnny finally appeared, strung out, wearing leather pants. The moment he walked on . . . I saw it.”

  The look on Thunders’s face—imperious and desperate all at once—struck Westerberg: “He was frightening and beautiful and mean at the same time,” he said. “Like a child.”

  Physically struggling through the show, while battling an audience hurling brickbats, Thunders had been rendered a prisoner of his own addictions and cult infamy. “When Johnny was playing, it looked like he was walking dead,” recalled Westerberg. “It was pitiful, like watching a guy in a cage.”

  That image of Thunders lingered with him. The following morning Westerberg sat at home with his guitar, rejiggered the chords to the Heartbreakers’ “Chinese Rocks,” and turned out a haunting ballad, a requiem called “Johnny’s Gonna Die”:

  Everybody stares and everybody hoots

  Johnny always needs more than he shoots . . .

  And New York City I guess it’s cool when it’s dark

  There’s one sure way Johnny you can leave your mark

  Johnny’s gonna die . . .

  It was, as Jesperson noted, a “pivotal song”—the first slower, ballad-style number Westerberg had written. And as it romanticized and crucified Thunders all at once, the song also evinced the Janusian quality that would later mark his best work.

  Predicting the passing of a still-living punk icon and massive personal influence was a bold act—Westerberg was ceremonially killing his idol, though, typically, his own view of the song was more jaundiced.

  “Half the people who hear it know he’s gonna die,” said Westerberg at the time, “and the rest won’t know who we’re talking about.”

  Although coming up with material was relatively easy, recording the Replacements’ first album was a drawn-out affair—the product, unlike most slam-bang indie productions of the day, of many months of work and several passes at multiple locations.

  After the initial Blackberry Way sessions in July, Jesperson felt that the band had been a bit reserved, even uncomfortable, in the studio environment. “It was clean, almost like a hospital,” said Bob Stinson. “The atmosphere was really clean. That’s what probably made us nervous.” To put them more at ease, Jesperson decided to try capturing them playing in a club.

  In September, Paul Stark brought Twin/Tone’s new twenty-four-track mobile recording unit to the Longhorn, and then again the following month to Sam’s, where the band did a pair of faux concerts during the day. They went through their repertoire a couple of times, hoping to capture the lightning of their live show. But playing to an empty room felt even more bizarre. The recorded results were predictably uninspiring, so in November the band returned to Blackberry Way to make the album in earnest.

  By then, it was also apparent that Stark and the Replacements were a bad fit (“Those personalities clearly didn’t work,” said Jesperson), so Blackberry Way house engineer Steve Fjelstad was charged with the task of recording the group. A musician himself—having played in numerous bands, including Fingerprints—Fjelstad was an easygoing “Minnesota nice” character. He was smart enough not to tinker with the band’s methods or moods; instead, he adjusted to their idiosyncrasies and simply captured the results.

  The Replacements sessions mostly took place at nights, not just because Tommy was in school during the day, but because of volume. Basically a house studio in the heart of Dinkytown, Blackberry was located across the street from a church that emptied out after dark. It was also surrounded on both sides by other residences—most of which, fortunately, were rentals occupied by University of Minnesota students, who didn’t mind the noise. And there was a lot of noise.

  “Tommy had his [Ampeg B15] stack in a room that wasn’t soundproofed,” said Fjelstad. “I remember going outside to listen as he was playing and just cringing—‘Jesus, this is loud.’”

  “We used to joke that Tommy didn’t pick his amps based on how good they sounded,” said Jesperson, “but how big and loud they were so he could torture everyone.”

  In an effort to put the band at ease, Fjelstad had them set up as they did live. “We tried to have everyone play together at the same time, to feel like they were onstage,” he said. “The whole band could see each other, and we got some kind of headphone mix going. And we let them play loud; that was part of their sound. I never had anyone turn down in the studio. That would’ve been defeating the purpose.”

  Fjelstad also knew to always have the tape rolling: “A lot of times the first thing they did was the best,” he said. Often, before counting off a song, the band would get distracted. Once, Fjelstad gently reminded them, in his nasal honk, that money was being wasted.

  “Uhhh, guys, tape’s rollin’ . . . ”

  “So what?” Westerberg replied dismissively. (The exchange, along with several others, was preserved on the album and became a crucial part of the record’s snotty ambience.)

  “There was not a lot of drinking going on—relatively speaking, anyway,” Fjelstad said. “But musically, there was something magic happening with them. Something definitely that was not there with other bands.” Part of that was Tommy Stinson, whose rapid maturation on bass added a new element of dynamism to the songs. “For a little kid, he turned into a very good musician very fast,” noted Westerberg.

  Tommy would dismiss his early style as “me just playing eighth notes” (though as the band’s later producer Jim Dickinson observed, “No one on earth played eighth notes quite like Tommy Stinson”). The younger Stinson’s nimble fretwork and animated runs highlighted tracks like “Oh Baby” and “Love You Til Friday.”

  Typically, the Replacements cut fast, knocking out songs after a couple of passes. A track like “Kick Your Door Down” was done in one take, with no overdubs. “Some took longer, depended really on how much alcohol we had in our blood,” said Chris Mars. “There’s some that you have to get a certain force [behind]. It’s hard to get that raw sou
nd on a tape.”

  Often, their errors turned out to be gems, as on the album take of “Customer.” “The lead was a mistake,” noted Bob Stinson of his spiraling, madcap guitar break. “That’s why we kept it.”

  “To me, the soul of rock-and-roll is mistakes. Mistakes and making them work for you,” Westerberg would note. “In general, music that’s flawless is usually uninspired.”

  Their collective power as a unit—which seemed to grow exponentially during the late months of 1980—was a mystery even to themselves. They’d finish cutting a track and marvel at some peak they’d reached, never sure of the path they’d taken to get there. “We’d just kinda . . . listen back,” said Mars, “and say, ‘Hey, that was great—how did we do that?’”

  Another element of the Replacements’ character was their inability to replicate performances. “Those songs, they’d change like every time we’d do them,” recalled Mars. Each version of a song would move, swing, and take flight differently—most of which was down to Westerberg. He would tweak guitar parts on the fly or simply alter his energy—and the feel of the track—along with it.

  Mostly, Westerberg was fond of changing or ad-libbing intros and lyrics. Kicking off an unused take of “Careless,” he paid homage to the New York Dolls’ homage to the Shangri-Las: “When I say I’m in debt,” Westerberg drawled, “you best believe I’m in debt—D-E-T.”

  In one unreleased version of “Johnny’s Gonna Die,” he improvised lines—“Everybody says, Johnny looks fine / This time, Johnny, take one more line”—while on another he ended the song by screaming “Good riddance!” An outtake of “Love You Til Friday” showed Westerberg’s Catholic roots: “Girls are a pain in my ass / when they don’t go to mass. . . . ”

  On “Raised in the City,” he did away with the line that first drew Jesperson’s attention—“Got a little honey, nice tight rear”—replacing it with the more prosaic “Raised in the city, raised on beer.” These changes were partly the result of boredom—Westerberg had little patience for repeating himself—and partly out of an unwillingness to commit to any one version as the definitive lyric or take. “Our patience, our attention spans, were so short,” said Westerberg. “I mean, Steve Fjelstad was lightning fast compared to Paul Stark. But even the thought of doing a song twice, three times—whaddya fucking mean? We didn’t understand the recording process. I didn’t anyway.”

  Another element underlying the sessions was a quiet creative frisson between Paul and Bob as to how melodies, solos, and arrangements should go. The musical tug-of-war that was so effective between them onstage could get sticky in the studio.

  “If Paul didn’t get what he wanted out of his melody, he’d either show Bob how to play it or he’d just do it himself and Bob would pick it up,” said Tommy Stinson. “Then they would argue over the solos. Again, if it wasn’t happening, then Paul would start playing it.

  “They had a little battle of the wills early on over that stuff. That’s what him and Bob fought about and bumped heads on. It should be more like this, or more like that. It should go this way, it should go faster. Should you play the solo or I play the solo? Or, fuck you, you play the solo.”

  These minor arguments masked a more crucial, though unacknowledged, conflict over control of the band. Since its inception, Dogbreath had been Bob’s baby. He’d been the one who’d decided to bring Westerberg into the fold in the first place. Within a few months, as they morphed into the Impediments and then the Replacements, Westerberg—who’d elbowed his way to the front as singer over Stuart Cummins and Tom Byrne and then as songwriter over Chris Mars—also became the group’s de facto leader, taking over the role from Bob.

  As Paul Stark would observe, even by the band’s first demo session back in July, “Westerberg had already won [that battle]. But Bob always thought he was the leader. He had to. It was an element to his ego.”

  By early December, the band had tracked a big chunk of the material, but they continued to record as Westerberg kept coming up with more songs, including the spritely standout “I’m in Trouble.” On the eighth of that month, they were rehearsing some of this new material in the Stinson basement when John Lennon was murdered outside his apartment in New York City. “By the time we got done practicing, we’d heard about it,” said Westerberg.

  Peter Jesperson was shattered by the news and proceeded to drink his grief away. “I think it was less of a shock to us right then, just because we had to keep up the punk rock facade,” said Westerberg. “I remember someone spray-painted ‘RINGO’S NEXT!’ in the dressing room downstairs at the Entry. It was that sort of attitude.”

  A few days later, the Replacements played their first show outside of the Twin Cities, borrowing Paul Stark’s van and traveling to Duluth to open a concert for the Suburbs at the Saints Roller Rink.

  Chris Mars would remember the strange atmosphere of the venue. “There were a lot of young people, and they were just skating around, and we figured they wouldn’t pay much attention to us,” said Mars. “As soon as we got up onstage, they kind of all just turned and rushed up to the front and totally surprised us. And from then on, we just kinda went nuts. They helped us, they just pushed our adrenaline up a couple notches.”

  Toward the end of the set, during a scorching version of “Rattlesnake,” Westerberg jerked his guitar violently toward his body. As he did, the neck snapped off and the momentum caused him to cut himself in the head with the broken, jagged piece. As blood spilled down his face from his temple, “it was this very dramatic rock-and-roll moment onstage,” said Jesperson, who was at the back near the soundboard.

  By the time Jesperson made his way through the crowd of skaters and up to the stage to check on Westerberg, the band was rumbling through “I Hate Music.” Toward the end of the song, a bloodied, frustrated Westerberg peeled off his Gibson ES-335 and began hammering it into the stage. “These kids were just like, ‘Oh my God,’” recalled Jesperson. “It was stuff like you read about seeing the Who or something.” Westerberg smashed his guitar, sang the last verse, and then walked off, leaving behind a stunned crowd.

  The incident in Duluth revealed Westerberg as an impulsive, compelling stage performer. As shy and retiring as he could be in real life, the few feet of elevation on the floorboards changed him, as did the security of having a gang of brothers to fall back on. Duluth and various other early concerts made him aware that there was a power that could be wielded from that perch, an ability to create moments that could make a band’s reputation.

  “I knew that we had to make them remember us somehow,” said Westerberg. “If we played on a Tuesday night, on Wednesday afternoon you don’t see your friend and say, ‘Man, did you hear the Replacements last night?’ It’s like, ‘Did you see the Replacements?!’ It became a visual thing more and more.

  “I felt like, let’s have good songs on the record, and then make the shows more of a shambles or a performance art thing. Me and Chris were in cahoots pretty good on that. I think what the Stinsons had was something we didn’t have: a kind of brute force and outrageousness. But Chris and I had a little better knowledge of theater and art and the idea of having a crowd and being able to manipulate them.”

  From reading biographies of P. T. Barnum, Westerberg recalled the grand showman’s words: “Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.” Over the course of their career onstage, the Replacements would happily play the role of jesters and buffoons, but their concerts were also a high-wire act as well as a geek show.

  On one level, it was theater, pure performance—but it was real too. The band was constitutionally unable to put on a conventional act. If they were bored, they sounded bored; if they were drunk, the sets careened; if they were angry, their playing seethed; if they felt ornery, the show might devolve into one long piss-take, a joke on the crowd. That kind of calculated authenticity—in all its paradoxical glory—would be the Replacements’ methodology moving forward.

  “We were a new breed of entertainer,” Westerberg woul
d claim later. “It was show business, but we took it to a different level. We were the first ones to really sorta say: ‘Take it like we make it. Take us as we are. This is it.’”

  CHAPTER 11

  As the Replacements recorded and played into the winter of 1981, Peter Jesperson’s role with the band continued to grow. In addition to being their label owner, A&R man, and coproducer, he would become their manager as well.

  It started with him driving the band to gigs—none of them had a car or even a license. He’d help them set up gear before the show and then settle up with the club owners after it was over. The relationship was ultimately formalized—at least as formalized as anything ever got with the Replacements—following an argument with the Longhorn’s Hartley Frank, who was trying to bully the band into taking a last-minute gig at the club.

  Frank was generally lousy at managing the Longhorn’s calendar and was constantly scrambling to fill in dates, trying to strong-arm bands into playing poorly promoted and sparsely attended weeknight shows. “He’d done that with a couple other groups already,” recalled Jesperson. “When I saw him starting to do that to the Replacements, I stepped in.” He and Frank got into a heated debate at the Longhorn’s bar about the haphazard booking. Frank whisked Jesperson and the band outside to continue the conversation away from the other patrons. In front of the club, along the Fifth Street plaza, Frank and Jesperson squared off as the four Replacements took a seat on a bench.

  “Look,” Frank complained to the band, “I’m trying to give you guys an opportunity here. Do I have to talk to Peter every time I want to book you now?”

  Westerberg looked at Jesperson wonderingly. They’d never discussed the possibility of him managing the band before. But after a moment’s pause, they exchanged nods.