Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  There was only one serious candidate: High Noon Management, the fledgling New York City–based company founded by Russ Rieger, then twenty-six, and Gary Hobbib, then thirty-one. They were an almost comic contrast in style, personality, and manner.

  Born on Long Island, the feisty Rieger was the youngest of three children in an upwardly mobile, middle-class Jewish family. He was a student at Levittown’s Island Trees High School in 1975 when the campus became a First Amendment battleground: The local board of education had removed a number of books from the school’s library in the middle of night. Rieger was one of five students who stepped forward to sue. The Supreme Court decided 5–4 in favor of the students—a landmark censorship ruling. Rieger saw the power in making a grand gesture, and it would guide his thinking going forward. He attended the University of Albany, where he majored in political science and, more decisively, became besotted with Bruce Springsteen and the Clash. After working as the music director of the college radio station and promoting campus concerts, he decided to pursue a music-biz career.

  The oldest of four kids in a Lebanese-Italian family, Gary Hobbib grew up lower-middle-class in Plainfield, New Jersey, where his father worked as a quality control manager at a factory. Gary attended college at the University of New Hampshire, where in the early seventies he booked shows on campus. “I did Aerosmith and they drew forty-five hundred people to the field house; the band trashed the dressing room,” Hobbib recalled.

  Quiet, brainy, and methodical, Hobbib earned bachelor’s degrees in both math and psychology. “Had I known I was going to manage the Replacements, I would’ve gone for the PhD in psych,” he said. He moved to Boston and became a booking agent there, meeting Rieger in 1981. They got to know each other the following year working for Side One, a New York–based music marketing and management company.

  Hobbib was tanned, with jet-black hair, a monochrome wardrobe, and a muted manner. Rieger was fair-skinned with flowing blond hair and lots of chutzpah. He was also a kind of rock-and-roll chameleon. “Whoever was popular, Russ would come in and dress that way,” said Hobbib. “One day he’d come in dressed like Prince, the next day he’d come in dressed like Springsteen.”

  Improbably, they became fast friends. “I was very intense, talked very fast,” said Rieger. “Gary was much more laid-back, very thoughtful. It was a yin-yang thing.” Added Hobbib, “Russ had a mouth, I didn’t. In this industry, if you have a mouth, nobody trusts you if that’s all you have. But if you don’t have a mouth, you don’t get anything done.”

  In early 1984, they launched High Noon out of Hobbib’s apartment with two acts: South African band Juluka, on Warner Bros., and the Wanted, rockers from Allentown, Pennsylvania. Then they landed the Del Fuegos just as that group was transitioning from Slash to Warner Bros. proper.

  High Noon didn’t become aware of the Replacements until late 1984. “I thought, ‘How the fuck is this band on the cover of the [Village] Voice?’” recalled Hobbib. “I saw they’d come up from the bottom, from the street. That was appealing to me.” At Michael Hill’s office the following summer, the managers heard an advance of the Tim closer “Here Comes a Regular.” “It gave me chills,” said Rieger. “Who are these guys and how can we work with them?” he demanded.

  It helped, said Sire’s Sandy Alouette, that “Seymour [Stein] had a good relationship with them. They knew how to work Seymour and work the building.” Not that Warner Bros. expected a hit out of the box. “Warner Brothers was like a bunch of music-loving entrepreneurs working in their own little fiefdoms,” said Hobbib. “It was a laid-back kind of company.”

  Rieger and Hobbib headed out to Minneapolis in October for their first band meeting. Predictably, the ’Mats auditioned High Noon with a marathon twelve-hour bar hop.

  “We got there at two in the afternoon, met them at the CC Club, and basically went to every bar in Minneapolis until three or four in the morning,” recalled Rieger. He and Hobbib had been warned about what they might face, and so they’d fortified themselves. “Gary and I both drank a lot of milk beforehand to make sure we were going to be okay.”

  Conversation was strained at first, but after a few rounds had been ordered, everyone loosened up. “Paul and Tommy were the only ones you could talk to. Chris didn’t really talk that much. And Bob was just out there,” said Rieger. “But they were fun. They had a lot of life in them, and it was genuine.”

  At one point they all piled into a rental car to hit the next bar. Hobbib was behind the wheel when Tommy Stinson suddenly leapt from the backseat and covered his eyes. “If you can guess who this is, you get us as clients,” said Stinson, as the car swerved wildly across Hennepin Avenue. “Then I think one of them opened the door and was trying to throw the other one out,” recalled Hobbib. “It was antics, all antics.”

  At the CC Club, Westerberg punched up “If Only You Were Lonely” on the jukebox. “He was trying to trick me, saying, ‘Forget us—you should manage this band,’” said Rieger. “He was trying to see if I knew the song or not, which I don’t think I did.”

  Westerberg laid out his ideal manager—a cracked vision gleaned from years of mythmaking rock bios and magazine stories. Paul wanted a combination of Andy Warhol and Malcolm McLaren—someone both artistic patron and merchant of chaos. “I remember him yelling over the music, telling me he wanted to be represented by a shoe magnate,” said Rieger, “who would just give them money to do whatever they wanted. Probably everything we ever should have known about the Replacements we learned that night.”

  Already, Rieger was wary of the culture of “enabling” he saw around the band. “The fans, the press, some of the people at the label even, reveled in their drinking and their shows being like a car crash,” he said. “People lived vicariously through them and egged them on.”

  Initially, Rieger and Hobbib had little inkling of the growing issues surrounding Bob Stinson or his fractured relationship with the rest of the band. Nor did High Noon grasp the depths of Westerberg’s innate aversion to authority. “We knew they were dysfunctional and big drinkers, but not enough to give us second thoughts,” said Rieger.

  For their part, Rieger and Hobbib were smart, fun, and said all the right things. The ’Mats were even willing to overlook the fact that Hobbib’s first name was the dreaded “Gary.” Wisely, High Noon also voiced support for Jesperson’s continued involvement. “We wanted Peter. We wanted that stability,” said Rieger.

  While his commission would drop from 15 to 10 percent, Jesperson’s redefined role as part of the ’Mats management would never really be made clear. High Noon saw him as a road manager as well as a kind of band buffer. “We were never thinking of co-managing,” said Rieger. “We thought of him as part of the old team in a lot of ways.”

  In late November, Jesperson called to tell High Noon they’d passed the audition. Rieger could barely control his excitement, screaming into the phone and across the room at Hobbib: “Gary, we got the fucking Replacements!” as hoots of excitement broke out. It was the last time they would ever feel such unadulterated joy about the band again.

  CHAPTER 27

  They weren’t going to light the tree for hours, but Rockefeller Center was already jammed. It was the morning of December 9, 1985, and the whole area around New York City’s Forty-Ninth Street was teeming with tourists anticipating the annual holiday ritual.

  Making his way through a crowd of Christmas carolers and promenaders, Lorne Michaels hurried past the pageantry and into the lobby of NBC Studios without looking up. The creator and producer of Saturday Night Live, Michaels had no time for holiday cheer; he was too busy worrying about saving his beloved show.

  Having helped shift the comedic and cultural zeitgeist with his original group of “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” Michaels left SNL following its first glorious five-year run in 1980. The program had continued—first, briefly and near-disastrously, under producer Jean Doumanian, then with the steadier guidance of network pro Dick Ebersol. Though Ebersol’s SN
L had showcased a stable of stars like Eddie Murphy and Billy Crystal, by 1985 its ratings were nearly half of Michaels’s final season.

  Michaels’s own golden boy status had been severely damaged the previous year when his prime-time NBC program, The New Show, was canceled midseason. “I had won big and now I was losing,” recalled Michaels. With NBC’s president, Brandon Tartikoff, threatening to cancel Saturday Night Live, Michaels felt duty-bound to return and try to revive its fortunes.

  The show’s eleventh season team included a mix of first-generation SNL writers and producers, hot young actors (Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Jr.), veteran performers (Academy Award nominee Randy Quaid), and rising stand-ups (Dennis Miller, Damon Wayans). The opener had featured Sire Records supernova Madonna as host and musical guest. The premiere was a ratings winner, but a critical loser: “This was comedy the way Hiroshima was comedy,” jibed a reviewer. By December, ratings were plummeting again, and NBC was hinting at canceling the show once and for all. “Everyone was on pins and needles, every week,” said Saturday Night Live music booker Michele Galfas.

  On The New Show, Galfas had booked adventurous acts like ex–New York Doll David Johansen, performance artist Laurie Anderson, and post-punks the Pretenders. That continued on SNL, where she brought in Dream Academy and the Cult (on one episode), Simple Minds, Queen Ida & the Bon Temps Zydeco Band, Sade, Sheila E., and Mr. Mister.

  Michaels, by his own admission, was not up on things musically. “I had to ask who Mr. Mister was,” Michaels recalled. “It turns out they have this number-one song.” The Replacements had something just as valuable: the endorsement of one of Michaels’s close friends, Warner Bros. chairman Mo Ostin.

  In mid-December, the Replacements wrapped up a month-long tour with two triumphant nights at Hollywood’s Roxy. The year-end accolades for Tim were starting to pour in: it would place second in the Village Voice’s “Pazz and Jop” poll, just behind Sire labelmates Talking Heads. But the praise had done little for the album’s commercial prospects: Tim had stalled at a modest 30,000 copies after three months, failing to crack the Billboard top 200. The label needed something to kick-start sales.

  In California, Westerberg and Jesperson were summoned to Burbank to meet with Warner creative director Jeff Ayeroff. The company had been pushing the ’Mats on the video issue. Ayeroff wanted to change their hard-line stance against making a video. Silver-haired and hulking, Ayeroff exuded a sort of Zen-hipster arrogance. He’d already overseen video campaigns for the Police’s Synchronicity and Madonna’s Like a Virgin.

  “I don’t wanna hear about the fact that you don’t want to make a video,” Ayeroff said. “I want to talk about the video that you will eventually make.”

  “Tell you what,” said Westerberg, without missing a beat, “you get us on Hee-Haw and I’ll lip-synch to ‘Waitress in the Sky.’”

  At this, Jesperson burst out laughing. Ayeroff wasn’t amused. Nevertheless, a serious conversation began about Warner Bros. getting the band on television. “The compromise was that we’d do live TV if they could swing it—thinking that they couldn’t,” said Westerberg. “Me and my big mouth.”

  First, Ayeroff sent a letter to Galfas touting the group. Then the ’Mats’ product manager, Steven Baker, and Warner A&R head Lenny Waronker pressed Mo Ostin to put in a call to Lorne Michaels. “Mo was the one who got them on Saturday Night Live, because he had such a strong relationship with Lorne,” said Waronker. “There was an understanding how important they could be for the company.”

  Based on Warner Bros.’s faith, Galfas put the ’Mats on a shortlist of acts for the show—without having seen the band play live. “That,” said Galfas, “may have been a mistake.”

  Early in 1986, after a couple of years apart, Tommy Stinson suddenly rekindled his romance with former girlfriend Daune Earle. Awkwardly, he was still dating Mary Beth Gordon, and Earle was living with Pete Conway, bassist of the hardcore band Rifle Sport. “Tommy came up to me at First Avenue,” said Earle. “It was New Year’s Eve, and my boyfriend was playing. Tommy said: ‘I’m still in love with you.’ I told him, ‘You’re drunk, go away.’” Early the next morning Earle’s phone rang. “I’m not drunk now,” Stinson told her.

  This only added to Tommy’s local rep as a lothario. “He was quite hated around town, because he was such a cocky kid,” said Earle. “But I saw something in Tommy that a lot of people didn’t see. At his core, I knew he was a really good person.” The couple were soon living together, but the day Earle moved into his apartment, Tommy hit the road. “It seemed like the band was just gone all the time,” she said.

  Bob Stinson’s domestic situation was no less complicated. Following his assault arrest, his rehab stint, and the halfhearted suicide attempt, he’d toned down his drinking and drugging to appease his fiancée. But after a fall and winter on the road, he’d fully returned to his old habits.

  “He’d get up at the crack of dawn and I’d hear him go into the kitchen and pop a can of beer,” said Carleen Krietler. “A beer for breakfast, a six-pack by lunch, a case by midnight, and he’d get up the next day and do it again, and again. He couldn’t go fishing, go to the movies, couldn’t go anywhere, unless we picked up a six-pack on the way. I thought it was just beer—but I later found he was hiding whiskey in his sock drawer.”

  As Bob’s drinking escalated, his involvement with the band became even more strained. The Replacements had effectively recorded Tim as a trio. Now Tommy, Paul, and Chris were rehearsing without Bob on a regular basis.

  The Replacements, Bob in tow, did return to the stage on January 11 at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro. The one-off gig was a tune-up for an East Coast tour scheduled to commence later in the month.

  When the group arrived back home from Chicago, they got word that a last-minute slot had opened up on Saturday Night Live. The Pointer Sisters, scheduled for that week’s show, had to cancel.

  The band was going to make their national television debut, fittingly, as replacements.

  In early January, NBC chairman Grant Tinker was asked for his assessment of Saturday Night Live. “It’s a hard job to keep a show like that fresh and alive. . . . I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt,” said Tinker ominously, “for a little while.”

  Harry Dean Stanton would host the January 18 edition of SNL. One of the more offbeat choices in the program’s history, the fifty-nine-year-old character actor was enjoying a late-career surge thanks to hip directors like Wim Wenders and John Hughes. The episode would also feature controversial stand-up comic Sam Kinison as a special guest, as well as the Replacements—a potential powder keg of a lineup.

  The ’Mats arrived in New York on Wednesday and did a run-through at NBC’s studio 8H Thursday morning. It was clear from the outset that this was not the “wild and crazy” SNL of the seventies. “They’d stocked the dressing room with breakfast stuff—fruits and juices,” recalled Peter Jesperson. “Bob wanted beer. And the people at SNL were really, really appalled by this. I had to go down and find a store in Rockefeller Plaza and get a six-pack.”

  “They didn’t like us too much down there,” Bob Stinson would recall. “They pretty much ignored us, thinking we would probably crumble—when, in fact, it was quite the opposite.”

  The show’s uncertain status was palpable even to outsiders. “We could feel that the show wasn’t funny and wasn’t popular at the time,” said Jesperson. As it turned out, a number of NBC affiliates had already committed to preempting Saturday Night Live that week in order to air a syndicated cerebral palsy telethon. (The episode was shown on late-night tape delay in numerous markets, including the band’s hometown of Minneapolis.)

  Newly minted Replacements co-manager Russ Rieger turned up to the rehearsal with his poodle coif, leather pants, and snakeskin boots. “Okay, guys, you know what camera blocking is?” he asked the band. “That’s where you’ve gotta stand in the spot they tell you.” Jesperson winced. “That was the worst kind of thing you could say to the Replacements,
” he said. “It was the first time I started to wonder if picking [High Noon] was such a good idea.”

  Oddly, the ’Mats toyed with performing “Answering Machine” on the show. Warner Bros. was understandably miffed that the group would use the SNL spot they’d lobbied for to play a Twin/Tone number. Finally, the band settled on “Bastards of Young” and Tim’s putative single, “Kiss Me on the Bus.”

  During rehearsal, Westerberg recalled SNL’s soundman working on a crossword puzzle. He’d occasionally glance at the decibel meter, then yell at the band to turn it down. “They told us the scream at the beginning of ‘Bastards of Young’ wouldn’t come across on TV,” said Paul.

  The ’Mats’ lawyers and label benefactors showed up Saturday to wish them luck. The band members’ significant others had flown out for the occasion; even Twin/Tone’s Paul Stark made the trip. Coincidentally, Stark had attended prep school in Minnesota with SNL writer-producers Tom Davis and Al Franken, and he spent time catching up with them on set.

  By that evening the band’s reputation as a handful was clear to everyone on the show’s staff. None of the Replacements realized they’d be trapped on the eighteenth-floor set from sound check till showtime. When Warner Bros. publicist Mary Melia arrived to look in on them, Tommy, Paul, and Chris were on a dressing room couch, watching uncomfortably as Bob paced like a caged animal. “He was out of his mind to leave,” said Melia. “Bob was scary.”

  To soothe the band’s nerves, soundman Monty Lee Wilkes smuggled some alcohol into the studio in a little road case. As the ’Mats began to dip in, the show’s host said hello. When “Harry Dean stuck his head in, we asked him to have a snort,” recalled Westerberg. “He slammed the door behind him and proceeded to gulp.”

  Word began to circulate that the host was getting drunk mere hours before the live show. Panic ensued until a production assistant dragged Stanton out of the band’s dressing room.