by Bob Mehr
The dustup with Albini underscored the larger point: no one—maybe not even the band itself—really knew what the Replacements were, or what they were capable of becoming. Would the group continue as an adolescent lark until they simply burned out? Would they become small-time lifers grinding it out on the club circuit? Or were they going to aim for something bigger?
In all his time hanging with the Replacements, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck said the band never once discussed making the jump to the major labels. “It wasn’t ever even a topic. I just assumed that they would stay with Peter and Twin/Tone forever,” said Buck. Although R.E.M.’s label, IRS Records, was distributed by a major, they were in much the same situation as the Replacements. “We had minor league promotion. There was no money. We had two great [promo] guys, but they didn’t have a penny. We tried to get a tour poster done once—like 300 posters for 150 bucks—and the record company didn’t have enough money to do it.”
Like the Replacements, R.E.M. found itself at a career crossroads at the end of 1984. “Even in my band there was some doubt—are we gonna get bigger or are we going to step back from it?” said Buck. “My feeling was, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’d feel stupid if I threw it away. It was a decision, though, and it took a lot of talking and thinking through. There was an understanding where the four of us in R.E.M. said: ‘This is how we’re going to do it from here on out.’ I don’t know that the Replacements ever had that talk. I’m not even sure how much Paul wanted it. Everyone wants it a little bit. If you get up onstage even once, you must want it to a certain degree. Then it’s just a matter of finding out where your lines are.”
For the Del Fuegos, the lines began to move quickly. After signing with Warner-distributed indie Slash for their debut The Longest Day, the band moved over to Warner Bros. Records proper for its second LP, Boston, Mass. The band’s producer, Mitchell Froom, sanded off their rougher edges, and the label gave them a visual makeover. When they came back to Boston after a spell polishing up in LA, Bill Sullivan joked that they’d gone to “John Cougar Summercamp.”
The Fuegos then fired their manager, Lilli Dennison, to sign with the label-endorsed firm of High Noon. Fatefully, the band also joined several other up-and-coming groups—including the Long Ryders and dB’s—and signed on for a promotional deal with Miller Beer’s Rock Network at the end of 1984. The pact meant a much-needed injection of tour support money and a merch line. It also meant appearing in a Miller television commercial.
“Rock-and-roll is folk music,” grinned singer Dan Zanes in the ad’s kicker. “It’s music for folks.”
The reaction to the Del Fuegos’ Miller spot—which debuted during the Live Aid telecast and aired on Monday Night Football and all over MTV—was damning. They would be attacked by their peers (the Young Fresh Fellows lampooned them with the song “Beer Money”) and the rock critic establishment alike. Short-term, the Miller deal improved the Fuegos’ life on the road and got them on the mainstream radar, boosting their sales and draw. “The problem was the clown population increased,” said Warren Zanes. “Suddenly, we’ve got guys who wouldn’t know the Gun Club, X, and the Blasters from a hole in their heads going crazy for us. At the end of the day, you have to wonder, what made them love us? A beer commercial? It’s not the best way to cultivate a thinking, listening audience.”
Paul Westerberg was somewhat oblivious to the industry buzz building around the Replacements in the wake of Let It Be. “I remember a writer coming up to me saying, ‘Do you know where you’re at right now? Do you know what’s happening?’ And I remember thinking like, ‘No—what?’” said Westerberg. “At the time we were exploding we weren’t seeing it or acknowledging it. Our reaction was to dismiss it, like, ‘Yeah, yeah—don’t forget to spit on us when we’re in the gutter next year.’”
“We bought into that whole ‘lovable loser’ thing,” noted Tommy Stinson. “And it wasn’t good for us.”
Westerberg had serious qualms about the prospect of signing a major-label deal. He was worried about what would happen to the band and how they would be perceived. “He definitely wanted to be a success,” said his girlfriend, Lori Bizer. “But he didn’t want to sell out, he wanted to keep his rebelliousness intact, he didn’t want to kowtow to The Man. He didn’t want to have his music be used for a commercial, he didn’t want to make any videos. He didn’t want to do the things you would actually have to do to get to that point.”
His reluctance to play the game was spurred by a collection of fears: of success, but mostly, of failure. It would become the dominant theme of the latter half of the Replacements’ career—Westerberg was more inclined to sabotage himself than risk rejection. “There’s a certain amount of admitting failure before I will actually say, ‘I might be defeated,’” said Tommy. “Paul definitely had that. Paul felt more comfortable going, ‘I can’t live up to that,’ than actually trying to live up to that. And me? I was just following my leader, dude.
“The weirdest part of that period was feeling like, on one hand, ‘Wow, we’re actually getting somewhere.’ And on the other hand, as things were getting more positive, we were acting more negative. You couldn’t help but feed off Paul’s dissatisfaction with certain things—’cause he wore it on his sleeve. But I think he had problems that were bigger than him. That were bigger than all of us, that we didn’t even know about.”
The mental health issues in the Replacements camp had already begun to crop up. That fall longtime crew member Tom Carlson quit his job with the band, following what had been, in retrospect, the first signs of a mental break. Carlson would eventually fall into a spiral of schizophrenia. (He died prematurely from a heart condition at the age of fifty-three in 2011.) Bob Stinson’s difficulties, the residue of his traumatic childhood, were on the verge of becoming a major issue as well. In the meantime, entering his midtwenties, Westerberg was starting to feel a black cloud settle over his own mind. “I remember Paul saying to me, ‘It’s like World War III in my brain all the time,’” recalled Jesperson.
Alcohol, which had fueled their public spectacle, also served as both a salve and a mask. “There was a lot of medicating happening and not really knowing what we were medicating for,” said Tommy. “Paul is the first one to tell you today, ‘I have a problem with depression.’ He didn’t know what that was then.”
At the point where he should’ve been most triumphant, Westerberg was feeling anything but. “I never think of him as being happy,” said the Rat booker Julie Farman. “Or grateful to be where he was. I never think of him any way other than depressed . . . no, not depressed, but sad. And internal.” Former Fuegos manager Lilli Dennison would sometimes play sob sister to Westerberg. “He was a pretty confused guy, I think,” said Dennison. “I just remember our talks being about unhappiness, about his dissatisfaction in general. It was like the Peggy Lee song: ‘Is that all there is?’”
Yet, despite all of Westerberg’s fears and uncertainties, it seemed like the band was being pulled inexorably toward a major-label career, toward some grand destiny. “We’d like to take it as far as possible, to say we did it, to see what it’s like,” he told an interviewer that fall. “Why the fuck not?”
CHAPTER 19
Twin/Tone’s Dave Ayers was a native of Stillwater, a hamlet outside the Twin Cities—population 10,000—best known for its state penitentiary. So was a rising young music business lawyer named George Regis; a few years older than Ayers, his Stillwater High reputation was well known. “He had moved to New York,” said Ayers, “and I knew him well enough to call him up and make some introductions—which I did for both the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.”
The oldest of five, Regis grew up in a Catholic household filled with music and alcohol. His father had played trombone on the Midwest jazz circuit. When he became the band director at Stillwater High, he brought a drinking problem with him. “My mother told me that he would hide a vodka bottle in his desk drawer when he was teaching,” said Regis. “He had a violent temper. I had
a recurring nightmare, owing to him blowing up at me when he was drunk.”
In the early sixties, the elder Regis went to rehab at Hazelden, then still in its infancy. “After that, he never relapsed. He worked through it,” said Regis, whose father would go on to have an illustrious career as one of the nation’s top school band directors.
After attending the University of Minnesota, Regis moved to New York in 1979. Within a few years, he was working for a shooting star of the music biz, attorney Owen Epstein of the firm Levine, Thall and Epstein, whose clients included U2 and Pat Benatar. Epstein was a wild child with plenty of the era’s bad habits, including a serious cocaine problem. Regis would later help him into rehab; Epstein would die of a brain tumor, not long after getting sober, in 1988.
Between his father and his boss, Regis was well suited to deal with the Replacements’ chemically fueled chaos: “It certainly wasn’t unknown to me.” He’d seen the band around late 1982, after Ayers and Jesperson raved about them, and immediately hit it off with Westerberg—no mean feat in itself. “I knew quickly that they were deathly afraid of success. And that they wanted to be in a situation where they couldn’t get pinned down or forced to do anything they didn’t want to do.”
With Regis’s help, the Replacements began feeling out labels as early as the fall of 1983. During the band’s first West Coast tour that October, they met with Bob Biggs, head of Los Angeles–based Slash Records. The label was technically an indie, but had distribution and development ties with Warner Bros.
John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X had been talking up the ’Mats to Biggs. “I remember trying to go to the meeting with just Paul and I, and Tommy insisting on coming,” recalled Jesperson. The younger Stinson then “looked at Biggs and said, ‘Okay, how much money are you gonna give us?’ It was like, ‘Tommy, come on.’”
Soon after, Columbia Records junior A&R woman Joanna Spock Dean began pursuing the band. Dean had worked for Miles Copeland’s management firm and at IRS and Faulty Records. “I’d go backstage to say hello,” said Dean. “Peter was cool, Tommy was bratty, Chris didn’t talk too much, and Bob was crazy. And I was like every other female—madly in love with Paul Westerberg.”
Dean flew to see the Replacements that September at Joe’s Star Lounge in Ann Arbor. On the plane ride out, she realized a couple of representatives from A&M were on the same flight, for the same reason. The ’Mats couldn’t quite fathom these big labels flying out to “bumfuck” Midwestern cities to sweet-talk them. “I met these two guys in Michigan and didn’t believe they worked for a label,” said Westerberg. “They were wearing tennis shoes and said they were from A&M records. So I grabbed one of them and said, ‘Fuck you! Where’s the coke?’”
Columbia would become a more serious suitor with the arrival of New York–based Steve Ralbovsky. In the eighties, Columbia was a behemoth, home to Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Toto, and Loverboy, among other blockbuster acts. Hired there in 1984, Ralbovsky immediately signed British power pop band the Outfield, gave a development deal to a nineteen-year-old Matthew Sweet (on R.E.M.’s recommendation), and brought Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin’s fledgling hip-hop label, Def Jam, to the company.
Ralbovsky convinced Columbia A&R head Mickey Eichner that the ’Mats were worth bringing aboard, pitching them as low-cost and low-effort. “I didn’t have to do a whole lot of lobbying at the company.” He knew it would take some persuading, but the band was more than a little intrigued. “In those days, if you were on an independent label, there was a ceiling,” Ralbovsky said. “They were kicking the tires as far as their opportunities went.”
No A&R man had the in with the Replacements that Michael Hill had—he’d booked their first New York show and established a friendship that predated his career working for Warner Bros.
Born in 1954 in Newark, and raised in Orange, New Jersey, Hill was, unusually, the only child in a lower-middle-class Irish-Italian Catholic family. His father’s struggle with depression and drinking forced the young Hill to become a calming, mediating influence in his home, an ability that “would eventually come in handy” working with the Replacements.
Hill attended Fordham in New York, largely so he could go see concerts at the Fillmore East. Soon he was writing music criticism for the Jersey-based Aquarian Weekly. He worked for AT&T before New York Rocker, which folded in 1982, and his byline appeared in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice while he co-booked “Music for Dozens” at Folk City.
In the spring of 1982, Hill attended Voice music critic Robert Christgau’s fortieth birthday party and met Karin Berg, an old friend of Christgau’s. An influential and much revered A&R woman, Berg had signed Television and the Cars to Elektra before becoming head of East Coast A&R for Warner Bros. “We started chatting about bands, and she complimented me on my writing,” said Hill.
In the late summer of 1983, Berg hired Hill as an A&R man—he had to turn down Christgau’s offer to become the Voice’s music editor to take the job. With his smiling eyes and olive complexion, Hill was an attractive figure—a well-read, unaffected intellectual whose easy confidence in the showbiz world belied his blue-collar beginnings.
Upon landing at Warner Bros., Hill’s immediate priority was to sign the Replacements. “What convinced me was hearing Hootenanny, hearing ‘Within Your Reach,’ as well as the stuff that Peter would carry around,” said Hill. (Jesperson would play his well-guarded cassette tapes of Westerberg’s unreleased solo songs, like “You’re Getting Married,” for select intimates like Hill.) “I loved the band, but I loved that other side of Paul especially—that wonderful, sensitive singer-songwriter guy who seems so improbably expressive.”
The Replacements appreciated him in turn. “Michael was a lot like us,” said Westerberg—meaning, young and from the underground, and also Catholic, working-class, and steeped in similar familial dysfunction. “I came pre-packaged to cope with them,” Hill said.
In October 1983, Hill brought several top Warner staff—including Berg and department head Michael Ostin—to see the Replacements at Club Lingerie in Hollywood. “Karin got mad at me, because she said I was jumping around too much during the show,” said Hill. “‘You’re not here as a fan. You’re here as the record label.’”
But the band didn’t take it seriously. That fall, prior to a CBGB show, Hill casually mentioned to Westerberg that he liked the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” During the show, Paul called to Bob for the riff, then started singing: “Start me up . . . you want a flop?” he howled. “I’ll take you places . . . you never want to go to.” Afterward he wheedled into the mike, calling out to Hill: “Do we get a record deal yet? Come on, pleeeeeze?”
CHAPTER 20
Much ink had been spilled over the Replacements already, but no single article would be as essential in crystallizing their legend as a Village Voice cover story from December 1984.
The author was twenty-five-year-old RJ Smith, a Detroit native who’d attended the University of Michigan, where he wrote for the school paper and was a classmate of Lori Bizer. He spent a year at a daily paper in Buffalo, then headed to New York, where he hooked on at the Voice. He quickly proved to be one of the paper’s most incisive music critics and feature writers.
The paper’s editor, Robert Christgau, had been following the ’Mats for several years. In 1982 he’d given a lecture in Minneapolis and been taken to see the band at First Avenue. During the set, Paul Westerberg grimly announced that Chuck Berry had just died, before playing “Maybellene” in tribute. A panicked Christgau scurried to a pay phone before he realized he was being put on.
Smith had fallen hard for the Stink EP and was there for the band’s New York debut at Folk City. “Anybody with a brain or a taste for adventure could tell from watching an ‘average’ Replacements show that this would be a fun group to follow on the road.” Smith penned a lively review of Hootenanny for the Voice in late ’83: “They end up acting fucked up about being fucked up—metafuckedupitude—and grabbing at anything that mig
ht serve as a buoy. The result is a solid sensibility, shows capable of spontaneous combustion, and a new album that passes like a warm beer shit.”
With Let It Be out that fall, Christgau pressed Smith into an in-depth feature on the band, the Twin/Tone label, the Minneapolis scene, and the burgeoning indie rock culture in America. Smith embedded himself with the ’Mats for a week. “That notion of bands traveling in a van from town to town, with an address book that had the names of club owners and record store guys and people with couches you could sleep on, was still new,” said Smith. “This network had sprouted up simultaneously across the country.”
In September, Smith met the band in Ohio and rode with them through the Midwest, into Canada, and back. The band had set up for sound check at Stache’s in Columbus, and Jesperson and Westerberg were waiting for Smith to arrive at the club. “When the door opened and RJ walked in, it was like, ‘That’s the guy.’ He kinda reeked of rock critic—he had the glasses and just looked the part,” said Jesperson.
Just as Smith strode over and put out his hand to introduce himself, Westerberg stood up and announced: “Well, I gotta take me a warm beer shit,” quoting Smith’s line back to him. “Everybody cracked up,” said Jesperson.
“People got comfortable with RJ,” said Jesperson. “He got into the spirit of things and had a few drinks with us and got a little silly.” In turn, Smith openly scribbled in his notebook for the next few days. His observations added up to a remarkably raw, sometimes unflattering, but essentially accurate portrait of a band that was flying high and living low.
“They were showing me and saying things they probably shouldn’t have,” said Smith. “I mean, if you’re going to do cocaine next to me and then fall asleep—which Paul did and which I was very impressed by—then that’s fair game. Though I left that one out of the story.”
