Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  “We were a bunch of young twerps, spoiled Americans,” said Wilkes. “‘What do you mean the phone doesn’t work the same way?’ ‘Haven’t you people ever heard of ice?’ ‘What do you mean we can’t get dinner at two in the morning? Where’s the Perkins, for God’s sake? Isn’t there a Denny’s around here?’”

  Though Mars snuck out to visit the Louvre in Paris (only to find it was closed), the band kept to their scheduled clubs and hotels, maintaining Westerberg’s old dictate: “We’re on tour, we’re not tourists.” At one point the band did a gig on the southern coast of Spain, just a few miles from North Africa, across the Straits of Gibraltar. “It’s weird to think we were that close to Africa and we didn’t know or didn’t care,” said Westerberg.

  Another night in Italy, the band found itself loose inside the ancient walls of Perugia following a show. It was a magnificent old Etruscan city, founded sometime in the sixth century BC and later part of the Roman Empire. “It was such a beautiful and fascinating place,” said Proudfoot, who had to laugh as he watched the Replacements drunkenly wandering through its cobblestone streets, searching in vain for a Denny’s.

  CHAPTER 30

  At the end of May, the Replacements were included in Rolling Stone’s first annual “Hot Issue.” Alongside 1986’s other rising talents (actress Laura Dern, director James Cameron, boxer Mike Tyson), the ’Mats were named the year’s “Hot Band,” an accolade accompanied by a multi-page interview with Westerberg by David Fricke. “On one side, I wish I was famous; I couldn’t stand for someone else to be famous and not us,” confessed Paul.

  The months of touring behind Tim, the press piling up, and word of mouth about their live show had created an unmistakable excitement about the band by summer’s start—just in time for another East Coast and Southern tour in mid-June. High Noon brought Andy Proudfoot over from England to watch them on the road. “They hadn’t been able to find a victim for the US,” he said. “Their reputation preceded them.”

  On June 17, Proudfoot was running late picking up the band at Boston’s Logan Airport. “I went into the terminal, and I didn’t have to look very far—I just went to the bar. Bob had on a summer print dress with boots. Paul and Tommy had blue-and-white-striped trousers and massive braces, and their hair was tousled out. They looked like clowns, basically.” As he led them through the airport, Proudfoot recalled seeing “people’s jaws drop open; kids were pointing.”

  At the Living Room in Providence for the first gig, Bob picked up where he’d left off in Europe and pulled a runner. “I hadn’t done my speech before with the owner, about not giving him money,” said Proudfoot. “They gave him two hundred bucks out of the fee.” Though Bob went off for several hours, he returned in time for the show.

  Being on familiar turf renewed the band’s confidence. The Living Room and Boston’s Channel the following night were riotous affairs. “The band looked more comfortable onstage than in Europe,” said Proudfoot. “They had more of a swagger about them.”

  On Long Island, the band made an appearance at a local record store for several hundred enthusiastic fans. Westerberg noticed a large cardboard display of the band Sire had sent. He, Tommy, and Chris were on one side; Bob was on the other side, alone. The portion with Bob could be cut off completely without affecting the display—a telling sign of how the label had come to view the band.

  The Replacements reached Manhattan for two sold-out nights at the Ritz on June 20 and 21. The gigs would be their biggest ever in New York City, and the excitement and nerves were palpable. Warner staffer Julie Panebianco was backstage, trying to calm Westerberg, who was eager to get the show started.

  “I said, ‘You can’t go on now, nobody goes on early in New York—the guest list line is a block long,’” said Panebianco. “The lightbulb went off in his head: You mean I get to fuck over all these people?”

  The ’Mats took the stage that minute. Patrons were still stacked at the ticket windows. Once the band started, recalled Panebianco, “people were screaming at each other to get in. It was hysterically funny.”

  The second night was even more memorable. To open the set Bob Stinson asked the crowd for drugs. Standing with a large contingent of Warner staff attending the show, manager Russ Rieger blushed with embarrassment.

  The real mayhem ensued once the music started. Jon Pareles of the New York Times noted that, “with the band’s first song, the area near the stage of the Ritz became a slam-dancing pit where people happily flailed and collided; every few minutes, someone would be heaved up to the stage, usually to somersault back into the crowd and continue dancing.”

  In the middle of one song, Westerberg decided he’d try a little stage diving and leapt into the audience spread-eagle. “Suddenly the sea of people parted and, Whaam!” he recalled. “It was pretty damn embarrassing. I jumped off the stage—and nobody caught me.”

  On the ground, somebody stomped on Westerberg’s left hand with a combat boot. Immediately he felt a sharp pain in his middle finger. Paul soldiered through a few more songs. Later in the set, when the band members switched instruments and he took over the drum kit, he “hit a rim shot and finished the job on the finger.”

  Tim cover artist Robert Longo squired Paul to the emergency room. The finger wasn’t broken, but it was hurt badly enough that the band canceled the remaining nine shows, mostly in the South.

  That afternoon Paul visited Sire’s offices to meet with Seymour Stein. He’d taken a handful of pills to kill the throbbing pain in his hand. Westerberg was in the midst of a conversation with Stein when they kicked in. He slowly slid out of his chair and passed out under Seymour’s desk.

  “Paul, there’s things about me you don’t know,” said Stein impishly. “You definitely don’t want to be in that position.” Westerberg was carried out of the office.

  He did manage an upright conversation with Stein later. The Sire head was one of the few record company figures Westerberg liked and respected—as much for his personal flamboyance as for his musical acumen. “Seymour was living a pretty wild life back then too,” said Sire assistant Sandy Alouette. “There was this notion of ‘We can relate to this guy.’”

  Stein had been aware of Bob’s issues for some time. It was nothing to him, of course. He’d endured the Ramones’ bickering, the Dead Boys’ insolence, the Pretenders’ heroin problems. “I thought they were all a little crazy. But there’s degrees of crazy,” said Stein. “When the Replacements’ issues first started, I said, ‘You guys gotta try and work it out; there’s two brothers here.’ I tried to let nature take its course.”

  Now Stein sensed the issue could no longer be avoided. Moreover, he’d come to realize that Sire actually had a valuable commodity on its hands. He felt that if the Replacements could come up with the right song, they could be massive.

  Stein had no relationship with Bob to speak of. (Backstage in New York during the Tim tour, Bob had approached Karin Berg and asked: “Are you Seymour?”) Neither did Michael Hill, nor High Noon, now solely in charge of guiding the band’s career. “We never discussed Bob to the way that Bob should’ve been discussed,” said Gary Hobbib. “It wasn’t about, ‘He’s hurting himself, and because he’s hurting himself, he’s going to pull us down with him.’ And that should’ve been the conversation. We didn’t handle that one right.”

  As Stein and Westerberg talked it became clear that the Replacements’ future might hinge on whether Bob remained in the band. In time Westerberg would be said to have fired Bob Stinson owing to label dictates. But that was an oversimplification. “Paul came to me—I didn’t go to him,” said Stein. “I do remember saying to him, ‘I regard you and Tommy as “the band.” To me, the songs are everything, and you’re the songwriter.’ But I certainly didn’t instigate anything.”

  “There was a little more emphasis on ‘He’s wrecking it for you guys—and the band is going to pay for it,’” said Westerberg, who didn’t feel Stein had issued him an ultimatum but rather had offered reassurance about S
ire’s support of the band, whatever they decided to do. Westerberg left New York thinking that Bob would be all right, that the band would figure out things on their own.

  Bob Stinson was relieved to return to Minneapolis earlier than planned in June, but he’d come back to a bad situation. He and Carleen had settled into a brownstone on Franklin and Dupont. They’d had to leave their previous place after it’d been broken into. But they were burglarized again at the new house. Bob couldn’t even keep a guitar at home. He was feeling beset from all sides.

  His schizoaffective disorder would flare in these times of crisis. July was marked by all the symptoms of manic and major depressive episodes. Carleen recalled him being “upset and crying. He’d just sob. And not eat.” In the past, these spells had been marked by outbursts of violence against others—or himself.

  This was the lingering damage of his childhood and the transgressions of Nick Griffin. “He never had the counseling to learn how to deal with that and go forward—if that’s even possible for that level of abuse that he sustained at Tommy’s dad’s hands,” said Krietler. “He’d tell you it was no big deal. . . . [But] once something triggered those memories, he would go on an emotional roller coaster.”

  This time, said Carleen, “I think it was a direct response to the [band’s] attitude that ‘Bob is the problem.’” She wanted him to quit the group: “I said, ‘This isn’t healthy. If this is causing you so much anxiety, why can’t you just get in another band?’ That didn’t seem like an option to him.”

  His friends grew worried at what they saw that summer. “Bob was coming unglued,” recalled Bob Dunlap, who tried to counsel him. “I wasn’t worried about him getting kicked out of the band; I was worried what being in the band was doing to Bob.”

  One afternoon in July, Carleen arrived home, opened the door, and stepped into a puddle. She looked and saw water coming into the living room from the bathroom. Throwing the door open, she found Bob lying unconscious in an overflowing tub. He’d swallowed a bottle of Carleen’s prescription muscle relaxers (for her back), turned on the hot water, gotten into the tub, and waited to die.

  Panicked, Carleen called an ambulance. Bob was rushed to Hennepin County Medical Center, where his stomach was pumped. Anita came down as her son was put under a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold. Unlike his suicide attempt the previous fall—which had seemed more like a cry for attention—those around Bob were convinced that this was a serious attempt to end his life.

  Tommy and the Replacements were not made aware of the overdose attempt. Bob didn’t want them to know. “It felt like a big deal at the time,” said Ray Reigstad of the incident. “Of course, later on, Bob just laughed the whole thing off.”

  After a month at home, Westerberg’s finger healed and he got restless. Rather than stay idle, the ’Mats wanted to demo some new songs—they’d already previewed a few on tour. Warner Bros. booked several days for the band (under a pseudonym) at their old Dinkytown haunt, Blackberry Way.

  The prospect of going into the studio—the most direct reminder of his loss of standing in the band—only seemed to unnerve Bob further. “I think it drove him nuts a little bit,” said Tommy. “He just didn’t fit into any of the new material.” Westerberg argued that Bob had simply refused to evolve with the band: “Slice the pie twenty ways: Bob wanted to rock harder. Bob wanted more metal music. Bob liked fast power chords, he liked to take long big solos. We started to craft the songs . . . [and] it left less space for him to be Bob the Maniac.”

  In early August, Tommy called his brother several times to rehearse for the session. Bob refused to answer. “If you offered him the phone, he’d smash it,” said Krietler. “He probably broke ten phones in a two-week period.”

  Come session time, Bob showed up, albeit grudgingly. With Blackberry Way’s Mike Owens and Michael McKern engineering, the four-piece Replacements cut template versions of “Valentine” and “Red Red Wine.” Bob left after the first day and didn’t return. The remaining trio completed six songs over the remaining days, including a pair of new thorny rockers, “PO Box (Empty as Your Heart)” and “Time Is Killing Us,” plus “Bundle Up,” a winter-themed reworking of Hank Mizell’s 1958 rockabilly novelty “Jungle Rock.” Tommy even recorded several solo numbers, with McKern playing drums.

  The whole session, however, became an afterthought. Westerberg knew Seymour Stein was right: “[Bob] didn’t show up, and that was the last straw,” he recalled. Something needed to be done. So Westerberg decided he would quit the Replacements.

  He met Tommy and Chris at the Uptown. Anita Stinson was behind the bar serving drinks. “I said, ‘I’m gonna quit the band. I can’t do this with Bob anymore,’” said Westerberg. “And they said, very sweetly, ‘Well, who’s going to play bass with you?’ ‘Who’s going to play drums?’ I thought, ‘Well, do you guys wanna?’

  “I was ready to say fuck it: fuck Sire, fuck the Replacements. And Tommy and Chris wanted to stick with it. So then it became, ‘What are we going to do about Bob?’”

  It was the conversation they’d all dreaded.

  Mars didn’t want to fire Bob. Given his own brother’s mental health issues, he understood there was something deeper going on. He also knew that the band’s professional problems were bigger than any one person. “But I did not have a whole lot of say,” said Mars.

  The decision came down to Tommy Stinson. “None of us wanted to get rid of Bob. We all were against it,” said Tommy. “But there was a fact there: we couldn’t keep going the way we were.”

  Tommy knew that, if he wavered, the ’Mats would end there and then. But what about Bob? For all his fuck-ups, all his problems, he was still family—the one who’d put the bass in his hands and given him this life to begin with. Tommy was being forced to make an impossible choice.

  After a long silence, he spoke up: “Well,” he sighed, “I guess we gotta fire my brother.”

  That evening Paul steeled himself and called Bob. This time Bob answered the phone. “I don’t know what the hell I said,” Westerberg commented later. “We never talked on the phone, ever. Our communication usually didn’t go beyond ‘Look at her ass,’ or ‘Are ya holdin’?’”

  “So when I called him . . . he knew. He’s immediately like, ‘Don’t fucking tell me that you’re . . .’ And I’m going, ‘Man, it’s not working. What we’re doing now, you’re not shining anyway. We’re playing acoustic guitars and shit like that.’”

  “Yeah,” said Bob, meekly. “I guess I’m not happy doing this anymore.”

  “Then we both got sad,” recalled Westerberg. “I thought, ‘Well, fuck, we can keep trying.’ And then I thought, ‘No, I wanna quit the whole thing.’ And then he sort of acquiesced. He accepted it. But I think he was sad. He was sad as hell that it was over.”

  Though news of Bob’s dismissal was kept from the public for several weeks, privately the fallout was immediate.

  Anita Stinson hadn’t taken sides. “I don’t know the conflicts between him and Tommy over that, because Tommy and Bobby at home were not Tommy and Bobby in the band,” she said. Like Carleen, Anita felt that Bob’s life might actually be improved if he was out of the band.

  Anita’s mother, Virginia, was furious. “She never forgave me,” said Tommy. “‘How could you fire your brother?’ Shit, well, this is my life too.”

  “Tommy was pretty logical, even at that age,” said Daune Earle. “But it was still horrible. He was really depressed, because it fell on him. Even though Paul made the decision and they all backed it, even Anita backed it, he still had to look him in the eyes.”

  “I can’t sit here twenty-five years later and give you an emotional portal to look into it and go, ‘Whoa, that’s what that was like.’ There’s no way,” said Tommy. “You can’t put into words how that affects people, and how you move on from that.” Though the two brothers would see each other at family functions and make nice in later years, the hurt and estrangement lingered, unresolved, until the very end of Bob’s life.r />
  With the deed now done, “there was concern all around: do these guys really know what they’re doing?” said Rieger. “It left a massive hole. There was uncertainty on how to proceed.”

  Bob’s ouster would fundamentally alter the delicate dynamics of the group. “Things were never the same for me after Bob left,” said Mars. “When he was gone, I felt that emptiness from behind the drums.” As Mars moved away, Paul and Tommy grew closer. “We figured: now we’re in this thing together come hell or high water,” said Tommy. “And from that point on, it was mostly hell and mostly high water.”

  Bob and sister Lonnie, with their parents Neil and Anita Stinson in Minnesota, 1961. The couple’s marriage would not be happy or long-lived.

  A new life in California: Lonnie, Bob, and Anita with baby Tommy.

  Tommy rockin’ the cradle: “He was full of spit and vinegar.” (Courtesy of Anita Stinson)

  Bob, age 7, at the start of his troubles.

  Harold “Hal” Westerberg in Paris at the end of World War II.

  Bastard of Young: Paul, making faces with his mother, Mary Lou Westerberg, 1963. (Courtesy of Paul Westerberg)

  Tommy and Lisa Stinson with Bob upon his return home after years in the state juvenile system. (Courtesy of Lonnie Stinson)

  Paul’s high school friend and mentor John Zika, who would commit suicide in 1977. “After he died,” said Westerberg, “I took on a bit of his personality.” (Courtesy the Zika Family)

  Paul Westerberg’s 1975 yearbook photo from the Academy of Holy Angels. (Author collection)

  A teenaged Mars on the drums. “He was like a little Keith Moon,” recalled Westerberg. (Author collection)