Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  While the Satellites could appreciate the Replacements’ professional conundrum, no band was quite as connected to their skewed sensibility as the Young Fresh Fellows. Westerberg had first been turned on to the eclectic Seattle indie popsters by his girlfriend Lori Bizer. “She’s the one who kinda got hip to the Fellows, when our first record came out in ’84,” said Fellows’ leader Scott McCaughey.

  The Fellows’ McCaughey, bassist Chuck Carroll, and drummer Tad Hutchinson met up with the ’Mats on the road in Providence in 1985, sparking an immediate connection. “They were really good guys—really easy to hang with,” said Tommy Stinson. “They were kind of like us, just lost in a cacophony of noise. We were like an island of misfits—the same island.”

  By ’87 the ’Mats were talking up the Fellows in interviews. “If you think we’re good, they’re the best band in the world,” Westerberg told Creem. “They’re like the new NRBQ, only sloppier.” He convinced the Replacements’ booking agent Frank Riley to take on the Fellows, who would open a pair of West Coast legs of the Pleased to Meet Me tour.

  The jaunts were among the most memorable pairings for the ’Mats, as the Fellows matched them in terms of consumption, chaos, and comedy. “I will say the two of us together exacerbated the problem, for sure—or made it more fun, however you want to look at it,” said McCaughey. “We spurred each other on to great heights. And neither of us needed any help in that regard.”

  Like the ’Mats, the influences of the Faces loomed large in the Fellows’ presentation. “We tried to make shows like a party,” said McCaughey. “We tried to take a party out to the people.”

  Amid the high jinks and high spirits, the Fellows saw the Replacements locked in an awkward dance with their label and management. “The ’Mats felt like those people were from another world,” said McCaughey, who would tag along to Warner Bros.–sponsored dinners and soirées, getting a behind-the-scenes look at the machine that powered things. “To me, it felt like this is what the big-time rock-and-roll is all about, but it also felt like the Replacements didn’t belong in that environment. They were crazy, and the way they dealt with all that stuff was by acting even crazier.”

  CHAPTER 40

  In the last week of June, the ’Mats launched a West Coast tour built around a sold-out two-night stand at the Variety Arts Center in downtown Los Angeles. The shows doubled as a Warner Bros. showcase—part of Russ Rieger’s plan to keep the company’s support for Pleased to Meet Me rolling.

  The large corporate turnout and High Noon’s fussiness about the show’s importance all but guaranteed a swan dive. This time the unlikely culprit was Chris Mars, who’d drunk himself nearly paralytic by showtime. After struggling through the first song, he simply retired from the drum kit and left the stage in a stupor. Tad Hutchinson, drummer for the opener, the Young Fresh Fellows, stepped in for a while, even donning a black Beatles wig to simulate Mars’s appearance. But Hutchinson wasn’t in much better shape than Mars and didn’t last long.

  In desperation, Westerberg called out into the mic: “Is there a drummer in the house?” The question seemed to pop a cork on the chaos. “Not only was there a drummer in the audience, there was hundreds, I guess,” recalled Fellows front man Scott McCaughey. “People kept coming up. It seemed like half the audience was onstage at one point.” So many stragglers strapped on the ’Mats’ instruments that Slim Dunlap didn’t even have a guitar to play. “I don’t remember the band actually finishing one song all the way through that night other than ‘California Sun,’” said Creem’s Bill Holdship.

  Among those in the Variety Arts audience watching was boho singer-songwriter Tom Waits, an avowed ’Mats fan. “I like their stance,” he noted that fall. “They’re question marks.” Waits looked on in bemusement as the band went down fighting themselves and the crowd. “There was this guy trying to climb up, and they kept throwing him back, like a carp. No, you can’t get in the boat! It was like something out of Mondo Cane.”

  Rieger and Hobbib tried to keep brave faces on as they watched the embarrassed Warner executives leave one by one. “That show was well attended with senior execs who wanted, wanted, to like them,” said Hobbib. “And they basically gave them the finger.”

  The events of the past twelve months had begun to stir a quiet disaffection in Mars. He’d stood by as Westerberg and Stinson took control of the group. He saw their egos being fed by the press and a group of fawning acolytes. “Tommy and Paul’s heads got too big,” said Mars. “They [tended] to think of the Replacements as something much more of a household word than they really were.”

  Over time Tommy had usurped Mars’s role in the group and in Westerberg’s affections. “I think in a lot of ways Chris fell back,” said Stinson. “Things had changed. It was a whole different band in a way.”

  The pandering aspects of major-label life had also become a sore spot. “Show business, hobnobbing with [people], it was this glitzy crap that I could do without,” said Mars. Westerberg felt Mars had purposely thrown the Variety Arts show, blown the big LA label gig, as a way of letting everyone know he still wielded some power in the band. “He felt he needed to remind us that the Replacements were gonna flop if he wanted us to.”

  Mars recovered sufficiently for the following evening’s Variety Arts show. True to form, the ’Mats delivered arguably the tour’s best performance. Only a smattering of Warner’s staff returned to see it.

  The next day, at the band’s hotel, Rieger got into a heated discussion with Westerberg, telling him: “This car-crash mentality is something you have to move away from. You write these amazing songs. Why are you sabotaging your own songs?”

  Rieger’s platonic ideal of a performer was Bruce Springsteen: someone who wrung emotion out of every lyric, put himself on the line with each show, and gave 100 percent night after night. That’s what he wanted out of the Replacements.

  “I’m not giving you a hundred percent,” replied Westerberg.

  It had become his refrain, practically a mantra, during Pleased to Meet Me. When Westerberg said it to Jim Dickinson, it was a question of trust; as he acted it out with the record company, it was a matter of insecurity. But as he spit out the words again to Rieger, it went far deeper. “I can’t mean it every night,” admitted Westerberg, meeting Rieger’s eyes. “I just can’t fuckin’ mean it every night.”

  Westerberg viewed performing, as he did everything, in stark black-and-white terms. He could live with drunken insouciance or bored incompetence, so long as it was real. What he couldn’t do was fake it. And he wasn’t willing to put himself on the line emotionally. “For him there was no middle ground,” said Rieger. “That’s part of the reason people gravitated to him as an artist. It was all or nothing.”

  For their American tour in 1987, the Replacements had a new tour manager: Derek Wilkinson, a foulmouthed British ex-pat from Hartlepool who’d spent a decade with acts like the Average White Band and the Allman Brothers. He came to the ’Mats straight off a gig with Foreigner. When the Replacements picked him up at LAX, Wilkinson was wearing a new $3,000 Armani suit. The band immediately spray-painted it yellow. Wilkinson didn’t flinch. “I had no idea who these motherfuckers were,” he said. “But I was as crazy as them. So we just hit it off.”

  Belying his relatively slight build, Wilkinson had a background in boxing; he’d picked up some karate from the Allman Brothers’ black-belt guitarist Dickey Betts. Promoters who tried to mess with the ’Mats were threatened with physical violence. “He could have got sued for what he did in a couple places,” Stinson said. “But he took care of us.”

  Unlike most ’Mats road managers, Wilkinson drank and drugged with them and handed out money with little regard for accounting. Yet the whole machine moved along for what would prove to be the band’s longest tour.

  The Replacements traveled in a small convoy: the band and Wilkinson in one van; roadie Bill Sullivan, soundman Brendan McCabe, and the gear in another. Warner alternative marketing staffers like Julie Panebianc
o, Mary Hyde, and Jo Lenardi usually followed somewhere behind.

  After the shows, Wilkinson would typically be ginned up, so Dunlap—barely any more sober—would insist on handling long-distance drives. Slim was frequently behind the wheel during some hairy situations. “The road manager would be out cold. The plan was to score,” Dunlap said. “So the band would reach into [Wilkinson’s] case and pull out eight hundred dollars. We’d be creeping down the street in the middle of the night, going up to strangers: ‘Hey, dude, ya holdin’?’”

  Slim had also quietly taken to carrying a handgun on the road, in case things got ugly. “Paul, especially, would say things to people that pissed them off. I wasn’t fearless.”

  Winding through the East Coast in July and August, it was clear that the band’s reputation was producing not just sold-out concerts but a carnival-like atmosphere around the gigs. The Replacements typically played rooms holding between 1,000 and 1,500—roughly half of the demand. “People were completely nuts for them,” said Panebianco. “You’d open the side door into the parking lot and see hundreds of people milling around, just listening.”

  On July 23, they stopped in New York City for a pair of concerts. The first was at the 3,000-seat Beacon Theater, the band’s biggest NYC date yet. Naturally, the venue brought out the best, and the worst, in the band.

  Relying on the benevolence of a clearly jacked-up audience, Westerberg spent most of the twenty-eight-song set playing around: delivering a giggling scat-jazz “Nightclub Jitters,” attempting the final climactic scream from “Nevermind” half a dozen times after the song was over. The bulk of the show was dedicated to light comedy: an a cappella “Hello Dolly” had the audience clapping rhythm; a ferocious “Gary’s Got a Boner” threw a dig at High Noon (“Gary’s fired . . . and so is Russ!”); and Westerberg sang a version of “If Only You Were Lonely” as he sucked from a helium balloon, which turned his voice into a ridiculous squeak.

  By the time the band stumbled out for a belated encore, the house lights were up, the stagehands were tearing down equipment, and half the crowd had filed out. “Whaddya think we are—fuckin’ entertainers?” asked a slurring Westerberg of the remaining patrons. “There’s a fine line between a self-indulgent freak show and rocking pandemonium,” wrote New York Times critic Jon Pareles, “and the Replacements walked it at the Beacon.”

  A few days later at the smaller Ritz, fans outside were literally begging for tickets: “Offering fifty dollars and up, all to see a band of drunken punk ’n’ roll hooligans who have never even seen the inside of the top 100,” David Fricke reported in Melody Maker.

  By now, the pattern was predictable: the Beacon had been a glorious shit-show; inevitably the Ritz would be a genuine triumph. “For once in their lives the Replacements played their own songs. Correctly! With the power and spirit they deserve,” noted Fricke. “No screwing around! They played the covers straight too. . . . What made the Replacements give so much of themselves tonight? Who cares?”

  With Dunlap girding things, the Pleased dates represented the band’s most consistent performances ever. Yet it became clear that proficient playing wasn’t what audiences had come to see. “People weren’t paying to see guys stand there and play,” said Dunlap. “They were paying to see this gigantic drunken caravan.” And Westerberg was usually more than willing to give them a sideshow.

  The Pleased to Meet Me tour was a banquet of excess. For the first time, there was real money, proper riders, free everything, every night. Nobody ate food, but the liquor was robust. The band mostly seemed to subsist on handfuls of Tums to quell their constantly churning stomachs.

  The cycle of abuse, combined with the nature of life on the road, had a roller-coaster effect. “Every day you go up and down. Every morning you wish you were dead, but come five o’clock you’re ready for the next [gig],” Westerberg explained to a reporter. “You’re not at home, you don’t feel at home, and you don’t act human. You abuse yourself, not intentionally. But you . . . can never relax in the place you are, so you tend to distract yourself by drinking.”

  The ’Mats’ new member quickly came to realize that drinking was as much a part of the job as playing. “I lived the life of being a hired drunkard,” said Dunlap. “I was quite intoxicated in those days. You couldn’t be teetotal. You couldn’t do it.”

  Warner Bros. had thrown a series of parties in New York and Los Angeles to celebrate the release of the record. Once the band got on the road, there was hardly a sober moment. When they went to visit a distributor or a radio station or to do an in-store, there was always a bottle and a case waiting. By the time they got to the venue, the buffet of booze was endless. “The label was certainly accommodating us and willing to push that image,” noted Westerberg. “That said, they didn’t do it to us. We were alcoholics.”

  Dunlap marveled at and then began to fear Westerberg’s consumption. “Before a show he would be carrying around a jug, a pretty heavy-duty thing, of Wild Turkey, and later it’d be empty. You’d think: If he drank that much he’s dead. That would kill a person.”

  There were moments when the band’s behavior was tempered, like the rare occasions when their girlfriends and wives were around. “It was fun to see them around their women because they were totally different,” recalled Wilkinson. “The girlfriends were backstage one night, and the band was twiddling its thumbs. And I’m winding them up: ‘Oh, so you’re not drinking tonight, boys?’”

  “Finally, the girlfriends left, and Tommy and Paul got a saucer and filled it up with Jack Daniels, put it on the floor, and jumped on it like two dogs lapping it up. I was fucking howling and pouring beer on their heads: ‘Do you want a chaser with that?’ By the time they got onstage they’d licked half a bottle of Jack Daniels and were soaking wet with beer. They went right into the first song like nothing happened.”

  The band’s capacity to drink and then deliver onstage was an essential part of their mythos. Before a show, they could barely stand, but then the adrenaline of the stage would kick in and carry them through, their bodies rapidly metabolizing the alcohol while they played, even as they continued to guzzle. “The stories of them being legless and then being able to get up and play a great show,” said Dunlap, “that part of the legend was true.”

  The band’s performances and drinking were both being exacerbated by their use of drugs, namely cocaine. “The creeps who had substances, suddenly there were more of them around, there was more of it available, and we indulged,” said Westerberg.

  “When cocaine comes into the picture, that’s another evil that you don’t need,” observed Mars. “It tends to make you want to drink twice as much, and then you’re really screwing up. . . . As our popularity increased, our insecurity pretty much stayed the same. That was part of it too. [All] that helped us perform.”

  High Noon’s Gary Hobbib was out on the road regularly with the ’Mats that summer, partly to connect with Warner Bros.’s field staff and partly to stay bonded with the band. “I was partaking as much as they were,” said Hobbib. “It’s good because they felt I was with them. But it’s hard for me to then stand up and say, ‘Guys, cut it out.’”

  More distressingly for Hobbib, profits were short of expectations. Much of the outlay for the tour had come from Warner Bros. After seeing the backlash suffered by the Del Fuegos for appearing in a Miller Beer ad, the ’Mats refused any endorsements or sponsorships and decided not to even sell any merch. Meanwhile, outside the gigs, bootleggers did brisk business in Replacements T-shirts.

  Paul and Tommy were unrepentantly profligate and derived a perverse thrill in behaving that way. When they needed drugs, they would bust into the road manager’s tour cash. As soon as they got their weekly per diems they would gamble the money away. After a while, the rush of losing cash at cards wasn’t enough. Westerberg and Stinson would simply cut to the chase and light their per diem money on fire.

  “We’d go and knock on the road manager’s door to get an advance for the next week so we co
uld burn it,” said Westerberg. “Chris, needless to say, would try and pull away from that the best he could, and Slim would pretend he was a little light. But Tommy and I would burn the damn money.” Like so many of their seemingly negative, ritualistic acts, it was also a form of bonding between them. “‘The money’s gone—what are we gonna do tomorrow?’” said Westerberg. “‘I don’t know. But we got each other; we’ll get by.’”

  CHAPTER 41

  On October 2, 1987, the tour’s debauchery was held at bay for the wedding of Paul Harold Westerberg and Lori Susan Bizer.

  The couple had been dating for almost three years, living together for two. Bizer had uprooted her life to come to Minneapolis and be with Westerberg. With him on the road for months on end, she wanted some reassurance. “I don’t want to say I pushed him into it. That sounds terrible,” said Bizer. “But we were in a domestic situation, and women want to take the next step.”

  Westerberg would say—perhaps truthfully, if somewhat uncharitably—that the reason he got married was to appease Bizer, to keep her from crying every time he left town. But there was more behind the decision.

  Westerberg was still only twenty-six. He was living impossibly hard, enjoying the bounty of feminine attention on the road and still striving—in his own way—to carve out a career. But the more time he spent touring and the more chaotically he lived while traveling, the more desperate he became for some semblance of order when he came home. “He probably needed some reeling in more than anyone really knew,” said Tommy Stinson.

  Stinson followed down the aisle eleven months later; Chris Mars would tie the knot just weeks after that. In hindsight, the band’s rapid-fire marriages were at least partly an attempt to control the chaos of being in the Replacements. “We needed moorings,” said Stinson. “We had this ultra-insane existence, and there needed to be a break from it.”