by Bob Mehr
Yet Bob wasn’t that much worse off than his bandmates. “They were all doing the same thing,” said Anita Stinson. “He was no more abusive than anybody else.” Even Westerberg agreed. “The farce of it all: Bob going through treatment as though we’re some little angels who were clean and sober. We were as dirty as anyone. But at least we were holding it together to do what we had to do to keep the thing moving.”
“The band was only two steps behind Bob,” said Russ Rieger. “On a human level, how could they kick him out? His reaction would’ve been, ‘Why me? What about you?’”
Early 1986 delivered a wake-up call for Warner Bros. “Particularly after Saturday Night Live, [Bob’s] behavior at the hotel was really disturbing,” said Michael Hill. “He was the wild card in that mix—even though Paul was the one who said the F-word on television.”
High Noon, still relatively new to the band, was powerless to intercede. “We felt this is something internal, something the four of you have to deal with,” said Gary Hobbib. “But they couldn’t. It was all passive-aggressive behavior between them.”
“We’re not the kind of guys who sit around expressing our feelings,” Westerberg would later admit, likening it to “Henry Fonda syndrome. You know, he couldn’t tell his children he loved them, and it was the same with us. We couldn’t talk. We couldn’t communicate.”
The watershed moment came with an appearance at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor on April 5. Once again, Bob was late. “That was the only show that the guy said, ‘Get out there, we can’t wait any longer,’” recalled Westerberg.
The three-piece band went on and announced they were auditioning for a new lead guitarist. They grabbed someone from the opening band the Skyscrapers for a couple of numbers. Meanwhile, Jesperson finally found Bob holding court in a bar a few blocks away. Bob had to fight his way past bouncers who didn’t believe he had any business onstage. He raised his arms in triumph as the crowd cheered. “You should be booing him,” Westerberg scolded.
“A tempestuous reunion followed,” observed a reviewer for the University of Michigan Daily, “in which every member of the band got drenched with beer.” Eventually, they settled down and locked in. When they were together and on, they still had a remarkable power. But those moments when all four charged together as one were becoming rare.
The show devolved into chaos. Tommy and Paul left the stage, still playing their instruments, as Bob elbowed his way to the mic to sing a highly ironic cover: “Takin’ Care of Business.”
Peter Jesperson’s 1986 datebook, filled with the Replacements’ gigs and commitments, ended abruptly in the final week of April. He was clearly no longer suited for road managing. Apart from his drinking, he was not dispassionate enough to crack the whip—however much that was even possible—with the ’Mats.
After six years with the band as its benefactor, champion, and guiding light, Jesperson was on his way out. In a sense, he’d made his position expendable by bringing in High Noon. Worse, his behavior made him vulnerable; he’d gotten careless and reckless at the wrong time. “Everybody thought the band partied too hard, and it didn’t look good for me to be doing it too,” he said.
On April 23, Peter was back in Minneapolis. The Replacements’ first European tour was upcoming, and he’d been sorting out passports and permits. He was heading out to buy a present for Anita Stinson—she was getting married that weekend to her fiancé Tom Kurth—when Westerberg called and told him they were having a band meeting at the Uptown.
“Why don’t you have the meeting without me, and just fill me in later,” Jesperson told him.
“No, Pete,” said Westerberg. “I really think you gotta be present for this one.”
When he showed up at the bar, it was just Paul and Tommy there.
“One thing I remember was Tommy, he was smirking a little bit before Paul dropped the bomb,” said Jesperson. “He was sitting there like, ‘I know something you don’t know.’ We were so tight, had been such close friends. I harbored a really deep resentment towards him after that.”
After dispensing with the small talk over drinks, Westerberg broke the news: “I’m really unhappy with the way things are. And when I’m pissed off I wanna start swinging, and I don’t want you to be in the way catching any punches.” Jesperson said, “It was a fairly humane way to put it.”
Jesperson’s dismissal would mark the start of a pattern: whenever Westerberg grew frustrated, he’d start pointing fingers. “In a nutshell, ‘Things are going bad. Let’s fire somebody, and maybe that will fix that,’” Chris Mars said. Mars, who didn’t endorse the firing, had refused to come in protest. Bob, meanwhile, was lost in his own world.
As the news sank in Jesperson froze. “It was like being kicked out of a club you’d helped start,” he said. “I felt humiliated, and I wasn’t going to humiliate myself further by begging or pleading for my job. At that point, I was like, ‘I guess this is done.’”
In the end, the decision to fire Peter was not High Noon’s but the ’Mats’—specifically, Westerberg’s. “Paul didn’t even call to tell us he was doing it,” said Rieger. Westerberg did confide the decision to George Regis. “They had outgrown Peter’s abilities,” said Regis. “Peter’s an enormous part of it; he’s the fifth Replacement. But at that point in time, things had moved on.”
It might have been a purely professional decision, but it couldn’t have felt more personal to Jesperson. “Peter was too much in love with them and had become too protective,” said Twin/Tone’s Dave Ayers. “That’s something that Paul was initially attracted to, and ultimately repelled by.”
After Paul and Tommy left, Uptown waitress Victoria Norvell asked Jesperson if he wanted another drink, telling him, “You look like your dog just died.” He went home to a quart of Johnnie Walker Red and an uncertain future. “I drank myself into unconsciousness,” he said—the start of a five-year free fall.
CHAPTER 29
Warner Bros.’s director of video, Randy Skinner, had been tasked with bringing Jeff Ayeroff’s proposed “speaker” clip to life. She had joined the label in August 1984 and was part of a team churning out over 200 videos a year by 1986. The Replacements’ project, filmed in LA, was modestly budgeted for one day at $10,000. Skinner hired a young director of photography named Bill Pope (who would become a major video director and cinematographer, most notably on the Matrix films) and shot at her apartment on Orange Drive, near Hancock Park.
For the set, they brought in a funky old couch and used Skinner’s milk crate, turntable, and speakers. They also added a dog walking around, for some homey atmosphere. The “professional movie dog” demanded a $500-a-day wage. “That was the most expensive thing,” said Skinner.
They also needed a human being—the camera was to slowly pull back from a speaker close-up to show a partial view of someone sitting on a couch listening to the music, smoking a cigarette, and tapping a foot. Though they were both on set, neither Westerberg nor Stinson was willing, even with their back to the camera. In the end, set production designer Robert Fox took the part, though Westerberg did allow his pack of cigarettes to appear.
Pope shot several variations of the video in color; the images were dialed to black-and-white in postproduction. The various versions would be synched with different songs from Tim. In the main “Bastards of Young” clip, Fox smokes, fidgets on the couch, and eventually kicks the speaker before walking out of the apartment. The video for “Left of the Dial” is similar, minus the dramatic exit. For “Hold My Life,” the video begins with Fox flipping through a stack of LPs, tossing out several, until he comes to a copy of Tim.
The throbbing movement of the exposed subwoofer was actually the result of the Replacements LP. “We really cranked up the volume,” said Skinner. Soon the entire building was rattling with the ’Mats’ music. “It drove my landlord crazy.”
Though the video for “Bastards” would air only a handful of times later that summer on MTV’s alternative music program 120 Minutes, it was t
he subject of much industry talk. “It may not be the best rock video ever made,” offered the Los Angeles Times, “but it’s certainly the ultimate rock video.” Steven Baker noted, “It added to [the Replacements’] mystique. That began their weird relationship with MTV.”
In mid-May, the Replacements headed to Europe for the first time, to play fourteen dates in three weeks. None of them had been overseas before. “Shit—to us, Madison, Wisconsin, was still exotic,” said Westerberg.
The ’Mats got a late start in the international market. None of their Twin/Tone albums were available in Europe until early 1986, when the UK label Glass Records issued a compilation that included the unreleased Alex Chilton–produced “Nowhere Is My Home.” Westerberg wanted to call the record England Schmengland; it went out as Boink!! instead. With the stateside noise over Let It Be and Tim, the UK music press was growing curious, and the weekly papers Sounds and New Musical Express both dispatched reporters to America that winter.
Mat Snow’s NME feature, “Hits from the Sticks,” gave the ’Mats their biggest exposure in the United Kingdom. Snow followed the band up the coast of California for several days on tour. “If you can show me a more rootin’ tootin’ new musical combo burning the boards anywhere on the planet right now, I’ll kiss your arse,” he wrote.
Westerberg was keen to play up the band’s high school–dropout history. “I’m a borderline illiterate,” he told the paper. Snow wrote: “But Paul Westerberg is far from stupid. He is, however, of that breed almost entirely extinct (in Britain, at least) outside the heavy metal fortress: Paul Westerberg is a solid-gold easy-action through and through rocker.”
The United Kingdom was in a strident political mood in 1986. Seven years under Margaret Thatcher had yielded a golden era of protest music. The previous fall a collective of British performers—including Billy Bragg and Paul Weller—had formed a group called Red Wedge to try to actively unseat Thatcher and the country’s Conservative Party.
In the midst of this, Westerberg saw an opportunity to grab some attention and wind up the NME audience by espousing his views on the separation of rock and politics:
Reagan? I like him. A President, to me, should look good. I like the fact that he dyes his hair and wears make-up. Seriously! He’s not supposed to have a brain, he’s just supposed to look good an’ shit. I’d rather have an actor as President than a politician.
When the band, Monty Lee Wilkes, and Bill Sullivan landed at Gatwick Airport on May 14, they were met by British tour manager Andy Proudfoot, a twenty-four-year-old veteran of tours with American bands like Green on Red and the Rain Parade.
“The specific thing that was communicated to me was that they had a bit of a reputation for destroying things,” said Proudfoot. “There was an episode where they’d had an RV and virtually gutted it.” Proudfoot wasn’t scared off, but he did err on the side of caution. Instead of renting a nice vehicle, he got an old box truck—basically a stripped-out panel van with windows cut into it and a separate cab for the driver.
One thing that had not been exaggerated to him was the extent of the band’s drinking. “It was more full-on than any band I’d worked with,” said Proudfoot. “The Replacements would drink large amounts all the time. The tour became a bit of a marathon.”
The tour began and ended in London, where audiences were sufficiently enthusiastic about, if mildly suspicious of, this gang of boorish Yanks. So they opened the first show at Dingwall’s with a roaring, goading cover of “The Marines’ Hymn”: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli . . .”
A few weeks earlier, the United States had bombed Libya in response to its role in several terrorist attacks against American interests. US planes had taken off from British airbases, and there were fears that the United Kingdom would be subject to terrorist reprisals because of its involvement in the raids. Westerberg was only too happy to give them his Ugly American shtick. “We came over as the secret weapon,” Westerberg told the crowd. “We’re here to save you—don’t ya know?”
They broke out all the old tricks for the new audience: swapping instruments, wrestling one another onstage, jumping on and wrecking Chris Mars’s (rented) drum kit. “Probably a lot of people were shocked by them,” said Proudfoot.
Further into the country, attendance began to wane. “The best and worst show was in Leeds—some workingman’s club,” recalled Wilkes. “The PA system consisted of a Bose hi-fi speaker on each side of the stage and the very first mixing board manufactured by Soundcraft, which had no EQ. I have never seen that band play with such fury as they did that night. It was so kick-ass—one song after the other, just tight and powerful. It’s very possibly the best show I ever saw them play, and hardly anyone was there, maybe twenty people.”
The venues got better outside the United Kingdom. “Holland was pretty mad for American bands,” said Proudfoot. “The Dutch shows we did were great.” But generally speaking, the ’Mats had no idea what to expect city to city, country to country, and their performances, accordingly, were just as unpredictable. “It was a complete box of chocolates,” said Proudfoot. “You never quite knew what you were going to get.”
Only one thing remained consistent: the band’s strange, ritualistic activities. “They had such short attention spans, they got bored incredibly quickly,” recalled Proudfoot. “They’d take the food from the dressing room and smear it all over the windows of the van. I remember thinking it was really funny, until I realized I was going to have to clean it off.”
One night before a gig in the north of England, Proudfoot heard a series of explosions coming from the dressing room. Standing alone at the far end, Tommy was methodically winding up and then pitching a case of beer cans at the wall, where they’d burst across the room. Tommy seemed somewhat confused by Proudfoot’s concern. “I’m getting ready for the show,” he explained innocently.
Gary Hobbib popped over to check on the tour. Traveling with the band in close quarters for the first time, he became aware of the depths of their drinking. “They’d show up for a two PM sound check, and they didn’t go on until eleven at night. That’s eight, nine hours of drinking. Paul would be on the floor, just pouring bottles on top of himself.”
The band made some radio and TV appearances in Europe, playing a short set on VPRO, the Netherlands national station. They were also booked on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the BBC’s venerable live music showcase. “We get there at eight in the morning, and we’d come from France,” said Westerberg. Bill Sullivan bribed someone at the BBC for a fifth of Scotch and watched as the band jumped on it—“Like flies on shit,” Mars recalled.
Lubrication notwithstanding, their British television debut was no repeat of Saturday Night Live. Using the gear of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, also guests on the show, the ’Mats got through “Kiss Me on the Bus” without any complaints about language or volume.
Proudfoot had been briefed at the outset about Bob Stinson—his behavior, his drug habit, his growing proclivity for getting his hands on some gig cash and disappearing until well past showtime. “I’d had a lesson from Russ and Gary about not letting Bob collect money from the promoter under any circumstance,” said Proudfoot. “But he turned out to be one of the more respectful guys.”
Bob’s great European-tour expense was all the phone calls to his new bride. The charges were astronomical; one all-night call cost $1,700. While he didn’t reveal much to Carleen, she could sense he was becoming troubled and fearful. “I found out later he was basically on the verge of a mental breakdown,” said Krietler.
There were flashes of strange behavior in Europe. Bob was a milk drinker in the morning, to salve the previous night’s boozing. In Holland the cartons came with a tricky, unfamiliar design that he couldn’t open. He got so worked up about the mechanics of the container that he flew into a massive rage and threw it against the dashboard of the van—a disturbing glimpse of his state of mind.
About six dates into the tour, in Genoa, Italy, Bob disa
ppeared for the first time. Genoa was a port town; you could find lots of trouble without even trying very hard. With the set time upon them, Bob had yet to show. “Bill Sullivan and I were standing at the main door of the club, looking up and down the street, wondering, ‘Where is he?’” said Proudfoot.
Suddenly, they could make out Bob’s figure at the end of the long, winding avenue. Looking closer, they saw that he was being chased by a small mob: “Eight angry Italians, two brandishing knives,” recalled Proudfoot. “He barreled through the doors, and club security stopped this gang who were after him. The guys eventually went away. I never found out what the story was.”
“He must’ve scored that night,” said Westerberg. “Because I remember he was horseshit when he tried to play. He actually fell off the stage.”
Bob would remain lost in his own world. “He’d show up for a gig an hour late,” said Krietler. “That was no longer acceptable. There’s three band members playing ‘Scooby Doo, Where Are You?’ and Bob is on the phone across town calling me long-distance to find out where the venue is.”
“I don’t think he was trying to be malicious,” said Krietler. “I think it was his last cry for attention. I don’t think that in his wildest dreams he ever suspected they were gonna cut him out of the picture.”
Europe was the first time the Replacements ever felt like they’d gone backwards in their career. “We were used to packing clubs in the States,” said Tommy Stinson. “Over there, there wasn’t anyone there at most of the shows. It turned us off to the place.” They spent the latter half of the tour grousing about the continent. “I believe Sullivan had the best quote about the place: ‘The toilet paper’s like cardboard, and the money falls apart in your hands,’ which was pretty much true,” said Westerberg.
