by Bob Mehr
In the spring of 1983, Riley cold-called Jesperson at Oar Folk and told him he’d be willing to represent the Replacements nationally, sight unseen. “Suddenly we had an agent,” said Jesperson. “We were headlining or being put into good packages. We felt empowered by it.”
“I used every bit of my resources, smarts, and what little experience I had at the time on their behalf,” Riley said. It was a thankless job—one that grew more thankless over time.
Before heading east, the Replacements added a key member to their ragtag road crew. A dark-haired, puckish twenty-four-year-old, Bill Sullivan had been raised in the first-tier Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. “My dad was a very strict Catholic,” Sullivan said. “The first time he let me out of the house to a record store by myself I came home with [Alice Cooper’s] Love It to Death. For a Catholic guy who thought I was going to be a priest, he was not very happy.”
Sullivan, who worked night security at the Walker Art Center and was a childhood friend and roommate of Replacements roadie Tom Carlson, had caught the band early on at the Longhorn. After a while, Sullivan and the band began socializing at the bar. “We’d get together at the CC Club and try and scam free drinks off the waitresses.” He and Westerberg in particular were foils; both had a mordant wit as well as a penchant for wild behavior after a few libations. (Westerberg would dub Sullivan Father O’Ruckus.)
Sullivan went on the Replacements’ “Eastern Whirl” tour unpaid. “After the first week they felt bad and started paying me [a few bucks] a day.” Sullivan would become the band’s dutiful court jester and caretaker. “My main job turned out to be stage security,” he said. “I became the barrier between the band and an irate audience.”
“There were times where he would come back from going out to eat and he’d bring me back a hamburger, ’cause he knew I hadn’t eaten in two days,” said Westerberg. “Bill always knew when we needed something, as opposed to just wanted something.”
After a short, solid set opening for the Circle Jerks in Milwaukee on April 8, the band played Detroit’s City Club the following night—challenging the soundman and the few fans there with their volume, something they’d do the entire tour. “Back then they didn’t even have good equipment, but they would pin everything to the wall,” said Sullivan.
After the first song at City Club, Jesperson went to the stage and whispered to Westerberg about adjusting the volume. “He had a glass of scotch on the floor by his mic stand, and he kicked it so it splattered in my face,” Jesperson said. “Then he turned his amp up and went into the next song.” The soundman stormed off in anger; a wet, furious Jesperson dutifully tried to man the board. “They totally cleared the room. When they were done, I said, ‘Fuck this.’” Jesperson walked to a nearby bar and ordered a double.
Offstage, but especially on, Paul could be rash and indifferent to people’s feelings. Part of it was a rebellious front-man act—but the cloak of the band also gave him free rein to indulge his more callous impulses.
The next morning the band awoke to find someone had siphoned all the gas out of their van. Despite the rough start to the trip, they glimpsed New York City just before dawn, checking into a cheap motel in Jersey City. Jesperson registered four and snuck in seven.
Enticed by their first vision of the Big Apple, Peter, Tommy, and Bob decided to take a PATH train into the city. As the others explored, Westerberg stayed back at the motel. Rather than try to fit into New York, he decided, the Replacements were going to stick out.
“We accentuated the fact that we were bohunks. We knew that we didn’t fit in, and we went to the extreme to get in their face. Like, ‘Hey, wheyre’s the Eym-pire Stay-ate Billdin’?’ We were determined to be as Midwestern as possible.”
New York Rocker was founded in 1976 by Alan Betrock and later purchased by former Oar Folkjokeopus employee Andy Schwartz. It was one of the first national outlets to cover the Replacements: the February 1982 issue ran a glowing review of Sorry Ma.
Later, managing editor Michael Hill received a spec feature story about the band by Minneapolis writer Tony Lonetree. “It really intrigued me,” said Hill of the piece. “It made them sound like backwoods bluesmen some anthropologist had stumbled across on a field trip.” But that fall the Rocker would fold before the story could run.
Shortly after Hill lost his job, he and onetime Rocker contributor Ira Kaplan (who later founded Yo La Tengo) began booking a weekly showcase at Greenwich Village’s Folk City called “Music for Dozens”—three bands for three bucks, every Wednesday. It would help launch a number of emerging underground acts: the Minutemen, Violent Femmes, Sonic Youth.
The band Hill was most eager to bring to Folk City was the Replacements. They would make their New York debut on April 13, headlining a bill with Boston’s Del Fuegos (also playing New York City for the first time) and locals the Del-Lords—“Whom everyone was afraid of, ’cause they thought they looked like bikers,” recalled Hill.
With multiple New York–area appearances that week, Westerberg and Carlson crashed at a friend’s apartment in the city, while Jesperson and the Stinsons took over the Hoboken, New Jersey, flat Kaplan shared with his girlfriend, Georgia Hubley. “I can recall Bob being sacked out in a sleeping bag in the middle of the afternoon—every afternoon—and we’d step over him,” said Hill. “Tommy left quite an impression with his hairspray in the bathroom.”
The Replacements kicked off the Folk City show with a “Hayday” that practically stripped the paint from the walls. The woman running sound at the club told Jesperson he needed to get the band to turn it down. “That’s not in my job description,” he said, still shaken after Detroit. She bolted, and Jesperson once again tried to salvage things at the board. The band blasted through nearly thirty songs off their first two albums and the still-unreleased Hootenanny. The covers-heavy closing section yielded inspired versions of tunes by the Grass Roots, the Clash, and Lloyd Price. They ended with a rumbling take on Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” that blew out the club’s feeble PA. “The owners of Folk City were not happy,” recalled Hill.
While Jesperson remembered the show as a bit of a nonstarter due to the sound issues, others were bowled over. Glenn Morrow, the former New York Rocker editor and front man for Hoboken post-punks the Individuals, pressed against the stage, utterly transfixed. “Normally you can dismiss someone: ‘Ah, they’re a bar band,’ or, ‘It’s generic punk,’ or, ‘They’re art damaged.’ But the Replacements were this other life force beyond easy pigeonholing,” said Morrow.
For jaded Manhattan, these Midwesterners were exotic. “The weirdest thing was that they weren’t really on anybody’s radar,” said Morrow. “It was a total Jon Landau–Springsteen moment for me: ‘This is the future of rock-and-roll.’”
The band’s second gig in town took place a few nights later at the chic Danceteria on Twenty-First Street. “It was a velvet rope–type club,” said Jesperson. “They had multiple floors with dance rooms everywhere. It was an eye-opening place. I remember walking through and seeing people having sex in the stairways, doing cocaine out in the open. We were like ‘Wow, really?’”
Milwaukee folk-punks the Violent Femmes opened the show, and the Replacements didn’t take the stage until well after 2:00 AM. “It was so late by the time they got on,” said Jesperson, “that the band had gotten drunk and already sobered up. So they played really well.”
The following night, the Replacements were paired with hometown rivals/friends Hüsker Dü at punk club the Great Gildersleeves. It was a significant enough event that both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minnesota Daily dispatched stringers to cover the show. “There was a little competitiveness there between the bands,” said Daily writer Mike Hoeger. “Kind of like, ‘Who can rock the best tonight?’”
Musically speaking, the evening was a draw—though, as Hoeger’s piece noted, the contrasts between the Replacements and Hüsker Dü remained as stark as ever:
“The Hüskers drink coffee before their gigs, a
lways stick to their song list (they have little choice, their set is like an avalanche), and are always emotionally and physically fatigued after a show,” he wrote.
The Replacements . . . play don’t-stand-in-my-way rock ’n’ roll. Westerberg sings and Westerberg thinks and the other three disagree with him. Jesperson makes out their song list, which they never follow. Their set is a series of sprints, of starts and stops. Once in a full moon, they maintain a sprint just for kicks, or so it seems, and on that night there is no better band in America. And, they drink beer before their gigs.
Also attending was a group of writers from Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. The Voice’s music chief, Robert Christgau—who’d written favorably about the Replacements’ first two albums—had already seen them play at First Avenue the year before. He seemed less impressed with their Gildersleeves set, but intrigued by Twin/Tone. “How does Jesperson do it, anyway?” Christgau asked Hoeger. “Where does he get the money? Do any of his bands make a living?”
In New York, Jesperson had been sent a test pressing of Hootenanny to approve for manufacturing. During the Gildersleeves show, Westerberg and Jesperson were up in the club’s booth, talking to deejay Jack Rabid, who edited The Big Takeover ’zine. Paul wondered if he wanted to play a cut off of the LP advance. “How about you play the first song,” Westerberg said to Rabid, grinning. “You can never go wrong with that, right?” Jesperson winced.
Rabid faded from an Effigies track into “Hootenanny in E.” The hardcore crowd below started booing, then hurling bottles.
The Replacements bounced between hit-and-miss gigs in Philadelphia, Albany, Bridgeport, and Hoboken. In Boston, however, they would be passionately embraced from the first by a core of rabid fans.
The Rathskeller, or Rat, was a dingy 300-capacity club in Kenmore Square near Boston University. Julie Farman became the booker after putting together a successful show with the Dream Syndicate. “The owner, Jimmy Harold, was like, ‘You know what you’re doing,’” said Farman, one of many locals who became close friends with the ’Mats.
Another was Lilli Dennison, who began as a waitress at the club in 1979 and went on to manage the Del Fuegos, led by Concord, New Hampshire, brothers Dan and Warren Zanes. Like Anita Stinson, the Zaneses’ mother was young, single, and working-class. There wasn’t much money around, but she imbued her sons with a sense of possibility and achievement. The Zanes boys won scholarships to the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, the prep school of various Kennedys and Bushes, before rock lured them away. With drummer Brent “Woody” Giessmann and bassist Tom Lloyd, the Del Fuegos signed to LA’s Slash Records, the start of a tricky journey through the music business that mirrored the Replacements’ precarious path. (The two groups would ultimately come to share roadies, managers, a booking agent, and a record company.)
“I had gotten the Sorry Ma record, and it incorporated everything I loved,” said Dennison. “Then we met the band, and they were all so witty and sarcastic. The Del Fuegos and Replacements sort of fell in love.” So did the Rat’s audience. “I remember me and Doug Simmons, who was music editor at the Boston Phoenix, banging on the heating unit next to the stage in excitement,” said Dennison. “Everyone was blown away.”
The Replacements would make Boston a second home, often flopping there for days at a time between East Coast gigs. “All across town there was girls and drugs and drinking,” said Dennison. “It was full tilt.”
“They got lost in a few strange bedrooms that I also got lost in,” said Warren Zanes. “Sometimes it’d be like, ‘Whose shit is that on the nightstand? Oh, the Replacements are in town.’” At one point Farman had to kick Tommy out of her place because, she said, “he was fifteen or sixteen, and I couldn’t deal with him bringing all these girls in every night.”
Julie Panebianco, who wrote music features for the Phoenix, hit it off immediately with Westerberg, remaining one of his closest confidantes. “The Replacements had all the stuff that was cool about rock music: the excitement and glamour. But you—the audience—were part of the show too,” said Panebianco. “That was the twist.”
The tour wrapped up the next night at Worcester’s Xit Club. “There was like eight people there, and they fucked around the whole night,” said Farman. “Didn’t play a single Replacements song; played Glen Campbell covers. But it was every bit as good as the night before.”
The release of Hootenanny in late April 1983 was the Replacements’ career pivot. Its sprawling, messy scope fundamentally shifted both public perception of the band and the band’s own sense of itself. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s critic Jon Bream called it the band’s “version of the Clash’s Sandinista!—an unexpected exploration in eclecticism.” Playboy hailed it as “wailing Midwestern garage punk meets humorous thirties folk,” concluding, perversely, that it was “so terrible, it’s great.” The Village Voice’s Christgau approved: “This young band has a loose, freewheeling craziness that remains miraculously unaffected after three records. They’ll try anything.”
CHAPTER 15
The path to the Replacements’ West Coast audience came partly from the high-profile patronage of Los Angeles band X. Formed in 1977 by singer-songwriters Exene Cervenka and John Doe, grinning guitarist Billy Zoom, and drummer D. J. Bonebrake, X was a poetically inclined outfit with a rootsy streak who’d made a successful jump to major label Elektra after two indie releases on Slash.
The two bands met up in Madison, Wisconsin, where the Replacements opened for X at Merlyn’s. “At the end of the night we gave them a case of beer and they were forever our friends,” recalled Doe, laughing. X offered the Replacements the opening spot on a two-week Midwest tour. “They were good, and it wasn’t the same thing as us,” said Doe. “We felt we could give them some exposure.”
Already, Westerberg was writing and performing the evolutionary material that would make up their fourth album—songs like “I Will Dare” and “Sixteen Blue.” “It was obviously the beginning of an arc,” said Doe. “They felt like they could do something significant.” Cervenka would take in the Replacements’ sets from the front, scolding unmoving crowd members and dragging people to the foot of the stage to watch.
X also laid the groundwork for the Replacements’ first West Coast tour, twelve dates starting in late November ’83. Another influential LA fan was Chris Morris, the music critic for the alt-weekly Los Angeles Reader, who’d first heard them during a house party at Doe and Cervenka’s place. “I became a typical Replacements fan in that it was a love affair,” said Morris. “You fell madly in love with them, as people and as musicians.”
Morris, who would become a critic at Billboard a few years later, was one of the writers who forged a lasting connection with the band. “In that period I was getting fucked up a lot,” he said, “and those guys liked getting fucked up too.”
Like a lot of Southern Californians, Morris bemoaned the way punk had gone hardcore by 1983. “All the kids from Orange County and the South Bay invaded the town and fucked shit up and made it very difficult to go to a punk rock show with any comfort,” said Morris. “The Replacements were like a tonic when they first appeared because they were Midwestern guys. The axes were ground in their songs.”
Hootenanny made it clear that the Replacements weren’t predictable punks. “Maybe it’s the rock critic’s disease of always wanting to be surprised,” Morris said. “But with the Replacements, you weren’t ever sure if a thick steak or a hand grenade was going to appear on your plate. That was intensely exciting.”
“In their LA debut at the [Club] Lingerie on Saturday the group drew a weirdly eclectic audience that seemed unsure what to make of this band of outsiders,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Kristine McKenna. Mooning over Westerberg in print (“A rail-thin wraith with cheekbones Bowie would kill for”), McKenna was amused by the strange makeup of the band: “Lead guitarist Bob Stinson was performing in his underwear,” while “drummer Chris Mars looked as though he should be enrolled at Yale.” High sc
hool dropout Mars turned up for the next gig in a hand-lettered T-shirt: YAIL UNIVERSITY.
Months of national touring had only sharpened the Replacements’ instincts. When they hit the stage, they’d make immediate and critical adjustments to whatever environment they were in, whatever kind of audience they found themselves playing to. “Their attitude in a live situation was very fine-tuned,” said Morris. “They’d pick up on hostility, they’d pick up on boredom, and they’d serve shit back to people. I never saw a band that was so locked in to what was right in front of them.”
After celebrating Thanksgiving Day at John and Exene’s house, the Replacements highlighted their LA run with a show at Hollywood’s Cathay De Grade, a former Chinese restaurant with an upstairs bar and a dingy subterranean performance room whose ceiling tiles were stained and falling out. The ’Mats fronted a bill headlined by the venue’s house band, Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs, and the Fullerton punk outfit Social Distortion.
“Social Distortion brought in the typical hardcore audience,” said Morris. “All these dressed up OC punk shit-heads. This was anathema to the Replacements. These were people they felt didn’t walk it like they talked it.” Tommy Stinson walked onstage, took one look at the crew of cartoonish Mohawks jostling with each other, and droned sarcastically into the mic: “Wow . . . punk rockers.”
Westerberg decided to “pull a hootenanny.” Starting off with the bluesy shuffle of “White and Lazy,” the band proceeded to work their way through every ballad and country tune in their repertoire. By the time Westerberg went into full hillbilly mode—delivering a cornball version of Hank Williams’s “Hey, Good Lookin’”—the punk contingent at the foot of the stage was nearly apoplectic. Tommy Stinson admiringly recalled Westerberg doubling down with the audience: “I couldn’t have been more proud.”
