Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Even out of greasepaint, Mars would occasionally tie one on and lead the band’s bad behavior. Those times were often the worst collective displays; if Chris was out of control, then the others felt totally free to run wild.

  During the latter stages of the Let It Be tour, the band was booked for a gig at the Coffeehouse on the campus of the University of California at Davis, in central California. The school’s entertainment liaison brought Jesperson to a place called the Oak Room, which would be serving as the band’s dressing quarters. It was a beautifully appointed, wood-paneled conference room, with a long table, chairs, and big-pane windows looking out on to the campus. A lavish deli tray and an unusually generous supply of liquor had been laid out.

  His head immediately filling with visions of the havoc the ’Mats would wreak on the room, a nervous Jesperson actually asked for lesser accommodations. “Um, I’m not sure this is going to work,” he told the liaison. “Can you show me something in concrete?”

  The college didn’t have anywhere else to put them, so Jesperson tried his best to head off trouble: “You guys,” he told the band, “let’s try and be careful in here.”

  “Yeah, we’ll take care of this place,” said Mars, grabbing a bucket full of ice and beer and hurling it against the wall. Glass and suds splattered everywhere. “It was like, Oh my God,” said Jesperson, his worst fears immediately realized. “I don’t remember a whole bunch else after that.”

  “We kinda went nuts,” admitted Tommy. “We totally ripped the fucking room to bits. We had no idea the aftermath of that was going to be as bad as it was.”

  After a soused, subpar gig, the band packed its gear and hurried away before anyone in an official capacity realized the shape they’d the room left in.

  The next day, with a gig in nearby Fresno looming, Jesperson sheepishly checked in with booking agent Frank Riley in New York.

  “What the hell happened in Davis?” asked Riley.

  The college had flipped out when they saw the damage—estimated at a couple thousand dollars, and several times what the band’s fee was. “They’ve got a warrant out for your arrest!” Riley told him.

  The Replacements played the gig in Fresno, bracing for a police raid, while Jesperson—whose name was on the contract at Davis—spent the evening hiding out from the cops, who never showed.

  While Chris Mars’s occasional flights of madness were regarded with amusement, Bob Stinson’s behavior was becoming a cause for consternation.

  Donning dresses or diapers, performing in the buff, or seizing the mic to sing the ’60s wrestling novelty “The Crusher,” he’d become the band’s crazy, comic attraction. While his onstage displays helped boost the ’Mats’ live legend, there was occasionally annoyance about his over-the-top antics. “[A] sore spot with Paul was that a lot of fans really liked me,” Bob would claim in later years.

  On one level, Westerberg and the others couldn’t help but admire his sheer bravado. “When Bob was in the band, there was always that element of ‘I dare ya’ in the mix,” said Tommy Stinson. “We dared him to play naked; he played naked. We dared him to rub Ben Gay on his balls and play naked; he played naked with Ben Gay on his balls, and fucking hated it. He’d get drunk and he would open himself up to ‘I dare ya.’”

  “It’s great to see someone who’s not afraid to play the fool,” Westerberg noted at the time. “Till the day he dies Bob won’t take himself seriously.”

  “But the drinking did get bad with him,” said Jesperson. “He wouldn’t remember stuff; there would be blackouts. That got a little scary. We started calling him Mr. Hyde because he was really a different person then.”

  The more they were on the road, the more Bob would retreat into his own world. Even apart from the gang, he had no difficulty finding trouble. “And if he couldn’t find it, he’d make it,” said Westerberg. “He needed a certain amount of excitement, some daring, to keep him from being bored. But the people who liked that sideshow aspect, they weren’t the best for him.” As Tommy would note, “By Let It Be, it was painfully obvious that Bob was going down that road more than he was being involved with the songs and the music.”

  Bob’s behavior presaged a fundamental shift in the group as Tommy and Paul began to form their own tight kinship. In the beginning, Paul was naturally more connected with Bob. They were the same age and had the same goals in mind, while Tommy was just a little kid. “Shit, he was twelve, thirteen—he was a novelty,” said Westerberg. “Pete looked out for him. And then this little gaggle of young ladies took him under their wing.”

  But by 1984 Paul and Tommy—brought together in part by drink—were socializing and scheming with one another, even starting to look and dress alike. “I felt that it was right that we sort of fell into step finally,” said Westerberg.

  “Me and Paul would hang out together, more as friends, rather than just being in a band together,” said Tommy. “Also, I knew there was something happening with him musically that I was into. I was impressed. I thought he was great. I thought he was the greatest fucking songwriter.”

  “At a certain point, with Bob being so weird and so unmanageable, Tommy started siding with Paul a little bit,” said Jesperson. “Tommy was smart enough to realize what he had in Paul, in terms of a partner, in terms of a chance to achieve something musically. And certainly there was a lot of love between them at that time.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Nineteen eighty-four would prove a watershed year for Twin Cities music. In July, Hüsker Dü released their double-LP opus Zen Arcade to much acclaim. Also that summer, Prince and the Revolution issued the soundtrack to the movie Purple Rain. The album would go on to sell 14 million copies, and the film would become one of the top box office hits of the year. Shot on location at First Avenue, Purple Rain would turn Steve McClellan’s club into a tourist attraction as out-of-towners and looky-loos from the ’burbs began turning up, hoping to get a glimpse of Prince.

  “When Prince was popular, it was a great way to meet girls,” said ’Mats roadie and sometime First Avenue employee Bill Sullivan. “You just told them, ‘Sure, I know Prince. He hangs around all the time. He comes over to my house and does bong hits.’”

  Although seemingly polar opposites, Prince’s and the Replacements’ sense of showmanship had a common root. “We experienced the same weather and a lot of the same things growing up,” said Paul Westerberg. “Minneapolis audiences are mighty reserved, and learning to command an audience in a place where people are notorious for being quiet will either make you a wallflower, quiet artist, or it will make you really boisterous, aggressive, or flamboyant, which is what it did for both of us. I really think a lot of his flamboyance came from the suppression of the place that we live. It’s a cold place to live in more ways than one.”

  The ’Mats genuinely admired Prince. On one occasion, Tommy Stinson was watching Prince perform from the wings at First Avenue while standing next to Ric Ocasek of the Cars, who were also at their pop chart zenith that year. After the Purple One peeled off a breathtaking Hendrix-like solo, then danced his way across the stage and into a leg split, Tommy slapped Ocasek on the back hard, pointed at Prince, and said, with a measure of Minneapolis pride, “Let’s see ya top that, buddy!”

  Prince was rumored to have lurked in the shadows at some of the Replacements’ shows at First Avenue, but it was in the bathroom of a club in St. Paul where Westerberg finally ran into him.

  “Oh, hey,” said Westerberg, seeing the dolled-up singer standing next to him at the urinal. “What’s up, man?”

  Prince turned and responded in cryptic fashion: “Life.”

  While Prince grabbed most of the big headlines in ’84, the Replacements’ year was filled with important press. That spring the Minneapolis Star and Tribune’s music critic, Jon Bream, wrote a story on the band that appeared on the front page of the arts section. Featuring a photo of Westerberg at the piano, the piece offered validation to his parents.

  “They were relieved that maybe
I’d found my niche,” said Westerberg. “Of course, my ma tried to take credit. In her mind, the musical pedigree came from her side of the family. But the tenacity to carry on through boos and bottles being thrown, that was my dad.” Hal Westerberg rarely offered any comment on his son’s career, though secretly he took great pride in his achievements. “My mom, as moms do, would clip the newspaper story out and put it on the fridge. But the old man was very cool about it. The most he ever said—one time, after reading some article where I’d been cursing—was, ‘Why don’t you clean up some of these “fucks” and “shits”?’”

  That fall, the band also got its first mention in Rolling Stone when former Minneapolis writer Debby Miller penned a four-star review of Let It Be for the magazine—which ran ahead of a similarly lavish four-star review of Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade. Ultimately, the Replacements’ record would become one of 1984’s most acclaimed. It would place fourth in the Village Voice’s annual Pazz and Jop critic’s poll, behind only Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and Los Lobos (and ahead of the Hüskers and R.E.M.)

  The Replacements’ cozy relationships with the Minneapolis rock critic community would extend to national writers as well. The band was instinctively drawn to critics who shared their background: those who drank heartily, joked readily, and came from the Midwest. Creem magazine co-editors and Michigan natives Bill Holdship and John Kordosh became running buddies, as did former Chicagoan and LA Reader and Billboard writer Chris Morris. The ’Mats’ golden status among this fraternity was inevitable. In his songs, Westerberg was articulating a particular kind of male adolescent frustration. Rock writers—mostly male, attitudinally adolescent, and often frustrated—ate it up. Still, Westerberg was wary of what that kind of adoration could mean. “Being the critic’s band,” he remarked in early ’84, “is the curse of death.”

  Beyond a cadre of critics, the deeper impact of the Replacements and Let It Be would be felt by those who would come to define the next generation of alternative rock music. “You have to wonder—the Frank Blacks, the Kurt Cobains of the world—how many of them were anonymously out there in the crowds in the ’80s seeing the ’Mats come through town,” said Twin Cities writer P. D. Larson. “You wonder how many people were sitting there and saw them and it spoke to them in a way to start a band.”

  For Black, aka Charles Thompson—who would found the Pixies in 1986—Let It Be “totally liberated things. It made you feel comfortable doing some of the things they were doing,” said Black. “You got the impression when you were listening to the album that they understood punk music, but they weren’t all hung up on it. They’re just fine doing a cover of a Kiss song; they’re just fine doing a ballad. They weren’t all caught up in it’s gotta be straight-edge, it’s gotta be punk, it’s gotta be hardcore, it’s gotta be indie rock. It’s like, whatever, man. It’s just gotta be cool.

  “Most bands, especially back then, didn’t have that much swagger. They were so uptight about proving their point and their passion that it could get precious in its own way. Whereas, like, Dean Martin had swagger; the Rolling Stones had swagger . . . the Replacements had swagger.”

  In Oklahoma, Wayne Coyne, a fast-food franchise employee and leader of the fledgling psych-rock band the Flaming Lips, also found inspiration in the Replacements. “They played the music we liked: it was punk rock, but it was classic rock, and it was loud and kind of fucked-up,” said Coyne. “They were better musicians than we were at the time, but we saw something in them, and we were like, ‘Yeah! Look, they’re getting away with it. We could do that.’ We didn’t care that they might’ve only been playing to nine people in some club in Norman.”

  Even for established musicians, like veteran Los Angeles guitarist Ward Dotson, the ’Mats had a life-altering effect. Dotson had been a member of the punk-blues band the Gun Club with Jeffrey Lee Pierce. But he’d grown disenchanted with the band’s Gothier direction and what he saw as its fashionista fan base. Quitting the group, he eventually formed the Pontiac Brothers, a rough-and-ready rock outfit that owed a major debt to the ’Mats. “Looking back, it’s like, ‘God, could we have been more influenced by the Replacements?’” said Dotson. “It’s laughable. But I could have picked a worse band.”

  The Pontiac Brothers would open a series of shows for the Replacements during the Let It Be tour, and Dotson and Westerberg—united by a love of Slade and early ’70s bubblegum music—would become fast friends. Though Westerberg took pride in his skills as a writer, Dotson knew he was uncomfortable with the attention his work was starting to garner. “A total conversation killer with Paul was to start complimenting him on his songwriting, or talking about how much you love this song or that song . . . just conversation over,” said Dotson. “He didn’t know how to deal with it.”

  At the time, Westerberg was reluctant to focus on the writerly aspect of the ’Mats’ music. “I remember not wanting to play ‘Sixteen Blue’ and ‘Answering Machine,’ because it wasn’t part of the MO of the live band,” he said. “I always felt that we can have that stuff on record and the show is more of a performance. But it eventually became clear that a lot of the people were coming to hear this slower song, or that ballad, and not ‘We’re Coming Out.’”

  With Let It Be, people were paying ever closer attention to Paul Westerberg’s words. “It was a mixed blessing when I started to attract fanatics who would read something into a song that maybe wasn’t there, or maybe someone who would read exactly what’s there,” he admitted. Still, Westerberg never took the power of his songs, his ability to connect with listeners, for granted. “People always come up and say, ‘You wrote this just for me,’” he noted. “And I say, ‘Yeah, I did. I don’t know you, but I knew you were out there.’”

  Within a few months of its release, Let It Be was selling briskly—nearly 11,000 copies and trending upward. In comparison, by the end of ’84, Sorry Ma had sold only 6,000, Stink 4,000, and Hootenanny 8,000 in total. Given their success, the band, especially Westerberg, felt they’d earned the right to complain about Twin/Tone’s minuscule tour support and question what the label was doing to advance their careers. “He was frustrated,” said Peter Jesperson, who was constantly having to balance his loyalties to the band and the label. “Paul felt like, ‘We’re barely scraping by, and we need the label to give us more money.’ There just wasn’t that kind of money available. When I explained that, he would take it as me not siding with the band.”

  The solution to everyone’s problems—the band’s, Jesperson’s, and Twin/Tone’s—was obvious: have the Replacements sign with a major label. But that brought its own set of complications, compounded by the stigma of indie rock politics and the band’s own uncertainties.

  In 1984 only a handful of groups had made the transition from the American/indie underground into the major-label mainstream world. Rising young A&R man Steve Ralbovsky had signed the indie-roots bands Jason and the Scorchers and the Del-Lords to EMI America on modest deals, with both groups being slowly cultivated via EP releases and touring. The highest-profile move had been undertaken by the Los Angeles paisley underground outfit Dream Syndicate, who’d signed with the boutique major label A&M Records. They hired Blue Oyster Cult/Dictators/Clash veteran Sandy Pearlman to produce and spent a quarter of a million dollars over five months in three studios recording their label debut, Medicine Show. Released in the summer of ’84, the album was hardly a commercial-sounding effort, but it vexed underground purists who looked at the circumstantial evidence—major label, name producer, big budget—and lobbed lazy accusations of “sellout” and catcalls of “corporate rock.”

  Within the underground, there remained a deep suspicion about any band who dared try to cross the major-label Rubicon. When it came to the Replacements, those misgivings were voiced most loudly by Steve Albini.

  The leader of the Chicago post-hardcore band Big Black and a noted recording engineer, Albini had deep connections to the Minneapolis hardcore scene. He was also a professional gadfly, punk rock moralist, and
sometime music critic writing for the Chicago-based magazine Matter (generally a bastion of Replacements love, as the group was frequently fawned over in print by editor Liz Phillip and writers like Julie Panebianco).

  Albini had been dubious about some of the lighter aspects of Hootenanny—particularly tracks like “Within Your Reach.” When Let It Be—filled with a further assortment of pop songs and ballads—was released, he seized on the album as a total betrayal, one that he laid at Westerberg’s feet. Albini concluded his review of the record for Matter with the line: “I used to love these guys; now I hate this guy.”

  “I do remember hating that record,” said Albini. “When a band made the transition from being a punk band to being an R.E.M.-type band, that was the point where you could write them off—’cause they were never going back. There’s no way that a band that aspires to being a credible pop/rock FM radio band is ever going to make a snotty, smelly, messy punk rock record again. It’s never happened in history. It’s basically an indication of the kind of people they always were. And you feel a little bit foolish for having been duped.”

  After Albini further badmouthed the ’Mats in a Forced Exposure piece—in which he actually wished Westerberg dead—the Replacements front man finally rose to the bait. “[Albini’s] in show business, and that’s the point everybody misses,” said Westerberg. “Of course if you told him that he would probably fall on the floor and vomit and kick the wall out.”

  In truth, Albini’s broadsides showed just how little anyone, even their supposed indie contemporaries, understood the Replacements. The ’Mats never claimed to be punk or hardcore, never operated in DIY fashion, and certainly didn’t conduct themselves in a carefully considered manner that suggested they aspired to become like R.E.M.