Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Chris Mars, as a student at DeLaSalle High School, 1976. (Author collection)

  Mars, manning the kit for Dogbreath, 1978. (Photo by Andrea Olson Lorimer)

  Bob Stinson, fresh out of group home and intent on getting his band off the ground. (Photo by Andrea Olson Lorimer)

  Tommy Stinson: “A twelve-year-old [who] played like a motherfucker.” (Photo by Andrea Olson Lorimer)

  Chris Mars’ hand-drawn Dogbreath kick drum. (Photo by Andrea Olson Lorimer)

  Longhorn deejay, Oar Folkjokeopus manager and Twin/Tone Records co-founder Peter Jesperson at his South Minneapolis apartment, 1979. (Photograph from the Minneapolis Star and Tribune News Negative Collection; courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.)

  The Replacements demo tape that Paul Westerberg gave to Jesperson. (Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

  The fledgling Replacements, messing around in the Stinson basement.

  The band, still finding their act and spots on stage, at Duffy’s, 1980. (Courtesy Twin/Tone Records)

  The band’s first publicity photo shoots, taken at the Walker Art Center. (Photos by Greg Helgeson)

  Paul and Tommy on stage at the 7th St Entry in 1981; the image would serve as the cover of the band’s debut album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. (Photo by Greg Helgeson)

  Tommy, aka “Skunk.” (Photo by Steve Linsenmayer)

  The brothers Stinson, taking flight in Madison. (Photo by Steve Linsenmayer)

  Chris Mars bears down on the beat. (Photo by Steve Linsenmayer)

  Paul and Bob messing around. (Photo by Steve Linsenmayer)

  Switching up instruments for a “hootenanny.” (Photo by Steve Linsenmayer)

  The ’Mats make it to the Big Apple on their April ’83 “Eastern Whirl.” (Photo by Jason Sands)

  Playing the Rat in Boston. (Photo by Wayne Viens)

  Peter Buck and Westerberg, dolled up and drinking around the sessions for Let It Be. (Courtesy of Lynn Blakey)

  Bob and Paul conferring post-show at the Rat. (Photo by Wayne Viens)

  The bootleg Beatles: the Replacements do their version of Abbey Road, walking across Bryant Avenue. (Photo by Greg Helgeson)

  An outtake from the Let It Be rooftop photo session. (Photo by Daniel Corrigan)

  Clowning around at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Memorial Union, 1984. (Photo by Daniel Corrigan)

  Bob and Paul on stage during the December 1984 “Gary & the Boners” gig at CBGBs. The concert was supposed to have been the band’s major label showcase—instead, it turned into a “drunken lollapalooza.” (Photo by Lisan Seroty Lima)

  A wild ride: Inside the ’Mats’ beat-up tour van. “Once we got in there,” said Tommy, “it was our sanctuary, as well as our jail cell.” (Photos by Just Loomis)

  PART III Dreams and Games

  The goal became simplistic and unrealistic, which was to have a hit. And that’s where we died. We weren’t made of the stuff that makes popular music.

  PAUL WESTERBERG

  CHAPTER 31

  High Noon was eager to get the Replacements back into the studio for the next album before they changed their minds about staying together. “I hoped that making a record would be a rallying point—to prove that Bob Stinson did not define the band,” said Russ Rieger. “I wanted to make it an us-versus-them situation; I wanted to add to the chip on their shoulders.”

  He appealed to Westerberg to prove to one and all that it was his band creatively, and he urged Tommy to step into the rock star role he was destined for. “They wanted to do that,” said Rieger. “If there wasn’t an ambition somewhere in them, they would’ve fallen apart right then.”

  But a couple of things needed to be sorted out. First, the band decided to record as a three-piece. Finding a new guitarist wasn’t going to be easy; besides, replacing Bob so soon felt strange. Westerberg would handle all guitars for the time being.

  The other challenge was picking a producer. Reuniting with Tommy Erdelyi was quickly dismissed. “What I hated about ‘alternative’ records at the time was how incredibly thin they all sounded,” said Russ Rieger. “You couldn’t get them on the radio; you couldn’t put them next to Van Halen. My fight was always to make the band’s records sound competitive.”

  Even before the Tim tour had wrapped, Paul and Tommy began meeting with producers. The day of the “Bastards of Young” video shoot in Los Angeles, Warner Bros.’s Steven Baker arranged for the band to hook up with Dave Jerden, a top-notch engineer who’d worked with Talking Heads and Herbie Hancock and went on to produce career-making albums for Jane’s Addiction and Social Distortion.

  At the El Coyote restaurant post-shoot with the drunken ’Mats, “it turned into this ice-throwing contest,” said Jerden. “I couldn’t even talk to them.” Jerden was on the wagon and didn’t partake. “Paul and Tommy look at each other and are like, ‘If you can’t drink with us, you can’t produce us.’ And that was it,” said Baker. It would be a mere preview.

  Finding a producer who could meet the Replacements’ very particular standards was more difficult than it may have seemed. Big-time producers wanted to spend a lot of money and do things their own way. The ’Mats’ entire budget was a relatively modest $150,000—and the band wasn’t going to repeat takes endlessly, play to click tracks, or work banker’s hours. The band needed someone flexible, not technique-driven, and someone who’d be willing to charm, distract, and cajole them into making a record.

  Warner Bros.’s A&R man Michael Hill mooted a large number of candidates. Among them: Sandy Pearlman (the Clash, Dictators), Jack Douglas (Cheap Trick, New York Dolls), Don Gehman (John Mellencamp), Chris Thomas (Roxy Music, Pretenders, the Sex Pistols), a much-diminished Jimmy Miller (the Rolling Stones’ golden period between Beggars Banquet and Exile on Main Street), Mike Chapman (Blondie, the Knack,), and Seymour Stein’s former Sire partner, Richard Gottehrer (the Go-Gos, Marshall Crenshaw). Obvious “name” indie candidates like Mitch Easter and Don Dixon were rejected out of hand. “The Replacements didn’t want to use the producers that R.E.M. had used,” said Hill. Glyn Johns, who’d worked with the Stones, the Who, and the Faces, among others, was considered seriously. But he commanded an exorbitant fee that would’ve eaten up more than half the ’Mats’ recording budget.

  Part of the problem in selecting someone to supervise the ’Mats’ fourth album was that the band didn’t quite grasp what a producer did. “It was all a big question mark to us,” said Stinson. “We didn’t know what we were supposed to be looking for.”

  As the Replacements talked with various candidates, they were by turns insulting (“Boy, you made a lot of shit records”), self-deprecating (“Why do you wanna produce a bunch a losers like us?”), or simply rude—talking among themselves or yawning exaggeratedly while the producers spoke. “The Replacements were completely disrespectful and obnoxious to each guy that came in. Anything you could think to tweak someone, they were doing it,” said Rieger. “They had an animal instinct. In some ways, that’s a good quality to have. But they didn’t use it well. They wielded it like a baseball bat.”

  When Seth Justman, the keyboardist of the J. Geils Band, came to meet with them, it took only minutes before the ’Mats ran him out of the room. Finally, Rieger had had enough.

  “You’re not just immature,” he unloaded. “You’re scared shitless. You’re scared of trying. You’re so afraid of failure that you won’t do anything but shoot yourself in the foot.”

  Tirade over, Rieger thought he’d crossed a line. The band was shocked silent; he figured he might be fired on the spot. Instead, the Replacements broke into grins and began laughing and patting him on the back. “They made jokes about it: ‘Look at this young pup yelling at us and giving us our comeuppance.’ Instead of me getting canned, it got me closer to them. It was the first time I acted older than them, like I had some gravitas. They made jokes about it for days after—‘Oooh, we’re afraid of Russ. We’re afraid.’”

  That personal breakthrough did nothing, howe
ver, to improve the band’s behavior. Later that afternoon, the meetings moved over to the label’s offices, by which time the three ’Mats were more than well lubricated. Now it was Michael Hill’s turn to be appalled.

  The band locked themselves into Sire’s conference room. With several producers scheduled to visit, Hill would slip records by the prospective candidates under the door for the band to listen to. The ’Mats would break the LPs and slip the shattered pieces back to him.

  Inside, the band rummaged through several storage closets and found a stack of red credit card carbons and began smearing the ink on their faces and the walls. Soon they were blasting songs and rattling around Seymour Stein’s vintage Wurlitzer jukebox. A horrified Stein began yelling at Hill: “My jukebox! This is your fault! Get them out of there now!” “Oh God, it was so embarrassing,” recalled Hill. “I was never a hugely prideful person about that stuff, so I didn’t take it personally, but it was exasperating. ‘Guys, please don’t fuck with me like this.’”

  The band paused in time to meet with Scott Litt, a former Power Station engineer who’d produced the dB’s and had gone top 10 the previous summer with Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine.”

  As Litt walked into the room, the band—their faces inked up to look like tribal war paint—gang-tackled him onto the floor. “It was like Lord of the Flies in the conference room,” recalled Litt. “I was kind of ready for it, since their reputation preceded them. What am I gonna say to them looking like that? ‘I have a new way to make a record with you’?”

  The Replacements weren’t interested in meeting with a young up-and-comer like Litt and turned him down. A few months later, he began working on R.E.M.’s breakthrough, Document.

  By the end of that long, fraught day, even the typically restrained Hill ran out of patience. “After they came out, I closed my door and said, ‘I’m locking myself in my office and I’m not coming out. I’ve had it.’”

  “Part of all our behavior was an act,” said Westerberg. “But when Bob was gone, we were scared. It was just the three of us then, and we were trying to do every kind of weird, wild thing to distract ourselves from that.”

  “They would piss everyone off,” noted Rieger. “But there was a lot of respect for them as artists. If they were an ordinary band, they would’ve been dropped. But it was the brilliance of Paul’s writing, and the humanity that would come out of him, and the magic of the group, that would keep everyone believing . . . even when you wanted to kill them.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Born in 1941, Jim Dickinson was the only child of a hard-drinking salesman dad and music teacher mom. He was born in Arkansas, and his father’s job for the Diamond Match Company took the family to Hollywood and then Chicago for several years. In 1949 they resettled in the South, in Memphis.

  “I really hated Memphis at first,” he said. “But the music played a big hand in capturing me.” Accompanying his dad to work, he would encounter aging relics like Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band—street buskers since the 1920s—and cross paths with Howlin’ Wolf. He’d soon play boogie-woogie piano and lead one of Memphis’s earliest high school rock-and-roll bands.

  Dickinson figured his playing career had peaked with a 1959 gig backing Bo Diddley. He headed to college the following year, largely to avoid the draft, and landed at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. There he studied drama and volunteered for government-sponsored LSD experiments. Dickinson would be dosed and then asked to compete in standard physical and psychological tests against a group of chimpanzees. He also worked on a novel, The Search for Blind Lemon. He left Waco, however, after a couple of semesters.

  Dickinson eventually earned a history degree from Memphis State University. As a member of the New Beale Street Sheiks, he recorded a growling jug band number, “You Do It All the Time,” then sang on the Jesters’ garage-rock nugget “Cadillac Man”—the last great gasp from the original Sun Records. He became a session player at Chips Moman’s American Studios and began his production career at John Fry’s Ardent Studios; a satellite for the soul label Stax Records, Ardent eventually became the hub for Alex Chilton and Chris Bell’s band, Big Star.

  In 1969 Dickinson helped the Rolling Stones record at Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama, adding plaintive piano notes to the band’s ballad “Wild Horses.” (He lucked into the assignment because the Stones’ keyboardist, Ian Stewart, refused to play minor chords.) Dickinson would become Keith Richards’s sometime running buddy and confidant.

  As the seventies dawned, Dickinson formed the Dixie Flyers, a crew of Memphis players who became the house band for Atlantic Records at Criteria Studios in Miami for a couple of years. Dickinson also released his first—and for three decades, only—solo record, the cult classic Dixie Fried.

  Dickinson’s production discography ranged wide and deep: Ry Cooder’s Into the Purple Valley and Boomer’s Story (with Warner Bros. exec Lenny Waronker), among others; Big Star’s desultory Third; and later the brilliant chaos of Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert. In the early eighties, Dickinson worked with a series of up-and-coming American rock bands: Nashville’s Jason & the Scorchers, Austin’s True Believers, and LA’s Green on Red.

  Dickinson didn’t fit the image of a sharpie record producer. Paunchy and grizzled, with a calculated backwoods air, he’d impart axioms that flew in the face of industry-think: “Hits are in baseball, singles pick each other up in bars, and your royalty lives in a castle in Europe.” He refused to work on Saturdays, when he always watched professional wrestling on television. A gifted raconteur, musical philosopher, and cultural historian, he brought an existential approach to production, not to mention a practical one: “Pure and simple, a producer’s an actor. You’ve gotta be indirect, create a diversion, trick the artist into giving something he doesn’t wanna give,” he said.

  In late ’86 his old friend Seymour Stein called Dickinson, who was sent a copy of the Replacements’ Blackberry Way demos. Dickinson began talking with Michael Hill. “He understood the sensitivity and insecurity of an artist—he almost romanticized it to an extent,” said Hill. Dickinson endeared himself to High Noon by espousing a grand sonic vision for the album: “Like a big boombox blasting,” he told them. “That’s exactly what we wanted,” said Rieger.

  Crucially, when it came to the band, Dickinson opted for the soft sell. After meeting with “guys who would walk in and say: ‘You . . . need a hit, so you’re gonna do what I say and rehearse more, and I’m gonna make you a hit,’” said Westerberg, the man from Memphis was a relief. “When we gave the demos to Dickinson, he liked it as it was.”

  With Peter’s and Bob’s firings still heavy in the air, it was a good time to get out of Minneapolis for a while. The Replacements landed in Memphis on November 4, 1986—the day the Republicans would lose control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time since Reagan’s election.

  Jim Dickinson’s burly, bearded production assistant Jim Lancaster met the band at the airport. Lancaster—quickly nicknamed “Vito” by the ’Mats, for his Memphis Mafia–style air—was a musician and songwriter who would serve as the ’Mats’ driver, minder, and occasional background singer. He immediately noticed that Chris Mars had arrived in Dixie with a suitcase decorated with a caricature of Jed Clampett. “I knew right away these were some irreverent kids,” he said.

  He took the band directly to Ardent, to set up their gear and meet Dickinson. “It was like when I met the Stones,” said Dickinson. “When they come into the room, another presence comes with them. You know how when the Stones come together, all their personalities change? The same thing happens with the Replacements.”

  At the time Memphis had a draconian election day law prohibiting the sale of alcohol until the polls closed. The band made do with a cocktail of NyQuil and Vivarin as they cut a warm-up blues jam dubbed “Election Day,” with Westerberg howling, “I don’t care who gets e-lec-ted,” over a keening slide guitar.

  Next morning the band and Dickins
on had breakfast at Paulette’s, a nearby crepe joint. It was their first opportunity to discuss the recording in depth. Westerberg was drinking screwdrivers and throwing down gauntlets. “Paul’s going, ‘So, you recorded Big Star—so fucking what?’” said Tommy Stinson. “Just being a cocky asshole. It was like, ‘Yeah, we hired you because you did all that—but what are you going to do for me?’”

  Westerberg finally eyed the producer defiantly and told him: “I’m not gonna give you a hundred percent, ’cause you don’t deserve it.”

  “I’ve heard black artists espouse that notion before,” said Dickinson, “but I’d never heard a white artist say that.”

  For Dickinson, there was a glint of recognition: his father, Big Jim, had been a similarly confrontational alcoholic. Instead of rising to Paul’s bait, Dickinson wisely took a step back. “When you’re making a punk record, you can’t do it without punks,” he said. “I pretty much let ’em do what they wanted to do.”

  There was more to this hands-off approach than met the eye. When recording was at an impasse, Dickinson would strategically disappear. “I’d leave the room for ten or fifteen minutes, and they would, without talking to each other, solve the problem,” said Dickinson.

  Though he didn’t drink, because of severe stomach problems, Dickinson would roll fat joints and tell stories. “He talked more than any person we’d ever met. And I don’t think he repeated himself,” said Westerberg. “In a way, it helped us relax and forget about what we were doing, ’cause he would have a million and one stories about everyone from Otis Redding to the Rolling Stones to Elvis. Then he’d say: ‘Shall we try one?’ It was a good way of taking our mind off what we were there to do.”