Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  The song also offered Dickinson an opportunity to bring in the first of several guest players. Over the years the producer would try to portray the use of outside musicians as a Warner dictate; in truth, those choices were Dickinson’s. He began by enlisting Edward “Prince Gabe” Kirby for “Nightclub Jitters,” guessing correctly that the band would be charmed by the colorful Memphis horn legend, a Beale Street fixture since the 1930s and an almost vaudevillian character the ’Mats fell for instantly.

  After Kirby completed his smoky, woozy sax solo, the band—listening in the control room—broke into spontaneous applause. Dickinson caught the moment on the talkback mic and added it to the end of the track. Just weeks later, Kirby collapsed at his home and died at age fifty-seven, after a longtime battle with high blood pressure and asthma. “We heard he died fucking a whore,” recalled Stinson. “That’s the way we wanted to go out. If you gotta go, you wanna go out onstage or fucking.” Chris Mars’s drawing of a sad-eyed sax man inside of the finished LP served as memoriam to Kirby.

  At first Tommy and Jim Dickinson butted heads. Stinson tended to police those he felt were messing with the band’s integrity. “I talk to people pretty much as I see it, and Tommy does pretty much the same thing,” said Dickinson.

  During one early argument, Dickinson dismissed Stinson, whom he felt wasn’t being serious about the work.

  “You don’t think I’m serious?” asked Stinson. “I fired my fuckin’ brother. That’s how serious I am about this band.”

  From then on, the producer viewed Stinson differently. “I really let him produce that record whenever I didn’t know what to do. His instincts were so sharp.”

  Their relationship grew beyond the sessions, taking on profound significance for each man over the years. “Tommy Stinson may be my favorite musician I’ve ever worked with,” Dickinson would claim. “People say Keith Richards is the living embodiment of rock-and-roll? I’m sorry, but I know Keith, and it’s Tommy.”

  “There was a kind of father-figure aspect to their relationship,” noted Warner Bros.’s Michael Hill. “I don’t think Paul needed that, but Tommy did.”

  Crucially, Dickinson would encourage Stinson’s songwriting as well. In the midst of the session, the producer told Westerberg to take a day off from the studio in order for Stinson to cut his own material.

  Stinson’s writing was still in its infancy. He’d attempted one original, “Havin’ Fun,” during the Tim sessions, and he’d demo-ed several more at Blackberry Way over the summer. Inevitably, his songs were heavily influenced by Paul Westerberg. “Paul was always encouraging of me writing,” said Stinson. For his part, Westerberg always felt awkward about Stinson’s tunes. “[It] was a little painful, because he sounded so much like me,” he said. “It was a little like listening to your own voice for the first time.”

  Stinson, playing most of the instruments, cut two tracks in Memphis: the full force rave-up “Trouble on the Way” and a gentle song dedicated to Daune Earle, “Try to Make This Your Home.” Though rough and unpolished, Stinson’s musicality and sheer exuberance shone through. “Without question the best things we cut . . . were Tommy’s two solo songs and they’re the only things that have never come out,” said Dickinson. Stinson disagrees: “As I listen back, I can’t sing; they’re not great songs.”

  Stinson wasn’t the only one: Chris Mars also wrote and sang an amusing, if slight, original called “All He Wants to Do Is Fish.” Mars’s deadpan delivery on the Sons of the Pioneers’ Western loper “Cool Water” also wound up as a Pleased to Meet Me B-side—the first non-Westerberg lead vocal on a ’Mats release.

  The music industry lived and breathed singles, so the Replacements needed some commercial songs, an issue High Noon’s Russ Rieger pressed Westerberg on throughout the sessions. The manager saw the unfinished, mostly instrumental “Nevermind” as having the most potential. “In my mind that was an AOR single,” said Rieger, who urged Westerberg to craft a populist set of lyrics to the song.

  The lyrics to “Nevermind” would become a serious bone of contention. Rieger would regularly call the band in Memphis, pleading with Westerberg to make it a hit. “He’d say no . . . repeatedly. He’d start chanting it, actually: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no!’—then he’d hang up,” recalled Rieger.

  Rieger was crestfallen when he heard the finished track. “All over but the shouting . . . just a waste of time . . . nevermind.” “That was my ‘fuck you,’” said Rieger, “I always believed that.” But the lyrics were also colored by Paul’s uncertainty about his impending marriage (“I’m not as ready as I’ll ever be . . . You oughta say if you’re not sure”). Mostly, though, Westerberg admitted, “That’s basically a song to Bob.”

  The months after the split had been awkward around Minneapolis. Neither Paul nor Tommy had seen Bob, and both feared the guilt that would accompany their first meeting since his firing. In a way, “Nevermind” recounted the breakdown of the band. As Westerberg recalled, “The line ‘The words I thought I brought, I left behind’ is the kind of thing where you intend on saying something to someone, apologizing, and then you get together and you’re speechless, you don’t know what to say. So, you know, never mind.”

  The other track with rock radio potential, at least musically, was “The Ledge.” Westerberg had cribbed the riff from “Highway Song,” the 1979 hit from the Southern rockers Blackfoot, building it into a darkly melodious minor-key burner. Lyrically, it was rather knottier. Inspired by the deathly reckoning in Hank Williams’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” Westerberg had been toying with the idea of a defiant suicide song for some time. Back in 1980, he’d come up with a number called “D-E-A-D”; the song’s kicker line was: “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead.”

  “The Ledge” would contain an undeniable element of autobiography—a whisper of Westerberg’s own teenage overdose attempt and the suicide of his friend John Zika. Sitting home on a rainy afternoon in the fall of 1986, he wrote “The Ledge” in forty-five minutes, from the perspective of a jumper looking down at a gathering crowd below: “I’m the boy they can’t ignore / For the first time in my life, I’m sure.”

  In the studio, the band vested the song with a perfect combination of nervous energy and fatalistic drive. “They reached beyond themselves on that one,” said John Hampton. Cut in a single take, everything was done live, even Westerberg’s haunted vocals, which ended with the song’s protagonist hurtling to his death. “When he finally jumps off—it sounds like he’s actually jumping off the ledge,” said Hampton of the recording. “It was like, ‘What did we just go through? Did we just go through a suicide?’ It felt like we had.”

  When the take was over, a drained Westerberg collapsed on the control room couch and asked Dickinson: “I don’t have to do that again, do I?”

  The figure casting the longest shadow over the Memphis sessions, in more ways than one, was Alex Chilton, whose connection to Dickinson had been the initial lure for coming to Ardent. The producer made a point of using many of the same microphones he’d utilized to record Big Star’s Third.

  The band hadn’t seen Chilton since the infamous Houston concert riot a year earlier. Chilton would occasionally turn up at Ardent, usually barefoot. “We caught a couple funny glances from him when he heard like ‘Shooting Dirty Pool,’” recalled Westerberg. “He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and walked out.”

  Westerberg had been messing with a song titled “George from Outer Space”—loosely inspired by a ’Mats road pal named George Lewis—before reworking it into an homage called “Alex Chilton.” When Westerberg first met Chilton backstage at CBGB in December 1984, he’d fumbled for an icebreaker: “I’m in love with that one song of yours—what’s that song?” (He was thinking of Big Star’s “Watch the Sunrise.”) For the Memphis sessions, Westerberg had turned it into a lyrical hook (“I’m in love / With that song”) and developed a chord sequence that “reminded me of a singsongy pop kind of thing [like] Big Star.”

  Westerberg worried
that a song about Chilton was too on the nose. But Mars and Stinson pushed him to complete it; in return, he gave them each a cowriting credit. “If there’s a sense of ‘Oh God, what if this is looked on as being stupid or weird?’—that’s usually a tip-off that it’s worth doing,” he said. “Those are generally the best songs, and I had that feeling about ‘Alex Chilton.’” The lyric represented a hopeful projection on Westerberg’s part as well: in a world where “children by the million” clamored for Alex Chilton, surely they’d beg for the Replacements too.

  The timing was perfect. The Bangles had just covered Big Star’s “September Gurls” on their multi-platinum Different Light, and R.E.M. and other young acts were regularly name-checking the group in interviews. “There was more than a grain,” said Westerberg of lines like “I never travel far / Without a little Big Star,” “that I thought it would appear hip. But a lot of it was genuine. We did absolutely live with those Big Star tapes for years, so it sunk in there.”

  Ironically, Chilton never listened to the song in Memphis. “We made sure to turn ‘Alex Chilton’ off every time he came in,” said Westerberg, “because I didn’t want him to take it the wrong way.” It wasn’t until the following spring, when he opened some concert dates for the ’Mats, that Chilton finally heard it for the first time.

  “I couldn’t really make out the words,” Chilton recalled. “Then I heard the record and couldn’t make out the words there either.” Still, he would allow that it was “a pretty good song” and a boost for his reputation. “I feel like a great legendary outlaw, like John Wesley Harding or something,” he would say.

  Originally, the idea had been for Chilton to play lead guitar on the track. Instead, he played on “Can’t Hardly Wait.”

  It was the song that wouldn’t die. Since writing “Can’t Hardly Wait” shortly after the Let It Be sessions, Westerberg and the band had tried recording it myriad ways. A live version had appeared on The Shit Hits the Fans; they’d cut both acoustic and electric versions with Chilton producing in early ’85, then re-recorded it for Tim. “We had played it so many times that we were tired of it,” Westerberg said.

  Michael Hill urged them to take one last shot in Memphis. After a couple of unenthusiastic early passes at a straight eighth-note pace, they returned to it after a particularly grueling night out. “I was hungover,” Westerberg said. “So we started off with the quiet guitar, and everything fell in from there.”

  Fittingly, it was a Memphis-style interpretation, with everyone, even Mars, laying back on the groove. Westerberg rewrote the final verse in bed at the Holiday Inn. To punctuate its dramatic stops and starts, Dickinson spiked the song with a couple of big moments of digital silence just before Westerberg’s pleading choruses.

  The more prominent contributions would come from a pair of the city’s most famous sidemen: tenor saxophonist Andrew Love of the Memphis Horns and Ben Cauley, trumpeter for the Bar-Kays and the lone survivor of the Otis Redding plane crash. Westerberg didn’t object to using horns, but he was initially concerned they might be too jarring. To ensure plausible denial, he and Stinson left Memphis the day before the horns were actually cut.

  With the band gone, Dickinson took further liberties: he hired classical violinist Max Huls from the Memphis State University music department to add strings—a nod to Dan Penn’s pop-soul productions with Chilton’s Box Tops. Westerberg would blanch at the string additions and later disavow them to the press, mostly to defuse backlash from their more orthodox fans. “It’s like the Replacements trying to sound like 1968,” he said, “in [our] own feeble way.”

  The Replacements might have been recording at a $10,000-a-week studio, but after seven years, they were still scraping by. “We’re making welfare money,” Westerberg told a reporter at the time. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars a month . . . [and] all the beer you can drink.”

  Westerberg had long resigned himself to penury. “I remember I was having a tuna fish sandwich in some restaurant in Memphis,” he said, “when Vito [Jim Lancaster] kinda exploded at me: ‘You think your fucking manager up in New York City is having a tuna sandwich right now? You think those guys up there are living like you are?’ That was the first time it came in those terms: Those guys up there.”

  As sessions continued into 1987, the record’s paradoxical character—Dickinson’s high-fidelity recording of a low-fidelity sound—came clear. Mars’s drums had been given new prominence. “[The] drums don’t just sound like they’re being hit, but like they’re flying apart, exploding,” said Dickinson. That propulsion was balanced as Dickinson filled the spaces with bits of weirdness: “I’m doing stuff like taking the echo and syncopating it, creating a kind of groove with nothing but an effects loop,” he noted.

  For all its electronic manipulation, Pleased to Meet Me was highlighted by a number of very human mistakes. Tommy cackling during takes, Paul fumbling to find his microphone in the dungeon, Chris knocking his cymbal off its stand and sending it crashing onto the floor—Dickinson studded the tracks with such moments.

  By mid-January, basic recording was complete, and the ’Mats went back to Minneapolis with a batch of John Hampton’s rough mixes. The band was under the impression that the final mix wouldn’t be radically different, but Dickinson had other ideas.

  With Joe Hardy back on board, the producer spent another three weeks in the studio mixing; Hampton returned again for final tweaks. Dickinson layered organ and piano overdubs, crediting himself as East Memphis Slim. He created the clattering opening of “I Don’t Know” with a drum sample and ran Westerberg’s guitar through a Leslie speaker to conjure the quavering feel on “Never-mind.” He also made tons of tiny embellishments via the Fairlight.

  Westerberg didn’t fight the postproduction changes. “We really didn’t fucking care,” he said. “They were spending a lot of money, and Jim was determined to give the company the product of the day.” It would be the last time the ’Mats were ever so accommodating in the studio. “I think they learned a lot about how to make a record watching me,” noted Dickinson, “and took it out on the next couple of producers.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The Replacements still hadn’t replaced Bob Stinson, and the band was deluged with correspondence from guitarists angling for the gig. “[They] were, for the most part, pretty bad,” said Westerberg. “All of them were big Replacements fans and were trying to fill Bob’s shoes, and that’s not at all what we wanted.”

  High Noon, meanwhile, was making a more serious effort to push the band to hire, in Gary Hobbib’s words, “a guitar-slinger.” What High Noon really wanted was another Tommy Stinson: someone young, with an attractive look and personality, who could also play.

  The most intriguing candidate was Texas phenom Charlie Sexton. Already a burgeoning solo star, having hit the charts the previous year with an aggressively marketed debut for MCA, the eighteen-year-old had the goods despite the hype. He’d come up through Austin’s roots music scene as a prodigy and had backed up the likes of Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Ron Wood.

  Surprisingly, the Replacements were receptive to the notion of hiring a “featured” guitarist, but decided not to pursue Sexton for typically capricious reasons. “I think we saw one of his press photos or something and thought, ‘Naaaah,’” recalled Westerberg. With his tousled hair, pouty lips, and chiseled looks, “Cheekbone Charlie,” as Sexton had been dubbed, was unnervingly handsome. “Christ, he was way too good-lookin’,” said Tommy Stinson. “Yikes.”

  No, a full-fledged band member needed to be able to get the Replacements’ sense of humor and tolerate their drinking. And he had to be from Minneapolis. Naturally, they began looking in their local tavern. One night at the CC Club they shanghaied their drinking buddy David Postlethwaite into going to rehearsal with them. Peter Jesperson’s close friend and roommate, Postlethwaite had played in a number of Twin Cities bands; Chris and Tommy had recently backed him on a track for a Twin/Tone compilation. But with everyone more than halfway in the bag,
the late-night session didn’t go well, and Postlethwaite faded as a possibility.

  A more serious candidate was Jeff Waryan, who’d been in Fingerprints and Curtiss A’s band before launching a solo project called Figures on Twin/Tone. “Paul’s dad and my dad played golf together,” said Waryan. “They would talk about their rock-and-roll sons, and we would joke about going to caddy for them.”

  They spent two nights jamming at the band’s new downtown rehearsal space. Waryan was a slinky, elegant guitarist in the mold of the Only Ones’ John Perry. “Paul left the lead stuff up to me, and we actually had a blast.” Waryan’s low-key demeanor also offered a welcome change from Bob Stinson’s outsized persona. Westerberg offered Waryan the job, but Waryan was deeply committed to Figures, which had just released a new album and had a couple of tours already on the books.

  With Waryan out, Tommy Stinson decided to take the initiative. That winter he visited the offices of First Avenue, quizzing the club’s booker Chrissie Dunlap about potential candidates. As the conversation wound down, Dunlap grinned and said: “If you really want the best guitarist in Minneapolis, I happen to know just the guy.”

  Born to a distinguished clan of newsmen, lawyers, and politicians, Bob Dunlap had been expected to follow their path. The Dunlaps were Scots who’d arrived in America in the late nineteenth century and settled in St. Paul, where they became one of the city’s influential families. Bob’s grandfather, Roy Dunlap Sr., was the managing editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch for thirty-five years; his son, Roy Jr., would become the paper’s columnist and managing editor.

  Bob’s father, Robert Rankin Dunlap, graduated from the University of Minnesota law school in 1941—just as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He spent the next few years fighting in Europe, eventually in the medical corps. He returned home in 1946 with a new bride, Jane Elizabeth Smith, whom he’d met while stationed in Virginia. Jane was a grade school art teacher, and the couple would have five children together—three girls and two boys—with Robert Bruce Dunlap arriving in the middle of the pack on August 14, 1951.