by Bob Mehr
The college town of Madison, Wisconsin, would prove the group’s first real stronghold outside the Twin Cities as they became a top draw at spots like Merlyn’s, G.S. Vig’s, Club de Wash, and Headliner’s. The band would make the five-hour trek from Minneapolis, drinking heartily along the way. They’d pull up hammered and fill up on what was—to them anyway—an exotic delicacy, gyros (which Westerberg refused to pronounce correctly, insisting on calling them “jai-rohs,” like a stereotypical Midwestern bohunk). Then the debauchery began.
In Madison the crowds were rowdy, the after-parties were good, and the drugs were even better. “That was like our Hamburg,” said Peter Jesperson, referring to the down-and-dirty German city where the early Beatles came into their own. “Madison was that place for the ’Mats; it was a big deal in the development of the band.
“The whole thing of being in a band is like putting on a mask, it gives you license to do things you wouldn’t normally do, especially when you’re away from home,” Jesperson would later note. On the road and in close quarters, the Replacements’ personalities became exaggerated: the sometimes petulant Tommy became “The Brat,” penny-pinching Chris became “The Chince,” Bob, ever in his cups, was dubbed “The Drunk,” while moody, churlish Paul was “The Louse.”
Tagging along with the Replacements as opener on a number of these regional dates was a fledgling group called Loud Fast Rules. The band was led by Dave Pirner, a South Minneapolis Catholic school refugee who was a year ahead of Tommy Stinson at West High. Pirner had started playing music as a kid, taking up trumpet (“It was the loudest instrument and had the fewest buttons”) before switching over to saxophone. When punk happened, he learned to play guitar and drums. One day Pirner showed up at high school hockey practice with a Ramones “Gabba Gabba Hey!” button on. “And I got the shit beat out of me,” he said. “The hockey players did not want punk rock to infiltrate their sport. So I walked away from that.” Instead, Pirner went on to front a short-lived band called the Shitz, which made a couple of appearances at the Longhorn.
The Shitz—whose standout song was a rowdy cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence”—had impressed Dan Murphy and Karl Mueller. Murphy was a Marshall High grad and guitarist who’d been playing in a group called At Last. Mueller was a bassist who’d spent a little time in England and come back looking like Sid Vicious. They were both working as carryout boys at the Lund’s grocery store on Lake Street. “I would go over to Lund’s and take a weed break with them,” recalled Pirner. “That’s how I got tight with those guys.”
They formed Loud Fast Rules in the summer of 1981, initially with Pirner on drums, before Pat Morley took over the kit and the band changed its name to Soul Asylum. Their early performances evinced the same raw, youthful dynamism as the Replacements’ first gigs.
The ’Mats would go on to adopt Soul Asylum as a kind of baby brother band. “I was quite intimidated being around Westerberg, ’cause he’d written all these great songs,” said Murphy. “It seemed pretty heavy that he would come to our shows and be into us.”
Westerberg struck Murphy as strangely ill suited to the spotlight. “I don’t think he played himself as an outcast, I think he was an outcast. He could be charming when he had a few drinks in him. But he was really shy.” Onstage, Pirner was far more at ease, a whirling dervish who relished performing. “Pirner was trying to be sexy,” said his friend and West classmate David Roth. “Westerberg was trying to be working-class angry. Pirner was trying to get the chicks. It didn’t seem like Westerberg was trying to do that.”
The Replacements’ patronage helped Soul Asylum secure a deal with Twin/Tone the following year, after a standout gig in Madison that wowed Peter Jesperson. Eventually, though, a sense of competition came between them. Soul Asylum stopped opening shows for the ’Mats, though the two camps remained friends.
Writer David Ayers, who went on to manage Soul Asylum, reckoned that Westerberg was uncomfortable with the contrasts between himself and Pirner. “Something that always informed Paul’s sensibility was his inwardness. He was fundamentally uncomfortable with people looking at him,” said Ayers. “And he recognized that Pirner kinda liked it—and I’m not sure Paul liked that.”
As the Replacements developed a habit of living and playing hard during their first sojourns, the effects were often damaging—particularly for Westerberg, who was smoking, speeding, and blowing out his voice regularly.
Riding home one night following a gig at the St. Croix Boom Company, he began having a physical freak-out. Jesperson was driving and Chris Mars was riding shotgun, when they heard Westerberg hyperventilating, then retching and writhing around in the backseat. “I thought he was having some kind of heart attack or something—dying basically,” recalled Jesperson. “So I just floored it . . . and was driving really crazy into the city, running red lights to get to a hospital.”
A panicked Jesperson had a knot in his stomach, fearing the worst. Just then, he felt Westerberg’s hand reach up and grab his shoulder.
“Pete . . . Pete,” Westerberg croaked.
“Yes, Paul, what is it?” Jesperson replied breathlessly.
“If I die . . . don’t let Bob sing,” cracked Westerberg, before slumping back.
The comedy continued as Jesperson pulled up to what he thought was Hennepin County General’s emergency entrance but turned out to be an adjacent office building instead. “We carried Paul out of the car, and it was the wrong door,” he said. “And then we had to carry him back into the car.” By the time they reached the bay of the emergency room and medics whisked him away, Jesperson was almost as ashen as Westerberg: “I really thought one of the greatest artists I’ve ever known is gonna die on my watch.”
It would transpire that Westerberg was having an adverse reaction to some potent pharmaceutical amphetamine someone had given him at the club that night. “The doctor wanted to know if I’d been [freebasing],” said Westerberg, who was given a sedative to normalize his heart rate. He was also diagnosed with pleurisy—a painful inflammation of the membrane surrounding the lungs. “It was probably that I was straining, trying to sing like Lemmy from Motörhead,” he said. The doctor suggested he slather his chest with Ben-Gay before he sang—which he did for the next few years, giving the Replacements’ dressing rooms a distinctive preshow aroma.
The following morning, semi-recovered, Westerberg began writing a frantic blues ramble recounting the incident (“I don’t wanna die before my time . . . I’ve already used eight of my lives”) called “Take Me Down to the Hospital.”
Though it wouldn’t become fodder for any song, a few months later Bob Stinson nearly bought it in even more dramatic fashion during a trip to Kansas. The Replacements had become small stars in the college town of Lawrence, where the University of Kansas radio station, KJHK, had been playing Sorry Ma endlessly (largely thanks to the station’s Blake Gumprecht, a ’Mats champion who would eventually go to work for Twin/Tone).
That May the band was booked to play a pair of sets at the Off the Wall Hall in Lawrence for $350. It would prove to be their biggest payday to that point, as well as their farthest gig away from the Twin Cities.
Arriving at the venue, which had been converted from an old airplane hangar, the band started sound-checking. Bob, who was playing through a ratty rig—a rundown head and an old Sears Teisco amp—stepped to the foot of the stage. With one hand around the neck of his Gibson Firebird, he went to adjust the microphone when something went horribly wrong. A massive jolt hit his body, electrocuting him. The surge caused him to spasm and lock up. Unable to let go of the mic, he then began shaking uncontrollably—snapping the neck of the guitar in two places.
Chris Mars had his head down, adjusting his drums, when “I heard a stuttering moan coming from Bob. The shock was so great that he couldn’t even yell.” As Bob collapsed to his knees, Mars leapt from behind the drum kit, spread eagle, knocking over his cymbal stands. “I grabbed Bob by the shoulders and tried to yank him away,
and I got a jolt that felt like I’d put my hand into an electrical socket,” said Mars. “It was one of the most frightening things I have ever witnessed.” He was finally able to roll Bob on his back as the club’s soundman, realizing what was happening, cut the power. “Chris probably saved his life,” said Jesperson.
Dazed but living, Bob laughed off the incident, a surge of adrenaline carrying him through the aftermath. But later, during a preshow dinner, Tommy Stinson would remember sitting across from his brother, “and we locked eyes . . . and we both started crying. It was super surreal that it had happened. After everything had calmed down, that’s when it hit us just how scary it was.”
When the band returned to Minneapolis, Bob went to get his guitar fixed at the Knut Koupee Music Store. There he encountered the Suicide Commandos’ Chris Osgood, who gasped when he saw Stinson. “The whites of his eyes were red, blood red,” recalled Osgood. “He showed me his left hand, and he had six burn marks where the strings had singed into his skin. I remember thinking, This would’ve killed anybody but Bob. A normal human being would’ve been fried on the spot. But Bob managed to take it because he was such an ox.”
Added Mars: “Whenever the band was onstage or around the amps or PA gear, you can bet your life we were pretty damn cautious from then on . . . for at least a week.”
In the spring of ’82, the Replacements opened a gig in Madison for UK punks the Damned. Seeing the band’s flamboyantly styled guitarist and resident character Captain Sensible would exert a profound influence on Bob Stinson.
The Damned leader took a shine to Bob, who was wearing some unfashionable jeans his mother had bought him and a scoop-neck Mama Rosa’s shirt. The Captain offered him a bit of showbiz advice. “Bloody hell, mate—you need to lose the fuckin’ flares,” he told Bob. “If anyone’s gonna notice you up there, you need to look and act the part.”
Bob would heed those words and come into his own as an outré performer and onstage personality. “When I saw [Captain Sensible] playing naked or in his underwear, he wasn’t scared,” said Bob. “If he didn’t like the sound check, he’d just whip it out and piss on the monitor.” Bob began to take the stage in wild outfits: a detective’s trenchcoat, a ballerina tutu, a woman’s house dress, or occasionally in the buff. “He started to find his own act, his own image, and then really lived that up,” said Westerberg. “That’s where he started to get his own fans and his own following.”
Between his scorching leads and comic attire, Bob became the key element of the band’s spectacle. “To me, Bob was the best part of the Replacements, the funniest part,” said Tommy’s pal David Roth. “When he’d grab Westerberg’s mic stand during ‘Rattlesnake’ and everyone would get pissed at him, he didn’t care . . . he was fucking goofy. But he gave the Replacements this brutal energy too.”
“He was so much the ‘X factor’ of the live show,” noted Dave Ayers. “Tommy was always exciting, and Chris was totally dependable. But that snowflake quality of the shows usually came down to Paul and Bob.” The two might tussle onstage, wrestling and booting each other, either out of joy or frustration. “We have fun when we play good, and when we have a bad night and we fight, that keeps it real,” noted Westerberg at the time. “If Bob plays shitty and the crowd isn’t gonna let him know, I’m sure as hell gonna. That’s the immediate way, to kick him. That’s what we all understand. That’s part of the deal.”
When he wasn’t donning outrageous garb and playing the guitar, Bob was an altogether different person. “There was this whole other side to him that had nothing to do with the stage Bob; there was nothing loud or attention-grabbing about his personality,” said Ayers. “There was a kind-hearted, quiet guy underneath the oaf in the dress.”
Bob’s deep fascination with Yes guitarist Steve Howe continued unabated into the ’80s, even as the Replacements went pseudo-hardcore. Even in the ’Mats context, Bob would continue to cop Howe’s lovely, lilting neoclassical riffs and put a jet engine on them. Howe’s new supergroup, Asia, had released its debut that March. When the band played Minneapolis, Jesperson got a giddy Stinson backstage to meet his idol. “Steve Howe is pretty much the antithesis of punk,” said David Ayers. “But that showed Bob wasn’t just a slash-and-burn guitar player. He was really unique in what he played and how he saw things.”
Westerberg would famously acknowledge Bob’s sometimes confounding duality, claiming: “I don’t know if he’s the stupidest genius or the smartest idiot I’ve ever known.”
Ever since his release from the group home, Bob drank consistently, if not chronically, as a way of numbing the pain of his childhood. As the band developed so, too, did Paul’s and Chris’s tendency to abuse alcohol. (Teenage Tommy had yet to start imbibing.) Drinking had always been part of the Replacements’ methodology, a way of shedding their nerves and shyness and getting up onstage—but it would eventually come to define them as well.
The ’Mats’ growing reputation in this regard was divisive within the Twin Cities. During a live KFAI radio interview, deejay David McGowan took Westerberg to task for the band’s turn toward wasted performances.
“Don’t take this wrong,” said McGowan, “but I don’t have as much fun seeing you guys live as I used to, and I think it’s ’cause you’re too damn drunk.”
“Then again,” countered Westerberg, “there are nights we were so drunk we couldn’t recognize each other and we played good too.”
“Well, I’m tired of seeing wrestling matches onstage.”
“We’re tired of playing sometimes.”
In a sense, the band’s drinking and dissolute behavior had been wrapped up in the mythology of their songs from the very beginning. “The songs were about what we were. It was never a pose,” said Westerberg. “It may have come suspiciously close when we got attention for being fuck-ups. Where we thought: This works, people come to see this. I think then we accentuated it, and maybe even stretched the limits of what we actually were. Let’s get even drunker.”
“A certain segment of fans, they latched on to that,” said Kevin Bowe of the sober rockers the Dads. “Like, ‘Boy, these guys are drunk all the time, I wish I could do that, but I can’t because I have a job,’ or, ‘I’m in school.’ The Replacements got to be the poster boys for who they wanted to be. And none of that had to do with music.” It was a by-product of the Midwest’s hard-drinking culture. Said Bowe: “You think Minneapolis is bad, you oughta go to Duluth. You think Duluth is bad, hop over to Superior, Wisconsin.”
True Replacements fans—not the ones coming to live vicariously through them or to find sanction for their own behavior—were a different breed. “When we started, we were mixed-up kids, and we wrote about it,” said Westerberg. “It’s funny that the people who related to it the most weren’t fucked-up kids, though. Our fans have always been, dare I say, a little more intelligent than the band was labeled as. I always thought that ironic.”
Replacements partisans were, on the whole, literate, dark-humored, and a bit confused about their place in the world. They weren’t the go-getters or yuppie types, but they weren’t hopeless wastrels either. They were, Tommy Stinson would note, “more like us than they fuckin’ knew. They didn’t really fit anywhere. They probably didn’t aspire to a whole lot, but also didn’t aspire to doing nothing either. That’s the kind of fan we probably appealed to most: the people that were in that gray area. Just like us.”
In June 1982, as Stink was being released, there was a sudden focus on Westerberg’s work as a writer. “What the Replacements were known for mostly was being loud and fast and drunk,” said David Ayers. “There hadn’t been a whole lot of attention paid to what the guy really had to say.” Ayers would pen a cover story for the Minnesota Daily on the band’s creative engine.
“Paul Westerberg is likable. Even onstage during his worst, shrug shouldered, grumbling, half-drunks he’s magnetic and a little disarming,” wrote Ayers.
He’s also polite, thoughtful, and inquisitive. It’s not that he’s got
a trumped-up, angry stage persona; he’s still sorting himself out. He takes great pains to be honest, even if that means contradicting himself at times as he does in his conversation and in his music. In his words, “sometimes my mind goes a hundred different ways at once.” He wasn’t speaking on the topic at the time, but that’s a pretty fair description of a young man trying to come to grips with his own raw genius.
The article would reveal that the B-side “If Only You Were Lonely” was merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to Westerberg’s solo material. While Ayers was privy to Westerberg’s “secret” stash of songs—Jesperson had played them for him—“the public knowledge of that stuff was non-existent up to that point.” Ayers raised the possibility that Westerberg would use the material to make a solo record. “‘Sometimes I think that’s right around the comer, sometimes I think it won’t be for five years,’ said Westerberg. ‘I’m uncomfortable about it causing tension with the band right now, because if I were to do that I can honestly say it would not be the Replacements, and that would be weird. To do it solo . . . I’d feel vulnerable. Now if somebody throws a bottle at least I’ve got three guys with me.’”
A few months later, however, Westerberg would play his first solo acoustic show, opening for former Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen at First Avenue. The seven-song set saw Westerberg strip down some ’Mats material and fidget nervously onstage. “I’ve never been so scared in my life as when I did that,” he would recall. “You’re so naked up there . . . no noise to hide behind. No one dancing. They’re just standing there staring at you.” (It would be his last solo appearance for two decades.)
Westerberg was still giving Jesperson new home recordings all through the Stink era, including revelatory pieces like the fragile acoustic experiment “Hold Me in Suspension.” “He called me up and said, ‘I just recorded this song, and I sing it all in falsetto, and I want you to hear it—but I’ve got to get it out of the house right now or I’m going to erase it.’ It was like he’d done something and freaked himself out.” Sometimes Paul would deliver a cassette cued up to a certain spot and tell Jesperson not to listen to anything else. “I honored that for a while, but when he didn’t ask for the tape back, I got curious. Thought maybe he doesn’t mind me exploring what else is on here,” said Jesperson, who found other songs hidden on the tapes, like the fingerpicked beauty “You’re Pretty When You’re Rude.”
