Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  In a way, the Replacements were guinea pigs for the way alternative music would be developed, promoted, and sold at Warner Bros. “The alternative format was still kind of like playschool for most executives,” said label executive Steven Baker. “It didn’t mean big sales, it wasn’t powerful enough. So Warner Brothers, being the groovy company it was, allowed people to play around in that world.” Baker soon moved from A&R into product management, essentially to look after the new cutting-edge signings at the label. He would handle those duties for the Replacements and become one of the band’s key West Coast allies.

  “Warner Brothers was a fabulous machine that could sell millions of Fleetwood Mac records,” said Adam Sommers, vice president of Warner’s creative services department. “When it came to bands like the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, even Talking Heads, there wasn’t any understanding of how to market these bands.”

  Warner’s explosive eighties success—with ZZ Top, Prince, and Madonna all peaking at once—further marginalized smaller acts. “The WEA guys are overwhelmed,” said Sommers. “They’re focused on selling their hits, because they make their commissions that way. And Seymour was saying there needed to be a specialized group of people who could make sure these other records wouldn’t fall between the cracks.”

  In 1984 Sommers put together an “alternative marketing department.” It was an anomaly within the company—a young, female-dominated division that started with Mary Hyde and Cathy Lincoln and later included Jo Lenardi and Julie Panebianco. Both Lenardi and Panebianco had been friends with the ’Mats for years, and all knew the burgeoning indie/alternative world unlike anyone else at Warner Bros.

  The alt-marketing department ran wild contests and promotions, hosted listening parties, interfaced with independent retailers, and advanced tours. They worked grassroots retail and avoided Warner groupthink. “Eighty percent of the people that worked at the label just didn’t get what we were doing at all,” said Jo Lenardi. “They couldn’t understand it, didn’t think it mattered. They were dinosaurs in our eyes.”

  These alt-marketing “girls” were the Replacements’ closest conduits to the label for the first couple of years. “Even then, we still found ways to make a mess,” said Tommy Stinson. As much as he and Paul were beginning to see the promise of a career, they seemed incapable of accepting the compromises of one. “We were not smart enough to know how to play that game, or didn’t want to play the game because we thought it was beneath us,” said Tommy.

  Sommers, like many at the label, saw the band’s rebel stance as naive, if not hypocritical: “Once you sign with Warner Brothers, you’re in the game. You’re not indie renegades.” But that conflict was acute within the Replacements and played out in their conduct and the way they performed. “Anybody who saw them on a good night drank the Kool-Aid,” said Warner’s sales vice president Charlie Springer. “I think maybe the problem was that some people rarely saw them on a good night. There were regional sales people who never saw them on a good night.”

  After nearly three years touring the country, the Replacements’ reputation guaranteed some kind of chaos wherever they went. “Sometimes we would come into a venue and people would be terrified off the bat,” said soundman Monty Lee Wilkes. “It depended on what had happened the last time.”

  In addition to Peter Jesperson and Bill Sullivan, the band’s traveling retinue now included Wilkes and their old friend Casey Macpherson. Macpherson had just come from tour-managing the Suburbs and would soon leave to do the same job for Hüsker Dü. With the ’Mats, he served as monitor man—despite the fact that he had no experience or qualifications for the job. Each show, like a running comedy, Westerberg would become frustrated with the monitor mix and fire Macpherson from the stage. “Then at the end of the night he’d come very sheepishly, apologize, and rehire me,” said Macpherson.

  The Tim tour provided more and better targets for mischief. “There were bigger PAs and more expensive microphones to break, and nicer wedges to pour drinks into,” said Wilkes, laughing.

  At the board, Wilkes began to understand that, contrary to popular belief, the band’s alcohol intake wasn’t always the reason for their more unhinged performances. “I’ve seen them so drunk they could hardly walk and go out and just amaze. And I’ve seen them where everything looked like it was going pretty good and, God knows what, but something happened between the dressing room and the stage, and it turned.”

  Heading into Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee, there would be plenty of those turns. Something about the South brought it out in the band; their history in the region would be checkered with riotous gigs, audience battles and arrests. “When certain bands came down south to play, there was a radical-ness to the shows in the region,” said Wayne Coyne of Oklahoma’s Flaming Lips. “The Replacements shows in the area were always like that too.”

  In Nashville the ’Mats shared a bill at Rooster’s with their buddies Agitpop. “Tommy wore a green plastic cowboy hat and made some snide comments that really pissed the crowd off,” recalled Agitpop’s John DeVries. The next night the two bands played together at the Antenna Club in Memphis. “That show was kind of a downer. There wasn’t a lot of people there,” said DeVries.

  “We were gonna meet at Graceland the next morning to visit Elvis. Everybody was hungover.” Apparently Westerberg had no desire to linger at the King’s backyard grave. “I think him and Tommy found a bar across the street that was selling Budweisers at ten-thirty in the morning, while the rest of us went,” said DeVries.

  In Norman, Oklahoma, the band had been booked to play the Subterranean, run by Wayne Coyne’s girlfriend, out in the middle of a dry county. She brought in booze for the band, with a warning to keep the alcohol confined to the dressing room.

  Just before showtime, Tommy was swinging on a back door leading to the alley, when a cop car happened by and spotted him. “They made some comment, and he lipped off to them, and they got out and said, ‘Young man, come over here,’” recalled Jesperson.

  “So they pull me out and go, ‘Can you walk a straight line?’” recalled Tommy. “Fuck, probably not. I’m getting ready to go onstage here and I’m having a drink. I guess I was underage down there. They threw me in the fucking clink.” Stinson was charged with public intoxication.

  Now missing their bass player, the band was forced to take the stage as a trio. “Everybody was worried about Tommy, but the show must go on,” said Wilkes. Someone whispered to Westerberg that Wilkes could play bass. “Now, I can barely bang out a crappy punk rock song,” said Wilkes. “But they start calling me from the stage.”

  Jesperson came over to the sound booth and told him to head up.

  “I’m not doing it,” insisted a mortified Wilkes.

  Peter sighed wearily: “Monty, you’ve got nothing to do with this,” he said. “You’re going up there, and if you don’t, they’ll leave the stage and they’ll come back here and they will physically drag you up there. So save yourself and everybody a lot of trouble and just go do it.”

  Bill Sullivan was throwing punters back into the pit, all of them angling to get up and play bass, as Wilkes walked up and strapped on Tommy’s Rickenbacker. The band started banging out the easiest thing it could think of: Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” In the spirit of the moment, Macpherson got up to sing. But after a few half-baked covers the crowd grew restless.

  Paul surveyed the scene and leaned over to Wilkes. “They’re getting ugly. We need to give them what they want,” said Westerberg, who called for “I Will Dare.”

  “My blood ran cold,” said Wilkes. “I didn’t have the slightest idea how to play that.”

  Up to that point, Bob had been helping Wilkes, facing him and playing well-defined power chords so he could follow along. When Westerberg started up “I Will Dare,” Bob looked at Wilkes, laughed, and turned away. He was on his own.

  “I don’t think we made it to the chorus before it fell apart and people started pelting us with all kinds of shit,�
� said Wilkes. “I saw Chris split first. Then I said, ‘I’m out.’ That was the end. There was nothing else we could do.” The band actually came back and soldiered on, with Westerberg grabbing the bass and letting a few audience members play before the whole enterprise finally collapsed.

  They got Tommy out of jail around three in the morning. Wayne Coyne drove Jesperson down to the police station in his Volkswagen Bug. By this point, Peter had knocked back quite a few himself, and he was acting a little cocky toward the night sergeant as he arranged Tommy’s release. The cop on the desk sniffed at him: “Hey, pal, I can smell liquor on your breath—you wanna join your little buddy in there?”

  Jesperson quieted down, paid the $50 fine, and sprung Tommy. He made sure to save the receipt for tax purposes.

  In the world of the Replacements, bail had become another business expense.

  The rising action of the tour reached its climax a few nights later in Houston, where the ’Mats played the Lawndale Art Annex.

  It was an unusual venue for the band—a couple of miles from the University of Houston campus, it was basically an old warehouse the school used for more highbrow art events. The gig’s promoter, Tom Bunch, had been booking hardcore and punk shows in the city for several years, working with Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys (he would go on to manage the Butthole Surfers) without any problems.

  The Replacements had sold some 600 tickets in advance to a mix of punk scenesters and college kids. The latter demographic was making up a more noticeable chunk of the band’s audience. “Hey, Greeks! If you like Springsteen, R.E.M. or U2, you’ll love the Replacements!” ran a show ad in one student newspaper that autumn.

  There was also an increasingly large contingent of rubberneckers. “The audience no longer exclusively consisted of people who ‘got it,’” said Wilkes. “I could see it looking around every night. There were the people that had come solely to see the car crash. You’d overhear them in the can: ‘I hope they’re not too drunk tonight.’ ‘Oh man, that’s the only way to see them.’ These were the kind of people who would’ve tried to beat up the band at a party two years earlier.”

  The Lawndale Annex gig also reunited the Replacements with Alex Chilton, who’d come up from New Orleans to play a couple of shows with the band. Perhaps Chilton’s presence played a part—Westerberg was always looking to impress him—but that night Paul almost singlehandedly started a riot. “For years I claimed Alex had spiked my drink backstage and put some sort of hallucinogen in it,” said Westerberg, “because my behavior was so off the map.”

  From the start, Jesperson sensed it was going to be one of those shows. Early on the Tim tour, he’d tried harder to dole out the booze in increments, and not too far in advance. “I’d have to lie to them all the time about that: ‘We can only get a twelve-pack now.’ I was trying to ration it out as best I could.”

  In Houston, Chilton asked Jesperson for a lift back to his hotel and to wait while he got ready, then took his time shaving and getting dressed. Meanwhile, the band got its hands on the rest of the liquor: “A bottle of whiskey, a bottle of vodka, two cases of Bud, one of Heineken, and one bottle of red wine,” recalled Bunch. When he went into check on them a little later, “every bottle was empty. Completely bone dry. I thought, This is going to be interesting.” When Jesperson finally returned, he walked into the dressing room to find the band had “actually embedded bottles of Heineken into the drywall. Not only was the liquor gone, but I was required to get them more.”

  Outside, fans did double takes: Paul and Tommy and a couple of local women “were sitting out front of the venue, in the gravel parking lot, in a kiddie pool, with no water in it, completely fucking drunk,” said Bunch. Meanwhile, Chilton’s set was being marred by some hecklers. “So Paul and Tommy dragged the kiddie pool out into the middle of the people who were being assholes, just to mess with them,” recalled Wilkes.

  The ’Mats began. As a local alt-weekly reported: “To say ‘degenerate’ implies that the Replacements started out in control.” Drinking Jack Daniels from the bottle, Paul stumbled back into the amps, and then fell into Chris Mars’s drum kit. “I was legless when we went on and couldn’t play at all,” said Westerberg. “We finally tried ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ thinking that might come easy, but I couldn’t finish a song.”

  After about thirty minutes of this ineptitude, Westerberg knew what had to be done: “It became plain that we could suck or we could incite a riot and get this thing over with,” he said. The audience’s ire was already obvious, as they booed and shouted at Westerberg. “People were fucking pissed off that they’d paid eight bucks to see this,” said Bunch. “Then they started throwing stuff at him.” The band promptly picked up the half-full beer cans aimed their way and drank the remains.

  Westerberg got on the mic and offered the audience their money back. He grabbed his wallet, fished out a few dollar bills and threw them into the crowd. At that point, a line of disgruntled patrons formed at the box office looking for their refunds—“whereupon the doorman spirited the cash box to safety,” as the Houston Chronicle noted.

  Once things began to devolve, much of the crowd—which included the Velvet Underground’s Sterling Morrison, whom Bunch had invited to the show—fled in fear. “Half the audience bolted when it got weird, ’cause they thought it was going to get violent,” said Bunch. “The other half stayed to the bitter end to see the debacle.”

  The older couple who ran the Annex quickly called campus police. It took them only a few minutes to arrive, and they were followed closely by a group of City of Houston police officers. By then, however, things had gotten even uglier:

  “You suuuuck!”

  “Go back to Minneapolis, you Yankee pieces of shit!”

  At that, Westerberg went into his wrestling heel routine, laying it on thick.

  “You guys are a buncha fucking ignorant rednecks. If you come up north to Minneapolis, this is what we call music,” he said mockingly. “This is actually considered quality music north of the Mason-Dixon Line. You fuckers wouldn’t know good music if it hit you in the head.”

  “That really, really pissed the audience off,” said Bunch. “Calling Texans a bunch of ignorant hicks? Those were fighting words.”

  Sure enough, a group of shit-kickers down front lunged at Westerberg’s legs, trying to pull him down. “I remember getting a cowboy boot right up the spine, right up the ass,” said Westerberg. “A guy literally kicked my ass back up on the stage.”

  When the cops showed up, they immediately ordered Wilkes to shut off the PA. “But they were the kind of band that was so loud you could turn the PA off and not notice any difference,” Wilkes said.

  Attempting to bring it to a close, the police were forced to go onstage and physically take the instruments from the band. Jesperson watched as one of Houston’s finest snatched Westerberg’s guitar from around his neck. “I’d seen a lot of stuff with the Replacements, but I’d never seen that happen,” he said.

  Westerberg continued jawing and tussling with the crowd. It appeared he was about to be pulled into a sea of angry Texans when the police intervened. “Five cops tried to keep thirty or forty people from beating up the band,” said Bunch. “The cops were throwing people off the stage, throwing them by their arms and hair and trying to keep them from pummeling those guys.”

  The ’Mats made a hasty exit stage left; Westerberg figured they’d arrest him for inciting the whole mess. “I do remember,” he said, “someone shoving me under the table in the dressing room behind a tablecloth, hiding me from the police.”

  The band managed to escape without being locked up. Bunch, meanwhile, was billed several thousand dollars for the police services and the venue damages to the Annex. “They never did another musical event there,” he said.

  After the show, Westerberg, still seriously wasted, realized he needed to call his girlfriend Lori Bizer back home to check in. Jesperson stopped at a pay phone and marveled as Paul chatted casually with Bizer.

&n
bsp; “I was close enough to overhear, and he was talking totally normal. ‘Hi, honey, how you doing?’ He was acting as if nothing had happened.”

  “Paul’s thing was performance art,” said Agitpop’s John DeVries. “I was never once under the impression that it was some dumb guy who was drunk, stumbling through all this. He knew exactly what was up, always.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Since 1980, Peter Jesperson had been the ’Mats’ band manager, road manager, driver, babysitter, and best friend. But moving to Sire/Warner Bros. meant he was now expected to interface with label executives, schmooze with industry players, and plan business moves. Jesperson was a music lover, not a mogul in training, and the job had outgrown his particular skill set.

  No one was more aware of it than Jesperson himself, especially after a fall strategy session at Warner Bros. in New York with lawyer George Regis. “I remember thinking, This is not my world,” said Jesperson, who wanted to bring in outside management to handle the band’s industry concerns. “I’d remain their personal manager,” he said.

  Despite their acclaim, the Replacements were a tough sell. “It was the thought that these people are genuinely out of control,” said Jesperson. When they tried to engage Ramones and Talking Heads manager Gary Kurfirst, “he did not want the trouble,” said Regis.

  Veteran Mike Lembo of Mike’s Artist Management, whose roster included the Church and NRBQ, had a typically troubling encounter when he met the band in Minneapolis. “They were all so drunk they could barely sit and have a conversation,” recalled Lembo. “I was really angry. I knew they had a reputation as drunks, but this was about business. If this is something they’re doing for fun, I’m not amused. And if this is how they’re going to treat their career, I’m not amused either.”