by Bob Mehr
Chilton had put his own drinking problems behind him a few years earlier. “Alex was very in tune to how antsy we were,” said Westerberg. “I remember him saying, ‘If you’re going to take some cocaine, don’t take it yet. Wait until we set up the mics.’ Of course, me and Bob were raring to go.”
It was the ’Mats first time at Nicollet Studios. Built as a vaudeville theater in 1914, it became a movie house until 1955, when legendary engineer Bruce Swedien, who’d worked with everyone from Nat King Cole to Michael Jackson, transformed it into one of Minnesota’s first commercial studios. A couple of years later a group that included Amos Heilicher, head of SOMA Records, purchased it. In the 1960s, the renamed Kay-Bank Studios turned out several major hits, including Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird,” and the Castaways’ “Liar Liar.” It changed hands several times before Twin/Tone took over in late 1984.
Twin/Tone’s house engineer Steve Fjelstad left Blackberry Way to run things. Fjelstad found one drawback: “It was haunted,” he said. “A piano player for the vaudeville theater had died there. You could hear loud booming noises at odd hours of the night—it freaked me out a few times.”
The Replacements spent parts of four days in the studio with Chilton and Fjelstad, kicking off with “Can’t Hardly Wait.” Westerberg had cut a ghostly template of the song—backed by Chris Mars’s light snare work and cooing harmonies—in Nicollet’s echo chamber/projection booth, but the band couldn’t hear the headphone playback over their instruments. They recorded a rumbling rock version instead, which wasn’t quite what Westerberg had envisioned.
On “Left of the Dial,” Paul’s romanticized ode to college radio, Chilton added his high harmony to Westerberg’s voice and cemented the song’s yearning coda. “He really took great care in working that up,” said Jesperson.
For the first time on a session, Bob Stinson didn’t have a natural place in the songs. The band was almost working around him on the acoustic “Can’t Hardly Wait” and the finessed atmosphere of “Left of the Dial.” “Nowhere Is My Home,” however, charged along riding Stinson’s coruscating riff, propelling Paul’s impressionistic ode to the band’s gypsy existence in vans and bars.
Chilton stayed at Jesperson’s apartment at the Modesto, rolling joints, listening to records, and sleeping on the couch. It was a chance to bask in Chilton’s mesmerizingly inscrutable presence. “Alex . . . he scares me in a way, but he’s real,” said Westerberg. “He’s weird.”
“Real weird,” added Chris Mars.
“He was just a normal guy, like the rest of us,” said Bob Stinson—a remark that may have been the best indication of how peculiar Chilton truly was.
Chilton was unusually effusive about the tracks they’d cut, playing the mixes over and over. At the end of the week, he played a solo show opening for the Replacements at the Uptown. Tommy sat in on bass, and Alex introduced him as “Miles . . . Miles Off.”
Later that month, Twin/Tone released The Shit Hits the Fans—the official “bootleg” of the ’Mats’ performance at the Bowery in Oklahoma City the previous fall. Its limited cassette-only release was intended as a farewell of sorts to Twin/Tone, since the band would be on a major label soon.
Sire Records was making headway in contract talks with George Regis, but the Replacements’ attorney encouraged Columbia A&R man Steve Ralbovsky to continue pursuing the band. (If nothing else, Regis wanted a bit of leverage in his negotiations.)
Ralbovsky headed out to Minneapolis in January to court the group, but was fighting an uphill battle. For a start, Columbia was only willing to offer a one-record deal, as opposed to Sire, which was guaranteeing two (with further options for six). Pitted against the historically hip Sire, Columbia—whose rock roster was led by the likes of Loverboy and Judas Priest—simply paled in comparison. Ralbovsky returned to New York crestfallen. Soon after, Regis informed him that the ’Mats had agreed to terms with Sire.
The Replacements’ contract called for an all-in budget—covering recording costs and band advance—of $125,000 for the first album, then double for the second. But the band’s concerns had more to do with control than money.
“It was more about ‘Don’t tell me what to record, don’t tell me who to do it with, don’t tell me what’s on the record,’” said attorney George Regis. “Warners was an artist-friendly home, so I didn’t have to pull teeth to get that right.” He did make a crucial amendment: in the section that read, “The artist will seriously pursue its career,” he crossed out the word “seriously.”
Reviewing the nearly sixty-page contract with the band in Minneapolis, Regis recalled, “Bob would poke me: ‘George, am I gonna get this?’ ‘Am I gonna get that?’ I can’t tell you that he asked me about fair use in the copyright law or anything.” Westerberg adds: “We were terribly naive. To us it was a foreign language, these business deals.”
Still, Westerberg was sharp enough to make sure he wasn’t giving away any of his publishing. “Even while subscribing to the band’s ethos of nihilism,” said Regis, “he had one ear cocked at things that meant something to him.”
Though Westerberg was still leery of signing contracts, with Sire there was no way around it. As a hedge, Westerberg and Mars signed each other’s names to the contract. “In our own fucked-up way, we thought that would be our out if we ever had to go to court,” said Westerberg. “We could swear to God that we never actually signed our names on the contract.” Following a long fall on the road, the band was heavily in debt, so they saw very little money up front. “After paying off our lawyers, friends, the paternity suits, the abortions . . . we should end up with about a thousand bucks a piece,” cracked Westerberg.
They played a run of West Coast shows in April just as the paperwork was finalized. They dubbed it “Hawaii by Bus,” though they were still using a van. Their Hollywood Palace stop doubled as a showcase for Warner Bros.’s Burbank brass. News of the signing was front and center of a USA Today profile on the Replacements that month. (“We’re not going to be able to jump into this and immediately become a well-oiled machine,” observed Westerberg.)
At the Palace the band appeared in matching baby-blue pajama tops and white chinos—and began a covers onslaught, from Hank Williams Jr.’s “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” to X’s “More Fun in the New World.” At one point, someone requested “We Are the World,” the all-star anti-hunger ballad released a few weeks earlier. “We got our own version,” said Westerberg, as the band worked up a short original. “This is called ‘Let ’Em Starve.’”
The show ended in a perfect ball of confusion as Palace officials tried to hustle them off the stage in order to start the club’s dance party night. The band ignored the warnings and went into a ferocious version of “Gary’s Got a Boner” instead—at which point the venue brought the curtain down on the ’Mats midsong. The band kept playing until the power was shut off amid a hail of boos. Then Bob pulled Chris offstage and into the audience on top of a group of perplexed spectators and label employees.
Warner staffer Kevin Laffey filed an official interoffice report on the gig: “Dangerous band to see ‘blind.’ Some preparation necessary for the faint hearted, but will leave an impression nonetheless,” he wrote. “Those that find them abrasive live at least will find them genuine. I don’t know, however, how long the charm of their drunken devil-may-care personae will last.”
The Palace performance was part welcome, part warning to their new label benefactors: Sire and Warner Bros. were officially in the Replacements business.
CHAPTER 22
In the spring of 1985, Bob Stinson met the woman who would become his most serious love and ultimately his wife. Carleen Krietler was born in Los Angeles in 1962, the middle child in a family of three. Her parents were from the Midwest—her father was a doctor, her mother a nurse. “Every time I coughed or sneezed I got poked or got a pill shoved down my throat,” said Krietler. “I developed a phobia towards medical practices
.”
Despite her parents’ zeal, she grew up sickly: “I had a mystery illness from age ten. My gall bladder was ready to explode. I was forming and passing gallstones for seven years. It kept happening, no one could figure out what was wrong.”
While in high school, Krietler’s parents moved back to their native Nebraska. After a couple of years in junior college, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where she declared an art major and began playing in bands. Her professionally minded father cut her off financially, so she put herself through school as a waitress.
In August 1984, Krietler’s home was invaded, and she was held at knifepoint for several hours. “It was a life-changing ordeal,” she said. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder. “I had a hard time sleeping, a hard time feeling secure.” Looking for a fresh start, she decided to move to Minneapolis at the end the year. There, she fell in with the band Go Great Guns and started dating its guitarist, Mark “Earth” Lauer.
On Easter Sunday, she and Lauer had a fight and broke up. She was sitting in the corner of the Uptown Bar, sobbing and getting drunk, when Lauer’s bandmate Tom Cook told her someone wanted to meet her. “Bob was sitting in the booth all by himself, trying to act suave,” said Krietler. “He introduced himself; he said he was a cook, and that he thought I was real pretty. He noticed I’d been crying and wanted to know what was going on.”
They left the bar and spent the night walking and talking around the lakes in Uptown, and Krietler began to feel safe for the first time in ages. “We ended up in his room around the time sun [was] coming up,” she recalled. They soon began dating, doing “Bob things,” like sneaking six-packs into movies and exploring the railroad tracks. “He knew everything there was about trains,” said Krietler. “He’d call them ‘choo-choos’ in a kiddie voice.”
They’d been hanging out together several weeks before Krietler found out that Bob was in a band on the verge of signing to a major label. He finally invited her to a Replacements show: “My boyfriend’s playing and everybody likes him. He was on pins and needles waiting for me to get there. When he saw me, he stopped playing and parted the crowd for me to come down front.”
Krietler introduced Bob to Ray Reigstad and John Reipas, teenage musicians who’d just moved to the Twin Cities from northern Minnesota. The three immediately hit it off and began hanging out. They found that Stinson could be incredibly childlike. Once, on the way to the Uptown, “We cut through an alley behind Lagoon and Hennepin,” said Reigstad. “Bob kicked in a garage window and yelled, ‘Run!’—this is a twenty-five-year-old man.”
Bob and Carleen moved into an apartment at Twenty-Eighth and Dupont. Though he was reluctant to share, she began to understand his personal history, and how all that ugliness had been transmuted into an obsession with music. “He didn’t hear music as songs; he heard it as parts chained together,” said Krietler. “He understood and analyzed music in a microcosmic way.” However, she added, “he didn’t allow Replacements music in the house.”
That spring Bob’s band-rehearsal attendance was sporadic at best. “He felt he was in the back of the boat, when he was used to being the captain,” said Krietler. Paul, Tommy, and Chris spent the period developing a new chemistry together. “The four-piece had gotten lost, because Bob was so out there. But when the three of us were rehearsing the songs,” said Tommy, “there was a power behind it that was still intact.” There were no screaming arguments at first, just a building tension. “They would just make little snaps at each other: ‘You gonna be there or not?’” said Reigstad.
Signing to Warner Bros. seemed to make little difference. Bob insisted on keeping his job as a cook at Mama Rosa’s. “The sense I got was that Bob wanted to stay playing the Entry forever,” said Reigstad. “To him, being in Uptown was heaven. He didn’t really aspire to anything beyond that.”
Although everyone liked the Alex Chilton-produced demos, he wasn’t seriously considered for the Replacements’ Sire debut. To the industry, his dissolute seventies reputation lingered; even Karin Berg, a close friend and champion of Chilton, didn’t support his candidacy.
The options quickly narrowed to one: Tommy Erdelyi, founder, former drummer, and longtime producer for the Ramones. He was born Tamás Erdélyi in Budapest, Hungary, in 1949, and his parents, both professional photographers, were among the only relatives to survive the Nazi purge. “Most of my family was murdered in the Holocaust,” said Erdelyi. The family moved to the United States in 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, eventually settling in Forest Hills, Queens.
In the late sixties, Erdelyi interned at New York’s Record Plant recording studio, assisting on Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies. After seeing the New York Dolls, Tommy formed the glam-trash outfit Butch, then set up a showcase/rehearsal space called Performance in Manhattan. In 1974 he formed the Ramones with his high school buddy John Cummings, a tough, working-class Irish guitarist who brought in a couple of other talented misfits from the neighborhood: Douglas “Dee Dee” Colvin and drummer-then-singer Jeffrey “Joey” Hyman.
Starting out as their manager-mentor, Erdelyi would become the band’s drummer, cowriter and producer, helping shape the Ramones’ epochal early albums for Sire and defining punk rock in the process. Though he continued to produce the group, he quit playing with the Ramones in 1977 amid the increasingly contentious personal atmosphere of the band.
After making three early ’80s albums apart, the band reunited with Erdelyi for 1984’s Too Tough to Die. In the interim, Erdelyi worked for another New York City studio, the Power Station. “I was scouting talent for them,” said Erdelyi. “I was involved with all kinds of odds and ends, working on a solo career as well.”
Erdelyi had actually sought out the Replacements on his own a few months earlier, introducing himself after December’s CBGB show. “The Village Voice article got me excited,” recalled Erdelyi. “I saw Tommy Stinson after the show, walked up to him, and told him who I was. He was kind of startled.” Sire suggested Erdelyi fly to Minneapolis for a two-day session at Nicollet for a couple new Westerberg songs, “Kiss Me on the Bus” and “Little Mascara,” and to break the ice generally.
At the end of March, Westerberg and Jesperson picked Erdelyi up at the airport. “We got on right away,” said Erdelyi. “There was a certain chemistry there. I think I understood them.” The Replacements blasted through the material a couple of times, doing their best Ramones impression. “The songs were done very quickly, very raw and punk,” said Erdelyi.
Bob Stinson’s imprint was heavy on “Kiss Me on the Bus,” which he turned into a showcase for his breakneck riffing and power chords. He had a harder time with “Little Mascara,” a still-developing vignette of domestic strife. On the take, Stinson seems uncertain, playing a couple of ill-fitting solos that threaten to fall apart.
Back in New York, Michael Hill played the two new tracks to Seymour Stein at Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was recovering from a heart procedure. He agreed that Erdelyi should produce and that the band would be well served staying in the Twin Cities, recording at Nicollet with their longtime engineer Steve Fjelstad assisting. “To preserve some sense of continuity,” said Hill, “and keep the band comfortable. As much as that was ever going to be possible.”
CHAPTER 23
On June 2, the eve of the first session for the Replacements’ major-label debut, Tommy Erdelyi and the Replacements were hanging out at Peter Jesperson’s apartment when Paul Westerberg announced to Jesperson, in front of everyone, “Hey, Pete, we don’t want you in the studio while we’re making this record.”
Jesperson had been an integral part of each of their albums to that point. He’d just mapped out the next six weeks of his life, thinking he’d be at Nicollet working with the band again. Jesperson had no illusions: he knew that Michael Hill was handling A&R now and that Erdelyi was there to produce, but he still thought of his presence as indispensable. So did Erdelyi and Hill—they’d come to rely heavily on his counsel.
Shocked, Jesperson sputtered out: “Why?” Only Chris Mars spoke: “I might be inclined to be more spontaneous and do something different if you weren’t there,” he said, framing the decision in creative terms.
Looking back, both Paul and Tommy admit that the move was belated pay-back for Jesperson leaving them to tour-manage R.E.M. nearly two years earlier. “It still stung,” said Tommy. Jesperson would inevitably have to be around the sessions to a degree: someone had to dole out per diems and drive the band and Erdelyi around. But he was not welcome during recording.
Jesperson wasn’t the only one missing. Bob Stinson was little more than a spectral presence at Nicollet—he spent his days working at Mama Rosa’s, which left Erdelyi somewhat bemused. “It was an absurd, avant-garde situation,” said Erdelyi. “Here’s a guy who’s very important to the band, working as a cook while we’re recording.”
The two demo sessions had cemented Bob’s belief that his voice wasn’t being heard anymore. “I could never sit in a bar with Paul and talk,” said Bob. He also felt betrayed by Mars, whom he said “acted like a session man.” When he wasn’t at work, Bob was with Carleen and his new pals, Ray Reigstad and John Reipas—and when not with them, he was somewhere getting drunk or high.
As Westerberg noted, there was never any direct confrontation between them. “Bob may have said, when I wasn’t around, ‘This is my band, what the fuck does Paul think he’s doing?’ I’d been in fifteen bands before the ’Mats and finally found the right thing. So I was determined to take it the way I wanted.”
Tommy tacitly sided with Westerberg. “I knew we were stepping up,” he said. “It felt like Paul had taken it up a level with his songs. Maybe in an unconscious way, we were starting to move on without [Bob].”
Before the Sire deal, said Westerberg, “We wouldn’t have played, we would’ve waited for [Bob].” Now they carried on regardless. “To me, a lot of this was just ingredients to make a soufflé or bake a cake—including the problems and the troubles and the turmoil,” said Erdelyi. “I was accepting it for what it was.”
