Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  “Yeah,” Westerberg said, turning to Frank. “You do need to talk to him.”

  And with that, the Replacements became Jesperson’s charges. “The fact that he was gonna manage the band was secondary to us,” said Westerberg. “It was like, ‘You talk to the fat guy at the club and we’ll be over here drinking.’”

  At the same time, it seemed almost inevitable that Jesperson would take on a managerial role. “I don’t know if he had visions of being our Brian Epstein, but it certainly fit,” said Westerberg. “Given his love for the Beatles, I think he’d thoroughly digested the Epstein myth. He’s the record store guy, and here’s this little group that he’s the first person in the world to love.”

  Over the years Westerberg could be parsimonious when assessing Jesperson’s importance to the group. “It depends on how generous I feel for him at the moment,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “If it wasn’t for Pete, I believe we would have found someone else, which would have gotten us out of the [basement].”

  But those close to the band agree that they simply wouldn’t have gotten far without Jesperson’s particular combination of patience, diligence, and faith. “The Replacements were the proverbial ‘couldn’t organize a two-car funeral’ type band,” said writer P. D. Larson. “They couldn’t even get across Lake Street without help. Their logistical baseline was nonexistent. It was one of those fortuitous things that they had a Peter Jesperson. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say he did a miraculous job. People inside and outside the group can bad-mouth him all they want, for whatever reason, but that band probably wouldn’t have made it to 1981 without him.”

  “There’s plenty of great talent that languishes with no Peter Jespersons,” noted Lou Santacroce. “He wasn’t just someone to sign them or manage them . . . he was someone to believe in them.”

  In warmer moments, Westerberg would acknowledge that Jesperson’s patronage was crucial. “Look, I love him, to this day even. In a way, he gets under my skin and always did,” said Westerberg. “But he’s enthusiastic. And when for the first time in your life someone is enthusiastic about you . . . well, we lapped it up like little puppies and believed what he told us. He was the best thing in the world for us, because he was so positive and over-the-top.”

  The relationship with Jesperson in those first few years would prove particularly important in forming Westerberg as an artist and a person. For one thing, Jesperson’s involvement was reassuring to Westerberg’s parents. “They felt I was taking okay care of their son,” said Jesperson. “I had the impression he’d hung around with some lowlifes, so I looked pretty good in comparison.” It was enough that Hal and Mary Lou Westerberg quit pestering Paul about getting a job and allowed him to leave his short-lived janitorial career behind to focus fully on writing songs and making music.

  Moreover, the friendship that would develop with Jesperson was different from anything Westerberg had experienced with his siblings, high school buddies, or neighborhood pals. At heart, Westerberg was a sensitive intellectual who craved a kind of male intimacy—even if his whole mien argued against it. “Paul was a real thoughtful person who did not want you to know he was a real thoughtful person,” said Santacroce. “Like that was betraying some kind of vulnerability.”

  Through his sheer enthusiasm, Jesperson managed to bring Westerberg away from his solitary, cloistered self. They would spend hours talking, smoking through shared packs of True cigarettes. “Even though he was generally a loner, there was a period where we were really tight,” said Jesperson, “where I probably was the best friend he had.”

  Westerberg grew close enough to Jesperson that he began giving him cassettes of songs he’d been demoing on his boom box at home since the summer of ’80. These were not Replacements’ tunes or even rock numbers at all, but wholly different musical expressions which came as part of his first big writing burst. There was the rueful ballad “You’re Getting Married,” the Springsteen-esque narrative experiment “It’s Hard to Wave in Handcuffs,” and the autobiographical janitor’s blues of “Bad Worker” (“I’ll give you minimum effort for minimum wage”).

  “Ripping off punk and rockabilly stuff was exciting and fun,” said Westerberg, “but then I sat down and thought, like ‘God, could I actually write something that had some words that meant something, where I bared my soul?’ And so I started writing stuff like that. That started the confessional aspect to [my] writing.”

  Rather than erase these songs out of uncertainty or embarrassment, as was his inclination, Westerberg would instead walk to the Modesto at all hours, ring the buzzer—he had his own special code: long-short, long-short—shove a tape of fresh tunes into Jesperson’s hands, then leave without a word.

  “This was obviously not something the band was going to play, but I was realizing that shit had a place in my life,” said Westerberg. “Even if it’s just putting it on a cassette and playing it for Pete and then being satisfied with that. I knew he had at least the heart to be able to listen to something like that and accept it for what it was.”

  Jesperson would prize these recordings, playing them in secret for a cadre of special friends and selected journalists. Though they clearly wouldn’t fit the Replacements—even their existence was mostly kept from the rest of the band—he pushed Westerberg to keep working along those lines. It was a crucial encouragement that would lead him from being a sharp-tongued rocker to developing into a songwriter of depth and range.

  “It wasn’t like I could do no wrong in Peter’s eyes,” said Westerberg. “He didn’t like everything I did. I would bring him a song, and he’d say, ‘Nah.’ But I did feel a need to go, ‘Okay, here’s someone I can try and impress.’ Later on it was like, ‘I’ll write for critics,’ or, ‘I’ll write for a record company guy,’ or whoever. But in the beginning it was just Pete.”

  Over that first year the rest of the band would form their own individual and collective bonds with Jesperson. The five of them grew into an odd little family unit, and their lives centered around Twenty-Sixth Street and Lyndale Avenue.

  On a typical day, the band members would variously hang out at Oar Folk, rifling through records or sitting near the little heater by the window and reading magazines. In the afternoons, after Tommy got out of class, they’d adjourn to the Stinson house to rehearse. Usually, they’d follow up with drinks and palaver at the CC Club, the local tavern kitty-corner from the Oar Folk that became their unofficial headquarters. Although Tommy wasn’t allowed in at first, by age fifteen he was a regular—usually found playing video games in the corner of the bar—despite still being several years under the legal age.

  At night they’d end up walking over to Jesperson’s apartment—which was well stocked with music, rock books, and booze. “It was a place for us to hang out and drink beer and spin records—I mean, Pete was a record store unto himself,” said Westerberg, who would go through Jesperson’s massive collection of singles, fixating on finds like Mission of Burma’s “Academy Fight Song” and Prince’s “When You Were Mine.”

  “The musical education for all of us came from right there,” said Tommy Stinson. “Peter turned us all on to shitloads of stuff. Even stuff that he knew each of us would like separately. He would hip Paul on to certain things, and then I would get turned on to things he thought I’d like.”

  Tommy gravitated toward smart, quirky pop groups like Squeeze as well as more outré artists such as Captain Beefheart. (He used to do a funny, fairly spot-on impression of Beefheart singing “Ashtray Heart.”) Jesperson also spoon-fed Tommy the kind of culture that he’d never experienced before, taking him to see Werner Herzog films and old Greta Garbo revivals at the Uptown Theater.

  Bob Stinson, too, would hungrily consume the volumes in Jesperson’s rock library, pore over his prog albums, and banter with him, often teasingly, about the relative merits of his beloved Beatles. Jesperson managed to turn Bob back on to the band. “I started listening to them again,” said Bob, who’d hook up his record player to a phala
nx of guitar amps, toke up, then crank Revolver, hearing it with new ears.

  For Chris Mars, Jesperson’s apartment was like manna. It was filled with comics of the recent sci-fi film Alien and books by its imaginative artist, H. R. Giger (who would exert a profound influence on Mars’s later paintings). Chris, like the other Replacements, would also come to treasure the records of NRBQ, who, with their lyrical cheek and rootsy eclecticism, were everyone’s idea of the perfect bar band.

  Then there were the acts that Jesperson passed along like prized heirlooms—among them, a group of cult artists and bands unfairly consigned to the margins of history. He would play them the collected works of doomed Memphis power-pop band Big Star, who would become a Replacements favorite. He would also trumpet the work of star-crossed English rocker Terry Reid, spinning songs off his 1969 self-titled LP, including the halting breakup ballad “Mayfly.”

  As Jesperson’s apartment filled with the sound of Reid’s soaring vibrato, the Replacements sat silently marveling in discovery. The notion that someone as gifted as Reid should toil in relative obscurity was daunting—particularly as they pondered their own promise and prospects.

  In March, the band wrapped up their debut album at Blackberry Way. With Bob working at Mama Rosa’s, Tommy in school, and Chris off doing his art, it was left to Westerberg, Jesperson, and Fjelstad to finalize the album. (The three would share coproduction credit on the LP.)

  It was a collective effort to get the record’s mix just right. “We didn’t have automation at Blackberry,” recalled Fjelstad. “So Paul would have his hands on the faders, Pete would have his hands on them—everyone had a little bit of hands on.” After playing back the finished LP, Fjelstad shrugged his shoulders and offered a sufficiently heartening verdict: “Well, if nothing else, it’s louder than the Ramones’ first record.”

  Fully ensconced in his multi-hyphenate role with the band by early ’81, Jesperson took charge of several big picture decisions. He persuaded the Replacements to launch their career in classic fashion: releasing a 7” picture sleeve single with a non-LP b-side. He chose “I’m in Trouble” as the lead track somewhat to the band’s surprise, as Westerberg thought his vocals were a bit flat.

  Late in the mixing stage, Paul was messing with a country-styled barroom narrative titled “If Only You Were Lonely,” a cheeky look at a man on the make, redolent of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells A Story.” “He called me to his house and played the first verse on a demo he’d recorded, then the rest of what he had on his brother’s acoustic,” said Jesperson. Westerberg, feeling protective of the band, was reluctant to record a solo song. But Jesperson convinced him it was a perfect b-side for the single. “He finished the song in the van on the way over to cut it at Blackberry Way. I was driving and he was scribbling furiously and crossing out things. He was so earnest.”

  With the full-length, Jesperson had originally wanted to include twenty-two tracks—“because the first Wire album [Pink Flag] has twenty-one songs on it, and I think they should one-up ’em,” he said at the time. Ultimately, the decision was made to scale back the LP. Though not necessarily by design, they ended up cutting a batch of Westerberg’s more orthodox rockabilly/rock-and-roll rave-ups (such as “Get on the Stick” and “Oh Baby”) because the performances, they felt, were lacking. That left the album with eighteen songs—nine to a side—and a nearly thirty-seven-minute running time.

  The band also decided to ditch the working title they’d been using, “Not Suitable for Airplay,” in favor of something better at playing up their adolescent spirit.

  For a time, Jesperson had sought to tag the band as avatars of “low-class rock”—a description that graced a number of gig flyers during the period. “We were always looking for a new angle,” said Westerberg, “’cause we weren’t really punk rock, and we didn’t fit in with what was considered the rock-and-roll of the time.” Eventually, Westerberg came up with the snappier term “power trash.” (Jesperson would include a helpful note to retailers on the LP’s cover to “File Under Power Trash.”)

  With its inherent allusions to the New York Dolls classic “Trash”—as well as Bob Stinson’s Dogbreath-era rehearsal chore of emptying his mother’s kitchen bin—it would inspire them to name the album Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash.

  Westerberg also penned a set of liner notes—heavily influenced by Creem magazine’s resident rock critic/comedian Rick Johnson—that perfectly conveyed the Replacements’ brand of humor and general self-disregard as effectively as the songs themselves. Assessing their performance on “Careless,” he wrote: “Don’t worry, we’re thinking about taking lessons.” Of “Hanging Downtown” he observed, “We wanted to put car horns over the mistake, but none of us own a car,” while noting that “Kick Your Door Down” was a “1st take—written 20 mins after we recorded it.” Elsewhere, he complimented Bob’s lead on “Customer” as being “hotter than a urinary infection,” while “Otto” was “proof that Chris Mars is one of the best drummers we could find at the time.” In what would become one of his running themes, Westerberg played up their inherent laziness, cracking that “More Cigarettes” “could have come close to rockabilly if we had taken the time” and confessing, on “Don’t Ask Why,” to stealing “a mess of these words from a guy who’s never gonna listen to this record” (referring to B. B. King, whose “You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now” he’d pilfered lyrics from).

  The record’s dynamic cover image—a shot of a leaping Tommy and a mic-throttling Paul—was captured during a gig at the 7th St Entry by Greg Helgeson. The design came courtesy of Bruce Allen of the Suburbs, who gave the sleeve a cut-and-paste aesthetic—ripping up the photo, adding a beaming blue–hot pink color scheme and hand-scrawled lettering—that owed much to the work of the Sex Pistols’ graphics maven Jamie Reid.

  By the spring, the single and album were complete—though they’d have to wait several months for it to come out so that Twin/Tone could line up multiple releases in order to save money on pressing and promo costs.

  That April the group was in high spirits, partying late at the Modesto as Jesperson spun his favorite R&B tunes. He grabbed an old Atlantic Records compilation and played “Sweet Soul Music” by Otis Redding protégé Arthur Conley.

  “Chrissake—that shit is too good. I ain’t ever gonna be able to sing like that, Pete,” muttered Westerberg. “Why don’t you play me something white and talentless instead?”

  Jesperson just happened to have a fresh test pressing of “I’m in Trouble” sitting next to the turntable. In a flash, he put it on and dropped the needle as everyone fell about laughing.

  PART II A Band for Our Time

  We started to leave home and go play other places . . . and people started to show up. Once that happened it was like “Game on.” We’re not like a little basement band, just guys in the neighborhood, anymore. We’re something else. We may not have been great, but we were fuckin’ special.

  TOMMY STINSON

  CHAPTER 12

  In September 1981, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash finally saw the light of day. Twin/Tone released the Replacements’ debut album in concert with the Pistons’ Flight 581 and the Suburbs’ Credit in Heaven.

  Thanks to Peter Jesperson, the Twin Cities music press had been in the tank for the Replacements from the start. What came as a surprise was the response the band got from several influential national voices. In New York Rocker, critic Phil Davis singled out the group. “[Their] subject—Midwestern angst—hasn’t been better rendered by any punk band,” he wrote. “The endless car rides to nowhere, Stop-N-Go Snacks, familial pressures, drug induced escapism—they all have psychic consequences. Confronting the internalized damages through simple external summations is the group’s forte.”

  The Village Voice’s eminence, Robert Christgau—the self-appointed “Dean of American Rock Critics”—graded Sorry Ma a B-plus in his “Consumer Guide.” He hailed the Replacements as “a not quite hardcore Twin Cities quartet who soun
d like the Heartbreakers might have if they’d started young and never seen Union Square: noisy, disgruntled, lovable.” Even the legendary Lester Bangs, in what would prove to be the last dispatch before his death, gave a positive nod to Sorry Ma in the Voice.

  The plaudits were gratifying to the group, but also a much-needed means of promotion, as commercial radio—particularly in Minneapolis—was closed off to bands like the Replacements. Program director Doug Podell, of Minneapolis rock powerhouse KQRS, noted in print that fall that the band was “just too hard for us.”

  Twin/Tone tried other ways of promoting the group. With his filmmaking background, Paul Stark decided to set up a professional multi-camera concert shoot at the 7th St Entry for the label’s roster, as well as several other local bands. The Replacements played well enough, though their footage was deemed unusable because they were out of tune for so much of the set.

  Ironically, given their later much-publicized stance against making videos, the Replacements would actually attempt to film a clip for their first single, “I’m in Trouble,” in 1981. MTV had premiered that August, and though Jesperson didn’t have cable, local clubs like First Avenue were airing the network on big screens in between bands. “There was this burgeoning thing with music videos happening,” said Jesperson. “I thought, Maybe this is something we should tap into.”

  Jesperson contacted his friend John Brister, a Minneapolis filmmaker he’d known since the ’70s: “He was one of the early people interested in making videos, and he wanted a guinea pig,” said Jesperson. Brister shot footage of the band walking in Loring Park and spray-painting REPLACEMENTS STINK on the brick wall outside Oar Folk. Another narrative segment saw Westerberg wearing pajamas and lying in bed, as if waking from a dream.

  After a while, the band began to lose interest—Bob kept missing shoots to work shifts at Mama Rosa’s—and Twin/Tone rejected Brister’s request for funds to complete the project. The whole thing went away—much to the band’s relief.