by Bob Mehr
If the Replacements’ relationship with Warner Bros. was on an upswing, the band’s dealings with Twin/Tone were becoming increasingly contentious.
While Peter Jesperson retained his partnership in the label, he was still licking his wounds from the Replacements experience. Working a day job in a warehouse, he removed himself from Twin/Tone’s business for several years.
Though Jesperson was sitting on hours of unreleased Replacements material, there was little concern that he might release or bootleg the material for financial gain. The band didn’t share that same faith when it came to Twin/Tone’s head, Paul Stark.
The group’s enmity toward Stark had only grown over the years. Westerberg’s refusal to sign a contract with Twin/Tone meant the first four Replacements records were made on a handshake agreement and an understanding that once the group recouped, they’d be given a 20 percent royalty. By 1987, the ’Mats’ back catalog was shifting serious units. The group was far and away the company’s top act, representing over half of its overall sales, with the Mekons and Soul Asylum a distant second and third.
Despite that boost, Twin/Tone was in constant financial turmoil, largely owing to a series of crippling distributor bankruptcies; the first, in 1986, was Los Angeles–based Greenworld, which went under owing Twin/Tone over $100,000. “It seemed like one big distributor bankruptcy would happen every year,” said Dave Ayers, who remained Twin/Tone’s vice president until 1991. “They would always leave a five- or six-figure debt that we’d never be able to reconcile.”
Making matters worse was the somewhat precarious manner in which the label’s day-to-day operations were handled. “Bless Paul Stark’s heart, but he did not know how to run a business,” said one former Twin/Tone employee. “Whoever was screaming the loudest would get paid; otherwise, you wouldn’t.”
In the fall of 1986, Twin/Tone was heavily promoting Soul Asylum’s third album, While You Were Out, hoping for a breakthrough. At the same time the company began missing its scheduled royalty payments to the Replacements. “The justification became, ‘Do we stop putting records out and pay a few people whose royalties are due, or do we keep putting records out, sell them, and then we can pay everybody?’” said Ayers. “That’s what it turned into.”
By issuing more product, Twin/Tone was incentivizing its remaining distributors to pay on time. To keep the product flow steady, Twin/Tone continued signing bands and hiring employees. At one point its roster included nearly forty acts, including the ’Mats’ road pals Agitpop. “I remember telling Westerberg, ‘I think we’re gonna sign to your old label,’” said Agitpop’s John DeVries. “He laughed in my face.”
It appeared, from the outside at least, that Twin/Tone was doing well. “It was all a shell game,” said Ayers. “There was no money there.”
By early 1987, the Replacements claimed they were owed nearly $30,000 in royalties; the label put the figure closer to $5,000. Stark did little to assuage the animus brewing. “He fueled the paranoia,” said Ayers. “It would’ve been very easy for him to dispel a lot of that, but he just wasn’t interested.”
If Stark wasn’t going to respond on his own, the ’Mats would just have to find a way to get his attention.
In the last week of February, Slim Dunlap rounded up the band for a photo session in a black Dodge van. Driving through Uptown, Westerberg noticed an old rifle wrapped in a blanket in back. Dunlap had been given the gun by a friend who wanted him to test it out. Westerberg encouraged him to use it as a prop, to play up the “Small Town Slim” persona.
After finishing with the photographer, the band was drinking its lunch at the Black Forest Inn, a German biergarten a stone’s throw from Twin/Tone’s offices, and stewing about the money they were owed. To add further insult, Twin/Tone had just announced that it was going to release Sorry Ma, Stink, and Hootenanny on cassette for the first time.
As the drinks and anger flowed, the band got an idea: they would steal their master tapes from the label. In fact, they would destroy them. Westerberg advocated a ceremonial end by casting them into the Mississippi River.
“That part never made any sense to me,” said Dunlap, who proposed hiding the tapes in his basement. “If you steal ’em, then keep ’em. Why throw them in the river? But it wasn’t a logical discussion.”
Dunlap pulled up in front of the Twin/Tone complex on Nicollet and left the engine running. The other three entered the building. Tommy chatted up receptionist Roz Ferguson, while Westerberg and Mars headed for the storage area and began rummaging through the tape library. “If it went to court, I don’t think anybody could testify that they actually saw Chris and I grab any tapes,” said Westerberg coyly.
Initially, staffer Chris Osgood and office manager Abbie Kane didn’t give the band’s presence much thought. “They had this look on their faces like they were up to something,” said Osgood. “That wasn’t weird in itself—they were always up to something.”
After a few minutes, Mars and Westerberg left quietly. Stinson soon followed, carrying a large box. Kane held the door for him. She watched Dunlap’s van peel off and walked back inside. “I got maybe ten steps in and Paul Stark came running out saying, ‘Where the hell did Tommy go?’” recalled Kane. “‘Where are the tapes? Where are the tapes?’”
Tearing down Nicollet Avenue, the band looked through their haul. “The stuff wasn’t clearly labeled,” said Tommy. “Some of it was ours. But we could’ve gotten other people’s records too.” (A later inventory revealed that the band had mostly grabbed Replacements album safeties used for promotional cassette dubs. The band’s master tapes were actually stored inside Twin/Tone’s second-floor suite of offices. “See,” said Westerberg, “we were too lazy to even go up a flight of stairs.”)
Heading downtown, Dunlap pulled over by a railroad bridge. Westerberg wanted to send the tapes dramatically over the water. “But I said, ‘What if you get out onto the middle of the bridge and a fucking train comes along?’” recalled Dunlap. “There was no place to walk. That freaked ’em out. So they decided, ‘We better not hike out there.’”
They found a safer spot near the old Pillsbury Mill building. Atop a small embankment, they began bowling down spools of tape into the Big River. “It was fun,” recalled Westerberg. “A lot of them we rolled down the hill and the reels came undone. Then we realized we had to go to the edge, down to the lip, to get them into the water. Instead of floating out and then gently plopping down,” he said, “they just sunk like a stone.”
Initially in high spirits, the ’Mats headed to the CC Club, crowing about the caper. Somewhere between rounds, the realization hit that they’d actually failed in their original mission. The handful of tapes they’d gotten couldn’t have been their master reels. If they weren’t at the studio, the band figured they must be stored at Stark’s home in the nearby suburb of Golden Valley.
“By the time we’d gotten past the part of throwing things in the river, we were even drunker,” said Stinson, “and we took it to the next level: ‘Let’s go to Stark’s house; let’s go rob him.’”
Despite Dunlap’s reluctance, he took the wheel again. Soon the band began creeping through Stark’s tony neighborhood. When they arrived at his house, it was obvious that Stark’s wife, Julia Bertholf, was home.
Tommy rang the bell. The plan, such as it was, called for another charm diversion. Bertholf, however, was immediately suspicious of her rubber-legged, reeking young visitor. She slammed the door in his face and quickly dialed her husband.
The ’Mats’ drunken initiative was dissipating into alcohol fatigue. The legal implications hit them as well: “Stealing from the record company what we thought was ours was one thing, but entering a guy’s home . . . that’s when it got a little dicey,” said Westerberg. The band skittered away empty-handed. “We figured we’d made our point anyway,” said Stinson.
By then, word had already gotten back to the Twin/Tone offices that the ’Mats had thrown the stolen tapes in the river. “When we heard th
at, I do remember some irreverent laughter,” said Kane. “It was the Replacements—you really had to just laugh. Unless you were Paul Stark.” The next morning, the story of the heist was being wildly exaggerated around town—one version of the tale had Slim and his rifle holding the label’s employees at bay while the others grabbed the tapes. “That was no longer funny,” said Dunlap.
Unsurprisingly, the cold war between the band and the label grew chillier over the next eighteen months, culminating in a 1988 lawsuit seeking a lien on the unpaid royalties. The parties settled out of court two years later. By then, Twin/Tone was in better financial shape, having signed a pressing and distribution deal with major label A&M (later Soul Asylum’s home). Stark agreed to pay off the ’Mats’ balance—now unarguably in the $30,000 range—over a year. He also got his wish: the wording of the settlement acknowledged that the label did have a binding contract with the band.
In November 1990, Tommy Stinson signed the agreement on behalf of the group, as vice president and partner of the Replacements LLC. Technically speaking, Twin/Tone never did get Westerberg’s signature on a contract.
CHAPTER 36
Happy as Warner Bros. was with Pleased to Meet Me, there was still no consensus on a first single.
A sixteen-year promo veteran from Cleveland, George Gerrity, Warner’s VP of rock promotion, had become a dominant figure in the radio world. In 1986 nearly half the records topping the year-end AOR chart were Warner acts. Gerrity saw Pleased to Meet Me as a major step in the Replacements’ development. “To my ears, we had a record we could do something with,” he said.
On the label’s alternative side, staff members like Steve Tipp felt that “Alex Chilton” was the right direction to go: get traction among college and freeform stations and then use the buzz to build the record at mainstream radio. But in other quarters, there was doubt that a track paying tribute to an obscure figure like Chilton would fly. The horns and strings of the album’s other standout, “Can’t Hardly Wait,” seemed too much of a stylistic stretch. Besides, the band itself was adamantly against it. “Down the line maybe,” said Westerberg, but as a leadoff, “it would’ve seemed like false advertising.”
Eventually, Gerrity decided on “The Ledge,” figuring its driving backbeat and blistering guitar solo would appeal to AOR. By early 1987, aside from a few outliers like U2, the format was a mixture of arena superstars (Van Halen, ZZ Top), seventies holdovers (Heart, Foreigner), younger hair bands (Whitesnake, Bon Jovi), and heartland bores (John Mellencamp).
Most of the 150 or so AOR stations in the United States were tightly playlisted, controlled by national consultants like Burkhart/Abrams and the Pollack Media Group. New bands and songs trying to break into the format were subject to a rigorous audience testing process. “That was the era of market research: ‘Here, listen to seven seconds of this record: do you like it?’” said Gerrity. “That’s how judgments were made.”
Moreover, many AOR outlets ramped up the number of classic tracks in rotation to appeal to an older demographic, leaving fewer slots for up-and-coming bands. “No one at AOR was going to take a big risk with the Replacements at that time,” said Gerrity. “A band like that wasn’t going to research well. And frankly, Paul’s ability to write was a little beyond what average radio audiences were able to comprehend.” He figured that if “The Ledge” failed, they could try again with “Alex Chilton” or “Can’t Hardly Wait.”
Historically speaking, Warner Bros. had no qualms about spending time and money to break in an act slowly. “It wasn’t a one-and-done situation,” said Gerrity. “I had the latitude and the budget to take a couple runs at it.” But High Noon was desperate for immediate results. For a band that tended to lose interest and motivation quickly—that had nearly broken up six months earlier—the first shot was the most crucial.
Nevertheless, enthusiasm ran high at Warner that spring. Following the Memphis party, Sire formally picked up the Replacements’ option, committing to an additional four albums, with an option for six in total. The advance and recording budgets for subsequent records would nearly double, from $150,000 to nearly $300,000. “They felt like Paul was writing great songs and the best was still ahead of them,” said Rieger.
Westerberg’s response to the news was less than sanguine: “Suckers.”
There’s a riot goin’ on: The Replacements inciting the crowd at Houston’s Lawndale Art Annex during the Tim tour. (Photos by Mark Lacy)
High Noon Management’s Gary Hobbib (left) and Russ Rieger began steering the Replacements career starting in late-’85. (Author Collection)
Bob Stinson with his future bride Carleen Krietler at the CC Club: “Is being in the [Replacements] healthy for you?” she asked him. “I don’t know if he wanted to answer that honestly.” (Photo by Just Loomis)
The brotherhood between Tommy and Paul was fully forged with the decision to kick Bob out of the band in 1986. “We figured: now we’re in this thing together,” said Tommy, “come hell or high water.” (Photo by David Brewster. From the Minneapolis Star and Tribune News Negative Collection; courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society)
Recording Pleased to Meet Me at Ardent Studios in Memphis. Top left, producer Jim Dickinson. Top right, the ’Mats surround engineer Joe Hardy. Third row, far right: Westerberg cuts a guitar track as engineer John Hampton listens. Bottom row, far right: Dickinson supervising the horns on “Can’t Hardly Wait,” as trumpeter Ben Cauley plays. (Photos by Jim Lancaster, courtesy of Rhino Entertainment Company, A Warner Music Group) (Top right photo courtesy Ardent Studios)
Bob “Slim” Dunlap would join the Replacements as a lead guitarist in early 1987. (Courtesy of Rhino Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group)
Slim’s wife, First Avenue booker Chrissie Dunlap. (Photo by Alison Cummings)
The Replacements, making an art of offending everyone. (Photo by Daniel Corrigan, courtesy of Rhino Entertainment Company, A Warner Music Group)
Sire’s Seymour Stein and Warner Bros.’ Michael Hill are all smiles as the Replacements present them with the tape of Pleased to Meet Me at the Memphis playback party. (Courtesy Ardent Studios)
Outtakes for the Pleased to Meet Me album cover. (Photo by Daniel Corrigan, courtesy of Rhino Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group)
On the road in ’87: Slim getting into the spirit; Paul mugging; Tommy preening; Chris turning into “Pappy the Clown” as Westerberg and the Georgia Satellites’ Dan Baird look on. (Photos by Julie Panebianco)
All dressed up: The Replacements and Phil Westerberg (far right), put on tuxes for Paul’s wedding to Lori Bizer.
Paul and Lori: “I settled down,” said Westerberg, “but only on paper.” (Photos courtesy of Lori Bizer Leighton)
The band in Los Angeles at the end of the difficult, drawn-out recording sessions for Don’t Tell a Soul. (Photo by Dewey Nicks)
Chris Mars and his wife, Sally Schneidkraut. (Photo by Julie Panebianco)
The disastrous tour opening for Tom Petty in 1989: Stinson with the Heartbreakers’ keyboardist and ’Mats fan Benmont Tench. “I didn’t understand why they would just thumb their nose at the whole experience,” said Tench. (Photo by Carl Davino)
Paul and Slim join the Heartbreakers on stage. (Photo by Carl Davino)
Wearing the Heartbreakers’ wives dresses and riling up the crowd in Nashville. (Photo by Carl Davino)
Mayhem and madness on the road in ’89: Westerberg transforming the ’Mats’ bus into a “gerbil cage.” (Photo by Jim “Velvet” Sullivan)
Westerberg, wet and wasted: If the band “couldn’t have fun that one hour onstage we’d make sure we had fun the other twenty-three hours of the day.” (Photo by Jim “Velvet” Sullivan)
Tommy as a crazed clown: “We’re not respected anywhere! We don’t have respect. We don’t want it!” (Photo by Jim “Velvet” Sullivan)
Paul struggling to record vocals for All Shook Down: “I was drinking myself into a stupor.” (Photo by Donna Ranieri)
Westerberg in a haze at the Hyatt House in Hollywood: “Throwin’ us trunks as we’re starting to drown . . .” (Photo by Donna Ranieri)
Westerberg and Stinson try to salvage the band: “Paul knew that he needed Tommy as much as Tommy needed him,” said Daune Earle. “And maybe some of that was alcoholic codependency.” (Photo by Michael Wilson)
Tommy, with wife Daune and daughter Ruby, in Minneapolis, summer of 1990. (Photo by Michael Wilson)
Paul, on his own, at the end of his marriage and his drinking. (Photo by Michael Wilson)
Veteran Twin Cities drummer Steve Foley was tapped to take over for Chris Mars on the Replacements final tour. (Photo by Daniel Corrigan)
The “traveling wake” comes to an end with the ’Mats’ farewell show at Chicago’s Grant Park. (Photo by Paul Natkin)
Tommy says goodbye: “Yeah, you were robbed . . . and I’m stillllllll being robbed!” (Photo by Paul Natkin)
Bob Stinson with his sister Lonnie in the early ’90s. “That’s how I see him,” she said, “still that little boy . . . trying to convince people that he had value; that he had merit.” (Photo courtesy of Lonnie Stinson)
Bob with his mother Anita. (Photo by Daniel Corrigan)
Tommy, Paul, and Chris, together again in the studio, December 2005. (Photo by Darren Hill)
