Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Bizer was conservative at heart. “There was not a thing out of place in her house; the way she cooked, everything about her was regimented,” said Panebianco. For Bizer, who’d grown up with an alcoholic, depressive father, Westerberg’s increased drinking and mood swings didn’t register as warnings. “Because of my dad, I thought that’s what a mate was supposed to be like,” she said.

  Some 150 guests attended the ceremony at the Antioch Lutheran Church in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills. Paul’s brother Phil was the best man, and the rest of the Replacements served as ushers. “We definitely were the odd men out there,” said Tommy. “Her family was not into him marrying their daughter at all, or us being there.” Bizer’s mother, Louise, in particular “went out of her way to make Tommy feel extremely uncomfortable,” said Stinson’s girlfriend, Daune Earle. “She almost banned him from the church because of his hair. It was really horrible, and Paul didn’t stick up for him.”

  The Young Fresh Fellows, dressed in powder-blue thrift-store tuxedos, helped usher and served as the wedding band. (“I couldn’t afford NRBQ,” cracked Westerberg.)

  The couple said their vows as part of a traditional Lutheran ceremony, conducted by a Pastor Johnson—whose first name was Gary. “Paul and the band sang ‘Gary’s Got a Boner’ for him at the reception,” said Bizer. “The pastor actually went and saw the Replacements on their next show in Detroit. They converted him to a fan.” By the end of the night, however, the reception turned into a “classic” Replacements concert complete with drunken, half-finished rock-and-roll covers.

  After a brief honeymoon in Maine’s Acadia National Park, Paul and Lori purchased a cottage on West Fifty-Fourth Street. Then Westerberg returned to the road. Little changed in his behavior. “I settled down, but only on paper,” he said. “Being young rock-and-rollers, we left the wives at home and left the notion of marriage at home too.”

  Touring could wreak havoc on any marriage, even one as strong as the Dunlaps’. Slim wasn’t a womanizer, but after months on the road drinking at a level and rate he’d never experienced, his relationship with Chrissie began to be affected. “He really changed, being in that band,” she said. “There were three children who wanted their dad. And he wasn’t in dad mode. He was in rock guy Replacements mode.

  “After one fight or another, he would say, ‘I’ll quit if you want me to.’ ‘That’s not what I want. I want you to go play, and I want you to call me every day and tell me you miss me, and I want you to come home and be nice to us.’”

  The ’Mats headed back on tour in November for the first time in four years without the help of Frank Riley’s Venture Booking.

  For over a year, High Noon had been bringing bigger agents in for clandestine road meetings. Typical was the face-to-face with Rob Light of CAA, the powerful Los Angeles–based firm run by superagent Michael Ovitz. Light flew to see the band play at Washington University in St. Louis. After the sound check, he recalled, “I walk into this old funky college locker room and it’s pitch-black. Taped to the ceiling is a flashlight over a stool. And all you hear is banging on these old metallic lockers, like a drum beat, and the guys are humming that theme from The Wizard of Oz where the flying monkeys go ‘Oh wee oh . . .’ at the top of their lungs.”

  “Sit down!” commanded a disembodied voice from behind the lockers, which turned out to be Westerberg.

  Immediately he began firing all manner of ridiculous questions at Light—“Can we open for Madonna?” “What’s your favorite TV show?” “Forget Madonna, can we open for Michael Jackson?”—while the rest of the band snickered their approval.

  Light passed the band’s initial test, and they agreed to have a drink with him after the show at their hotel. “We’re trying to have a serious conversation about touring and what CAA could do, but their focus is in and out,” said Light. “And within thirty minutes they’ve each had three doubles. They’re just drinking themselves into a stupor.”

  The bartender announced last call. Drunk and tired, Westerberg told Light the band would sign with him if he could get CAA head Mike Ovitz on the phone . . . right then. Light looked at his watch and saw that it was well past midnight in LA. He wasn’t about to rouse his boss and put Westerberg on the line with him. “I’m not waking up Mike Ovitz, Paul,” Light told him.

  It took Westerberg a moment. “Okay, then, here’s what I want,” he said. “I want you to drop your pants and walk around the bar clucking like a chicken. And if you do that, I’ll sign with CAA.”

  Light thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “I love your music. I love this band. But my pride is worth more to me than representing you,” said Light. “I’m gonna pass.”

  After flirting with several other agents in similarly ridiculous fashion, the band finally went to the Premiere Talent Agency, run by Frank Barsalona, an intimidating figure who’d helped build the rock concert business in the sixties and seventies with the Who, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin. He’d later work with punk acts, including the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.

  Barsalona exuded the air of a mobbed-up tough guy; Westerberg certainly thought he was “connected.” That fall Chicago’s WXRT was pressing the Replacements to play a free concert for the station, as a way of apologizing for the “Little Village” radio incident months earlier. Westerberg knowingly asked Barsalona to “tell the ‘boys’ in Chicago to lean on [WXRT] so that we don’t have to play this gig. He looked at me like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’”

  Westerberg professed ignorance over the Frank Riley decision. “I barely understood the notion of a booking agent and his fee,” said Westerberg. But according to First Avenue’s Steve McClellan, “they dumped Riley very unprofessionally. He heard he might be losing the band, so he flew to Minneapolis to go to one of their . . . shows that he’d booked. Word is that Tommy threw bologna at him.”

  McClellan had seen the work Riley had put in with the band over the years. “They were a pain in the ass to deal with, they drank too much, and they didn’t make that much money,” said McClellan. The timing of Riley’s dismissal also stung. “We ignored loyalty,” admits Rieger.

  A quarter-century on, Riley—now one of the most successful agents in the business—can barely bring himself to talk about the Replacements. “You get kicked in the nuts at some point,” he said, “and it’s hard to forget.”

  By late 1987, Pleased to Meet Me’s second single, “Alex Chilton,” had steadily gained traction. Warner Bros. simply resubmitted “The Ledge” video, totally unchanged, for “Alex Chilton,” and it received a few daytime airings and play on MTV’s specialty alternative show 120 Minutes, helping improve the band’s fraught relationship with the network.

  Industry tip sheet The Album Network even took the rare step of repicking Pleased to Meet Me for its best new music section: “The Replacements are touring and according to Sire are very willing to support radio with station-sponsored concerts.”

  “Very willing” may have been an exaggeration, but the band did play a couple of free promo gigs for radio stations to help push the single. One was for KROQ—a special daytime show at the Country Club in Reseda, California. Lewis Largent was again on hand, this time to emcee.

  “As I’m introducing the band, unbeknownst to me, Tommy Stinson kneels down behind my legs and Westerberg walks up and pushes me over him,” recalled Largent. “I catch air and you could hear the sound of me hitting the floor on the mic. And Stinson is going, ‘Lemme tell you something, we fucking hate KROQ, man.’” Even so, “Alex Chilton” was one of the station’s ten most-played songs that year.

  Wherever the Replacements played, sales would typically jump, so the label and management kept the band touring through December. For the final legs, High Noon replaced road manager Derek Wilkinson with Larry Weinles, another seasoned pro.

  The ’Mats quickly nicknamed him “Larry Wine-Less,” since he was charged with keeping a lid on the band’s drinking. Weinles had worked for Alice Coo
per and Natalie Cole in their postsobriety stages. “I certainly did turn into the strict babysitter,” said Weinles. “But it was pretty much impossible with the Replacements.”

  On December 1, the band was hanging out at Seattle’s Mayflower Hotel bar with Scott McCaughey when Westerberg suggested they all shave their eyebrows. “By the time we actually got done with it,” said Stinson, “the feisty stage was over, and it was like, ‘Oh . . . shit. I’m going to bed. I hope this goes away by the time I wake up.’ It didn’t.”

  The following night during a gig at the Moore Theater, McCaughey discovered the value of eyebrows. “I had sweat just pouring into my eyes, blinding me,” he remembered. “Plus, they take forever to grow back. I walked around like that for months.”

  The finale of the tour had the Replacements doubling back up the West Coast, playing the Palladium in LA, the Gift Center in San Francisco, and the Pine Street Theatre in Portland.

  Neither the Replacements nor the Young Fresh Fellows slept much after the Gift Center gig. The long haul up Interstate 5 to Oregon made everyone especially cranky. “We walked into the Pine Street Theatre at five o’clock, and Paul was sitting in a chair. He just looked at me and went: ‘Drink!’ So we commenced,” said McCaughey. “I think I was still drunk from the night before. It went downhill from there.”

  The evening began with the Fellows and the ’Mats tossing a couch out of the theater’s second-floor dressing room window. It ended with Westerberg swinging from the theater’s chandelier like Tarzan before yanking the entire fixture down on himself. “They always fall,” said Westerberg sagely. “But damn, it feels so good for that one split second.”

  In between, the bands made desperate attempts to play. “We were actually so hapless during our set, they came up and grabbed instruments and started playing for us,” recalled McCaughey. Backstage, Westerberg had grabbed McCaughey’s tour bag, taken every piece of clothing in it, and put it all on. He and the band then began stripping and tossing the garments out into the crowd. The ’Mats ended the set playing in their underwear. “We flopped like murder,” said Westerberg. “I don’t think we got paid that night either.” Westerberg later memorialized the evening’s events in a song called “Portland,” an apology to the city.

  With the tour concluded, Pleased to Meet Me had pushed past 170,000 sales, more than double Tim’s total. It was cold comfort for High Noon. “Pleased to Meet Me should’ve gone gold,” said Russ Rieger. “But it was crippled because of ‘The Ledge.’”

  Still, the band made serious retail inroads and, despite themselves, got a foothold in alternative radio. More importantly, Warner Bros. announced it would form a new radio promotions department under its reactivated Reprise banner, ostensibly to focus on hipper, up-and-coming acts like the Replacements. “Everything was lined up for the next record,” said Hobbib.

  There was just one problem: the band itself was in a state of early decay. “By the end of that tour, we were wasted: morally, physically, and mentally,” said Westerberg. And they were still missing their eyebrows.

  CHAPTER 42

  Reeking of booze and Ben-Gay from the previous night’s gig, Paul Westerberg shifted uncomfortably in his seat. As the Replacements drove back to Minneapolis from the final dates of the Pleased to Meet Me tour, he sat staring at the latest issue of Rolling Stone.

  From its cover, four familiar faces peered back beneath the headline: “R.E.M.—America’s Best Rock & Roll Band.” Their sixth album, Document, had transformed the group from an intriguing college rock band to certified million sellers, thanks to a top-ten hit in “The One I Love.” It was a triumph of sonic semantics: Stipe’s voice had finally been forced to the front of the mix, Bill Berry’s drums had been invested with a new power, and the song was simple and insistent, yet vague enough for mainstream radio.

  The man responsible for the shift was Scott Litt, the former Power Station engineer who’d been considered and rejected for Pleased to Meet Me. With R.E.M., he’d effectively midwifed alternative rock as a commercially viable genre.

  “With ‘The One I Love,’ I would say to the guys, ‘I hear this alongside a Whitney Houston song on a top-forty station,’” said Litt. “I thought that the execution of this type of music could be just as big.”

  Rather than systematically alienating Warner’s field staff and undertaking kamikaze attacks on taste-making stations like KROQ and WXRT, R.E.M. had been busy charming radio brass. “We did make an effort to do all that,” said R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. “I don’t mind going into a room and shaking people’s hands. I don’t mind going to a couple radio stations and talking to them so they’ll play a record that I think is a hundred times better than the crap they’re playing anyway.”

  Westerberg would view R.E.M.’s success as a matter of maturity rather than music. “Like Sammy [Davis Jr.] says: ‘It’s show, and it’s business.’ We knew the show and didn’t want to hear about the business. We were bound and determined to fight it.”

  In April 1988, R.E.M. signed a seven-figure, multi-album pact with Warner Bros. The next few Litt-produced R.E.M. albums would build on Document, each becoming bigger than the last, and the band would be catapulted to international stardom and pop-culture celebrity. “When they had the hit, they didn’t run away from it, they embraced it and found their way through it,” said Rieger.

  For Litt, the ’Mats always had the 90 percent that makes a great song but were lacking the 10 percent that makes a hit. “Look, if ‘Alex Chilton’ was called ‘Buddy Holly,’ it could’ve been the Weezer hit,” said Litt. “Something that small can be . . . the difference between selling 300,000 records and selling a million.”

  R.E.M.’s ascent dramatically altered the landscape for bands like the Replacements. None of this was lost on Westerberg. “He was bothered a lot,” said his wife Lori Bizer. “Seeing people become successful and he’s still scrapping. I think he started to feel the pressure.”

  As Westerberg limped home at the end of 1987, after eight months of touring and nightly self-abuse, his new bride was left to deal with the damage. “He didn’t want to do anything. Didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t want to see anybody,” said Bizer. “He needed a recuperating period. But then that would go on for a long time.” Westerberg spent the winter of 1988 as a hermit. High Noon had sent along a Tascam four-track cassette recorder so he could cut demos at home. This modest home studio would have a fundamental impact on Westerberg’s songwriting—and the Replacements’ creative dynamic.

  For eight years he’d been writing songs designed to impress—first Peter Jesperson and the band, then the small army of critics who championed his work. By the time Westerberg was in the major-label spotlight, he admitted, “I might have gotten to the point where most of my songs were written for beer-swilling nineteen-year-old males.”

  Finally able to flesh out arrangements on his own, he began to write as he pleased, presenting the material to the band as a fait accompli. “I knew I was changing,” said Westerberg. “I wasn’t feeling like the Replacements. I was just feeling like myself for the first time.”

  He was coming up with far more character-driven pieces, partly after further immersion in Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams. Ultimately, much of the new material played as portraits of the women in Westerberg’s life: his sister, his wife, his numerous road dalliances. “I never knew what, or who, his songs were about,” said Bizer. “I’d ask him and get a different story every time. So I stopped asking.”

  Of course, some of Westerberg’s female protagonists were merely disguised versions of himself. “It is easier for me to say what’s on my mind by using a character. And it’s generally a woman,” he said. At the same time, many of the new tunes—raw reflections like “They’re Blind” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Ghost”—were more nakedly autobiographical than ever.

  In early 1988, Westerberg wrote dozens of songs, the most he’d written in one spurt since the run-up to Sorry Ma. Much of this material, like “Last Thing in the World�
� and “Forever’s Outlaw,” wouldn’t make the LP; still more never even left the basement. “Every time I would ever go to his house, he would play me a bunch of new songs that killed, none of which ever saw the light of day,” said Slim Dunlap. “He would just tape over something when the next song idea came along.”

  Westerberg wrote most of the new material on his Yamaha acoustic guitar. Initially, he thought the next album should follow suit and be all acoustic, sans drums. Instead, his compromise was to stop categorizing the songs: “I decided to make the ballads more rockin’, and the rockers more tuneful,” he said.

  Still, one question remained: how did the band, Chris Mars in particular, fit his material? Along with his four-track, Westerberg had also gotten an Alesis HR-16, a rudimentary drum machine. He developed a bizarre attachment to its rigid programmed beats and, with it, an acute case of “demo-itis” that would plague him for the rest of his career. “Now he’s got this rhythm in his head of how the song should be played,” said Tommy Stinson. “It wasn’t just about Chris. He didn’t understand why something that worked on his four-track didn’t work the same with us playing. Well, it’s just different. Four guys in a room are never going to sound the same as your demo. That really changed things.”

  Chris Mars’s 1988 was bookended by two major events. In January his eighty-one-year-old father, Leroy Mars, died, and in the fall he married his girlfriend Sally Schneidkraut. A brunette pixie with a toothy smile, Schneidkraut had materialized on the Minneapolis scene the previous year. Born in Queens, New York, in 1964, she was the youngest of four kids, like Mars. She was Jewish but had been raised in a blue-collar Catholic neighborhood like the one Mars had grown up in.