by Bob Mehr
Bob Stinson hadn’t even heard the song before cutting it. “We ran through it one time. Then [Bob] came in and played along for about half of it. Steve rolled the tape, and that was it,” said Westerberg. “That one was really nice because there was no time to think. He played real well on that—reserved, but with emotion.”
Bob disagreed: “If we’d put another five minutes’ worth of time into it, it would have sounded fifty times better,” he complained.
Part of the song’s charm was its off-the-cuff quality, coupled with the intensity of Westerberg’s vocal delivery. Still, to its author, “Unsatisfied” is “one of the most overrated, half-assed, half-baked songs. It doesn’t have nothing but one line.” Perhaps it cut too close to the bone. “It’s about as melancholy as we want to get,” he said, “and [still] be alive.”
This album would offer significantly less opportunity than usual for Bob Stinson to go wild. “The material was changing,” said Jesperson. “It was the beginning of the landscape changing and Bob not wanting to change with it to some degree.” Though he contributed key parts to “Sixteen Blue” and “Unsatisfied,” Bob wasn’t involved on “Androgynous” or “Answering Machine.”
In the past, Westerberg’s solo songs had been anomalies, but fans’ and critics’ favorable reaction to “Within Your Reach” encouraged him to continue in this vein of bruised romanticism that would become his signature. “By then, he felt like, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going to be worried anymore. If Bob doesn’t like these songs, it’s his problem, not mine,’” said Jesperson.
They were buoyed by group-written rockers, composed in rehearsal or on the studio floor, that showcased Bob’s animated fretwork and the band’s irreverent, often insider humor.
“We’re Comin’ Out” was a throwback to the fast and furious songs of Stink. Originally titled “Warning Sound,” it was another potent bit of self-mythologizing as they portrayed themselves as a gang of rock-and-roll marauders. Its hard-brake tempo change, false ending, and rapid-fire finale were conceived spontaneously in the studio.
“We were supposed to stop, and I guess somebody didn’t stop, so we said, ‘Take it down to hell after the lead’—we weren’t sure what to do,” said Westerberg. “You can hear me yell, ‘C!’ and everybody ended back on the C chord. It was a lucky guess. Then Chris started slowing it down. He was thinking, Aw, fuck this, let’s end it. Then we picked it back up. Later we overdubbed the piano and finger snaps.”
The snotty-riffed “Favorite Thing” had already been road-tested; in the studio, Bob gave it a memorable, drawled-out guitar opening. “Bob started on the wrong note so he bent it [up] to make it fit,” recalled Westerberg.
They’d also been messing with a chanted chorus called “Rico Gets a Haircut,” after the band’s nickname for Mars. Eventually, Westerberg found the opening sample—a singsongy, spoken “Tommy gets his tonsils out!”—on his little sister’s children’s record. From there he formulated a narrative about a ne’er-do-well surgeon who tears out kids’ swollen glands between rounds of golf.
“Gary’s Got a Boner” was a funny throwaway founded on an odd Westerberg peeve. “He’d say, ‘Have you ever known anyone named Gary who was smart?’” said Jesperson. “For a while all dumb people were ‘Garys.’” They cadged the song’s riff from Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever,” earning the Motor City Madman a tongue-in-cheek cowriting credit. Accordingly, the track’s appeal rested on Bob Stinson’s searing, uninhibited guitar work.
The mostly instrumental “Seen Your Video” had once been called “Adult”: “You look like an adult / Walk like an adult / Who taught you that?” But Westerberg hadn’t come up with verses, so the song was recast as a defiant rejoinder to the growing behemoth of MTV (“Seen your video / It’s phony rock-and-roll”).
Westerberg had become outspoken in his disdain for the music videos the channel played. “I think it takes the danger out of rock and makes it false and silly,” he said, relieved that the Replacements’ own embarrassing clip from 1980 had never been completed. “I don’t want our band to have anything to do with it.” It was a stance he and the band maintained, with some difficulty, for years to come.
The ’Mats also cut some early ’70s covers: the Grass Roots’ “Temptation Eyes,” T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy,” the DeFranco Family’s “Heartbeat (It’s a Lovebeat),” and Kiss’s slow-burn rocker “Black Diamond.” “The hip song to put on the record would be T. Rex—the curveball would be Kiss,” said Jesperson. “We decided it was cooler to put on the ‘uncool’ song.”
“Black Diamond” was Kiss’s ham-handed story-song about a tough prostitute on the prowl. “That was, in 1974, dangerous, exciting rock-and-roll for us,” said Westerberg. “I was ashamed to admit it at that time, but now I’m smart enough to know that that stupid music was the thing that got me going.”
Between tours, work on the album carried into January and February. Westerberg tacked a twelve-string acoustic intro and keening lap slide onto “Unsatisfied” and added a memorable mandolin part to “I Will Dare”; Mars overdubbed maracas and tambourine to several tracks, and Tommy added background vocals, notably on “Black Diamond.” While Westerberg’s plonky piano playing had sufficed for a couple of tracks, the Suburbs’ Chan Poling gave a more refined quality to “Sixteen Blue.” The band even built sand blocks, from chunks of wood found in Blackberry Way’s basement, to add to the shuffling mood of “Androgynous.”
Mixing dragged through March. “It’s tough trying to make four out-of-tune guitars sound good,” noted Westerberg. He, Jesperson, and Fjelstad took production credit; it was easily the best-sounding record they’d made, and it mixed material that captured the ’Mats’ smart and stupid sensibilities in one perfect package. “That was the most complete record we made,” said Westerberg.
The band marked the album’s completion that spring at the Coffman Memorial Union on the University of Minnesota campus—a benefit for a relative of a student who was getting a heart transplant. But the heart proved to be the wrong size. The gig was put on hold until another suitable organ could be found.
A few weeks later, the ’Mats finally had their moment. “It was really exciting that they were playing a big room full of kids at the university,” said Jesperson. “It’s like, ‘Wow, we’re really making progress here.’ I just remember the band looking so cool . . . and Paul strapping on the guitar as he’s getting himself situated.”
Just before the ’Mats slammed into a Let It Be–heavy set that began with a fitting cover of “Heartbeat (It’s a Lovebeat),” Westerberg paused at the microphone: “Let’s just hope the fucker fits this time—’cause we ain’t coming back.”
That spring the band was en route to a gig in Madison when inspiration struck. “We were riding around . . . kicking around silly [album] names and we thought, ‘The next song that comes on the radio, we’ll name it after that,’” said Westerberg.
Just then, the sound of plaintive piano chords and Paul McCartney’s voice filtered through the speakers: “When I find myself in times of trouble . . . ”
It was fate: Let It Be would be the title of the Replacements new album. “We peed our pants [laughing], and Peter is at the wheel, silent as hell, thinking, ‘They’re not going to do this,’” said Westerberg. “We did it pretty much to piss him off and pretty much to show the world, in a Ramones kind of way, how dumb-smart we were. . . . Just to figure how many feathers we can ruffle.”
Twin/Tone had recently hired the local music writer—and sometimes caustic ’Mats critic—Dave Ayers to help around the office, and he was the one who would coordinate the cover. At first, the band wanted to keep the cheeky Beatles theme going. Photographer Greg Helgeson was dispatched to the Stinson house and made some pictures of the Replacements crossing Bryant Avenue, single file. “We went through an entire shoot of us walking across the street, à la the Abbey Road cover,” recalled Westerberg.
Another of the band’s key visual chroniclers, Daniel Corrigan, was responsibl
e for Let It Be’s iconic image. Corrigan had been shooting photos for the Minnesota Daily, including several previous Replacements sessions. The gig that brought him to the Stinsons’ house in the spring of 1984 paid $250. It was a second attempt, after a shoot in an elevator didn’t work out.
For some months, Corrigan had been exploring a series of conceptual setups he called “danger shoots”—taking bands and putting them in precarious positions. “Getting the Replacements anywhere was always an incredible hassle,” noted Corrigan, so instead of traveling somewhere for the shoot, he suggested they climb onto the second-story roof of the Stinson house.
The band made their way out of Lonnie Stinson’s bedroom window—where her softball trophies were prominently displayed—and onto the dirty white-tiled landing. For a while, they teetered on the edge, goofing off, beers in hand.
At one point, the Stinson family dog was brought out, and they posed fake-kicking it, with Mars jokingly grabbing the terrier as though he was going to hurl him off. Corrigan stood on a van parked on Bryant and snapped away; then he joined them upstairs.
Crouched in the far left corner of the roof, Corrigan took a couple of shots of the band sitting down together with a wider lens, then moved closer and fired off a dozen more. This would yield Let It Be’s final cover.
Given a cyan-toned treatment by sleeve designer Bruce Allen, the photo captured something ineffable about the band, the four of them clad in denim and sneakers: Westerberg aloof, looking away from the camera; Tommy sleepily cool, wiping his eyes; Bob craning his neck curiously; Mars peering guardedly into the lens.
Corrigan’s image—bootlegged, imitated, paid homage to for the next thirty years—would be subject to numerous theories and readings. One critic suggested the “roof on which they’re perched seems the refuge of a heart-on-his-sleeve would-be romantic who escapes out his bedroom window to peer up at the stars on lonely nights.”
“I don’t know what to say about all that,” Corrigan chuckled. “It’s just those guys on the roof and me trying to line up some angle so that it’s visually pleasing.”
Having quit school, Tommy Stinson was always the antsiest when the Replacements were idle. For a time he played drums with John Freeman’s punk band, Irenic Regime. He also had a steady girlfriend, Mary Beth Gordon; five years older than him, she’d moved to Minneapolis from Chicago after high school.
Mary Beth and Tommy enjoyed a scuffling rock-and-roll existence together, kicking around Uptown Minneapolis. “You’d ride around on the 4 bus, and then head back to your little punk-rock ghetto with sixty cents in your pocket and hopefully you could afford Taco Bell on the corner,” said Gordon.
Bob, the only Replacement who maintained a regular job—still cooking at Mama Rosa’s and the West Bank Valli Pizza and Pub—retreated into his own odd world at home. “He didn’t hang with the pack, he was a bit of a loner,” said Peter Jesperson. “Bob had his strange habits. Like, it’d be time to go sit on the bench by the railroad tracks. He would have these things that would call him away.”
That summer some of Chris Mars’s self-described “fantasy type” artwork was showcased at the Minneapolis Underground Art Fair. Another selection of drawings, “Hillbilly Soup,” was later displayed at the Norwest Bank. Over the next few years, Mars began to spend the downtime between tours—and even on tour—sketching and painting. “The calling to draw and to paint really started to creep up,” he said.
Westerberg’s distractions were mostly women. On the road, he had the proverbial “girl in every port.” His fleeting rock-and-roll relationships were both an entertainment and something more, particularly for a naturally sensitive character who clung to a certain masculine ideal in public. “I had relationships with guys, and the band was the ultimate one, but my relationships with women were more relaxed and easy,” he said.
In early 1984, Westerberg’s life underwent a serious change with the arrival of Lori Bizer. Nine months older than Westerberg, Bizer was born and mostly raised in suburban Detroit, the youngest of five children, and only daughter. Bizer’s mother worked as an administrative assistant and her father as a graphic artist in the advertising business.
As they had for Westerberg, mental health issues cast a shadow across Bizer’s childhood. “My dad was not an alcoholic, but he was bipolar,” said Bizer. “He would be hospitalized [off and on] for many years. There were shock treatments. His issues were hidden from us for a long time.”
Bizer had long been obsessed with rock-and-roll, with many touchstones handed down from her older brothers, two of whom would become professional musicians. “It was Hendrix and Zeppelin, and the stuff that was going on in Detroit at the Grande Ballroom and that you’d read about in Creem magazine,” said Bizer.
In high school, Bizer helped launch a little radio station that broadcast across campus: “I played Sparks records at lunchtime for students in the cafeteria.” After two years of community college, she enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1979. There she served as a deejay on student-run WCBN and got a job at Schoolkids Records, a pro-Replacements Midwest indie chain. “When Hootenanny came out, I really latched on there,” said Bizer.
She first saw them in late 1983 at the Heidelberg in Ann Arbor; the performance, she said, was “wild, magical, spirited.” Westerberg approached her while she was deejaying in the club after their set.
“He brought me a record to play—a Chairmen of the Board single that he’d bought that day,” she said. “He handed me the side with ‘Everything’s Tuesday’ on it. So I played that, but he’d intended me to play the [A-side] ‘Give Me Just a Little More Time.’ That’s how we got to talking.” Bizer was dating someone else then, but by the Replacements’ next trip to town in January 1984, she was single and things quickly heated up between her and Westerberg.
For Westerberg, the attraction was obvious: Bizer was a stunning, statuesque redhead, with a turned-up nose and down-to-earth grace. “Lori was the first girl he went with who was more his match . . . than just a girl to sleep with or hang around with,” said Jesperson.
Westerberg spent the spring writing and calling Bizer (hence “Answering Machine”). On a couple of occasions, he zipped up to Michigan to visit her between tours, using free tickets from his sister Julie, a Northwest Airlines flight attendant. In February, Bizer came to Minneapolis. Hal and Mary Lou Westerberg embraced her immediately. “They were like my second family,” she said. “Took me in like I was their daughter, they were so welcoming.”
It was an eye-opening trip. “It was my birthday, and it was odd because the Replacements were playing a show at Regina High,” Bizer said. “It felt weird spending my twenty-fifth birthday at a high school. I tried to keep up with Paul drinking that night. And I think I threw up in the bushes at his parents’ house. That’s the last time I ever had whiskey. The lesson learned was, do not try to keep up with Paul Westerberg . . . ever.”
By May, Bizer decided to move to Minneapolis. She got a job with CD manufacturer East Side Digital, then at the Northern Lights record shop, before she was hired by Twin/Tone. She settled into a basement efficiency apartment, just south of Loring Park, where she and Westerberg became domestic, after a fashion: “He would come over after I got off work and then stay until the next day, then go back to his parents’ house and do whatever—write songs, I guess. I made dinner; I cooked all the time. Occasionally we’d go out. Mostly, we’d watch TV or read.”
Things were fairly blissful, except when it came to music. Bizer was into finding new records and bands, but Westerberg was largely uninterested in her discoveries. (The Young Fresh Fellows, the Jacobites, and oldie favorite Ricky Nelson were exceptions.) “He said he didn’t want to be influenced by anything,” said Bizer. “It might’ve been his insecurities in hearing somebody else that was good. I should’ve realized how stubborn he was at that point.”
The relationship with Bizer also marked a division between Westerberg’s personal life and the Replacements. She never really got
to know the other band members well and hung out with them only a few times after shows or, on rare occasions, on the road. “By that point, I don’t know that he liked hanging out with them,” said Bizer. “He spent enough time with them when he toured that he wanted to be off when he was home.”
Bizer wasn’t sure how far the Replacements would go or last. She knew Westerberg wrote great songs. “But would the band be the vehicle for that? Not necessarily,” she said. “I don’t know if that was his end-all either. I’m not sure he thought it was.”
By mid-1984, Twin/Tone was in significant transition. After years working out of the basement of Paul Stark’s home in Bryn Mawr, the operation would move to Twenty-Sixth Street and Nicollet Avenue in South Minneapolis. The complex of offices—parts of which would later be occupied by Hüsker Dü and the Minnesota Music Academy—also included a suite of label-owned studio rooms run by Steve Fjelstad, who broke off from Blackberry Way that summer.
The previous year Twin/Tone’s biggest cash cow, the Suburbs, had signed with Mercury Records. The Replacements were expected to follow suit. Stark and Jesperson had always viewed Twin/Tone essentially as a farm team for the major labels. “Frankly, we didn’t have enough money to take bands to the next level,” said Stark. “And our back catalog wouldn’t have been worth a lot if they didn’t go further—so it was a win-win for both sides.”
While EMI and Columbia had expressed cautionary interest in the Replacements, the band’s behavior concerned Stark. Still, he strenuously avoided advising Jesperson or involving himself in Replacements affairs. “I only put up with the Replacements because of Peter,” said Stark.
“I don’t think Paul Stark really got it,” said Blake Gumprecht, who handled Twin/Tone’s marketing. “He understood Peter’s enthusiasm for the band . . . but would Stark ever really put on a Replacements record for fun? I seriously doubt it.”
