Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  That night, while recutting his part on “Asking Me Lies,” Berg wanted Stinson, the bassist claimed later, to funk-slap the instrument; Berg said he simply wanted a “funkier” part. The discussion ended abruptly when Tommy hurled a half-gallon of gin through a studio window. Then Westerberg lit the remnants of the smashed Gibson guitar on fire in a garbage can on the studio floor. “You didn’t want to be around us,” said Stinson. “We were gone-crazy-devil-drunk.”

  The chaos climaxed with a Stinson-Westerberg game of “I Dare Ya.” “I believe I was dared to walk across the studio console,” recalled Westerberg. Bearsville was home to a truly magnificent Neve 8088 board that had been custom-built for the Who. Westerberg was instantly up on the $250,000 console, Jack Daniels bottle in hand, nimbly tiptoeing around the faders and knobs.

  Berg became apoplectic. A screaming argument erupted, a week’s worth of frustration spilling out. As things boiled, each man tried to flee the studio in a different direction, but they simply wound up following one another down the hall. “By the end of it, Tony and I were in tears, crying and yelling,” said Westerberg.

  They arrived at the canteen, where the members of Metallica, in Bearsville to mix And Justice for All, sat quietly eating Chinese takeout. As the meltdown passed dramatically before them, their jaws visibly dropped. “They had this look like, ‘What the fuck is this? A prank?’” said Westerberg. “I’m sure we looked like a bunch of lunatics.”

  Before escaping the studio, Berg, remembering the story of the Twin/Tone heist, grabbed the session masters. “They were acting so irrationally, I thought they might do something horrible,” he said.

  After a few more hours of drinking, the Replacements came back to the studio to hear the day’s work and were furious to discover Berg had taken the tapes. Westerberg summoned Berg to his cabin for a showdown. The producer walked to their cabin in the pitch-black night, dreading what awaited.

  Suddenly, the ground fell from beneath him. He plunged a dozen feet down a stairwell that led to a basement apartment where the widow of the Band’s Richard Manuel lived. “I completely fucked up my knee,” said Berg. “I get back up and hobble over to the band’s place, in really bad shape, only to be met by these furious renegades.”

  He managed to placate the band, despite Dunlap hissing: “Are you with us or agin’ us?” After a long night’s sleep, an uneasy denouement was reached. The sessions carried on without incident for a few more days before the band packed up and headed back to New York City.

  “We went up there, hit a fucking tree, threw knives at each other, walked across the board, smashed up some shit, scared Metallica,” said Westerberg. “But we felt like, ‘That’s it, we’re done with the fucking woods.’”

  “I walked away from there like a Civil War veteran,” said Berg of the Replacements session. Despite everything, he remained eager to finish the record. “I genuinely loved the songs,” he said. “I went to bed singing them, I woke up singing them.”

  Even unmixed, half a dozen of the songs (they’d tracked fifteen, twelve with vocals) seemed like potential keepers. But High Noon was not so optimistic. “There was absolutely no edge to the tracks,” said Rieger. “We were a little bit surprised how much Rieger disliked it,” said Westerberg. “But there wasn’t any real magic there.”

  With more than $70,000 invested so far and a fall release impending, Michael Hill persuaded everyone it was worth another shot with Berg. The producer would fly to Minneapolis in June and work with the band to recut “Cruella de Vil”—minus the X-rated lyrics—and further discuss the album.

  When Berg met the band at the CC Club, he said, “I felt such hostility from [Tommy] immediately.” After some increasingly strained conversation over drinks, Stinson got up and went to the bathroom. There, alone, he suddenly broke down crying.

  Westerberg walked into the commode and asked Stinson what was wrong. “I can’t ever be in a fucking room with that guy again,” Stinson replied. He didn’t articulate it, but the message to Westerberg was clear: This guy’s best credit is Bette Midler. I play with you. This ain’t us, man.

  Westerberg knew bailing on Berg would bring serious repercussions. For all his faults, Berg was a songwriter’s producer; they had connected on the material to some extent. Yet again, Westerberg had to choose: be true to himself or be a Replacement.

  Westerberg finally motioned to the door. “Fuck it then, Skunk,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Back at the table, Berg felt the air grow colder. Finally, he demanded: “Look, Tommy, do you have an issue with me producing this record?”

  “Yeah,” Stinson snarled. “I think you’re too young to produce our record.”

  Berg was taken aback: “Are you purposely sabotaging this record?”

  “Yes,” said Stinson. “I am.”

  Berg looked to Westerberg hopefully. Paul said nothing, leaning into the booth next to Tommy. Berg stood up, marched angrily to a nearby pay phone, called his manager, and told him he was coming home. He was through with the goddamn Replacements.

  Shortly afterward, Peter Jesperson walked over to their table to say hello, unaware of the scene that had just been played out. After a long, awkward silence, Westerberg grinned and made introducitons: “Hey, Tony, this is Pete. He was our manager. We fired him,” he said. “Pete, this is Tony. He was our producer. We just fired him.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Calls poured into Michael Hill’s office. He listened quietly, and when the angry voices relented, he hung up and let out a long, tired sigh. As the events in Minneapolis were relayed back to him, Hill almost had to laugh. They hadn’t even made it into the studio; the whole thing had blown up over drinks in a bar.

  “I certainly would say the Replacements were more a lifestyle than a normal A&R gig,” Hill noted. When something went wrong—and something always went wrong—he bore frustration from all sides: label, management, and frequently the band itself. “It was all so ridiculous, but I believed that somehow everything was going to work out,” said Hill. “Maybe it’s like when you’re in an abusive relationship.”

  Within Warner Bros., Hill was always something of an outsider: East Coast, working-class, and Gentile, as opposed to Californian, affluent, and Jewish, as the label’s key A&R figures had historically been. Hill didn’t have an appetite for the era’s music biz avarice. He didn’t rub elbows with attorneys or industry power players, didn’t join their boys’ clubs or jostle to see who the biggest macher was.

  “Michael was like the band; he was young and alternative. He didn’t have any clout,” said Gary Hobbib, who felt Sire’s Seymour Stein had largely abdicated his responsibilities as the ’Mats’ label head, leaving Hill to fend for himself.

  “Someone heavy-handed might’ve been a help to the Replacements, because they needed a push,” said the band’s attorney, George Regis. “Michael was not that guy. Michael would not presume in that way.”

  For his part, Hill saw no benefit in being a hard-ass, acting like some record company hammer. “Maybe some people would’ve called me an apologist for the Replacements,” he said. “But what was the point in yelling or getting mad at the band? Besides, I loved Paul’s work. In the end . . . I really carried a torch for that music.”

  Though his feelings for the work ran deep, he understood Westerberg’s tendency to reject those who got too close. Hill had consciously decided not to buddy up to him. Yet to succeed at the level they were playing at now, there needed to be some deeper trust between them. “Paul and the band had strong opinions about everything,” said Hill, “but they would express them by acting out in a manner that would force someone’s hand.”

  They’d certainly forced Tony Berg’s hand. “We had no plan B for a producer,” acknowledged Russ Rieger. “This was a problem.” Scott Litt, working on R.E.M.’s Green that summer, was hearing apocryphal tales of the band “covering Berg in peanut butter and hanging him on a hook.”

  There would be no album before 1989’s first quarter. If more ti
me passed, Westerberg might decide not to record the current batch of songs at all. “There was a sense of urgency,” said Rieger. “I wouldn’t say panic . . . well, yeah—panic.”

  Lenny Waronker’s father Si was a classical violinist who’d cofounded Liberty Records and Metric Music Publishing in the midfifties. Lenny Waronker got his start at Liberty before joining Warner Bros. as a producer in 1966. For sixteen years he guided a roster that included Ry Cooder, Paul Simon, and his childhood friend Randy Newman and headed an A&R department that was the envy of the industry. In 1982, he was named president of the label.

  Waronker remained more creatively involved than any other label head. “If Lenny gave his stamp of approval, people took it seriously,” said Howie Klein, who became Sire’s general manager in 1988. That became difficult by the late eighties, said Waronker: “There was so many records, so many artists.”

  By then, the man with Waronker’s ear was his connection to the burgeoning alternative world—Steven Baker, VP of product management. Baker had helped make Talking Heads and the Smiths priorities for the company; now, along with Michael Hill, he began selling Waronker on the Replacements. “I would talk about Westerberg’s songcraft—that’s something that really interested him, because Lenny’s above all a song man,” said Hill.

  Hill played Waronker the tracks from Bearsville. Once he heard the new material, he was convinced. “As I listened, I realized Paul was a force. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, no wonder,’” said Waronker. “The songs are amazing. The guy . . . he has the gift.” Having spent his life with Randy Newman, Waronker could also appreciate Westerberg’s stubbornness, dark moods, and mordant wit.

  Waronker sensed that Westerberg wanted to move away from the Replacements’ chaotic posturing. “If the stance gets in the way, to the point to where it stifles musical growth, that’s when you really have to take a hard look,” said Waronker, who took it upon himself to solve the Replacements’ producer problem.

  A baby-faced, soft-spoken twenty-eight-year-old, Matt Wallace seemed unassuming—gentle even—in every way. But his looks and manner belied a bulldog tenacity that would serve him well in the music business. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on January 10, 1960, his father, Ed Wallace, was a commercial pilot for a series of international airlines. The Wallaces lived throughout the Middle East (Cairo, Beirut, Tehran) and Japan before finally moving back to the United States in 1975. They settled in Moraga, a San Francisco suburb.

  Wallace was a singer and a multi-instrumentalist who’d been playing in bands since his preteens. He also had an intuitive understanding of electronics. At fourteen, he’d developed a wireless guitar system out of a pair of GI Joe walkie-talkies, then built a four-track studio, dubbed Dangerous Rhythm, in his parents’ garage a few years later, ostensibly to record his own band. “But I got derailed and started making other people’s records,” he said.

  Charging twelve bucks an hour, the teenage Wallace recorded dozens of Bay Area acts—in particular, a group that would eventually become Faith No More—while pursuing an English degree at UC Berkeley. After graduating, he opened a larger operation in Oakland and eventually helmed projects for Faith No More and Sons of Freedom, both on Slash Records.

  Slash was distributed by Warner Bros., for which Wallace was tapped to produce the New Monkees. That album stiffed, but it established a relationship among Wallace and Waronker and Baker, who encouraged Slash to hire Wallace full-time as staff producer and A&R man. He’d just moved to Los Angeles when the Replacements were starting their producer search.

  Wallace, who had been following the Replacements since Let It Be, had called Baker every week to throw his hat in the ring for the ’Mats gig; after Berg’s departure, Baker said he might have a shot.

  Wallace hadn’t produced anything of note—Faith No More had yet to break big—but he had Waronker’s support. “He had the right personality to get in there and make it work,” said Waronker. “Anytime there was a potential hook, he might be able to embellish that.”

  Westerberg agreed to a trial session with Wallace after they spoke on the phone. Paul and Slim Dunlap would fly to LA first and work on a couple of songs. If everything seemed all right, they’d come back out with Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars. “By the way,” he told Wallace at the end of their conversation, “we drink a bit.”

  “That’s fine, I don’t drink at all,” replied Wallace. “We’ll get along famously.”

  Paul and Slim arrived in Los Angeles on September 1 and set up in the smaller room at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood. They spent a few days on “They’re Blind,” with Dunlap playing bass and Wallace programming beats on a drum machine. “From the moment I met Matt,” said Westerberg, “I thought, ‘This guy is very smart, has a sense of humor, and is gonna roll with it.’ I liked him right away.”

  “The fact that I had so little of a track record actually appealed to Paul,” said Wallace. “I think they felt like they could push me around and do what they wanted to do.”

  Dunlap was immediately dubious of Wallace, but kept his opinions to himself for a while. Stinson wasn’t exactly enamored to have Wallace—even younger than Berg—running the show, but for the time being he trusted Westerberg’s instincts. “I don’t think I ever thought anyone was the right guy for that record,” said Stinson. “At that point, we just had to make the fuckin’ record.”

  Rieger also stewed—Warner Bros. was pushing yet another inexperienced, no-name producer on them—but stayed quiet, since he planned to wage war, if necessary, to bring in a top radio mixer.

  The months off after Bearsville had given Westerberg time to write new material, including several uptempo numbers such as “Anywhere’s Better Than Here” and “Talent Show,” to balance out the Berg sessions’ dolor. In a way, Bearsville had served as the preproduction rehearsal that the ’Mats had always strenuously avoided. “We were really ready,” said Westerberg.

  Waronker’s interest buoyed them as well. “We got real sick of acting like we didn’t care,” Stinson said at the time. “We do care—I don’t want to push a broom, and that’s what I’d be doing if I wasn’t in this band.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Michael Hill wasn’t taking any chances. He flew to Los Angeles for the start of the Matt Wallace/Replacements sessions with a knot in his stomach. “You started to wonder: are these guys just unrecordable?” said Hill.

  His fears seemed legitimate. Sitting with Wallace and the band at a prerecording evening out at Musso & Frank’s Restaurant in Hollywood, he watched Tommy Stinson ask, upon meeting Wallace, “You know what I think of you?”—then hock a giant loogie onto the ground. Slim Dunlap was only slightly less subtle. He’d practically crushed the producer’s hand while shaking it.

  “I was threatened to be beaten up numerous times during the sessions, mostly by Slim,” recalled Wallace. “By virtue of the fact that he was the newest guy in the band, he was the enforcer. The only guy who was nice to me was Chris Mars. Paul sat back and watched how it unfolded and decided how to move after that. Once we started recording, Paul was really ornery too.”

  Wallace started with some rehearsals, a process he likened to “trying to keep marbles from rolling down a hill.” He quickly moved the ’Mats to Cherokee’s big room to cut rhythm tracks. Cherokee was an expensive, high-tech studio founded by the ’60s Midwest bubblegum musicians the Robb Brothers. Knowing he’d have his hands full, Wallace brought in veteran engineer John Beverly Jones, whose credits ran from Olivia Newton John to Camper Van Beethoven.

  As at Bearsville, workdays began around 10:00 AM and went for twelve- to fourteen-hour stretches, fortified by little other than grains and hops. “Those guys didn’t eat anything,” said Wallace. “The caloric ingestion was pretty much all alcohol.” Much of Wallace’s energy was spent trying to hide the daily afternoon liquor delivery until they’d recorded something usable.

  Wallace made all the basic Replacements rookie mistakes. He handed them their weeklong per diems at once; they returned next day with em
pty pockets. “What happened?” he asked. “Well,” they explained, “we went to the bar, and the bartender was such an asshole we tipped him everything we had.”

  Almost immediately, the same group psychosis that had marred the Bearsville sessions took hold. During a take, Tommy’s Gibson Thunderbird bass began to wobble out of tune. Suddenly, Wallace saw him begin to smash the instrument wildly. As Stinson sent shards and splinters flying around the studio, Westerberg pulled out a crisp $100 bill and lit it on fire.

  After three difficult days, the tension was unbearable. Extending an olive branch, the ’Mats invited Wallace and Jones to join them for a night out. The six of them headed to the Rainbow Room on Sunset Boulevard. If the band’s behavior had been slightly mitigated in the studio, being in the bar removed any remaining reserve.

  As Wallace nursed a light beer, Stinson grabbed a black marker and began drawing all over his pants and shirt. Meanwhile, Dunlap was drinking heavily, eventually getting in his face. “You’re a young fuck,” he hissed. “You don’t know shit. I’ll kick your ass.” Wallace’s blood began to boil. “I was like, ‘Fuck it—I’m done with this stuff, let’s fight,’” said Wallace. “That’s not even me. I’m not a fighter.” The Rainbow’s bartender was forced to break things up.

  “If they had been more confident, or more honest, they could’ve said: ‘Look, we’re scared shitless. We’ve run through a bunch of producers; we’ve already scrapped one version of this record; we’re working with you now, this is a big deal for us—what can we do?’” said Wallace. “But they couldn’t say that. So they did the best they could do, which was lash out.”

  The next day Jones arrived at 4:00 PM—six hours late—to tell Wallace he quit. Three studio days and one night out had been more than enough Replacements for him.