Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Paul, Tommy, and Chris spent the first week of the session cutting rhythm tracks live in the studio’s expansive main room. “There was some baffling around the drums, and we separated the amps,” said Erdelyi, “but the band was playing right next to each other, they had strong eye contact.” By the mid-’80s, recording trends had moved away from live tracking to cutting parts individually, but the ’Mats had never been separated in the studio.

  Unlike the high-velocity “Kiss Me on the Bus” recorded with Erdelyi in March, the new rhythm tracks had a more measured feel—Westerberg wanted slower tempos. “I thought, ‘Okay, great,’” said Erdelyi. “I didn’t want to make a full-out punk record with them; that had already been done.”

  Erdelyi helped Westerberg rein in the pace. “Chris always preferred playing things faster than I did,” said Westerberg. “I was always going for a [Rolling Stones] ‘Tumbling Dice’ feel, and that was not in his canon. But having Tommy Erdelyi being a drummer producing helped. Chris would be outvoted.”

  Westerberg was less impressed with the sounds the producer was getting. “After about a week, Tommy [Stinson] and I sort of talked to each other on the side and said, ‘Well, I guess it was Ed Stasium that we really wanted,’” said Westerberg, referring to the Ramones’ engineer.

  Part of the problem was the band’s gear: “I think I had a blown speaker, two blown speakers, in my amp, and those were the ones that were miked for the entire record,” said Westerberg. The bass on the album—or lack thereof—was also an issue. Tommy Stinson had decided to record using his somewhat thin-sounding Rickenbacker. “I would’ve preferred a [Fender] Precision,” said Erdelyi. “It would’ve been more of a solid bottom.”

  Apart from the technical aspects, the album represented a new process for the ’Mats. “This was about the time that I came in with some songs and said, ‘Here’s how they go,’” said Westerberg. Structurally, several of them —“Left of the Dial,” “Bastards of Young,” “Little Mascara”—were modeled after his favorite early Who records, beginning with two bars of guitar. “I followed that formula for a long time, where I would start with the guitar and the band would crash in, and then there would be a part somewhere in the song where we’d break down a little bit and then really rave it up.”

  Westerberg wrote several of the songs “a week before the album was recorded,” giving it a loose improvisational quality, including the LP opener, “Hold My Life.” “Yeah, because that one doesn’t have any lyrics,” laughed Westerberg. “That’s the perfect example: there’s no damn words to it. We were going for a feeling, and the [hook] line ‘Hold my life, ’cause I just might lose it’ was all I needed to say.”

  Erdelyi liked the almost indecipherable way Westerberg delivered the verses of “Hold My Life”: “To me, that added anxiety to the song.” “I’ll Buy” was slightly more crafted (“It had some seventh chords in it,” said Westerberg), with a hint of Broadway, but again, the lyric was largely made up on the spot. Westerberg’s pleurisy-ravaged rasp was in full effect here. “Paul had that kind of warm distortion in his voice that I really enjoyed,” said Erdelyi.

  The album’s biggest joke was an inside one: “Waitress in the Sky” was a winking nod to Westerberg’s sister Julie, a career flight attendant. Set to a jaunty rhythm lifted from Johnny Rivers’s “Mountain of Love” and T. Rex’s “Hot Love,” Westerberg came on like every stewardess’s loutish nightmare passenger: “Sanitation expert and a maintenance engineer / Garbage man, a janitor and you, my dear. . . . You ain’t nothing but a waitress in the sky.”

  As Westerberg recalled, “I was playing the character of the creep who demands to be treated like a king. I’d heard all the stories from my sister about how [passengers] would yell at the flight attendants and how then they’d ‘accidentally’ spill something on them.”

  The biggest revelation of the new material was how Westerberg dropped the punk rock mask of the ’Mats’ infancy to showcase his tender ballads and wistful pop songs. “Kiss Me on the Bus” was touched by both seventies AM Gold and a heavy dose of Big Star.

  Like the Chilton-penned “Thirteen,” it was a chronicle of adolescent longing recalled by a man a decade removed from the experience. Westerberg was still capable of conjuring teen years filled with unrequited romances. “Fine, don’t say ‘Hi,’ then,” Westerberg sneers, before playing a biting little solo—a nick of Keith Richards on “Heart of Stone”—that yields to the gentle sound of sleigh bells.

  “Little Mascara” was an altogether new kind of Westerberg number: a fictionalized character study. There was no model for the distressed protagonist shedding tears and Maybelline. “It’s me trying to write a short story and put it to music,” said Westerberg. “I went through a phase where I read all of Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor, a lot of great Southern tragic people.”

  In the midst of the session, as comic relief, roadie Bill Sullivan came in and tracked a rendition of the Soft Boys’ post-punk protest “I Wanna Destroy You.” Meanwhile, Tommy Stinson sang an original he’d written called “Havin’ Fun.” It was a melancholic rocker in the mold of Westerberg’s songs from the period; in fact, Paul liked it enough that he cut a version himself. Though it would have fit the album, the track was ultimately left off.

  In the van the previous fall, the band had taken to passing around a communal Walkman. On one ride, Westerberg handed his headphones to Jesperson to check out a particularly moving Frank Sinatra song. Later that day, Jesperson responded with a live bootleg of Neil Young playing an old Buffalo Springfield gem.

  Musically, the new “Swingin Party” drew on Sinatra’s version of Rodgers and Hart’s standard “Where or When” and the Springfield’s “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong”—with traces as well of Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid” and early-sixties popster Brian Hyland’s “The Joker Went Wild.” “If you steal from everything,” noted Westerberg, “nobody can put a finger on you.”

  The song’s oscillating rhythms and quavering guitars provided a perfect backdrop for the lyrics. “One of the reasons we used to drink so much is that it was scary going up onstage. That’s one of the things ‘Swingin Party’ is all about,” said Westerberg. “The funny thing is, people think you must have all this confidence to get up onstage.”

  For the first time, these kinds of songs were coming more naturally and more fully formed to Westerberg than the rockers. They allowed him to express a vulnerability he didn’t reveal in his life: “I could hide behind a character and then shed myself of it. I used to mine my deepest feelings and use that for the songs and then keep my relationships light. As light as I could, anyway.”

  Westerberg’s finest and most heartfelt anthem, “Left of the Dial,” celebrated the esprit de corps of the eighties American indie rock scene and was a tribute to the tiny-watt college stations populating the far end of the FM radio band—many of whose number let the Replacements crash after shows at campuses. “That’s where all our airplay came from,” said Westerberg. “We ended up going to college in an odd kind of way.”

  “Left of the Dial” was a “hidden love song” as well—a chronicle of Westerberg’s infatuation with Lynn Blakey, singer-guitarist for North Carolina’s Let’s Active. They’d met when the bands shared a bill at San Francisco’s I-Beam in the fall of 1983. “He followed me around and bummed cigarettes off me,” recalled Blakey. The following night, after a show in Berkeley, the two spent hours walking in the rain. They would exchange calls and letters as Blakey moved to Athens, Georgia, where she joined Michael Stipe’s sister Lynda in the band Oh-OK. “I figured the only way I’d hear her voice was with her band on the radio . . . on a college station,” said Westerberg. “And one night we were passing through a town somewhere, and she was doing an interview on the radio. I heard her voice for the first time in six months for about a minute. Then the station faded out.” The moment provided the song’s denouement: “If I don’t see ya, in a long, long while / I’ll try to find you / Left of the dial.”r />
  The version on the fifth ’Mats album was actually a holdover from the Alex Chilton January demos. Chilton received a special thank-you on the LP, but not an official production credit.

  The album’s other epic was a howl of youthful uncertainty and alienation called “Bastards of Young.” Set against a clarion guitar riff, the lyrics were loaded with multiple layers of personal meaning. “Income tax deduction, one hell of a function” pointed to both Westerberg’s fear that the ’Mats’ career could end up as no more than a corporate write-off and his induced New Year’s Eve birth as a tax break for his parents. (Lyrically it was one of the few numbers from this period that Westerberg truly labored over, sharpening the verses over a couple of drafts, though its often misheard chorus—“Wait on the sons of no one, bastards of young”—remained unchanged.)

  The song was a residue of Westerberg’s Catholic upbringing, with lyrical allusions to the gospel of Matthew, ruminations on the love of family versus the approval of strangers, and a cynical take on the slippery slope of earthly ambition:

  God, what a mess

  On the ladder of success

  When you take one step, and miss the whole first rung

  Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled

  It beats picking cotton and waiting to be forgotten

  Paul’s younger sister, Mary, provided a spark for the lyrics. At eighteen, she’d left Minneapolis to pursue an acting career in the Big Apple. “To me, a part of that song is about my sister who felt the need . . . to be something by going somewhere else,” said Westerberg.

  “It is sort of the Replacements feeling the same way . . . not knowing where we fit. It’s our way of reaching a hand out and saying, ‘We are right along with you. We are just as confused.’”

  As the band worked, Bob Stinson would occasionally turn up at Nicollet, usually with Carleen in tow. “He’d come in every couple of days, listen back to what we’d done, make a funny face, and walk out,” said Westerberg.

  Finally, after two and a half weeks, Bob cut his parts in a messy state. “He’s coming in and he’s all fucked up,” recalled Tommy Stinson. “We’re wasting time because he’s dragging the tracks down, either ’cause he didn’t like them or he was drunk. That was an uncomfortable set of circumstances altogether.”

  “I’d send out for drugs while we were in the studio,” admitted Bob in a 1990 interview, “and then I’d lie down in front of an amp, behind a partition so they couldn’t see me, and then just fall on the floor and play. That’s what you hear on Tim.”

  They tried to cut “Can’t Hardly Wait,” but Westerberg was unhappy. The song everyone figured was the “hit” wouldn’t even make the album. “The ones that didn’t come easily, Paul didn’t have a lot of patience for trying to figure out,” said Tommy Stinson. “Our whole career, that was the way a lot of songs came and went.”

  More upsetting than Bob’s nonparticipation was his playing—he’d try to force solos into songs they didn’t fit, like “Swingin Party.” “Bob’s whole thing mirrored Brian Jones frighteningly,” said Westerberg, who was reminded of the Rolling Stones’ founding guitarist who spent his final days in the band asking Mick Jagger what he could play. “I don’t know,” replied Jagger coldly. “What can you play?”

  To mitigate things Westerberg dashed off a couple of Bob-ready rockers. “Lay It Down Clown” was based on R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, who had an affinity for speed. Buck often carried a knife with which to chop his stash (“Got a big switchblade”) and had famously twitchy leg moves onstage (“The only exercise you ever get is the shakes”). “That was basically what we used to say to Pete Buck,” said Westerberg. “‘If you got that shit, lay it down, clown.’”

  The band also worked up “Dose of Thunder,” a boys-on-the-prowl number (“Looking for the eight ball . . . Only want a little, you need a ton”) credited to Paul, Tommy, and Chris and inspired by both Slade’s stomping numbers and Minneapolis’s stormy summer season. “I was always a fan of big loud thunderstorms and threatening weather and wove that in there too,” said Westerberg. In fact, one day while working, a tornado siren went off, spooking the Queensbred Erdelyi. “I didn’t know about tornados,” he said, “other than growing up watching The Wizard of Oz.”

  After his first attempt, Bob Stinson returned to the studio a few days later in better shape and did all of his overdubs. “He seemed very paranoid at the time, I’m not sure why,” said Erdelyi, “’cause I don’t know the internal politics.” Erdelyi let Bob run wild and edited the best bits into the record.

  But the guitarist’s contributions felt like afterthoughts; Westerberg often replayed the lead parts. When people asked Bob how the new album was coming along, he would snap uncharacteristically: “How the fuck would I know? I’m not on it.”

  Michael Hill visited Nicollet a couple of times and was sent tapes of the Replacements’ progress, but otherwise he was careful not to crowd the band at work. Still, his touch would be felt in crucial ways. Hill suggested they splice in the ending from an earlier version of “Bastards of Young,” with Westerberg shouting, “Take it, it’s yours,” repeatedly as Mars battered away wildly. Erdelyi agreed, and the song gained its memorably climactic coda.

  Hill’s greatest contribution, however, was pushing for what became the album closer and emotional anchor, “Here Comes a Regular.” A sad paean to the drinker’s life, it had been inspired by “hanging out at the CC Club, the fact that we’d go there every day with nothing to do,” said Westerberg.

  It was also created under the influence of Jacobites, the melancholy classic by UK duo Nikki Sudden and Dave Kusworth. “I sat down and wrote ‘Here Comes a Regular’ with the purpose of writing a song that was sadder than . . . their record,” said Westerberg. He caught what Peter Buck called the band’s “Midwestern fatalism”: “It was always like, ‘What are you going to do?’” said Buck. “‘Well, let’s go to the CC and get drunk.’”

  At one point Westerberg casually let Hill know about a “solo song” in his back pocket. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else. “[‘Regular’] wasn’t one where I immediately thought like, ‘Oh great, there’s a good backbeat for Chris, and Tommy’s gonna dig this, and there’s a part for Bob’s big lead guitar,’” said Westerberg. “It sort of felt like, ‘God, here’s another I don’t know if the band can play on.’”

  His hesitation also had something to do with the subject matter—“Here Comes a Regular” wasn’t cheeky and exultant, like “Treatment Bound,” but was about the drudgery of drinking, the ennui of alcoholism, the dead end of a bar life where everyone knows your name.

  “I was painfully self-aware of that,” said Westerberg. “Maybe that’s why I was hesitant about the song. We’d always said, ‘We’re a bunch of drunken fucking losers.’ That was the joke. But to put it in serious terms wasn’t something I was ready for.”

  Hill felt otherwise and told Jesperson about the song. Having been welcomed back to the fold for the final bits of recording, Peter put Westerberg on the spot. “He almost wished I hadn’t brought it up, but the cat was out of the bag,” said Jesperson. “I said, ‘Well, this record could really use something like that.’” Westerberg relented. Playing and singing live, he pulled up a pair of choir baffles—fifteen-foot dividers used to separate vocalists—and hid behind them. No one in the control room could see him, and Jesperson shut the lights to near-total darkness.

  Sitting on his stool, reflecting in the dim light of the barroom, the song’s narrator looks back at the friends, love, and chances that have slipped away: “Opportunity knocks once, then the door slams shut.” The song was filled with glimpses of the drinkers Westerberg had known, both distantly and well. “There’s a little of my father in there,” he said. “There’s a little bit of Bob in there too.” Erdelyi, Fjelstad, and Jesperson sat blinking back tears during the take. “It was breathtaking,” said Jesperson.

  Even Bob Stinson couldn’t deny Westerberg this one. “I have to give him credit [on] ‘Here Comes
a Regular,’” said Bob, who tried but fell short of a fitting part for it. “I was in that mood but couldn’t pull it out of me.”

  On July 2, after nearly a month of recording and overdubs, Erdelyi hunkered down at Nicollet to mix the album with Steve Fjelstad. It worked very differently than on past ’Mats records. “Erdelyi was much more in control of mixing—not like before where everyone had their hands on stuff,” said Fjelstad.

  The Replacements weren’t entirely pleased when they heard his first batch of mixes. Westerberg was far more likely to grumble privately than say something directly. But Tommy Stinson didn’t hesitate. “At that time I was just starting to get into a place where I was growing into a young man, where I would speak up and would have things to say about shit,” said Stinson. “I remember saying, ‘Can you turn the bass up? I can’t really hear it.’”

  Later, both Paul and Tommy would claim that the reason for the album’s tinny sound was Erdelyi’s failing hearing. “Tommy Erdelyi had ear problems,” said Tommy Stinson. “He listened to a lot of it and, frankly, mixed a lot of it in headphones, quietly. That’s the fact.” Erdelyi steadfastly refuted these claims. “There’s no hearing problems. As far as mixing, I would check things with headphones sometimes. That’s all.”

  Whatever the reason, all quarters grumbled about the sound after the fact. “There was no agreement whatsoever,” said Bob Stinson. “I mean, me and Paul had some real good licks and every one of them got taken out. . . . [Erdelyi] doesn’t know how to mix the leads.”

  Westerberg was more sanguine—it wasn’t the worst thing to release a rougher-sounding record than people were expecting. “Had we done something more polished, maybe it would’ve pissed off a bunch of people,” he said. Even so, there were a few comically dogmatic critics who cried “sellout” over the album, which, frankly, was far less “produced” than Let It Be.