by Bob Mehr
“It just got so dumb,” complained Westerberg of the video a few years later. “I hate to think it’ll surface one of these days.” He needn’t have worried. The footage was tossed after Brister—who went on to an award-winning career as an animator—died from AIDS in 1989.
Throughout the first half of their career, money was tight for the Replacements. The band members all lived at home, and none of them except Bob—who kept his line cook job—worked. They subsisted on the gig money they made in those first couple of years—anywhere from $50 to $300 a show, split four ways, minus expenses. Occasionally the band would supplement its earnings with contributions from the audience, beseeching crowds to “throw money.” “You would not believe how much people would whip out and throw onstage,” recalled Lori Barbero. “Those boys fighting over the money onstage was hysterical. I remember one show at Duffy’s their pockets were bulges, they couldn’t fit any more [change] into their pants.”
Despite the struggles of those early lean years, “we were very content,” said Westerberg. “I remember me and Chris cashing in his food stamps to buy cigarettes. We had a pack of smokes, and we were gonna go down the basement and jam with the Stinsons. Pretty soon some girls would show up, and we were happy as shit.”
Once the group gained some local renown, the women quickly found them. “That was the faucet we could never turn on where, suddenly, the handle flew off,” said Westerberg. Female attention had always been a major motivation for playing in a band in the first place. “Girls were 50 percent of the reason,” he said. “And we wanted to do something worthy that we could be proud of—but that was about it. It wasn’t like we were out to change the world, or become wealthy. Having read every rock biography, I knew it starts raining women long before you’re famous and rich . . . and you might not ever get famous or rich.”
Though Westerberg had kicked around for years in little combos before the Replacements, those efforts hadn’t generated any interest from the opposite sex. “I’m told that women are attracted to confidence and power, and none of those early bands had that. Even if the Replacements lacked confidence, we didn’t let it show. We were just down your throat.” It was this gaggle of early female fans who took to calling the band the ’Mats—short for Placemats, Westerberg’s drunken colloquialism for Replacements.
Among these women was Paul’s first girlfriend—Lucinda Teasley, a fellow high school dropout and a musician from Duluth. She’d seen him playing the Longhorn in late 1980 and made doe-eyes at him from the audience; they started going out soon after. Since Westerberg had no money, driver’s license, or apartment of his own, their dates had to be creative. “We might meet at Lakewood Cemetery at midnight and walk around together—mind you, we had to break in,” said Teasley. “Another time we were sitting on the couch writing romantic letters back and forth to one another—as though he were an inmate on the inside and I was his girl on the outside waiting for him to get out. We were using our middle names, Harry and Janie. Those are things that he thought to do.”
They’d been together six or seven months and Teasley wanted the relationship to become more serious. But having gotten his first taste of flesh, Westerberg began a lifelong pattern of romantic indiscretions. Several of Sorry Ma’s songs were colored by what he saw as Teasley’s attempts to tame him (“I’m in Trouble,” “Love You Til Friday”) and guilt over his own licentiousness (“Rattlesnake”). “At one point,” recalled Teasley, “he said, ‘I’m just a rat-rat-rattlesnake’—as a way to excuse his behavior.”
Bob made his own strides with the opposite sex (“He was so strange that girls that would succumb to Bob’s advances were strange too,” noted Jesperson), while it would be years before the ever-shy Chris got a girlfriend. Tommy, however, had become the subject of much female fascination in the local scene.
“There was a group of girls, older women, who were enamored with him and God knows what else, because he was a cute little boy,” recalled Westerberg. One local musician, a guitarist in an instrumental combo, decided she was going to deflower Tommy. “There was a big competition for that honor,” said Lou Santacroce.
It was another girl, several years Tommy’s senior, who ended up being his first. She was riding with Tommy and the band after a show. Dropping her off at home, he followed her in and shut the door behind him. “When everybody realized what was happening, you could’ve heard a pin drop,” said Jesperson. “Then the whole van erupted. Like, ‘Well, there he goes. Good luck, son!’” Recalled Tommy: “The girl I was with was eighteen. I was thirteen. That’s a little young, even by today’s standards. It probably caused a lot of weird growing-up shit right away.”
Tommy’s first serious relationship started in 1982, with the woman who would eventually become his wife, Daune Elizabeth Earle. Born in 1959 and a native of New York, Earle had moved to southern Minnesota when her father, a Birdseye executive, was transferred there. She arrived in the Twin Cities in the late ’70s to attend college and became a regular at the Longhorn and Oar Folk, where she first encountered Tommy. “I didn’t know who he was at the time,” said Earle. “There was a little alcove in the store, and he would be sitting there watching soap operas—All My Children—that Peter had taped. That was their thing.”
One day after leaving the store, Earle realized Tommy was trailing behind, following her home. She ignored him, but they met up again at a party a few nights later: “I’m Tommy Stinson,” he said, introducing himself formally. “I’m in the Replacements.”
Despite a seven-year age difference, they dated for the next nine months, before splitting up. They would reunite a few years later. “Tommy was everybody’s little darling and a jackass at the same time,” chuckled Earle. “He was this charmed, cocky kid. But I always saw something more in him.”
Tommy Stinson’s early teens were a strangely schizophrenic time. At nights he would play with the Replacements, carry on with older women, and exist in a totally adult world. Then, in the morning, he’d have to go back to school.
His closest friend during these years was a baby-faced kid named David Roth, whom he’d met at Anwatin Middle School. Though they lived in the same neighborhood, they grew up in different worlds. “I’m from like middle-class intellectual Jews; my father was an English professor,” said Roth, “and Tommy’s from this lower-class, working-class background. But we liked the same things: first it was candy and movies, then girls and pot. So we started hanging out.”
Roth had spent a year in England in 1979 during his father’s teaching sabbatical and came back to Minneapolis as an earring-wearing punk rocker. He began publishing his own fanzine (Power for Living) and underground comic (Ferret Comix) and became a fixture in the local music scene. “I was embraced almost like a mascot. Grant from Hüsker Dü, the guys from Rifle Sport, they thought it was real cute that I was this little punk rock kid,” he said. “I was thirteen, but looked about nine. I couldn’t get into bars, but I would go to after-hours parties.” Roth tagged along with the Replacements, sneaking into clubs with them by carrying gear. “You could tell Tommy was very enamored of Paul,” he said. “Paul would say things, and Tommy would repeat them. Little jokes or in-jokes. Paul had this cool factor, and you wanted to impress him.”
Over time Tommy would establish his own visual identity in the band, donning creepers and styling his hair—at one point he dyed a streak of shocking white in it, prompting Westerberg to nickname him “Skunk.” At West High School, Roth and Stinson stood out and were forced to steer clear of a gang of aggressive jocks looking to beat up punks and queers. “The football players from West, we called them the Disco Rumblers,” said Roth, “’cause they listened to disco and they liked to rumble. It was like the jocks against the freaks. They’d spit on me and Tommy as we walked through the hall.”
Even in his own neighborhood, Tommy had to move carefully in order to dodge a couple of hulking bullies who didn’t like his look. Sometimes Tommy would hang out with Suburbs road manager Casey Macpherson, who had a
n apartment nearby. “Tommy would ask me to walk him home,” said Macpherson. “’Cause there was always guys who wanted to thump him.”
Inside the clubs, Tommy had mostly managed to avoid any trouble. But after a couple of incidents—including one where Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics chased him around Zoogie’s for throwing a cigarette at her—Jesperson decided they needed some legal protection. In February 1982, Anita Stinson signed a notarized agreement making Jesperson her son’s legal guardian while he was performing and traveling “as a member of the musical group—The Replacements.” It wasn’t quite a Faustian pact, but in Tommy’s mind his fate had been sealed.
“We were talking about what his future plans were once,” recalled Rifle Sport singer Chris Johnson. “I was like, ‘You can’t play in the Replacements forever.’ And Tommy was like, ‘Oh yah, I’m gonna. By the time I’m twenty-five, if this is all over, you’ll find me playing at a Holiday Inn somewhere.’ He was saying that at fourteen, fifteen years old—that was it, he’d decided. I’m not doing anything else but music.”
Bob had put the bass in his hand to save him from a life of crime, but opened up a new world of possibilities in the process. “That was a very fortunate accident. If that had not been the case, he might not have discovered what a brilliant musician he was,” said local critic Dave Ayers. “And Tommy was—he could’ve played with Miles Davis if he’d been in the right place at the right time. He’s just really gifted. But he was also a kid—he was bratty, he was gonna try to get on your nerves. This is someone who’d been onstage since he was twelve years old. He never had a normal adolescence because of that.”
Westerberg would recall his own teen years—how nervous and uncertain he’d been—and marvel at how confidently Tommy carried himself. “Being in the ’Mats must’ve been like being a child circus performer or something,” he said. “If you weren’t strong enough, that would really screw you up.”
The Replacements’ post–Sorry Ma period would be most defined by their relationship and friction with a fellow Twin Cities band—Hüsker Dü.
The Hüskers came together in early 1979, when New York native Bob Mould—a student at Macalester College in St. Paul—hooked up with a pair of local record store clerks in drummer-vocalist Grant Hart and his friend, bassist Greg Norton. A strident punk power trio, the Hüskers were the senior outfit, having formed almost a year before the Replacements came along.
“They may have started first, but we were soon vying for the same opening slots,” recalled Paul Westerberg. “The big one being for Johnny Thunders [and Gang War]. They got it and we didn’t. The other one was Black Flag; we weaseled them out of that. There was competition from the get-go—for gigs, for attention. Whenever we played together, it was a friendly competition, but competition nonetheless. We wanted to see them fail. We wanted them to be the second-best band in the city.”
Though Bob Mould was not without ego when it came to Hüsker Dü’s status in the local scene, he embraced the creative push-and-pull with the Replacements. “It was about who’s going to play louder, who’s going to play faster, who’s going to play the better shows, who’s going to make the better records,” said Mould. “Historically, that’s what drives the business: bands jockeying and competing and trying to top one another. We all have these messages and ideas. It’s about who tells a better story, who’s going to get more ears to listen to the story.”
Their dialogue would play out onstage and on record. Sorry Ma had included a song about band life called “Something to Dü” (“Amphetamine sweat, girls you bet / Beats workin’ too”), which featured a winking coda referencing their rivals (“Something to Hüsker . . . break the mould!”). The Hüskers would nod back in the ’Mats’ direction by pilfering some of their riffs for the drinking song “First of the Last Calls” (“Hundred, hundred, hundred bottles on the wall / You wonder if you can drink them all”).
Though they shared some musical influences—namely, Johnny Thunders, John Lydon, and the Ramones—when it came to conducting their careers, the two bands had little in common. As a point of pride as well as necessity, the Hüskers were the quintessential self-sufficient, do-it-yourself outfit. “The three of us, we learned every aspect of the business that we could,” said Mould. “We felt like we had to. That was what we did with our lives.”
The Replacements, meanwhile, couldn’t be bothered. They were totally, unapologetically dependent on others. As one observer put it, “The Replacements were never DIY; they wanted someone to carry their gear for them.”
“When we looked to the Replacements, there was a little bit of a feeling of like, ‘Those guys don’t even know what’s happening to them,’” said Mould. “Peter Jesperson does everything for them.”
In 1981, the Hüskers started their own label, Reflex Records—with a loan from Hart’s mother’s credit union and the assistance of Oar Folk’s Terry Katzman—as a direct reaction to being rejected by Jesperson and Twin/Tone. In the process, Reflex would also help release records by Minneapolis compatriots like Rifle Sport and Man Sized Action and put together local scene compilations like Barefoot & Pregnant (to which the Replacements contributed a cover of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades”).
Mould was a big believer in the concept of community, the theory that rising tides lift all boats. “We helped out other bands in the scene, at least our scene. We were trying to raise everybody up,” he said. “The Replacements hardly did anything like that. It’s not a knock on them, it’s just a huge difference between us.” (There were other notable contrasts between the groups: Mould and Hart were both gay, a fact known in the Twin Cities but not widely elsewhere. Asked to elaborate on the main difference between the Hüskers and the ’Mats, Tommy Stinson once told a journalist, smirking: “We like girls.”)
Despite Hüsker Dü’s professional vigilance and communal instincts, they would ultimately be done in by one of their own. After a couple of years touring and building a reputation out west, the group signed with SST, the California indie label run by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn. In the end, the Hüskers would spend the next thirty years fighting Ginn over royalties—their album masters held hostage by someone they’d thought was a brother-in-arms.
Having established themselves early on in the hardcore-dominated Chicago scene, the Hüskers starting taking the Replacements to the Windy City as a support act in late 1981. “There was a period there in the beginning where we actually tried to fit into that world,” said Tommy Stinson. “It wasn’t always comfortable.” Mould felt that some more dogmatic audiences viewed the ’Mats “as a rock-and-roll band . . . trying to be hardcore. Maybe the overlords of the existing hardcore scene saw them as poseurs. But those people didn’t know shit anyways.”
From the start, Westerberg scoffed at the narrow orthodoxy of the era’s hardcore scene. “[They] didn’t see us as a punk band, but we embodied more of what a punk was than they did,” he said. “That was the weird little rub. Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets helped open up a broader picture of what’s punk and what’s not punk. I mean, the Stones were punks when they started.”
Westerberg was also dubious of the po-faced herd mentality that quickly overtook American hardcore audiences in the early ’80s. “They used to all show up in the same uniform,” he recalled. “And it became political and it became serious and it became deathly. . . . It was not the way we wanted to go.”
He resisted the genre’s ideological aspects, the hectoring anti-Reagan polemics that were de rigueur at the time. Westerberg was an avowed cynic when it came to politics, particularly politics mixed up with rock-and-roll. “There’s nothing that bores me more than a hardcore band that says, ‘Reagan sucks,’” he said. “That’s about as overused and easy and silly as ‘Let’s make love tonight, baby.’ I mean, yeah, Reagan sucks—so?”
Still, the months spent playing the Midwest hardcore circuit in Hüsker Dü’s shadow would have an impact on the Replacements’ sound. For a time they tried to keep up with the Hüskers’ penchant for spe
ed—both their tempos and their use of amphetamines. Westerberg even began writing a batch of his own sloganeering songs, like “Fuck School,” “God Damn Job,” and “Stuck in the Middle,” though these were seen by some as satire more than a genuine embrace. “When Paul wrote ‘hardcore’ songs, it felt like he was basically sending up the genre,” said Katzman.
“You could tell Westerberg was doing things for the upstart nature of it,” said David Roth. “I think he was maybe pissed at how popular Hüsker Dü was in a certain circle. Minneapolis was going pretty hardcore at that point—the whole Midwest was.”
During this 1982–83 period—with the release of the albums Land Speed Record and Everything Falls Apart—Hüsker Dü would dramatically ratchet up its presentation. “It was an acceleration of consistency,” said Mould. “We kept building on top of the good stuff instead of letting it crumble. I had a high expectation of what Hüsker Dü was going to be every single night.” As Hüsker Dü transformed into a kind of towering hardcore monolith, the Replacements went the other way: they became loose, louche, and unpredictable, and all the more so as their alcohol intake increased. “Over time it seemed like their drinking became part of their presentation,” noted Mould.
A buzzed Westerberg would look out over the teeming testosterone-driven crowds slam-dancing into one another and weigh his options. Instead of giving these people what they wanted—sharp, nonstop aggression—he’d go the opposite way: trying songs that the band hadn’t rehearsed, calling for incongruous pop covers, or simply slowing their well-honed material down to a frustrating dirge. “Paul enjoyed playing his mood basically,” said Katzman. “Playing sloppy didn’t bother him. That’s something the Hüskers wouldn’t have done. If they had some new song or a cover that wasn’t ready, they wouldn’t play it in the set. Where Paul would say, ‘Let’s give it a whirl. If we screw it up, so what? I don’t care what these people think.’”
