by Bob Mehr
The band had set up in Ardent’s smaller studio B, which was typically used for overdubs and mixing. Mars’s drums were placed in the main tracking area, while Stinson played in the control room; Westerberg was sent to a neighboring five-by-seven concrete sound lock known as “the dungeon.” It was, Dickinson noted accurately, the first time the Replacements had ever truly been separated in a recording studio. “I couldn’t see them at all when we were cutting our rhythm tracks,” said Westerberg, who was initially dubious of the setup.
Despite his old-school reputation, Dickinson staunchly advocated new methods and technology. “As primitive as I am, I consider myself a primitive modernist,” he said. Ardent had recently purchased a cutting-edge $360,000 Solid State Logic SL 6000E console and a $150,000 Mitsubishi X-850 thirty-two-track digital tape machine, which immediately became Dickinson’s preferred recording setup. “I embraced digital as soon as I discovered it because it enabled me to record sounds that up to that point had been unrecordable,” said Dickinson. He would then jerry-rig Ardent’s state-of-the-art gear with a mix of ancient preamps and limiters, like an old Ampex eight-track tape deck, a sixties Fairchild compressor, and a nasty-looking Gates Level Devil, originally used for radio broadcasting.
Turning knobs was Ardent’s engineer Joe Hardy, himself something of a tech wizard. Hardy had made his reputation working with the Fairlight, one of the very first digital samplers, which allowed everything—drums, vocals, guitars—to be copied, tuned and timed, and moved around in proto cut-and-paste fashion. Dickinson was enamored of the endless possibilities the Fairlight offered, and it would play a significant role on the Replacements’ album.
The comically cantankerous Hardy sparred with the ’Mats immediately. “Occasionally you would get annoyed if one of them would sidle up next to you while you were trying to do something fairly complex,” said Hardy, “and they’d be rambling drunkenly at you.”
“Hardy put me in my place early on,” said Westerberg. “I said something like, ‘Jesus, how many fucking records have you made?’ He turns around and goes, ‘About a thousand! How many have you made?’ I went, ‘Okay. Carry on.’ I knew when I was full of shit.”
The Ardent crew immediately focused on Chris Mars’s drums. Mars was a ferocious snare player, but worked his kick drum inconsistently. “I started talking to him about his kick drum pattern—and he did not know what I was talking about,” said Dickinson.
To help him focus, the engineers took a big barrel-shaped container of Green Sweep—a chemical powder used to clean Ardent’s floors—emptied it, cut off the ends, and fastened it to Mars’s kick, creating a four-foot-long extension on the drum. “It didn’t do much to change the sound, but it centered his brain on this huge fucking kick drum in front of him,” said Hardy. The device worked: within two or three days, said Dickinson, Mars “was playing his kick drum like Ringo.”
Dickinson could sense the ’Mats’ anxiety as they adjusted to Bob Stinson’s absence and found their way in a new configuration. “Just the three of us,” said Westerberg, “scared out of our wits.”
Somewhere around the third day everything fell into place. The Blackberry Way demos hadn’t hinted at a direction, but as they played through a stomping power pop instrumental that would become “Valentine” at Ardent, a new sound took shape. Instead of playing like three guys waiting for their fourth to show up, Paul, Tommy, and Chris locked in as a trio.
The results were promising. They recorded an exciting, if still evolving, version of “Red Red Wine”; the bittersweet fuzz-pop nugget “Kick It In”; a charming goof called “Beer for Breakfast”; and a few other similarly raucous numbers. Westerberg was being cagey and hadn’t shown Dickinson his best material yet, such as the dark rumination “The Ledge” and the Who-styled “Nevermind.”
At the end of the week, Michael Hill and Russ Rieger arrived in Memphis, desperately hoping for good news. At playback, the new tracks leapt out of the speakers. Dickinson had won them over. And the Replacements had decided to carry on as a band. “Tommy told me later . . . that they’d really come to Memphis to break up,” said Dickinson. “They’d had it planned that they were going to theatrically combust.”
CHAPTER 33
Jim Dickinson never let the truth get in the way of a good story, and the making of Pleased to Meet Me would become wrapped in the producer’s tall tales. “In a way, that was the best thing Dickinson ever did for us,” noted Paul Westerberg. “He helped build the legend.”
Though he may have exaggerated the band’s excesses, conjured nefarious record company plots out of thin air, and embellished the album’s technical manipulations, Dickinson would fundamentally portray the recording as a transformative journey for the Replacements. In that respect at least, he couldn’t have been more truthful.
The Replacements made three separate Memphis recording trips between November and January, working eight- to ten-day stretches. “Westerberg would do it for as long as he could put up with it, and then when he’d start to feel a compromise, he’d leave,” said Dickinson.
Following the precipitous fall of Stax Records in 1975, the Memphis music scene had all but collapsed. The community was still psychically scarred from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Beale Street was lifeless, Sun Studio was boarded up, and the Stax building was empty and crumbling. Tommy Stinson described the city in late 1986 as “this weird ghost town where rock-and-roll had come from.”
But Ardent Studios was flourishing again in the early eighties. It was situated in Midtown, once a thriving nightlife epicenter that, by the time the ’Mats arrived, was home to the indie rock venue the Antenna Club and little else.
Flopping at a nearby Holiday Inn, the band would start work around noon and begin drinking soon after. “After Bob left, it got worse,” said Chris Mars. Added Westerberg: “The three of us were now drinking for four.”
Soon Dickinson could chart the arc of their inebriation and get the best results accordingly. “Every day they were like a sine wave,” he said. “They wouldn’t be drunk enough early on in the day to get anything. Then they’d be good and drunk, and it would be great. And then they’d be too drunk, and they’d get useless.”
The band’s formal album sessions kicked off in mid-November with a new engineer, John Hampton. (Joe Hardy, called to other duties, would return to complete the record’s mix.) Hampton had worked extensively with Alex Chilton. He began the session by tracking the band’s call-and-response rocker “I Don’t Know,” a thrusting State of the ’Mats Address: “One foot in the door; the other one in the gutter / The sweet smell that you adore, I think I’d rather smother.” Improvising a litany of questions as verses, Westerberg threw in a cheeky dig at Hampton: “Who’s behind the board? They tell me he’s a dope.”
“IOU” was more band biography, Westerberg eager to cancel out old relationships: “I want it in writing / I owe you nothing.” The song appeared to be directed at Peter Jesperson and Bob Stinson, but Westerberg said the literal inspiration came from an encounter with Iggy Pop: “I was on the bus with him after a show, and somebody asked for his autograph. He wrote, ‘IOU NOTHING.’ I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.”
Like most of the harder rocking tracks, “IOU” and “I Don’t Know” were nailed after just a couple of attempts. As a producer, Dickinson was always wary of losing the essence over multiple takes. The ’Mats’ short attention spans also played a part. “They couldn’t conceivably play the same song four or five times in a row, because they would get bored,” said Dickinson. “So I would pick three or four songs, and we’d cut them like a set.”
The band labored a bit more to nail “Red, Red Wine.” Ironically, Westerberg’s roaring ode had been written and demo-ed sober in his parents’ basement. “I had the tape recorder on my mother’s ironing board,” he recalled. In Memphis, he topped off the track’s bridge with a larynx-shredding scream—though he had to fight Dickinson to keep it on the record. Dickinson’s wife, Mary Lindsey, insiste
d it remain.
The serrated scuzz metal chords of “Shooting Dirty Pool” provided the perfect backing for Westerberg’s riposte to all the club owners and promoters they’d ever encountered. The song was sparked by an incident with Randy “Now” Ellis. A mailman by day and punk rock promoter by night, Ellis had staged a number of Replacements shows at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey. But after a disastrous August 1985 concert, Ellis called up the local college radio station and badmouthed the ’Mats, who heard the interview while driving. Westerberg had the van pull over to a pay phone, and he called up the station. He got in a heated conversation with Ellis on the air, which ended with Westerberg telling him to “blow it out your fuckin’ ass.”
To give the song’s bar fight narrative some aural atmosphere, Dickinson recorded Westerberg smashing a beer bottle in the dungeon. Two Michelobs later, they had their sound effect. “It smelled like beer in there for a long time,” said John Hampton.
The Replacements would leave another, more lasting mark on the studio. One afternoon Westerberg was inside the control room of studio B, swigging from a large jug of Gallo wine. “He took a gulp, and it came back up through his nose, and he caught it in his hands,” said Dickinson, who claimed Westerberg stared at his upchuck for a moment, then casually tossed it into the air.
Weeks later, Ardent owner John Fry noticed the stain. “I’m not complaining, Jim,” he told Dickinson, “but I’m just curious: how did they get the vomit on the ceiling?”
Though it was a dank little hole, Westerberg quickly made a home for himself in the dungeon cutting his parts. It was where Alex Chilton had set up for the moodier tracks on Big Star’s Third. Ardent’s engineers were quickly forced to pad the side walls with mattresses for fear that Westerberg would bang his head on the concrete while thrashing around.
Of more pressing concern, however, were Westerberg’s lungs—his pleurisy began to flare up again during the sessions. On one occasion, trying to summon the strength to cut a vocal on “Shooting Dirty Pool,” Westerberg stripped to the waist, slathered his chest with Ben-Gay, and howled until hoarse. “Spit and spew would come out of him,” said Jim Lancaster. “When that session was done, that little closet was nasty.”
The loud, fast tracks the ’Mats were capturing were arguably more ferocious than anything they’d done since Stink. Admittedly, the band was aided by some performance-enhancing drugs. Lancaster had visited a quack doctor out in the sticks who supplied him with copious amounts of speed. “That kept them awake and allowed them to drink more,” he recalled. “The Replacements would take anything, anytime.”
When the pills ran out, the band would spike their drinks with a natural liquid speed from China called Rocket Fuel. “It’s good stuff,” said Westerberg. “You come down real quick. After a half-hour, you have a headache and your stomach aches.”
Outside of the studio, the ’Mats soaked up plenty of local color. Lancaster became their cultural tour guide. “These guys were from Minneapolis—to us they might as well have been from the fuckin’ Netherlands,” he said. Inside Lancaster’s ever-present black satchel, he kept sundry drugs as well as cassettes of rare Southern R&B and country music. “I would play them shit you couldn’t hear anywhere else: Eddie Hinton, Bill Brandon, various black singers from Jackson, Mississippi, like Tommy Tate.”
Lancaster would take the band to the blues burger bar Huey’s and the famed Peabody Hotel to hear the Fred Ford and Honeymoon Garner Trio. Wherever they went, the Replacements attracted attention, a magnet for women and odd characters. “I would have to try and keep them out of trouble,” said Lancaster. “But they had a pretty good idea of where the arrest line was.”
On one late-night excursion, Westerberg, Stinson, and a handful of groupies wound up at an after-hours club in the predominantly black section of North Memphis. Downing glass after glass of a strange blue liqueur, Westerberg noticed they were surrounded by a group of serious-looking characters, guns dangling as they leaned over and shot pool.
“We’re sitting there with these girls, and one of them rips her shirt off to get our attention,” said Westerberg. “And these dudes all around, packing heat, are staring at us and this bare-chested young woman. Me and Tommy just look at each other and laugh. We were too wasted to even perk up. Shit . . . we could a got killed every day we were down there.”
After seven years of letting Bob Stinson take the lead, in Memphis Westerberg “was a little anxious about being the sole guitar player and having to carry it all by himself,” said John Hampton. “But he was so well medicated it was probably okay.”
Westerberg tracked much of the record with a couple of Les Pauls, including his gnarled old gunmetal Junior and a black ’57 “fretless wonder.” Dickinson eventually sent the band to nearby Pyramid Guitars, where they picked out several new instruments on Warner’s dime. Westerberg came back with a “see-through” Plexiglas Dan Armstrong—originally made famous by Keith Richards—that he’d feature on a number of solos.
Westerberg struck up a friendship with Pyramid’s owner Rick Raburn. “He would come by shit-faced early in the day,” recalled Raburn. “One time my wife and little daughter were there, and he was real embarrassed by it. He told me, ‘When I’m home, I’m nothing like this. We only get like this to record and play.’”
For Dickinson, the biggest challenge was that Westerberg was constitutionally unable to repeat anything, frequently inverting his rhythm guitar parts. “Westerberg got mad at me for this, although later he copped to it in public: he’s obviously dyslexic,” said Dickinson. “He would play rhythm parts backwards, literally: the V chord for the IV chord, and the IV for the V.”
Dickinson would piece together complete tracks out of the parts using the Fairlight sampler, and he’d do the same with Westerberg’s lyrics. The singer wasn’t yet in the habit of writing down complete lyrics and would sometimes dump out bits of paper, napkins, and matchbooks from the night before with verses scrawled on them. Once on the mic, he would usually deliver lyrics off the cuff, changing the words wholesale each time. “I realized he was throwing away [good] lines,” said Dickinson. “So I kept them all, and I put together several of the songs in a computer.”
Westerberg was nonplused about the sonic manipulations. “I knew they were sampling some of [the] drums, and I knew they were cutting my guitar and looping it. But I also knew enough about pop music—hell, the Byrds didn’t play on a bunch of their best records. Whatever. We’re still a rock-and-roll band.”
The Memphis sessions were liberating for Westerberg. “When we started, ‘art’ was a word he wouldn’t let me use,” said Dickinson. “By the end of the session, he was calling himself an ‘artist.’”
“It’s been hard for me to do,” Westerberg would admit shortly after the session, “but I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’m an artist. For years I pretended I wasn’t. I pretended I was a punk, I pretended I was a rocker, and a drunk, and a hoodlum. I’m not a hoodlum. I’m a fucking artist. And now I can deal with that.”
Though only a couple of delicate numbers made it onto the finished album, Westerberg cut half a dozen ballads in Memphis, songs he would have never considered if Bob Stinson had still been in the band. Rather than the teenage ardor of “Within Your Reach” or the youthful angst of “Unsatisfied,” numbers like “Run for the Country,” “Learn How to Fail,” and “Birthday Gal” were about adult issues: grown-up love, the regrets that come with age, the difficulties of trying to mature in an adolescent rock-and-roll world.
That December, during a holiday break from recording, Westerberg decided to propose to Lori Bizer. “We were talking about what we were going to do for Christmas gifts,” recalled Bizer. “And for me, it turned out to be a ring.”
The language of Westerberg’s lyrics was also evolving, as glimpsed on “Valentine,” which borrowed its conceit from Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You”: “If you were a pill I’d take a handful at my will / And I’d knock you back with something sweet and strong.�
�� He would abandon the song as unfinished, but when Warner Bros. requested another track to fill out the album’s running time, Westerberg simply added a long solo and repeated the chorus in lieu of a final verse.
The simplest and most affecting number was the Twin Cities observational “Skyway”—written, ironically, in Memphis—about unrequited love, through a protagonist watching the object of his affection moving along the elevated walkways connecting frigid downtown Minneapolis. “It’s generally the people who are shoppers or who work,” said Westerberg. “I don’t go up to the skyways. I sit down there and watch the people walk by.” Still gun-shy about his softer material, Westerberg arrived at Ardent early one morning, while Tommy and Chris were still sleeping, to cut “Skyway” in private. (Mars’s gentle rhythm and Dickinson’s vibes were added later.)
The album’s biggest departure was the cocktail jazz nocturne “Nightclub Jitters,” which Westerberg wrote on his way to pick up smokes at a Super-America. In Minneapolis, Westerberg rarely ventured to bars or clubs anymore; he was tired of superficial relationships (“It don’t matter much if we keep in touch”) and felt disconnected from the crowd as he got older. “Sometimes someone . . . wants to come spit a drink in your face or pick a fight with you or something,” he said.
Westerberg was uneasy about the song. “Paul said, ‘Well, if we’re going to cut this song, we’re gonna have to get real musicians’—as if they weren’t,” said Dickinson, who’d brought in an old Yamaha electric piano and an odd electronic stand-up bass. “I left the room for fifteen minutes, and when I came back, Paul was playing the piano and Tommy was over in the corner playing the bass. We cut it in one take.”
