Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  While Warner Bros. and Sire had been largely hands-off with the band so far, Michael Hill was hearing the more disturbing scuttlebutt regarding Bob’s behavior. He also felt that Paul’s songwriting leaps on “Swingin Party” and “Here Comes a Regular” were important developments. “I was less worried about Bob’s presence in general, aesthetically,” said Hill. “Though I was becoming concerned about his behavior.”

  The album wrapped early on July 19 with the band at Nicollet. “We finished the final mix at like two or three in the morning,” said Fjelstad, who was actually set to be married the following afternoon. “Paul brought beer and stuff and said, ‘Here’s your stag party.’” In the drunken glow of the evening, there was finally a sense of excitement about what they’d achieved. “That album, to me, is one of my favorites,” said Tommy Stinson. “It represented a lot more of what we were about, and what we could be.”

  At five AM, the phone rang. It was Fjelstad’s bride-to-be. “Where the hell are you? Do you remember you’re getting married today?”

  CHAPTER 24

  Though Bob Stinson had changed much about his life in 1985—developing a new social circle outside of the band, becoming increasingly attached to Carleen—during the Replacements’ ascent the guitarist’s mental health remained largely unaddressed. It was not until the final months of his life that he would be given a proper diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

  Given his personal history and the anecdotal evidence, it’s likely that Bob’s specific condition was schizoaffective disorder, an illness that has features of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Many studies indicate a direct link between the condition and severe childhood trauma or abuse.

  The condition typically results in severe changes in mood and some of the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia, including hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking. (Sufferers are also known to shy away from most social situations.) The most severe periods can be broken up by stretches when the person shows improvement or sometimes no symptoms at all. One-third of people with schizoaffective disorder typically begin to develop the most acute symptoms in their midtwenties.

  In the summer of his twenty-fifth year, Bob would begin to show the most serious signs of his condition yet.

  Though they’d only been dating for a few months, that August Bob and Carleen got engaged. “We were sitting up in First Avenue in the middle of the afternoon, at the back bar,” recalled Krietler. “We could see across the street, and there was a jewelry store. He looked out the window and said, ‘Let’s walk over there.’”

  Bob got an advance from the band and bought her a little gold band. A few days later, he came home with the ring and proposed, in his own way. “He didn’t get down on one knee. But we both knew what it meant. Bob did a lot of talking with his eyes,” said Krietler. “I was scared to death, because I’d never been in love like that before. But I totally loved him, he totally loved me.”

  But Bob’s relationships largely ran on fear—fear of losing, fear of betrayal. As a result, he was always suspicious, even without reason. “He never trusted the girls he dated because he didn’t know how—which was kind of sad,” said Bob’s sister Lonnie. “It made him become obsessive.”

  “Carleen was not flirtatious,” said Ray Reigstad. “But Bob would think, ‘You’re hitting on that guy,’ or, ‘You’re letting that guy hit on you,’ and it just drove him crazy. He was very, very insecure.”

  That summer Bob took Carleen to a house party concert above an antique store on Lyndale. As he watched her go to the kitchen for beer, he took another man’s casual remark to Carleen (“The guy in line in front of me turned around and said, ‘This is a really good band,’ or something,” she said) as a kiss. Bob suddenly become enraged and, without warning, ran and punched Carleen. “Bob saw things that weren’t there and it would flip him out.”

  Suddenly realizing what he’d done, Bob panicked and ran out. A group of guys from the party took off after him, but he eluded them and made it back home. When Carleen returned to their apartment, she found Bob pacing the floor, beside himself. “He was so apologetic. Bob had snapped back into his body and realized what had happened. He wasn’t drunk. It was a mental snap.”

  Still confused and scared, Carleen decided to call the police. “I told him, ‘This is not good. I’m calling the cops, because this is never gonna happen again. If you wanna be with me, you have to take some steps to make sure this never happens again.’”

  Stinson was arrested by the Minneapolis Police Department, booked, and held in jail overnight. He was arraigned for assault the following day. Bob’s family—his mother Anita, brother Tommy, and sister Lonnie—all came to court to support him.

  The presiding judge was whipping through cases on his docket and was about to release Bob with a small fine and probation. He asked if anyone had anything to add before he handed down a sentence. Tommy spoke up immediately, but quickly deferred to Carleen, who explained the situation with Bob’s substance abuse, mental health issues, and the family’s fears about it all.

  The judge considered their pleas and ruled that, as part of his sentence, Bob would have to attend a court-ordered in-patient treatment program. He was recommended for the Chemical Dependency Therapy Program at St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Center in downtown Minneapolis.

  At first it seemed like a saving grace. St. Mary’s was a highly regarded center with a national reputation. Bob was committed to a month-long program with limited outside contact. After the first three weeks, patients were supposed to engage in educational and therapeutic sessions with “concerned persons”: relatives, lovers, friends, roommates. This relatively new form of “family therapy” was designed to bring about a more long-lasting recovery among addicts.

  The rest of the band knew Bob was in rehab, but not the specifics. “I didn’t know it was a court-ordered thing. I didn’t know about the [incident] with Carleen,” said Westerberg. “They didn’t want me to know that. And I guess it was none of my business. I don’t know if I would’ve felt differently if I’d known [going to rehab] was something that he had to do. It wasn’t real clear at the time. I must’ve been in my own fog.”

  After ten years, Bob was back inside another institution. One time he fled after he wasn’t able to reach Carleen for their daily call. “I didn’t get to the phone in time, so he escaped the treatment center to come check on me,” she said. On another occasion, Bob bailed to go buy drugs. “What I remember hearing is that he cut out of the place to go score, like, an eight-ball or something,” said Westerberg (though another source claimed that Krietler had actually sneaked drugs to Bob at St. Mary’s).

  Bob’s refusal to get straight was aggravating to the band, which was underwriting the costs of his rehab stay. “It just didn’t click for Bob. He wasn’t ready for it,” said Tommy. “The one thing about alcoholics and drug addicts is that they have to know it’s time and be willing to go. And he wasn’t at that place.”

  Eventually Bob made his way through the detox portion of the program and into the counseling stage. Krietler suddenly became aware of the depths of his problems. “I had never experienced addiction like that,” she said. “I got a glimpse into the horror of what it was in the family sessions. They tell you that 95 percent of people who are addicts die from their disease.”

  Slated to hit stores on October 14, the Replacements kicked around a few silly titles for their major-label debut—Whistler’s Mammy, Van Gogh’s Ear, Let It Bleed (to keep the theme going)—before settling on the rather obtuse Tim. “It started off as an inside joke. I can’t even remember what the reference was to,” said Tommy Stinson. “Calling a record Tim—after a bunch of drinks, it was funny. The next day it wasn’t so funny. But if you had more drinks, it became funny again.”

  To up the album’s class factor, Warner Bros. hired Robert Longo, a downtown New York art star of the ’80s, to do the cover, in hopes of getting him to direct a video as well. Longo flew to Minneapolis to hang out with the Replacement
s for a couple of days. “I needed to know who they were before I did it,” he said. “I was trying to make a voodoo object. I was trying to make it something more personal.” They helped Longo research by bringing him to “that fucking bar they went to”—the CC Club—and getting him “blind drunk. And I had been sober for a long time.”

  One night Longo was hanging out with Westerberg, who confided his misgivings about the Warner deal. “I had the feeling [Paul] was really worried about Bob. One of the reasons he didn’t want the band to have a lot of success was because he was afraid of what Bob would do, what would happen to him.” Longo advised him, “Stop taking the weight of the world on your shoulders.” Westerberg recalled “getting fairly emotional with him. I might’ve even sobbed, or cried; I remember embracing him and shit.”

  Longo conjured a strange mixed-media tableau for Tim’s cover. The bottom portion depicted the foreboding corridor of an Orwellian building that seemed to stand in for the music business. The top section featured a series of charcoal drawings of the band members, based on Longo’s photos of them. Mars and Westerberg appear to be blinded by some overpowering light; Tommy stands with his back turned, head bowed. The three of them are dominated by the giant upside-down image of Bob Stinson’s face, inspired by a shot of Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, which registers as an ominous peering force—all bathed in hot pink.

  “It’s very much about him,” said Longo. “Bob was obviously kind of this weird presence holding the band down, holding the band back.”

  In the third week of October the night sky in downtown Minneapolis was lit up by a curious sight: a flashing Bat Signal.

  It was Paul Westerberg’s idea of a joke. To mark the release of Tim, the Replacements had decided to do something special. Rather than play a show in the main room at First Avenue, they elected to do a five-night stand at the 7th St Entry, one of them for an all-ages audience. “Paul’s demands were that he wanted [a Batman] klieg light out for the gigs and free [soda] pop for the kids,” said Jesperson. “That was Paul’s idea of driving a hard bargain.”

  Several Warner/Sire execs flew out for the shows, squeezing into the cramped, overheated atmosphere of a more-than-oversold Entry. “All the people from New York came in,” said ’Mats roadie Bill Sullivan. “We made sure they were as uncomfortable as they could be.”

  The Replacements had hired a new soundman, Monty Lee Wilkes of Duluth, in time for the stand. At the Entry, he watched as Seymour Stein desperately tried to escape the crush of the crowd. “I remember Seymour looking terrified,” said Wilkes. “It was packed in there. I’ve possibly never seen anything quite so packed.”

  Onstage, Bob Stinson was grinning at the spectacle. He’d spent the weeks after his release from St. Mary’s doing his best to maintain his sobriety. “We went through family counseling and agreed to not have alcohol in the house or around him in support of his program,” said Carleen Krietler. “Things were pretty good for a while. The old Bob came back, the happy-go-lucky Bob.”

  That rejuvenated spirit manifested in the Replacements’ Entry shows, the bulk of which were remarkable for their sheer power. On their home turf, in their favorite venue, the band burned. They started with a Tuesday afternoon all-ages set. The Minnesota Daily noted that the band was “playing hard (that’s typical) and straight (that’s not), and sounding tighter than anyone could remember.”

  There were still occasional flashes of the tension festering within the band. First Avenue deejay Kevin Cole recalled one less than playful exchange between Paul and Bob: “They began a song, and Paul pulled down Stinson’s dress or pants or whatever he was wearing. They got into a fistfight onstage. Amps were falling down. It seemed like the fury of built-up frustration. That was just stunning to see.”

  Bill Sullivan decided to mark the final Entry show with a celebratory flourish. “I took a case of champagne out of the . . . cooler and brought it onstage and [passed it into] the whole crowd,” said Sullivan. “There was champagne everywhere. It was fun.”

  Despite the bubbly, the gig was the week’s worst. Playing four nights in a row made the band bored, then cranky, and they began messing with the crowd and with each other. Things reached an awkward point when the champagne bottles were passed around among the band. Bob demurred, not wanting to drink.

  Standing just a few feet from the stage, Carleen Krietler recalled what happened next: “Paul took a bottle of champagne, and he pointed it right at Bob and popped the cork at Bob as he was playing his lead. The cork hit him, I think in the eye or the temple. As he’s popping it, Paul said, ‘Either take a drink, motherfucker, or get off my stage.’ That’s what I heard.”

  Others there that night would recall Westerberg’s words—though Tommy Stinson was not among them. “If it happened onstage, I was on the other side and I didn’t hear it,” he said. “Or I’ve conveniently forgotten. Which is probably better.”

  After the cork hit Bob, he dove into Paul and they tussled for a moment. As Krietler would recount, Bob then reluctantly drank from the bottle. Other more dramatic versions of the story—some of which Bob himself would later relate to friends—had him chugging the whole thing with tears streaming down his face.

  Carleen would famously tell her version to SPIN in 1993 in a harrowing and controversial portrait of Bob’s post-’Mats life. The tale would be repeated in the Replacements chapter of Michael Azerrad’s 2001 indie rock history Our Band Could Be Your Life—and told and retold in dozens of stories and articles since.

  The problem is that Carleen’s original SPIN recounting was wrong in both conceit and chronology. She drew a straight line between the champagne incident and Bob’s exit from the band, depicting Westerberg’s offhanded jibe as a serious ultimatum; she claimed that Bob was fired from the group just two weeks later. In fact, nearly another year—ten months of other issues, problems, and conflicts—would pass before Bob Stinson was booted from the band.

  The champagne incident has bedeviled Westerberg for more than twenty years. “Yeah—he came out of his treatment, and I poured the liquor down his throat,” said Westerberg, dismissing the notion and the story entirely. “Everyone who knew Bob knew he was on a bad track from early on. The man would’ve self-destructed had he been a cook, if he’d never picked up a guitar.”

  Even now, Westerberg genuinely doesn’t believe the Entry incident happened, certainly not in the way it’s been portrayed. He could often be careless and cutting in what he said and did, especially when he was drunk and onstage. But the suggestion that he somehow did irreparable harm to Bob devastates him. “For everything that ever happened, or would happen between us,” said Westerberg, “I still fucking loved the guy.”

  Whatever actually transpired, Bob was affected by it, at least according to Krietler. “He came home that night in tears,” she recalled. “He was doing his best to keep the band moving and that show moving forward. He felt like everyone was trying to bring him down into clown mode.”

  A couple weeks later, the Replacements left home, to tour in support of Tim. For Bob, this meant an end to his brief sobriety. On the road, he soon plunged back into booze and other substances with a recidivist’s glee.

  Between the drink, the drugs, and his escalating mental health issues, Carleen was noticing distressing changes in Bob during the breaks between tours. She’d begun to push him to consider whether the band was a good thing for him anymore. “I asked him, ‘Is this relationship healthy, is being in the group healthy for you?’ I don’t know if he wanted to answer that honestly.”

  For Carleen the answer came later that fall when she arrived home and found Bob collapsed in the closet, with a belt wrapped around his throat. It had been a clumsy suicide attempt. The closet beam couldn’t support his weight. Even if it had, the distance of the drop could never have killed him. It was like so much else with Bob: a wounded child’s cry for attention.

  It had been a long time since Bob had felt so desperate, probably not since his teen years. Back then, too, he’d made
a couple of halfhearted suicide attempts—jumping out of second-story windows and the like.

  This time he shrugged the whole thing off and returned to the road.

  CHAPTER 25

  Just as the Replacements released Tim, Warner Bros. A&R woman, Karin Berg, signed Hüsker Dü to the label.

  Hüsker Dü was the beginning of a wave of “alternative” American rock bands that Warner would sign over the next few years: Faith No More (via a partnership with Slash Records), Jane’s Addiction, and Throwing Muses among them. “It was an experiment,” said Larry Butler, Warner’s vice president of artist relations. “Let’s not let this get by us. Let’s not get too comfy with Fleetwood Mac and Van Halen.”

  But within the company there was a certain level of disconnect. Out at the label’s Burbank headquarters, it was still all about ZZ Top and Eric Clapton. “This was the pre–alt rock era. So either you were a big FM pop/rock artist or you were not,” said Michael Hill.

  Most alternative acts were given modest expectations. Hüsker Dü was never expected to become the next Tom Petty. The Replacements’ songwriting and personal charm lent itself to a push. But, said Tommy Stinson, “most of the people at Warner Bros. were like, ‘What the fuck are these guys doing? And when are they gonna stop?’”

  Seymour Stein should have been the person to take the Replacements into the heart of Warner Bros., but he was often as full of paranoia and pique as Westerberg. “Seymour wasn’t terribly realistic as to what was radio-friendly and what wasn’t,” said Sire’s Sandy Alouette. “If something didn’t connect at radio, Seymour would often assume that Sire’s getting shafted.” And in 1985 radio was not ready for the Replacements. “The sad reality was that radio was looking at an image,” said Butler. “It was, ‘This is that alternative band, and we don’t play alternative bands.’”