by Bob Mehr
If anyone in the underground could challenge the Replacements as the American rock underground’s most buzzed-about band in 1983, it was Athens, Georgia, combo R.E.M.—enigmatic singer and lyricist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills, and drummer Bill Berry.
Like the ’Mats, the members of R.E.M. had met in 1979 and played their earliest shows in 1980. Their first single, the cryptic call to arms “Radio Free Europe,” was released by the tiny indie Hib-Tone in the summer of 1981. R.E.M. first played Minneapolis on a frigid Thanksgiving night that year, appearing at First Avenue for a small but enthusiastic crowd.
During the visit, Buck, the group’s resident record hound, got a copy of Sorry Ma. “About four months later, I finally listened to it and thought it was great,” said Buck. “Every town had one or two bands like us. None of us were really punk rockers, but we were inspired by punk to do something and ended up using the language of the music we grew up with.”
When Peter Jesperson met Buck at the Entry, a close friendship began, and he would champion the band to his Oar Folk customers. The band would return several times over the next couple of years; the Replacements opened R.E.M.’s outdoor show at St. Paul’s Navy Island in May 1983.
In R.E.M., said Buck, “we all listened to the same music, ate the same food, and did the same things. But the Replacements were four completely different characters. From Paul being really taciturn to Tommy really acting out, Chris being very genial to Bob being . . . well, Bob. It was like, ‘What are these guys doing in a band together?’”
Quickly, R.E.M. zoomed past the Replacements professionally. They’d become proud flag-bearers for the burgeoning Amerindie movement, turning down major label RCA and signing with Miles Copeland’s indie IRS Records. An unusually democratic band, R.E.M. made a point of sharing songwriting credits and royalties equally.
R.E.M. went out of its way to praise the Replacements. Buck would note, in an essay for Rock magazine, that the ’Mats had “all the energy and excitement of rock ’n’ roll and none of the self-consciousness that has crept in over the last decade.” In an issue of Matter, Berry called Hootenanny “one of the greatest records of all time.”
Though Westerberg liked R.E.M. personally and guardedly admired their music, there was a certain friction between the two bands, particularly their front men. “Stipe was definitely more of an intellectual than myself, so I’d play the guttersnipe to his more cultured hoo-ha,” Westerberg said.
In July, the Replacements opened an R.E.M. tour through the Midwest and East Coast. Though they weren’t booed outright, it was clear that the ’Mats’ roughneck charms simply weren’t suited to the more genteel sensibilities of R.E.M. audiences. “The way Westerberg works, as soon as he knows he’s not well received, then he has to pull something,” said Jesperson. “The shows would get weird as soon as any sort of animosity or negativity was perceived.”
With the Replacements around, Mills, Berry, and especially Buck drank, partied, and raised more hell than usual. “Everyone was really drunk all the time,” Buck said. “All I remember is chairs being smashed and people wrestling. I have a feeling R.E.M was a little more in control than the Replacements. Just marginally.”
Sixteen-year-old Tommy was often frustrated with how the band’s drinking would affect their performances, particularly on the R.E.M. tour. “He wanted to move up and get going with it,” said Bill Sullivan. But his innocence slipped away after R.E.M. headlined Bogart’s in Cincinnati on July 7.
The ’Mats weren’t even supposed to be on the bill. After some fussing, the venue’s manager relented and allowed the Replacements on first. “But he said, ‘They’re not on our contract, we don’t have to pay them anything—we’ll just give them free beer instead,’” recalled Bogart’s publicist Brian Baker. “A legendarily horrible mistake.”
A predictably dreadful set ensued. “At some point fairly early on, Paul and Bob started pouring the beers into R.E.M.’s stage monitors,” said Baker. “Of course, R.E.M’s sound guy was furious. He was like, ‘I’m going to kill every fucking one of them.’”
Tommy had had enough. He ripped off his bass, threw it down on the stage, and stalked off angrily—ready to quit the Replacements there and then. Arguing with Jesperson in the club’s production office, he tried to get Anita Stinson to wire him money for a flight home. After a little while, Jesperson managed to calm him down.
Bogart’s would be Tommy’s last stand. “What ended up happening after that is I went to the other side: I started drinking,” Tommy said. “That’s where the turn happened.”
Alcohol served many functions in the Replacements. For Chris, drinking was a form of rock-and-roll socialization, a way to fit in. Bob’s consumption inched toward hardcore addiction. Westerberg largely used alcohol to self-medicate, to manage his moods—but also to work up the nerve to go onstage.
With booze, as with everything else, Westerberg’s whole mien emphasized a gang mentality: “We might look like fools, but at least we’ll all look like fools together,” he would say. While it wasn’t the same clear-cut choice as quitting school, Tommy was essentially faced with a decision: either leave the band or join the party.
It didn’t happen overnight, but within a few weeks of the Bogart’s incident, certainly within a few months, Tommy Stinson was chugging vodka like a pro. “He was an Absolut guy,” said Jesperson. “He had class the moment he started drinking; he wasn’t going for any low-shelf stuff.”
“For a while there I was able to corral them a bit, because I was young and full of it and ready to conquer the earth and had to remind them of that,” said Tommy. “But once I started drinking, there was no conquering of the earth. There was no conquering of the block. Just the curbside.”
That summer, R.E.M. had a busy schedule—including a handful of stadium shows opening for the Police—and were between tour managers. After a gig in Madison, Buck asked Jesperson if he’d be willing to come out with them for a couple of months.
Jesperson figured the opportunity would only benefit the Replacements. “I thought it would be great for me to work with another band that was further along, to see a different side of the business,” he said. He asked the ’Mats, Westerberg in particular, for their blessing. “Everybody was saying, ‘Hey, this is good, you’ll meet more people and learn stuff,’” said Jesperson. “The Replacements were supportive—at least that’s what I thought the general attitude was.”
“Peter didn’t take that job just to learn the business,” said Jesperson’s friend Casey Macpherson. “R.E.M. was a big thing at the time, and as he was wont to do, he worshiped them, much as he did in the Replacements, but in a different way.” Jesperson quit Oar Folk after ten years to devote himself full-time to the music business.
Jesperson began the July tour with the Replacements. He would then switch to R.E.M.’s van when the two bands played the Paradise Theater in Boston. On the way out to the first gig, the ’Mats made a pit stop at a favorite roadside bar in Wisconsin. As they sat drinking, Jesperson made a joke.
A stone-faced Westerberg blindsided him. “Don’t you understand, Peter?” he said coldly. “You’re not one of us anymore.”
It quickly became clear that his decision to take the R.E.M. gig was not sitting so well with the Replacements. “It was like I was a traitor all of a sudden,” said Jesperson. “It was really weird. But, with all due respect to Paul, he could turn on you. I’d seen it happen to other people, and I thought I was immune to it.”
Jesperson’s decision would foster a lingering, unspoken resentment among the ’Mats toward R.E.M. “For him to just up and leave us for a prettier girl—it was never the same after that, really,” said Westerberg. Macpherson adds, “There was a certain part of Peter that didn’t realize the strength of that emotional dependency those guys had on him.”
With Jesperson’s departure, roadies Tom Carlson and Bill Sullivan were in charge of the Replacements’ fortunes that summer. “God love Bill and Huck, but I mean, th
at might’ve damaged our career a little bit too,” said Westerberg. “There was nobody responsible at all walking into these clubs or handling things.” Tommy called this configuration “a party on wheels”: “Sometimes we’d pull up drunk for sound check. I think we made it to most of the gigs anyway.”
Once, they didn’t even do that—at least Tommy didn’t. In New York City, he’d gone off with some young friends and spent the night at a YMCA. The next morning he dialed the place where the rest of the band was staying to tell them to come pick him up. “I call and there’s no answer,” said Stinson. “Apparently, someone had kicked the phone cord out of the wall. I finally call my mom, pissed off: ‘You gotta find somebody to help me out. I don’t know where they went.’”
“We waited for him,” said Westerberg. “We couldn’t find him.”
“Then they got tired of waiting, so they ditched me and went to Boston for the next gig,” said Tommy. “Thanks, dudes.”
Tommy finally got a hold of Lilli Dennison in Boston. “He’d been calling my house all day. There was, like, a hundred messages,” said Dennison. “‘Hey, it’s Tommy, I used to be in the Replacements—but not anymore!’” The band played the Rat with Del Fuegos bassist Tom Lloyd filling in, before doubling back to New York City.
Meanwhile, Tommy was stranded, broke, and hungry in Manhattan. He spent the day wandering around Central Park, feeling very much like a vulnerable child.
“I ended up hanging out with this painter guy who had his wares up. I could tell he was gay. He wasn’t hitting on me so much, just being real friendly,” recalled Stinson. “He offered to buy me a hot dog. It got to be kind of weird, though, like he might’ve thought I was making up my part of the story.”
Later Tommy met a pretty teenage girl in the park. When he told her his story, she admonished him: “You need to go home to Minneapolis. You need to go back to school.” Stinson dismissed her: “It’s all over for me.”
Beyond his role as Tommy’s guardian, Jesperson’s diplomatic skills were sorely missed during the tour—particularly when the band debuted at Washington, DC’s 9:30 Club. The headliners, New Orleans pop-punks the Red Rockers, had canceled at the last minute. The club slashed the admission to a buck for the Replacements. Some forty people milled about the club as the band played Bachman-Turner Overdrive covers at shattering volume.
“They were drunk and fucking around, being contemptuous of the Red Rockers fans who’d stuck around to see them,” said DC rocker Tommy Keene, who was being courted by Twin/Tone at the time and who attended the show. “The club owner was this artsy-fartsy woman who didn’t like rock-and-roll. She was getting really annoyed as they basically drove out most of the audience.”
Through Carlson, the owner demanded that the ’Mats get offstage. “Gotta quit—club owner is pissed off as shit,” said Westerberg into the mic, repeating what he’d been told verbatim. They kept playing until the PA was cut off on them midsong. “The shenanigans were constant when Peter was gone,” said Tommy.
Meanwhile, Jesperson enjoyed the relative calm of working with R.E.M. “There was a great camaraderie, and people were helpful to one another,” said Jesperson. Since he spent most nights after the shows doing paperwork and accounting, however, he had to admit that it wasn’t nearly as fun as being out with the ’Mats. “Honestly, I was never going to be the person shouting at the guy in the box office about ticket counts,” said Jesperson. “And that’s kinda what they needed.” Later, Buck’s girlfriend told Jesperson that he was simply “too nice a guy” for the job.
CHAPTER 16
The Replacements’ fourth album brought a rapprochement between Westerberg and Jesperson. “We might’ve been closer in that period than we were before or after,” said Jesperson. “He knew he was entering some important phase of his writing. We had a big connection on that stuff. We were nose-to-nose talking about that record, really bonding.”
“I was writing a lot of the songs on acoustic and taking them to the band and playing them electrically,” Westerberg said. “In the back of my mind, for that album, I was thinking Beggars Banquet.”
The band reunited with engineer Steve Fjelstad at Blackberry Way; the Dinkytown studio had boosted its operation since the Replacements last recorded there, from sixteen to twenty-four tracks. Sessions began on August 27, just as Jesperson wrapped up the final R.E.M. date.
He flew back to Minneapolis with a couple of Peter Buck’s guitars. Buck himself followed a day later and was a presence for the first week of recording. “Me being there was really just kind of an excuse to run around at the clubs at night,” Buck recalled.
Buck figured prominently on the album’s first and most famous song, “I Will Dare.” A chiming pop number, Westerberg had written it that February, just as Hootenanny was being mastered. “I got a call from Paul saying, ‘I’ve just finished the best song I’ve ever written. We need to record it now,’” recalled Jesperson. “But the record was already done, so we couldn’t do it.”
Not long after, during a ’Mats show at Goofy’s Upper Deck, Jesperson heard the song for the first time. “It was so instantly catchy,” he said. “The joke was, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be rich! He’s written the song.’”
Like “Kids Don’t Follow,” “I Will Dare” was another song influenced by the anthemism of U2. “That might have been another answer to ‘I Will Follow,’” said Westerberg. “Part of it has to do with the band: we’ll dare to flop, we’ll dare to do anything. ‘I Will Dare’ was a good slogan for a Replacements single. On the other hand, it was a kind of love song: ‘Ditch the creep and I’ll meet you later. I don’t care, I will dare.’”
The song’s element of illicit romance was rooted in Westerberg’s reality. “I think Paul had some dalliances with girls that he probably shouldn’t have at that time,” noted one of the band’s confidantes.
Paul, Tommy, and Chris laid the rhythm track as a trio, but there were tuning problems. “We tend to thrash around in the studio like we do onstage, and things go haywire,” noted Westerberg. After getting the basic take down, Westerberg borrowed Buck’s twelve-string electric Rickenbacker to add to the song’s jangle, while the bouncy riff that threaded the tune was Bob Stinson’s invention.
In the control room, Buck watched in amazement as Bob played through the tracks. “Bob knew all the songs, but he referred to them as ‘that one song,’ or ‘that other song,’ or ‘that other fucking song.’ He didn’t know the titles of anything. No matter how many times they played the song, it was a brand-new song for Bob.”
Bob’s frustrated attempts at a solo led to Buck’s famous cameo on “I Will Dare.” “I was just sitting there, and Bob said something like, ‘I can’t play a solo on this fucking thing.’ Those weren’t his chords,” recalled Buck. “And Paul goes, ‘Hey, Peter, you do it.’” Buck delivered a spindly sixties folk-rock figure, à la the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Zal Yanovsky. “That’s exactly who I was thinking of when I did it,” said Buck. “It only took a minute.”
Buck and Westerberg hung out a few evenings, getting drunk and putting on pancake makeup and eye shadow and playing out their mutual Marc Bolan/Peter Perrett fantasies. They ended up invading the First Avenue ladies’ room, later nearly getting into a fight at White Castle with some Northeast Minneapolis toughs who objected to their “faggy” appearance.
For a while that autumn, Westerberg donned kohl makeup before he went onstage. Leaving his parents’ for a gig one night, he walked past his father all dolled up. “Who does he think he is, Big George?” asked Hal Westerberg, referring to Culture Club’s Boy George.
Westerberg’s flirtations with femininity would result in the album’s most delicate composition, the piano ballad “Androgynous.” “A girl said it to us,” said Westerberg. “I didn’t know what the word meant.” After looking it up, he wrote the song on his parents’ piano.
It was a rare Westerberg third-person narrative, about a gender-bending couple named Dick and Jane: “Now something meets boy / And
something meets girl / They both look the same, they’re overjoyed in this world.”
“Sixteen Blue” was inspired by Tommy Stinson. Westerberg had witnessed how he’d been forced to grow up way faster than most kids, yet still faced the typical adolescent issues and doubts: “Your age is the hardest age, everything drags and drags / You’re looking funny, you ain’t laughin’, are you?”
“Hearing it the first time they did it, at a sound check in Boston, I thought, Jesus, he’s written a song about Tommy,” said Jesperson. “Tommy was kind of the mascot of the band, and Paul had written about him in songs before. But this wasn’t just some goofy thing. This was serious and tender.”
It was also a song addressed to Paul’s younger self. “Drive yourself right up the wall / No one hears and no one calls.” The ennui and loneliness of Westerberg’s teenage years were still vivid in his mind.
That winter, between sessions, Paul fell for a girl in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and would court her long-distance. Sometimes he’d call to sweet-talk her and get her answering machine instead. “I’m not a modern person,” said Westerberg. “Technology irritates me.” He transformed that frustration into “Answering Machine”: “How do you say I miss you / To an answering machine?”
Cut solo with himself on guitar and percussion, Westerberg considered it among his best songs: “There was real passion, and there was a real person on the other end, and that made it all come to life.” At the song’s conclusion, amid a wall of noise and effects, he would shout out Michigan’s 313 area code; he also threw out a couple others, including New York City’s 212, to cover his bases with a few other girls, just in case.
“Unsatisfied” may have been inspired by Westerberg’s developing interest in palmistry. Every palm reader he saw told him that the lines of his hand meant he was doomed to be unhappy forever. The song—keening folk-rock in the style of Rod Stewart’s early solo work—was a testament to the band’s seat-of-the-pants approach. Westerberg barely had any lyrics, save for the “I’m so unsatisfied” hook, and improvised as he sang.
