Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Plainview, Minnesota, was a town of 1,500, ninety miles southeast of the Twin Cities. There, the elder Dunlap served as a country lawyer to a community of farmers and field hands. There was little money around. “He’d work for a half a hog, or a farmer would pull up and dump a bushel of corn on our doorstep, and that was payment,” recalled his son. Eventually, Dunlap was elected to the Minnesota State Senate as a Republican, representing Olmstead and Wabasha Counties for thirteen years, starting in 1953.

  Though he made his name in public service, Robert Dunlap was also a gifted piano player who favored the ballads of Hoagy Carmichael. “That’s probably why he tolerated my ambitions towards music and would help me along, even though he worried about it,” said Bob Dunlap. “It always was and always would be a horrible way to make a living.”

  As a boy, Bob was highly intelligent, somewhat eccentric, and incredibly skinny. With his mop of curly black hair, big ears, and pipe-cleaner arms, he cut a curious figure among the corn-fed farm kids, who teased him for his brains and lack of brawn. The catcalls were always about his size: Beanpole, Skinny, Slim.

  Music was his refuge. He loved rock’s greasy-haired rebels—Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent—but his great hero was the bookish Buddy Holly. “It was so fun to hear a new Buddy Holly song on the radio—the utter simplicity of it compared to recordings by Perry Como, with fancy strings and a twenty-seven-piece orchestra.”

  By his early teens, Dunlap would sneak into his older sister’s room to pluck away at her little tenor guitar. Finally, his father bought him his own six-string. “I stayed up all night long for decades working really hard to get good,” said Dunlap. “For some people, music comes really easy. Other people have to work really, really hard to simulate that. In my case, no one can really know just how hard.”

  In 1964, as he was entering high school, Dunlap’s father moved the family to neighboring Rochester. “There were two cliques in the town, the rich kids and the poor kids, and I never really made it with any group,” he said. Dunlap would frequently skip school to wander the country’s byways alone. His father had to pull strings to get his son a diploma.

  After graduating, Dunlap would carry a worn copy of Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory as he hitchhiked around the state. In 1969 he enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis but dropped out after a couple semesters. He spent most of his time there tracing Bob Dylan’s steps through Dinkytown. “To someone my age, there was no touching his importance,” said Dunlap.

  His first band was a Small Faces–styled mod outfit, Mrs. Frubbs. At one of their shows at a farm outside the cities in 1971, Dunlap met Chrissie Nelson. “Bob was so cool, you’d never know he was from the Midwest,” she recalled. “He actually spoke with a bit of a British accent, which was a little odd, but we were all very young.”

  Born in August 1950, Nelson was raised in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park; her father was an architect, her mother a pharmacist. She attended her first show at age fourteen: Jimmy Reed at the Marigold Ballroom. Chrissie forged a note from her mother to gain entry. She’d also dropped out of the U of M after a couple of semesters. Chrissie took one look at the lean, frizzy-haired guitarist onstage and fell in love: “Bob and I sat up on a hay bale talking all night, and we’ve been together ever since.”

  Dunlap spent the early seventies “in some god-awful bands,” he said, as well as working as a cab driver. In 1976 he joined Thumbs Up, a variety band led by a wild white-soul shouter named Curt Almsted, aka Curtiss A. “We all lived this white trash existence in the city, but Slim was a little different,” said Almsted. “He’d had this small-town existence, but he also grew up reading The New Yorker. He was smart.”

  As the city dragged around in flares and a Quaalude haze, Almsted served up the sharkskin-suit soul of Wilson Pickett and the melodic finery of the British Invasion. Thumbs Up helped sow the seeds of Minneapolis’s first-wave punk. “We all went to see Curt’s band all the time,” said Peter Jesperson. “I wanted to start a record label to make Curt Almsted records.”

  Inspired by Scotty Moore and Chet Atkins, Dunlap had learned to play with a thumb-pick. “I was never into playing fast and fancy anyway,” he said. Dunlap would use his thumb and fingers to pull at chords; his colleagues would refer to “Bob’s Chinese guitar.” “He’d provide these moody, atmospheric, almost keyboard-like sounds,” said Almsted.

  Thumbs Up toured the five-state ballroom circuit in a rickety school bus, making a nice living on the road. “Those were good years, even though I was left alone most of the time,” said Chrissie, who married Dunlap and raised their daughter Bee and twins Delia and Louie. By the late seventies, Thumbs Up switched its name to the Spooks. Though Almsted and Dunlap were old guard, punks and new wavers welcomed them at the Longhorn.

  The Spooks signed to the newly minted Twin/Tone, releasing an EP in 1978, while Chrissie got a job at the recently reconstituted Sam’s, later First Avenue, in 1979. Though major labels in New York poked around, Almsted quickly soured any potential deals, telling A&R men: “If you guys fuck me over, I’m going to slit your throats.”

  In 1979 the band changed its name again, to the Personals. During sessions for that band’s Twin/Tone album, Almsted got drunk, punched a metal wall, and broke his hand. The rest of the group bailed, including Dunlap, who went on to front his own short-lived group, the Sentimentals.

  Driving his cab, Dunlap would see Bob Stinson walking along Lake Street. One winter night he picked him up, and they struck up a deep, almost profound friendship—two sensitive children saved by music. In 1981, when Stinson’s band opened for the Sentimentals, “they blew me off the stage,” said Dunlap. “When we started playing, you could just feel it: what we were doing was old, and this was the new thing.”

  By the mid-1980s, Dunlap was working as a janitor at First Avenue and the Uptown Theater and playing local gigs. He was the consummate sideman—in thrall to the music even if it wasn’t a career anymore.

  Ironically, the person urging Dunlap to go for the job most was Bob Stinson. As they shined First Avenue’s floors each day, Stinson would badger Dunlap to try out for the Replacements, occasionally grabbing a mop to mime the licks Dunlap needed to learn. Referring to Westerberg, Stinson would tell him, “Oh, he’s from hell. I don’t wish him upon my worst enemy, but you . . . you could do it.”

  Dunlap never quite understood the reasoning. But Carleen Krietler said it was always Bob’s firm and faithful belief that Dunlap was the only man worthy of taking his place in the band. In fact, when Westerberg fired him, Stinson had suggested Dunlap as his successor: “I heard Bob say,” Krietler remembered, “‘I sweep floors with someone who’s pretty good.’”

  Tommy Stinson was coming to the same conclusion. He’d known Dunlap for years. “He sang good backgrounds . . . had cool guitar sounds. And he seemed to be Curt’s better half,” recalled Tommy. On a personal level, Dunlap was Westerberg’s kind of character: a wry, Midwestern intellect, like a cranky, comic uncle who also possessed a calming manner to help stabilize Paul’s moods, as he had Almsted’s. To High Noon and Warner Bros., Dunlap—thirty-five, married, three kids—was a strange choice, which itself was part of the attraction for the band.

  In January 1987, Dunlap was at Nicollet Studios playing pedal steel on a Curtiss A record when Tommy came by and invited him to meet the band for a drink at J. D. Hoyt’s, a bar near the ’Mats’ rehearsal space. It was an audition of sorts; they wanted to see how he handled his booze.

  The Replacements didn’t mince words: they wanted Dunlap in the band. He demurred—he was too old, he couldn’t tour, he couldn’t play Bob Stinson’s stuff right, every excuse he could think of. Eventually, they talked him into coming next door to rehearse. “I tried desperately to play ‘not the guy’–type guitar,” said Dunlap. “But they had a couple new songs that I liked, and it was a good little moment.”

  Returning to Hoyt’s, the band again pressed him to join, but Dunlap was still resistant. They went bac
k and forth for many hours and many rounds. Finally, a cracked compromise was reached: They would all drink until somebody dropped. If one of the ’Mats went down first, they’d leave Dunlap alone; if he fell before them, he would join the band.

  The next morning Dunlap rubbed his bleary eyes and reached to steady his pounding head. He looked around and saw that he was at home, in bed, but couldn’t remember when or how he’d gotten there. All he was sure of was that he was the Replacements’ new guitarist.

  Dunlap was an unconventional choice: “Like the Rolling Stones deciding to replace Brian Jones, not with Mick Taylor, but with Carl Perkins,” said Westerberg, who later joked that they’d selected Dunlap primarily because he had something none of the rest of the band had: a driver’s license. But Westerberg’s interest was more serious than that. His songs were changing, and a versatile, sympathetic player like Dunlap would be an asset. “I wanted someone bluesier, who was hip to country music,” said Westerberg, “’cause that’s where I envisioned the band going.”

  For Dunlap’s sixteen-year-old daughter Bee, it was a surreal turn. “She was a Replacements fanatic,” said Chrissie Dunlap. “She loved that band. I almost came to hate the Sorry Ma record, because that’s all she played for a long time. So when Bob joined the band, it would’ve been like if my dad had joined the Beatles.”

  Dunlap had a teenage daughter and two younger children entering grade school. With a solid year of roadwork awaiting the band, he’d be pulled away for months at a time. “Paul always was very aware of that, and concerned,” said Chrissie. “He asked me more than once if that was going to be okay.” But Chrissie had always championed Bob’s music. “It was an answer to my wishes. I couldn’t imagine holding him back for a second.”

  The next order of business was a new handle. “Tommy couldn’t deal with calling him Bob,” said Daune Earle, “because it was just such a wrenching thing for him to go from one Bob to a [different] Bob.” Slim, the schoolyard jibe from Dunlap’s childhood, was now his affectionate stage name.

  Given Dunlap’s fairly prosaic local CV, the band decided to feed the national press a series of whoppers. Chuckled Westerberg: “We figured we would pretend we found a genuine bluesman.” They claimed he was “Small Town Slim,” an ex-con from the wilds of Wabasha County. Foreign journalists were told the tale of “Blind Boy Slim.” “I remember being on tour in the Netherlands,” said Dunlap, “and a guy telling me, ‘You see pretty well for someone who was blind. It’s in the paper that for many years you were blind and just recently recovered your sight.’”

  But Dunlap’s role with the Replacements was less mythmaking than grounding. He would become a close confidant to Mars, offer emotional encouragement to a still-maturing Tommy, and serve as counsel, musical foil, and amateur psychologist to Westerberg.

  Yet like the others, he had an incredibly jaundiced view of the music business. “He was just like them,” said Gary Hobbib, laughing. “He didn’t trust anybody, didn’t like anybody. He was a born Replacement.”

  CHAPTER 35

  In spite of the Saturday Night Live debacle, the firings of Peter Jesperson and Bob Stinson, and the canceled tour, High Noon was determined to rally the Replacements’ label to their cause. “Warner Brothers would put out so many records a week, and they weren’t just any records—it was Van Halen and ZZ Top,” said Russ Rieger. “We had to get enough key people on board to mount a serious campaign.”

  The rough mixes from Memphis made it clear that the album was going to be far more viable commercially than Tim. High Noon began badgering Seymour Stein for help. “We said, ‘We can’t take the record around from office to office,’” said Hobbib.

  Under the right circumstances, High Noon figured the Replacements could actually be charming and ingratiating. Rieger suggested that Stein pay for key Warner staff to fly to Memphis for a playback party with the band at Ardent. They would have dinner and drinks, spend a night on the town with the boys, and get everyone excited about the record. Stein agreed and on January 14 sent a memo to more than two dozen Warner and Sire employees:

  The Replacements are truly becoming a household word. Our goal in 1987 is to expand these households from a basic college and grass roots following to the rock ‘n’ roll world at large. . . . To expand this company’s awareness of the Replacements and their increased potential Sire Records would like to host a listening party celebration. . . . Please join us in Memphis. I guarantee no one will be disappointed.

  If nothing else, Stein knew how to throw a party. Set for mid-February, the trip would include accommodations at the historic Peabody Hotel and a VIP tour of Graceland. The very fact that the company was shelling out for such a lavish excursion didn’t escape anyone’s attention. “You didn’t pile people from Burbank and New York and fly them to Memphis to listen to records normally,” said national sales manager Charlie Springer. “We might’ve done it for Paul Simon or Madonna, but not for a band like the Replacements.”

  The ’Mats themselves were oblivious to High Noon’s coup. “It went over our heads. It seemed perfectly natural that everyone at the company should be there because we are the Replacements and we’ve made a record,” said Westerberg. “We were that arrogant. We had no idea that this was a special privilege.”

  On the day of the party, the band ventured to a Goodwill near Beale Street and outfitted themselves in deafeningly loud plaid suits, fat ties, and misshapen homburgs. But their label head one-upped them. “Seymour arrived in Memphis off a plane from Paris,” said Jim Dickinson. “He was wearing a tuxedo jacket with little Playboy bunnies all embossed over it. . . . I don’t think he’d been asleep in a week. The first words out of his mouth were ‘Where’s the coke?’”

  Amid a steady flow of booze and substances, playback commenced. “We were putting our best foot forward, in a way,” said Tommy Stinson. “We tried to embrace some of the Warner people, probably the most we did ever. Sitting there in a room with thirty people playing our new record? That was a huge goddamn move for us.”

  As the band went around the room greeting label execs, many of whom they hadn’t met, Tommy began to repeat a little joke: “Pleased to meet me, the pleasure is all yours.” The band would use that phrase—“Pleased to Meet Me”—as the album’s title. The cover depicted a Faustian handshake between a scruffy rock-and-roller, played by Westerberg, and a bejeweled record executive.

  Somehow, Westerberg and Stinson managed to convince the rest of the label that their new guitarist Slim Dunlap—whom the brass were meeting for the first time—actually was a gun-wielding ex-con with a hair-trigger temper. “I think we actually had them going,” said Stinson.

  One Warner staffer asked Dunlap, with a slight air, what he’d done before joining the band. Dunlap snapped back: “What the fuck do you do for a living?”

  The Replacements didn’t need any help being ornery. “We probably insulted a couple people during the party,” said Westerberg. “The fucker in the leather pants, the guy in charge of getting the record on the radio, Tommy said something rude to him, and one of us might’ve pissed on his foot in the bathroom.”

  As the partygoers mingled, the record played repeatedly. It was greeted by universal excitement—though Stein did take Hill and Westerberg aside to tell them the album needed another track, since it was only twenty-eight minutes long, prompting the adding of “Valentine” to the running order.

  The party moved to Justine’s. Housed in a nineteenth-century Italianate mansion, the French restaurant, a favorite of Stein’s, was known for its rich crab and lobster dishes and signature cakes. “I think the main reason Seymour was willing to pay for the whole trip was just so he could eat there,” said one Sire employee.

  Stein had arranged for a private second-floor dining room. The Warner crew did its best to keep up with the ’Mats’ drinking pace. “Later on, a lot of people at the label started going to AA and rehab,” said marketing staffer Jo Lenardi. “But Memphis was well before that time, so everyone was acting pretty
crazy.”

  During dinner, Stein proffered a toast to the band, delivering a wildly impassioned speech connecting the Replacements to Memphis’s rich legacy and placing them in the continuum of great American music.

  Then dessert was served.

  As the waitstaff brought out soufflés and elegantly arrayed silver bowls filled with chocolate sauce and crème fraîche, it was obvious where things were headed. “The trouble started with Chris Mars,” recalled Dickinson. “I saw him tilt a little sideways, [then] he took off his hat, took this poufed-up pie, put it on his head, and put the hat back on.”

  “The next thing you know,” said Warner’s radio promoter Steve Tipp, “the band was making hot fudge sundaes on each other’s heads.”

  Wide-eyed waiters looked on as the Replacements and their label overlords engaged in a massive food fight, chasing each other around the room. “Seymour was the wildest,” said video producer Randy Skinner, who watched Stein running around smearing chocolate onto the restaurant’s silk damask wallpaper. “I remember Tommy looking at me like, ‘This is the head of the label?’” said Julie Panebianco. Just then, Stein jumped up on a table to belt, off-key, “You Are My Sunshine.” The band hopped on and joined in.

  Justine’s management had seen enough. “They said the chandeliers were about to fall off the ceiling,” recalled Stein. “I was keeping the beat on the table. The Replacements were on relatively good behavior for them, and it was me that fucked up. But it was a great, great night.”

  “After that night,” said Michael Hill, “everybody walked away with a commitment to work that record.”