Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Sufficiently lubricated, the ’Mats’ dress rehearsal set went off smoothly. Bob had wowed everyone by donning a striped lady’s unitard that Julie Panebianco and Lori Bizer had picked up for him the day before. The only hitch occurred during “Bastards of Young”—Bob was late coming in on the solo. Westerberg would make sure he didn’t miss his cue during the live broadcast.

  Episode seven of SNL’s new season was yet another dog: weak commercial spoofs, a one-joke send-up of the Miami Vice set in Cleveland, a hackneyed Western gunfighter skit. Stanton was still wearing his frontier finery when he introduced the band just after midnight.

  As the group blasted the opening notes of “Bastards,” the cameras practically recoiled at the volume. Following the dress rehearsal, the ’Mats had secretly turned up their amps; it took a few seconds for the engineers to turn the sound down.

  Mars, looking pale and antic in denim overalls, bared his teeth as he played; Tommy bounced around vigorously, ignoring any notion of camera blocking, and was mostly out of frame; Bob hunkered down to wrestle manfully with his guitar, a comic counterpoint to his flowing, feminine outfit.

  Westerberg performed in a state of drunken insouciance. Several times during the song he walked away from the mic in the middle of a verse and casually strolled around the stage as if they were jamming in Ma Stinson’s basement and not to a television audience of eight million. “We just pretended we weren’t on camera,” he recalled.

  As the solo break approached, Westerberg shouted toward Bob, just offmic: “Come on, fucker.” The epithet, delivered as he turned his head, slipped past the censors. “It wasn’t really something I planned,” he said. “It was more me saying to Bob, ‘Let’s give it to ’em with everything we got.’”

  Quickly, however, the show’s producers realized that an obscenity had gone out live on the air. Producer Al Franken, standing in front of the band and gripping a clipboard, began to frown. Westerberg gave him an exaggerated vaudeville wink.

  After Mars bashed out the climactic machine-gun coda, “Bastards” careened to a halt. Tommy and Paul bowed comically. Bob followed with a backward somersault, revealing a tear in the seat of his outfit—his bare ass flashed briefly on-screen. The crowd, packed with ’Mats partisans, cheered wildly. Most people in the studio audience had missed Westerberg’s obscenity. But Lorne Michaels hadn’t.

  SNL had a troubled history with the F-word. In 1981 cast member Charles Rocket had said it during a Dallas spoof; the slip led to Rocket’s firing and loads of bad press for the program. “The whole deal with the network, in my mind, is that we operate on a level of trust,” said Michaels. “We have live air.” The producer was already on edge about SNL’s precarious position with NBC. Any kind of controversy, especially now, could be a fatal blow to the show.

  Jubilation followed the ’Mats to the dressing room. Everyone agreed they’d delivered a momentous performance. Rieger and Hobbib were busy shaking hands and slapping backs when there was a knock at the door. “An assistant told me, ‘Lorne Michaels wants to see you in the hall,’” said Rieger. “I’m thinking he wants to congratulate us.”

  Instead, Michaels stormed up and began to berate Rieger loudly: “How dare you do this? Do you know what you just did to this show? Your band will never perform on television again!”

  Rieger was genuinely perplexed as to the cause of Michaels’s anger. “Finally, I figured out that Paul had said ‘fuck’ on the air,” said Rieger. “I immediately started apologizing. Michaels wouldn’t hear of it. Since we were a new band and young, and a favor for Warner Bros., he could unleash. And he did.” Mid-tirade, Michaels caught a glimpse of the dressing room—the band had “redecorated” it. “He saw that and reamed them a new asshole,” said Hobbib. “It was horrible.”

  Michaels’s fit cast a pall over the band, but there was still another song to do. After Kinison’s stand-up set and several more sketches—including one called “Barroom Drunk”—the ’Mats went back out to play “Kiss Me on the Bus.” Perhaps a bit unnerved, the band botched the count-off and had to start the song twice. They quickly recovered, though, and played a gleeful, grooving version.

  They were quite a sight too: during the break, Paul, Tommy, and Chris had all changed clothes with one another. “I was in the bathroom getting high,” said Bob. “I had no idea those three had switched clothes, I didn’t even know until I saw the playback.”

  During the guitar solo, Michaels and the network censors held their collective breaths as Tommy sauntered toward Westerberg’s microphone. Grinning, he sarcastically whined, “Darn it!” The performance ended with Bob shouting, “Thank you!” and hurling his Les Paul behind his head—the guitar crashed in a heap of feedback. “Rock-and-roll doesn’t always make for great television,” said Westerberg. “But we were trying to do whatever possible to make sure that was a memorable evening.”

  The ’Mats returned to the stage for the end-of-show good-night. Aside from Bob, mugging behind cast member Joan Cusack, the rest of the band joked among themselves on the fringes, departing before the credits finished.

  Afterwards, band and entourage headed to the post-show wrap party at Café Luxembourg. When Michaels saw Rieger, he summoned him over to his table. “He proceeded to dress me down a second time in front of a bunch of people. I looked at him like, ‘Are you getting great pleasure out of this?’ But there was nothing I could do. All I could think about was him calling Mo Ostin.”

  Michaels may have been running hot, but the rest of the cast was decidedly cold. “We were ignored by everybody,” said Michael Hill. As Bob Stinson put it: “They put their noses up at us, and we spit up their nose hole.”

  Bob Stinson returned to the Berkshire Hotel and, in a chemical-fueled rage, proceeded to tear up his room, breaking a door, smashing a window, and shattering a pair of phones. He then got into a violent argument with Krietler, who emerged the following day visibly battered. “She came out all bruised up,” recalled Tommy. “It was troubling how much they fought. It was really dark and fucked-up.”

  Westerberg had been shielded from Bob’s previous assault incident and the extent of his mental and emotional troubles. But now everyone—including the label—was becoming aware just how deep his problems ran.

  On Monday, when Michaels got the $1,100 bill for the hotel damages, he hit the roof again. He was threatening to ban not just the ’Mats but any Warner Bros. act from appearing on SNL. In one night, the Replacements had managed to destroy a decade of cozy relations between the show and the label. “After that, we had to start over with half the executives at [Warner Bros.],” said Gary Hobbib.

  “I didn’t get it,” said Steven Baker. “I saw the performance and thought the Replacements were great.” Eventually, the hotel damages were paid for, the label issued apologies, and Michaels was soothed. “He was willing to let it go because of Mo,” said Baker.

  A couple of weeks later, Baker was invited to dinner with Ostin and Michaels at the Ivy Restaurant in Los Angeles. SNL cast members Jon Lovitz and A. Whitney Brown joined them. When they found out about Baker’s role in the Replacements’ booking, the table began to tear into him. “They were being jerks,” said Baker. “I remember saying to them, ‘If John Belushi was on the show, he probably would’ve been up there playing with the Replacements.’ They had no sense of humor about it.”

  A couple months later, NBC’s brass decided to cancel Saturday Night Live; only a last-minute reprieve gave Michaels another year to right the ship. SNL would soon return to ratings glory and cultural prominence.

  The Replacements wouldn’t appear on American television for another three years.

  CHAPTER 28

  For all the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing, the Replacements’ SNL performance actually had a positive effect: a week later, Tim finally cracked the Billboard top 200 after four months, at number 192. It spent seven more weeks in the chart’s lower reaches, doubling sales to roughly 75,000. Still, the Lorne Michaels dustup effectively ruled out live TV as a
viable promotional tool for the band.

  The same month the Star-Tribune, the band’s hometown newspaper, reported that the SNL appearance had persuaded Warner Bros. to consider “a satellite broadcast of a half-hour ’Mats concert to several cities around the country.” This was pure PR hype: the label was instead upping pressure for a video.

  Then Jeff Ayeroff had another idea: what if they made a video in which the band didn’t appear? “It gave them plausible deniability,” said Ayeroff. “They could go: ‘Oh, the record company did that, we didn’t do that.’” Several fellow Warner alternative acts, like the Smiths and New Order, had made videos in which they didn’t perform or appear. For the ’Mats, Ayeroff proposed something radical: a mostly static black-and-white shot of a stereo speaker blasting the band’s song.

  “The premise was, you’re in a college kid’s dorm room with a cinder-block bookstand and a stereo. The guy would be smoking a cigarette, listening to the song, and we’d show the speaker rumbling,” recalled Ayeroff. “The original idea was that he drops the cigarette and the carpet catches on fire. We couldn’t get that cleared by MTV. But it was making lemonade out of lemons.”

  That March, Westerberg told a reporter: “We’ve been able to resist making a video until now. But then, the video we’re making no one will ever want to watch again.”

  At the end of March, Bob Stinson and Carleen Krietler tied the knot at Blaisdell Manor, a Georgian-style mansion in South Minneapolis. The cards sent out by the bride’s family read: “On the dawn of a dream come true . . . ”

  But Krietler’s doctor father was anything but thrilled—and this was before he’d found out about Stinson’s assault arrest and the couple’s violent relationship. “My family thought he was marrying me for my inheritance, and his family thought I was marrying him because he was in the Replacements,” said Krietler. “We didn’t have a lot of support from anyone.”

  Though the other ’Mats attended the ceremony, Bob’s young pals Ray Reigstad and John Reipas were his best men. Most of the people at the wedding didn’t know who they were. “If anyone asks,” Bob told them, “I’m just gonna tell them you guys are my fishing buddies from Florida.”

  It was a formal affair with a few dozen guests watching as a justice of the peace presided over the nuptials. When Bob was asked if he took Carleen as his bride, he replied innocently, “Sure.” The justice snapped, telling him to follow instructions. Bob shrugged and said: “O-kay . . . I do.” After a quick Las Vegas honeymoon, the band resumed touring the Midwest and East Coast in early April.

  Peter Jesperson was now merely part of a chorus instead of the only one with the Replacements’ ear. He responded to his diminished status by ratcheting up his drinking and drug abuse. “Maybe there was a point where I was drowning my sorrows,” said Jesperson.

  This was risky behavior for a band road manager: “There were a couple [of] situations where I did the settlement after the show, and the promoter knew I was several sheets to the wind.” In Oklahoma City the previous fall, Westerberg had found Jesperson passed out in the hallway instead of settling accounts with the venue. “It wasn’t about the money,” said Westerberg. “I was thinking to myself: How long has this been going on, where the ‘responsible adult’ is one of us?”

  The next day Westerberg offered Jesperson a gentle warning. “If you’re not careful, this could be a problem.” Jesperson got the message: “Basically, ‘Your job’s in jeopardy if it keeps up,’” he recalled. But the ’Mats were becoming habitually destructive, and impossible for Jesperson to deal with.

  In advance of the Tim tour, Jesperson wanted to rent a vehicle with a commode. “They were drinking so much they’d have to stop to go to the bathroom constantly,” he said. But no one in the Twin Cities was interested in renting an RV or Winnebago to a rock band. Jesperson found a sympathetic dealer in Elk River, Minnesota, named Rollie Stevenson. “He said, ‘Peter, I’m tired of rock bands being treated like second-class citizens. I’ll rent to you,’” said Jesperson. “Famous last words.”

  The band’s new mini-RV had couches in front, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a lounge in the back. It wouldn’t last long.

  A week into the tour, following a gig at Toronto’s Concert Hall, Jesperson was already dreading getting the band back across the border. “Our rallying cry was always ‘Drunk for customs!’” recalled Westerberg. Jesperson decided to leave the sozzled ’Mats in Bill Sullivan’s hands and hopped into the equipment van with Monty Lee Wilkes ahead of them to deal with customs.

  They got to the Bond Court Hotel in downtown Cleveland earlier than expected. Jesperson had just enjoyed a nice shower and hot meal when he stopped at the front desk to see if the band had checked in. Just then, a set of keys went flying over his shoulder and landed on the desk in front of him. He turned and saw a haggard Sullivan standing there, covered in white paint. “You go park that thing,” Sullivan told him. “I’m never getting in it again.”

  Tommy and Paul were in the corner of the hotel lobby, averting their eyes like guilty children. “You park it,” Jesperson told Sullivan wanly. “I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  Jesperson’s mouth was agape as he surveyed the damage in the morning. In Toronto the band had stolen a couple of cans of paint backstage and turned the inside of the RV into a Jackson Pollock canvas. “They’d broken every window except the front windshield. Bob had been in the passenger seat and was about to give that a heave-ho too when somebody came to their senses and stopped him,” said Jesperson.

  The toilet was ripped out and tossed through the back door while speeding down the highway. Cabinets and fixtures were yanked out of the walls. All that was left were broken boards and lumber piled up in the back lounge.

  There was another week of dates left. “We actually had to finish the trip like that, driving around with all these broken windows. It was cold and, at times, rainy,” said Jesperson. “They struggled to find a clean dry place to sit, and they’d get ornery. The toilet was gone, so they just went to this heap of debris in the back and took a leak on that. Bob took a dump back there once. It was miserable driving that thing back. The moods were terrible at that point.”

  Jesperson would eventually concoct a story for the RV’s owner about overzealous fans partying and causing most of the damage. The bill: $10,000, a major chunk of the tour’s proceeds. It made Jesperson appear ineffectual to High Noon. Later, he would wonder aloud, “Maybe they were trying to make it so bad that I would quit.”

  Touring only exacerbated Bob Stinson’s distance from the other Replacements. He’d started to bail on sound checks, disappearing for hours to do drugs, then showing up late for sets. “It’s difficult to play in a band like the Replacements when all of a sudden you’ve got a stranger in the band,” Westerberg said. “We’d only see him onstage, really. He just drifted away from us.”

  At a Washington, DC, show, a fight broke out at the foot of the stage, and roadie Bill Sullivan got pulled into the mix. “Tommy and I dropped our instruments and dove into the crowd immediately to help, and Bob just stood there laughing,” said Westerberg. “In my head, I thought, God, I always figured he was with us fists-a-flying, no matter what. We could’ve used his muscle, and he didn’t join in. And we got our asses kicked.”

  Paul and Tommy had lightly fantasized about getting another guitarist over the years. Now those conversations were becoming more realistic. It was difficult to conceive of the Replacements without Bob, but things had become seriously problematic. The situation was further complicated by family ties and shifting loyalties: a deepening fraternity between Tommy and Paul was slowly supplanting the Stinson brothers’ bond.

  “Paul and I, we started to think, ‘Wow, we might have a chance here to do something,’” said Tommy. Paul had pushed a broom just long enough to afford his guitar and amp. Tommy had lasted all of a day washing dishes. Now, being a musician—a rock star—was within reach.

  Bob’s perspective couldn’t have been more different. The amount of roadw
ork required to support Tim had finally forced him to quit Mama Rosa’s. Between tours, he started working with an old friend, guitarist Bob Dunlap, in a cleaning crew tidying up local clubs during the day. The band had earlier joked about it, scrawling on flyers: “Bob Stinson (who wants to be a janitor anyway).” But Bob had no hang-ups about manual labor, and he clearly wasn’t suited for a music career.

  To Dunlap, Bob admitted that part of him had never wanted to play anyplace bigger than the Entry; he had never wanted to leave Minneapolis and preferred being a big fish in a small pond. Those feelings only increased when he fell in love with Carleen, and then again as more and more people he didn’t know—whose names he couldn’t remember, and who only seemed interested in Paul and Tommy—came into the band’s camp.

  There was another element at play regarding the band’s ownership. “There was always a very strange force within Bob to defeat Paul, to prove that Paul wasn’t any good, to somehow kick him out of the band,” said Dunlap.

  Six years after the fact, Bob was still mad that Westerberg had schemed to get singer Tom Byrne out of the group. Ward Dotson of the band’s onetime tourmates the Pontiac Brothers once had cornered Bob to ask about the ’Mats’ history and was surprised by this lingering animus. “I’m like, ‘Are you aware that you’re in a band with the greatest songwriter of the eighties?’” said Dotson. “Bob couldn’t even see that. He was like, ‘Nah, that other guy was a real good singer, and this asshole . . . maneuvered him out.’”

  At one time, Bob could make a show of rejecting Westerberg’s softer material. But Tim shattered that illusion. Now a whole machine catering to Westerberg acknowledged Bob only as part of the band’s sideshow, and it hurt being condescended to or ignored.

  The only power Bob had left was to act out, to get fucked up, to derail performances—a sad replay of his teenage days at Red Wing: Bob will act foolish and try to get others to act foolish in an attempt to be accepted.