Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Very little of this material, if any, was ever presented to the Replacements. “A lot of the reason why Paul didn’t bring in certain things was because he knew either all of us or definitely Bob wasn’t going to be into it,” said Tommy. “The dynamic was that if we weren’t all into it, it would just go away. And I’m sure there were times where that stung.”

  “I’m a little edgy about bringing songs now because each guy has his own tastes,” noted Paul at the time. “If it doesn’t rock enough, Bob will scoff at it, and if it isn’t catchy enough, Chris won’t like it, and if it isn’t modern enough, Tommy won’t like it.”

  During a gig in Duluth that summer, a tipsy Westerberg pulled Jesperson aside. “I just came up with the best lyric I’ve ever written,” he told him. “I can live without your touch / If I can die within your reach.” The delicately poetic “Within Your Reach” would be another “signpost song” for Jesperson, heralding a further evolution in Westerberg’s work. But he began to worry that Paul’s best material was going undocumented and would be lost. So, in July, Jesperson called Steve Fjelstad at Blackberry Way to book a solo session for Westerberg—without telling him. When he finally laid out the offer to Paul, there was a long, nervous pause. “Fuck yeah,” said Westerberg finally. “Let’s do it.” But he was desperate to keep it secret from the band.

  On the evening of the session, Westerberg met Jesperson at Oar Folk to head down to the studio. Just as they were about to leave, Chris Mars turned up unexpectedly. Mars took one look at Westerberg and his guitar case and figured something was up. They took Chris into their confidence and all headed down to Blackberry Way together. There Westerberg cut a trio of tracks: a version of Big Star’s “September Gurls” that he made Fjelstad erase immediately; a rough sketch called “Warning Sound” (which would eventually mutate into “We’re Comin’ Out”), and an exquisite take of “Within Your Reach.”

  Westerberg thought the song needed some percussion. Fjelstad suggested they try using a Dr. Rhythm drum machine that was sitting in the studio. It was exactly the sound Westerberg was looking for, but Mars convinced him he could add a live drum track and jumped on a kit that was set up on the floor. He made a few unsuccessful passes at the track—unable to replicate the rigid mechanical beat that Westerberg had in mind. “I remember Chris actually getting teary-eyed,” said Jesperson. “Like, ‘I suck. I’m not good. I can’t do what you’re asking me.’ I don’t think I’d experienced it, before or again, where Chris got that emotional. It was pretty shocking. He was sitting there feeling like, ‘I’ve been replaced by a machine.’”

  It was a watershed moment in Westerberg’s and Mars’s musical relationship. From then on, it would always linger in the back of Paul’s mind that Chris had his limitations as a drummer; that he might not be able to deliver as needed on some of his songs. “I’d done things to make everybody happy. There was some things that I wanted and if it made somebody unhappy . . . well, in that particular case I chose to do it,” said Westerberg. “For every ‘Within Your Reach’ that got recorded, there was five or six that I squelched or erased because I didn’t want to spoil the party.”

  The Replacements formally began work on their third album in October 1982. Rather than return to Blackberry Way and its limited eight-track setup, Twin/Tone’s Paul Stark engineered the project, using his twenty-four-track mobile unit. “I hadn’t worked with them since the demo a couple years earlier,” said Stark, who along with Jesperson would coproduce a series of three-to four-day sessions in a pair of suburban warehouse spaces through the winter.

  The ’Mats had actually gotten a head start on the record, cutting a few songs that summer at Blackberry—mostly a selection of Stink-centric holdovers like “Junior’s Got a Gun” and “Ain’t No Crime,” which wouldn’t appear on the LP. Only one of the tracks from this batch, “Run It,” would make the final sequence.

  It was breakneck rocker based on a true story: That spring Westerberg and Mars had been out drinking at Bob Mould’s house. They left together, riding Chris’s motorcycle, with Paul on back. As they sped through the streets of South Minneapolis, a police squad car drove up alongside and tried to pull them over. Instead of stopping, a suddenly wild-eyed Mars told the cops to “come and get me, you old fuckers!” and took off.

  The police gave chase as Mars fled down an alley with a shocked Westerberg clinging on for dear life. He tried cutting through someone’s front yard but clipped a hedge, which sent Westerberg flying off. The cops descended on Paul, who innocently claimed he’d only been hitchhiking and had clearly been picked up by a madman. “I’m not sure they believed me, but they were mostly after Chris,” he said. They soon caught up to Mars and arrested him. Later that night, Jesperson got a call from Westerberg: “Chris is in jail—what are we gonna do?” Peter chuckled; Westerberg made it sound as though they should try to bust him out of the joint. Mars’s family would ultimately post his bail.

  The resulting song—a manic Bob Stinson–led blitz with Westerberg recounting the harrowing ride (“Lyndale . . . Garfield . . . red light, red light . . . run it!”)—would prove to be the final gasp of the band’s hardcore phase.

  “It had been like a year or six months of touring and doing the Stink thing, and the last thing I wanted to do was really bash out another one like that,” said Westerberg. Being a student of the Beatles and the Stones, he understood that the best bands underwent massive changes from year to year, from album to album. “I didn’t think we were on their level, but I knew . . . if we just stood still and played the one thing, we’d be gone as fast as the Youth Brigade.” Mars was in agreement. “He was the first one who didn’t want to play fast—at that Hüsker Dü tempo—anymore,” said Westerberg. “He wanted to slow it down a little, and I was more than happy to oblige. It was impossible to sing that shit anyway; it was ripping my throat raw.”

  Westerberg felt that the ’Mats’ new record should move in a different direction—several of them, in fact. Cutting at a warehouse in Roseville, they began to work up a series of genre exercises. There was the electro-pop of “Within Your Reach,” which Westerberg abetted with some synth flourishes; the surf-rock instrumental “Buck Hill” (which name-checked a local ski slope), the moody soundscape “Willpower,” influenced by the Psychedelic Furs’ “Sister Europe,” and the bluesy desperation of “Take Me Down to the Hospital.” “Mr. Whirly” nicked the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” and “Oh! Darling” for its intro and Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” for its melody, while “Lovelines” saw the band recycle the boogie groove of their old nugget “Lookin’ for Ya” as Paul improvised lyrics, reading from the personal ads of alt-weekly City Pages (“Wednesday, October thirteenth, nineteen eighty-two, volume four, number seventy-nine . . . ”).

  The record had a free-flowing quality, a reflection of the band’s listening habits. “Every time we’d get in the van we heard all kinds of music and liked a lot of different shit,” said Westerberg. “We got cocky and thought: ‘Why can’t we play a little cocktail jazz, or a little blues or some folk?’ We always used to fool around with that stuff in the basement anyway.”

  The model was a group like NRBQ—“bands that would go from this to that, bands that had a sense of variety,” said Westerberg. “We wanted to do that. It was like, ‘Okay, that’ll be the “fuck you” for this record.’”

  The album’s emotional anchors were a pair of Westerberg’s best outsider anthems: “Color Me Impressed” (“Everybody at your party, they don’t look depressed”) and “Heyday” (“Times ain’t tough, they’re tedious”). These were pop songs, but ones connected to the band’s power trash aesthetic. “You could hear me more or less trying to find my voice, or trying to find out where I fit in,” said Westerberg, who saw the album as “a way of trying to fuse what I had been listening to growing up into what was happening at the time.”

  As they worked through January of ’83, the band would indulge in other musical experiments, cutting the odd, electronic-sounding “Shoot
Me, Kill Me” and the mood-piece instrumental “Sea Hunt.” Though the songs wouldn’t make the final cut, it was part of a process of finding the right dozen tracks for the record. “There was less concern of trying to make an album that was all fast rock-and-roll songs,” said Westerberg. “The record was going to be whatever turned out best on tape.”

  Early on, the ’Mats decided to call the album Hootenanny—a joking reference to folk boom–era jam sessions. Twin/Tone’s Charley Hallman had actually found a 1963 Crestview Records sampler with the same title. The ’Mats would change some of the text, but otherwise nicked the package—its design, liner notes, etc.—wholesale. “We figured, ‘Let’s use this old stupid folk record and put our name on it,’” said Westerberg. “We just pissed our pants laughing. When it came to those kinds of decisions, if it made us laugh hard enough, then it was right.”

  While most of Hootenanny’s tracks were cut live as a group, the band would overdub vocals and lead guitar. The latter proved a particular challenge. “The major consideration was how drunk Bob was going to be when he came to the sessions and how much you could get out of him before he got too drunk to work,” said Stark. “With Bob, we only had about twenty or thirty minutes to record every night.”

  Bob was aware of his issues with the bottle. That summer he’d voluntarily gone on the wagon, and the band’s shows had benefited. But he soon resumed drinking and alienating the others with his behavior onstage and off. “Even before Hootenanny, his shenanigans were becoming overbearing,” said Tommy, who sounded out Soul Asylum’s Dan Murphy about possibly replacing his brother. “He did have a talk with me at the Entry one time, saying they might be looking for someone else in the band,” recalled Murphy. “They were having some problems with Bob. I remember him saying, ‘This might be the last show you see with my brother playing guitar.’”

  During the Roseville sessions, things also reached an uncomfortable impasse over the band’s material. Though Westerberg had mostly kept his solo songs separate from the ’Mats, “Within Your Reach” had already been earmarked for the LP. He also wanted the band to work up a new ballad called “You’re Getting Married.” But Bob wasn’t having it. Jesperson would recall the guitarist essentially throwing the recording: “Bob was not trying, or sabotaging it to some degree because he didn’t like the song. He was playing wrong notes, turning his back.” (Years later Bob would deny the charges: “They said I kept them off ’cause I didn’t like them? Shucks, I can play anything, you know?”)

  Finally putting his foot down, Bob halted the recording of “You’re Getting Married” and told Westerberg flatly, “That ain’t the Replacements . . . save it for your solo record, Paul.” Bob got his way; the song would not appear on the album.

  It was clear that creative battle lines were being drawn. And given Westerberg’s growth and predominance as a writer, it was a fight that Bob was bound to lose. “I don’t know if there was a moment where he thought, This is no longer my band,” said Westerberg. “Because when we played the loud, fast shit, it was his band. But I felt like I can only do so much of that. I have to do this [ballad] crap too.”

  The issue would fester, coming to a head gradually over the next few years. But for the time being, Bob remained, for better or worse, the band’s undeniable force. “I remember one night he knocked me and Tommy’s heads together,” laughed Westerberg. “We were arguing about something and Bob just smacked us together, like the Three Stooges. We both fell like bowling pins. He would still take charge in the end.”

  Much as there might have been frustration with Bob, the real animosity during the session was directed at the ever-enigmatic Paul Stark. The band was pissed off about having to record in some freezing suburban warehouse, and they took it out on him nightly. They would typically show up late, drop off their gear, and then run to the nearby Holiday Inn bar, leaving a waiting Stark seething.

  Sitting in the mobile unit, Stark couldn’t see the band as they recorded. “So we bent over backwards to play jokes on him,” said Westerberg. “That record was more attitude than music, I think.”

  At one point while working on “Willpower,” Westerberg was arguing over the talkback mic with Stark, saying his vocals should be buried in reverb. Not wanting to mar the actual recording, Stark rejected the idea out of hand—he told him they could add the effect during mixing—pissing Westerberg off.

  After the exchange, Westerberg motioned to the others to switch instruments: Paul went to the drums, Bob got the bass, and Tommy and Chris the guitars. “What’s the next song?” Stark asked, rolling tape.

  “‘Hootenanny’ in E,” said Westerberg as they improvised a title track, a blues shuffle that consisted of little more than him bleating the phrase, “It’s a hootenanny,” over and over again. “They just made that up on the spot, as a way to flip the bird to Stark,” said Jesperson, who was in the room. “It was so funny to watch it go down—they played with such determination. I remember Chris doing the lead—him thinking, Whoa, that wasn’t too bad, surprising himself.” The band was trying to stifle their laughter during the take. “Stark didn’t even know it was a joke,” said Westerberg. “He took it seriously.”

  When the track was over, Stark’s voice came through the talkback. “Uh, okay,” he said, sounding confused about what he’d just heard. “Do you want to try that again or come in and listen to it?”

  “Nope,” said Westerberg. “That’s it: first song, side one.”

  As the sessions wrapped up, everyone was optimistic that Hootenanny might represent some kind of breakthrough for the band. Even though they had assimilated a number of styles, Westerberg would remark that it was “the first album that sounds just like us.”

  Before the record went to mix, Westerberg stopped by Jesperson’s apartment to show him a new song he’d just finished. “It’s kind of like ‘The Ballad of the Replacements,’” he told Jesperson. Titled “Treatment Bound,” it was a woozy chronicle of the band’s misadventures “from Duluth to Madison.”

  We’re getting no place

  Fast as we can

  Get a nose full

  From our so-called friends

  We’re getting nowhere quick as we know how

  We whirl from town to town

  Treatment bound

  Westerberg’s original idea was to play the song for the band in the Stinsons’ basement and have Jesperson record the performance and their reactions. It was an interesting idea—high concept in a way—but it didn’t work out sonically.

  Instead, the whole band took a stab at cutting it as a country ramble. The live-in-the-basement version—replete with flubbed chords and rolling beer bottle sounds—would fittingly fall apart at the end, as Westerberg’s lyrics seemed to ask the question on all their minds: “We’re gettin’ nowhere, what will we do now?”

  CHAPTER 14

  By early 1983, it was time to take on the coasts. There was one obvious issue, however: Tommy was still a sophomore at West High School. The band’s first few years, being managed around his schedule, had been limited to weekend regional runs and weeknight shows in the Twin Cities. “There was times I would come to school pretty beat up,” said Tommy, “because I’d played the night before.”

  The ’Mats had firm offers to play New York and Boston, with a longer spring tour of the East Coast shaping up. Jesperson and the band gathered for a meeting at the Stinson house. Peter expected a broad discussion about accommodating Tommy’s school obligations.

  Instead, he recalled, “Paul looked Tommy square in the eye and said, ‘Quit school or we get a new bass player,’” recalled Jesperson. “It was blunt and funny, in a Westerbergian sort of way. Tommy was like, ‘Whoa—okay, I guess I’m quitting school.’ He was startled and sort of laughed about it. I remember being surprised that Paul was so direct about it.”

  Westerberg vociferously denied Jesperson’s version of events. “I think that’s bullshit. I don’t believe that I would have told a ninth-grader [sic] he’s got to quit school,”
said Westerberg. “If he got a little nudge from somebody, I would bet it was more from Bob.”

  But Tommy didn’t need to be pushed by anyone else. “I wasn’t good at school anyway,” he said. “There was no point in it anymore. I presented it to my mom, and that was the end of it. She figured, ‘Well, he hasn’t been going to jail, he’s making a little money—I’ll sign off.’ She made my brother try and look out for me—which didn’t really happen all that much. Peter was the one that had to look out for me.”

  Frank Riley was a rare breed: an agent who specialized in the unglamorous world of club and college booking. “Frank was one of the few agents who would actually go to the venues he booked,” said First Avenue’s Steve McClellan. “You seldom had the big mainstream agents show up at the clubs they placed their shows. The clubs were what big agents gave their trainees.”

  After working with the dB’s agent-manager Bob Singerman, Riley launched his own New York–based independent company, Venture Bookings Ltd. He would help nurture the American indie rock circuit—a loose network of nightclubs, punk halls, and college campus gigs—that coalesced in the early eighties. Venture’s roster included the Dream Syndicate, the Feelies, Green on Red, and Violent Femmes, among others.