Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Paul and Tommy arrive for the first Replacements reunion show in Toronto in August 2013. (Photo by Ben Perlstein)

  Laughing on stage in front of 14,000 fans at Midway Stadium in St. Paul, 2014. (Photo by Steven Cohen)

  A complicated brotherhood, sealed with a kiss. (Photo by Steven Cohen)

  Pleased to Meet Me was officially slated for late April, and Sire’s media department began readying a PR campaign. New York publicist Liz Rosenberg, who represented Madonna, put her assistant Mary Melia in charge of the project. “When you worked in her office, you ended up with the acts she didn’t want,” said Melia. “But I loved those guys.”

  Melia’s mandate was to reach untapped markets and demographics—not easy, given the band’s reluctance to court anyone. Sometimes it made for fine comedy, as when Melia landed a Replacements feature in Guitar World, then enjoying a circulation boom among teenage metal fans. “Don’t buy those pointy guitars, kids,” Westerberg warned the magazine’s Ibanez-wielding readership. “They’ll give ya VD.”

  On the other end of the spectrum, Melia pitched the band to a variety of upscale publications. “Elegant, international, fun-spirited are not the words that come to mind re: The Replacements,” wrote back an editor at Elle.

  Ironically in light of the band’s still-fresh Saturday Night Live appearance, there was talk of the ’Mats appearing on TV. The most natural place on network television for the Replacements was NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman, which followed Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and had given Devo, Talking Heads, and R.E.M. all airtime. But by 1987, Late Night was mandating that its musical guests perform with the show’s Paul Shaffer–led house band rather than their own rhythm sections, and the ’Mats passed on Letterman’s offer.

  Not that the Replacements needed TV to remain press darlings. Musician editor-in-chief Bill Flanagan traveled to Minneapolis to spend a few days with the band. His feature, along with RJ Smith’s Village Voice profile, became one of the band’s defining portraits. Flanagan led off with a funny retelling of the Twin/Tone tape-tossing story—leaving out the aborted raid on Paul Stark’s home.

  Flanagan also probed Westerberg on becoming a major-label commodity. “The record company wants us to be big stars, but we’re uncomfortable with that. We don’t want to give them everything. We don’t want to give them a hundred percent,” said Westerberg. “As soon as you do that, you’ve got nothing for yourself.”

  Challenging him, Flanagan got something close to the truth. “I guess it’s the fear of failure,” admitted Westerberg. “I don’t want to give everything and have it turn out to be shit or have people not like it.”

  Rolling Stone made Pleased to Meet Me its lead review, under the headline “Meet the Misfits.” “It’s really thought out, and yet there is that wildness to it, that balance of crazy and concentrated,” recalled David Fricke, who wrote the RS review. “In terms of emotions, in terms of physical dynamics, that record is all over the place. And yet it sounds so much a piece.”

  Those plaudits fed Westerberg’s ego. “I bought into half of it,” he said. “Half of me laughed at it, and the other half thought, Hey, I am the best songwriter in the world.”

  But Westerberg was unable to reconcile the critics’ embrace with the industry’s resistance. “We’ve got forty critics across the land who love the band, but forty million people who don’t know us from a hole in the wall,” noted Westerberg at the time. “So I’d prefer the people hear us now.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Sending the Replacements out to do live radio interviews was a calculated risk, and High Noon knew it. “It could turn very ugly, very quickly,” said Russ Rieger. Especially now that they were visiting large-market alternative and independent stations and the more progressive AOR outlets, rather than largely inconsequential college stations.

  The first and most significant incident took place during an appearance on KROQ in Los Angeles in May. The band had been booked to appear on the station’s New American Rock show, a midnight slot hosted by “Swedish” Egil Aalvik.

  A pioneer of the alternative/modern rock format, Hollywood club promoter Gary Bookasta launched KROQ in 1972 as a low-rent, free-form progressive station. In 1979 Rick Carroll took over as program director and began playing songs by new wave artists in tight top 40–style rotation until they were hits, helping make stars of Duran Duran, Culture Club, Human League, and Depeche Mode. Infinity Broadcasting purchased KROQ in 1986 for $45 million, the largest cash transaction for a station at the time. The station moved next door to Warner Bros. in Burbank.

  KROQ was resistant to play emerging American rock bands like the Replacements anywhere but overnights and the odd specialty show. “We never gave the time of day to ’Mats or Hüsker Dü, even R.E.M. to an extent,” said former KROQ music director Lewis Largent. “Rick Carroll was doing a lot of drugs at the time. He was into that electronic new wave-y stuff and wasn’t responding to that rockier sound.”

  Largent, one of the ’Mats’ few vocal supporters at the station, hoped to bring the band into the fold starting with the New American Rock appearance. Paul and Tommy spent that day drinking with Creem writers Bill Holdship and John Kordosh, who’d moved to LA along with the magazine the previous year. The last thing they wanted to do was drive to Burbank for a radio spot.

  “Tommy and Paul said they would only do the show if John and I went on with them,” recalled Holdship. “Management was fine with that—whatever got them on. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea.”

  Largent greeted the red-faced quartet in KROQ’s lobby and escorted them to the studio. Aalvik, with his sonorous voice and Scandinavian accent, made a perfect target for the band. “They came on beyond inebriated, totally obnoxious and trying to be funny, and it was a disaster,” said Largent. “There was an underlying meanness there.”

  “Do you have any udder songwriters in de band?” wondered Aalvik.

  “Tommy and Chris both write songs, they’re just not as good as Paul,” croaked Westerberg.

  “Paul, why do you write songs?” asked Largent.

  “Because I wanna make Tommy and Chris look bad . . . no, I do it because I’m gay.”

  A pie-eyed Kordosh demanded that Aalvik take calls from listeners (“I want some pussy,” one caller requested), while Stinson badgered the accented deejay about his “fake voice.”

  “Dank you for coming,” offered a relieved Aalvik when the thirty-minute segment finally, mercifully ended.

  “The pleasure was all yours,” said Westerberg.

  Repentant drunk that he was, Paul began to wonder if they’d gone too far—in Warner’s backyard no less. “Afterwards, I do remember that he looked a little morose,” said Holdship.

  The response from KROQ was swift and public. The following morning, deejay Richard Blade—an Englishman with little love for boorish American rockers—brought a still-wounded Largent on the air to recount the incident. The segment ended with Blade dramatically breaking a copy of Pleased to Meet Me on the air. “The bosses were more than happy to say, ‘We’ll just drop them. They’re not worth it,’” said Largent.

  A few weeks later, the Replacements stopped by Providence’s WBRU. Program director Kurt Hirsch, a longtime supporter, interviewed them during drive time, in advance of their show in town that night.

  It didn’t take long for Hirsch to get nervous. “[Westerberg] wasn’t making any eye contact,” said Hirsch. “He was looking everywhere but at me.”

  Hirsch gamely tried to keep the segment moving. “We have some tickets to give away to your show tonight,” he said. “What should we make people do to win this?”

  “How about a little phone sex,” offered Westerberg. “We’ll be the judges.”

  Hirsch continued to serve as a straight man for the band’s zingers, while dutifully playing tracks off Pleased to Meet Me.

  “Damn,” said a bemused Stinson, “you’re too nice for us. What is this crap?”

  “Ooh, that’s one of the seven words,”
said Hirsch, cutting him off. “No one heard that. If you heard that you weren’t supposed to . . . ”

  “The big C-word?” asked Stinson.

  “’Cause the FCC doesn’t like that—they’re getting down on all the . . . ”

  “Crap?” repeated Stinson.

  “Don’t say it again. This is . . . this is very bad. I gotta get them out of here. . . . The Replacements, thanks for coming by, but you’re gonna get me in big trouble with the FCC because you said that word over the air.”

  “That’s not a bad word,” muttered Stinson.

  “Just forget it—which song are we playing?” said Hirsch. “‘Nightclub Jitters.’ Anything to say about it?”

  Westerberg finally looked Hirsch square in the eye as he leaned into the microphone: “It’s a motherfucker.”

  “Oh gee, good-bye,” said Hirsch. “They’re gone.”

  As the song cued up, the deejay was laughing nervously on the air. But the band, and its Warner reps, recalled being tossed onto the street in record time.

  By the time the ’Mats arrived in Chicago for an appearance on WXRT, they were coming up with more creative ways to offend. The station had actually been on board as far back as “I Will Dare” and was pledging to support “The Ledge.” More importantly, WXRT was a bellwether: if it added a song to the playlist, smaller stations throughout the Midwest frequently followed suit.

  Johnny Mars, host of the station’s Big Beat evening show, was another avowed fan. “I knew they were drinkers, so I bought a six-pack of Heineken and gave it to them,” said Mars. “But they came in toting bottles of champagne.”

  The interview went smoothly until the first commercial break, when Westerberg began riffling through the station’s library of blues LPs. His eyes lit up when he came across Sonny Boy Williamson’s Bummer Road. He excitedly nudged Tommy. Mars asked him if there was anything they wanted to hear. Westerberg requested “Little Village.”

  On the LP was a big note: “Do not under any circumstances play ‘Little Village.’”

  Mars tried to distract the band, but Westerberg began answering everything with: “If we can’t play ‘Little Village,’ then I can’t answer that.” Soon the rest of the band was badgering the deejay to play it.

  Finally, he relented: “So tell me about this Sonny Boy Williamson song you want to hear so badly.”

  “This is the problem we have when we’re recording,” said Westerberg. “The engineer doesn’t understand the artist. And Sonny handles it beautifully, I think.”

  “Well,” said Mars, “I think that’s as good an introduction as we’ll ever get, so let’s hear it.”

  Recorded in September 1957, “Little Village” was a legendary studio outtake that captured a spirited, half-joking argument between Sonny Boy and engineer Leonard Chess that contained two “motherfuckers,” two “son of a bitches,” and a “goddamn” in the first few seconds alone. Mars’s face flushed, but he played the track to completion.

  “That’s . . . I guess . . . what could happen in a recording studio . . . is . . . is that how you guys record?” waffled Mars.

  “That has more to do with the Replacements than anything I’ve ever heard in my life,” cackled Westerberg.

  After the show, Mars and music director Lin Brehmer took the band for drinks at the nearby Bucket O’ Suds, where the ’Mats insulted the bartender and embarrassed the WXRT staff. The following day, Brehmer sent a scathing missive to the radio industry newsletter Friday Morning Quarterback, lambasting the group for its behavior and for putting the station’s license at risk. “I just unloaded,” said Brehmer. “I didn’t hold back.”

  A week later, every program director in America knew the Replacements’ name. It wasn’t the kind of recognition any band would’ve wished for.

  Those incidents didn’t go unnoticed in Burbank. “Let’s be honest, anybody that can walk into WXRT or KROQ and get into trouble really had to work at it,” said George Gerrity.

  Sire label manager Suzanne Emil, Stein’s chief liaison with Warner Bros., did her best to control the damage, but few radio field staffers were willing to go all out for the ’Mats. “In those days you needed to go to the radio guys in the markets where you were doing okay and really talk them up,” said Emil. “Unless your song was just some unbelievably great, undeniable hit single, that was what you had to do to sell records.”

  To Westerberg’s thinking, radio was all a rigged game anyway: airplay was bought and paid for by the label and its promoters. That may have been true to an extent—a new radio “payola” scandal had broken the previous year. But it was still human beings programming radio stations, and none of them wanted to be the butt of the joke.

  High Noon’s first eighteen months with the Replacements had yielded one crisis after another. Rieger and Hobbib had managed the chaos and steadied the band’s career. Now, as they coordinated the campaign for Pleased to Meet Me, the band was starting to chafe at their handlers.

  Westerberg and Stinson always had a better personal relationship with the more grounded Hobbib, who spent time on the road with the band. “They were closer to Gary, who was mellower,” said Rieger. “I’m over the top. I could stumble over myself and be an idiot at times when I got very emotional.”

  A torrent of big talk and crazy schemes, Rieger had an instinct for hype that made the band nervous. For instance, he wanted the band to promote the album by traveling down New York’s Fifth Avenue playing live on a flatbed truck. Aside from the fact that the Rolling Stones had done this a decade earlier, and that the ’Mats wouldn’t have made it a block without being stopped by police, it reeked of desperation. Rieger also suggested that the band make a promotional appearance riding on the back of an elephant.

  “They always had ridiculous promotional angles,” said Slim Dunlap. “Even asking the Replacements to visit distributors and record production facilities. . . . What good was ever gonna come of that? Even to do in-stores was pointless. The more the fans met the Replacements, the more the band was rude, the less they liked them. It worked in complete reverse.”

  For Hobbib, bringing up serious matters with Paul and Tommy was always a fraught process. “They were drunks,” he said. “So it was always a strategy: What’s the right time to call? What’s the right setup? Everything we needed to discuss business-wise was a stretch for them.”

  “Russ was really rah-rah, and so it made Gary the one to have to deal with things in a realistic way,” said Warner’s Julie Panebianco. “As time went on and the band was getting frustrated and resentful, they weren’t going to pick on each other. They were going to pick on the managers.”

  High Noon kept the ’Mats on $750-a-month salaries, mostly so they wouldn’t burn through band savings. “Maybe it was my conservatism, but we always kept money in the coffers and didn’t tell them,” said Hobbib. “Rather than, ‘Here’s a bunch of money, go and blow it all.’ Because whatever you gave Tommy, he’d call a week later asking for more.”

  Westerberg was becoming suspicious that High Noon was ripping the band off, and he was growing equally dubious about Burton Goldstein, the high-powered business manager they’d hired to look after the band’s financial affairs. He also felt that attorney George Regis was treading too lightly with Twin/Tone over the issue of royalties because of his relationship with Dave Ayers—though he also knew that Regis wasn’t afraid to question Goldstein’s accounting. “My feeling was: I don’t trust any of these guys,” said Westerberg. “But at least I got them watching each other.”

  “They were based on fear,” said Hobbib. “They were afraid to do things because it would ruin them. Or they were afraid because someone was trying to fuck them.”

  CHAPTER 38

  On September 2, 1986, Joe Major, an eighteen-year-old resident of Bergenfield, New Jersey, a blue-collar suburb ten miles north of New York City, went with some friends to a party at the Palisades, the steep line of cliffs overlooking the Hudson. He drank a little too much that night. Messing around perilously
close to the cliff’s edge, Major lost his footing and fell 200 feet, dying on impact.

  After the accident, Joe’s girlfriend, sophomore Lisa Burress, and her sister Cheryl would frequent his gravesite in Paramus, leave him notes and presents, and pray for his soul. Major’s best friend, Tommy Rizzo, who’d watched Major die, was struck by horrible nightmares. He began hanging out with another troubled teen fresh out of rehab, Thomas Olton. Before long, Olton was dating Lisa Burress.

  Most of these kids came from broken homes; there had been suicide in their families and trouble with substances and the law. They were rock-and-rollers—mostly fans of thrash and speed metal.

  On the evening of March 10, 1987, Rizzo, Olton, and Lisa and Cheryl Burress decided to go out together. Cheryl told a friend she was going to “go see Joe”—he simply thought she meant a visit to Major’s grave.

  The four kids spent the night drinking and doing coke and driving around the streets of Bergenfield in Olton’s Camaro. At approximately 3:00 AM they stopped at a local Amoco station and bought a few dollars’ worth of gas. They asked the attendant if they could take a hose from the station’s car vacuum cleaner, but he refused. Later, they drove to an apartment complex where they’d frequently partied with Major, parked the Camaro in a vacant garage, and around 5:00 AM turned on the engine, rolled down the windows, and let their lungs fill with carbon monoxide.

  One of the items found among the bodies in the car—along with a pack of razor blades and some AC/DC cassettes—was a brown bag on which a long suicide note, signed by all four, had been written, expressing a desire to be buried together.

  The so-called Bergenfield suicide pact shook the region to its core. It also sparked fears of a “suicide cluster.” It was a phenomenon that had become increasingly common in the eighties following high-profile teen suicides: other kids would take their own lives in imitation or in some strange form of solidarity. The day after the Bergenfield tragedy, two girls, seventeen and nineteen, killed themselves in the same manner in the Chicago suburb of Alsip. A week later, police stopped a young couple trying to gas themselves in the very same garage where the “Bergenfield Four” had died.