Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  The fuss over Green—recorded, like the two most recent ’Mats albums, at Ardent and Bearsville—was not lost on the Replacements. “There was always a close comparison to R.E.M.,” said Matt Wallace. “In hindsight, that may have been a factor in trying to make more of a pop record than the Replacements had made before.”

  The Replacements’ resentment toward R.E.M. was real. “A lot of it had to do with how we were perceived,” said Tommy Stinson. “We didn’t hide the fact that we did drugs and drank and were fucked up. We wore our shit on our sleeve, and they hid their shit. Those guys hid it pretty well. And we know that, because we did their drugs and drank with them. I thought they were a bit phony, just playing the game. . . . Though they were nice guys, I guess.”

  Steven Baker was a presence in both bands’ camps. “When we’d had twenty beers and he’d had two, he’d ask us a couple pointed questions,” recalled Westerberg. “Like: ‘What do you guys really want?’ I looked him in the eye and told him I wanted to be as big as R.E.M., and he looked . . . sad. Because he knew that that would never happen. And I think I knew it too.”

  It wasn’t just R.E.M. zooming past the Replacements. The Sire-signed UK hard rockers the Cult—whom Westerberg disdained—had scored a top-forty hit and sold half a million copies of Electric. Even newcomers like LA’s Jane’s Addiction (whom he liked) had some small chart success with Nothing’s Shocking—produced by Dave Jerden, another producer the ’Mats had rejected.

  Most of the Replacements’ early contemporaries were gone now; even Hüsker Dü had called it quits earlier that year. Westerberg was almost thirty, and he felt the sell-by date for the band nearing. Deep in recording, Westerberg was still trying to come up with more songs, hoping to deliver that one hit that could change their fortunes. “When he couldn’t, he’d just be utterly depressed,” said Dunlap. “Everything was coming to a head. The underlying feeling was that this record has to break, or we’re done. This one has to be that record. And everyone was counting on Paul to pull it over.”

  Late in the process, Lenny Waronker came to the studio to listen to the band’s new tracks. Waronker had a dry, biting sense of humor that Westerberg appreciated. “For some reason I just blurted out, ‘Boy, I don’t ever want to become a famous celebrity,’” he recalled. “Lenny turned down the volume and said: ‘With a voice like that, you don’t have to worry about it, Paul.’ And then he turned it back up.”

  Waronker suggested that the band change Dunlap’s loud, bluesy solo on the otherwise delicate “They’re Blind.” Dunlap went back and added a more conventional, melodic lead. “We did bow to the powers that be some,” admitted Westerberg.

  Warner Bros. was looking for a hit. “In some ways, a hit covers up for a lot of errors,” said Waronker. The Replacements’ most clearly promising new tune was “I’ll Be You,” which cast Westerberg as a hardheaded protagonist, the proverbial “rebel without a clue,” chasing a rock-and-roll dream “too tired to come true.” At Bearsville, it had been a pleasant, if slight number. Over time the ’Mats pumped it up, adding piano, a call-and-response chorus, and a vocal jump in the third verse to heighten the song’s drama.

  Listening back, Waronker agreed that “I’ll Be You” had hit potential, but he felt that something was still missing. They didn’t know what else to add. At a loss, they began messing with the pitch. Westerberg became enamored with the vari-speed effect and wanted to make it go faster and faster.

  In the end, Wallace barely altered the track at all. But when Waronker heard the song again a couple of days later, suddenly he was sold. “Lenny couldn’t figure out what we’d done to it, but he loved it,” laughed Westerberg. “So we really felt like we’d pulled one over on the old man.”

  Along with Wallace, Westerberg and Dunlap headed back to Minnesota in early October to finish overdubs and vocals at Paisley Park Studios, the new $10 million, 65,000-square-foot studio and production facility built by Prince in the Minneapolis suburb of Chanhassen.

  When they arrived, the studio had just installed a forty-eight-track API console. The ’Mats would be the first to use it. As they settled in to work, Westerberg accidentally spilled a giant tumbler full of Jack Daniels across the newly refurbished board. Wallace recalled the studio tech’s horrified face as he watched the sticky brown liquid dripping into the faders. “We had basically announced our presence,” said Wallace.

  Westerberg committed another faux pas when he encountered the daughter of R&B icon Ray Charles, Sheila Charles, at the studio. “I told her I had this great song that her dad should sing, and I played it for her,” recalled Westerberg. “I was serious. I really thought it would be something he could do. But I get halfway through the song, and she’s looking at me real weird.”

  Westerberg went to the restroom, and there he realized that he’d suggested that Ray Charles sing “They’re Blind.” “It didn’t even occur to me,” he said sheepishly. “Not one of my finer moments.”

  High Noon had long planned on hiring someone else to mix the album, though Wallace was laboring under the impression that the project was his to finish. Russ Rieger had been waging an aggressive campaign to convince a reluctant Michael Hill and an even more reluctant Paul Westerberg that it was the right decision.

  Rieger’s instinct was good: combining an alternative band and indie producer with a mainstream radio mixer was a formula that would ultimately make Nirvana’s Nevermind a success a few years later. In fact, a prime candidate for Don’t Tell a Soul was engineer Andy Wallace, the hard-rock hit-maker who’d give Nevermind its sheen.

  Under pressure, Westerberg finally acquiesced. “I figured, ‘Well, we’ve already got the stuff down on tape, what bad can happen here?’” To many on the outside, the move was seen as a crass attempt to court airplay. “It was an insurance policy,” said Hill. “The radio people, the promo guys, the label, they all felt more comfortable if they knew someone with that kind of track record was involved.”

  After considering several candidates, High Noon zeroed in on Chris Lord-Alge. The New Jersey–bred son of a jazz-singing mother and the self-described “Lord of the Mix,” Lord-Alge had become known for his dynamic range: booming drum sound, effects-laden guitars, and liberal use of compression. He was an aggressive character who spoke in a caricature FM deejay voice and loved to wow his clients—from James Brown to Steve Winwood—by putting their songs, as he put it, “on steroids.”

  Lord-Alge didn’t know anything about the Replacements or the band’s history. “What I did care about was the record I was going to make,” he said. Lord-Alge listened to Wallace’s tracks and felt confident he could make them “sound less demo-ish and more like an across-the-board record.”

  In early November, Westerberg and Dunlap headed back to Los Angeles to hang around as Lord-Alge mixed the album at Skip Saylor Recording. From the start, they were suspicious: Westerberg noticed that Lord-Alge had MTV playing in the studio constantly, while Dunlap surveyed his disturbingly large battery of compressors and effects processors. Matt Wallace tried to offer Lord-Alge some direction—but he was rebuffed. “Lord-Alge was like, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ Basically, get out of here and don’t bug me.”

  Lord-Alge boosted the drums, swathed the vocals in reverb, chorused and harmonized the guitars, and gave the record a three-dimensional, radio-ready sound. Some of the sonic accoutrements were aesthetic choices; others were made to mask the band’s flaws. “I remember fixing a bunch of it just instinctively,” said Lord-Alge. “Part of the charm is that it’s sloppy; it’s like a Rolling Stones record. When the stuff is not really loud, or it’s just mushed together, you don’t notice any problems. But when you really pump the stuff up . . . then you notice the issues.”

  Lord-Alge made it harder to find the imperfections, but he also made it harder to find the essential sound of the band. Wallace, Westerberg, and Dunlap went over to the studio every couple of days to listen. They had wanted to make something timeless; instead, they got an album doomed to forever
sound like 1988.

  “You don’t hire Chris Lord-Alge and say, ‘Make this sound like a garage band.’ That’s not what he does,” said Dunlap. “But it was like, ‘Come on.’” After trying to make a record for nearly a year, Westerberg had little fight left. “I was sick of it,” admitted Westerberg. “I thought the little things I’d cut in my basement were closer to what I wanted.”

  In hindsight, Lord-Alge probably shouldered too much blame for Don’t Tell a Soul’s poor reputation, not only because Westerberg badmouthed the mix publicly but also because he made a convenient scapegoat. The band’s conflicted desire for success and the excessive overdubbing following Stinson’s departure were equally culpable.

  Moreover, the record documented a Westerberg caught between his allegiance to the Replacements and his emerging singer-songwriter self. Don’t Tell a Soul is the most bipolar album in the band’s catalog, slotting the bonehead rock of “I Won’t” alongside the harrowing realization of “Rock ’n’ Roll Ghost.”

  “We were trying to make a bigger, broader, deeper, wider Replacements record,” said Wallace. “Anyone who wanted the straight-up-the-middle Replacements was going to be disappointed.”

  Not everyone was so pessimistic. High Noon was over the moon: they finally had something sonically competitive enough for mainstream radio. The early feedback from the Warner/Reprise radio staff was especially encouraging. “We got the record in, and we loved it,” said Rich Fitzgerald, who would direct the campaign for Don’t Tell a Soul. “It wasn’t just ‘I’ll Be You,’ but the whole album.”

  Tommy Stinson may have been the most relieved when he heard the finished LP. “When I got a tape of the mixes, finally, I quit panicking,” he said. “Hearing it song by song, separately, you’d go, ‘Man, I dunno about this. This is a little out there.’ But after the mix, hearing everything in sequence, it hit you. It turned a scary thing into an [exciting] thing.”

  CHAPTER 48

  While the Replacements were busy trying to craft their breakthrough, Bob Stinson was starting from scratch. Gigging as a sideman with punk veteran Sonny Vincent had been good for him, a needed boost to his ego after the blow of being booted out of the Replacements. But Bob pined for the camaraderie and rewards that came with building a group from the ground up. He would tell anyone who’d listen: “If you wanna be in a band, you gotta sweat, fight, bleed, puke, shit, and laugh . . . together.”

  “He had this whole list of things that he said made a great band,” recalled Ray Reigstad. “Basically, he was saying: you gotta give everything.”

  Since meeting his young pals Reigstad and John Reipas a couple years earlier, Bob had been casually jamming with them. Though they were relative amateurs on their instruments—Reipas played drums and Reigstad bass—they’d work up Bob’s favorite ’70s covers by the Guess Who, the Sweet, and Bread. In the summer of ’88, they finally decided to get serious and form a band playing original material. Bob told Reigstad he should just sing and not play. “’Cause he didn’t want the lineup to look like the Replacements,” said Reigstad. “That was really important to him.”

  They recruited a bassist named Chris Corbett, an eighteen-year-old blond art student from Texas to whom Stinson took an immediate shine. “He was Bob’s surrogate Tommy,” said his wife, Carleen Krietler. Since their group included a couple of part-time cab drivers, they took the name Static Taxi. The four of them were like peas in a pod: prone to schoolboy high jinks, pranks, and roughhousing, with Bob leading the way.

  Woodshedding with the band was like reliving the glorious early days with Dogbreath. “It was going back to his roots,” said Carleen. “Bob helped everyone learn their instruments and get up to speed technically. They were willing to work with Bob and catered to him.”

  After his experience with the Replacements, it felt good to be the undisputed leader of a band once again. “I can get them to go in the direction I want, and they don’t already have an opinion,” noted Bob as the band was getting started. Stinson wanted to create complex, dynamic songs; he saw Static Taxi as playing a brand of “art-blues, blues twisted around and made pretty.”

  “The Replacements was my noisy years. I couldn’t really play that well, if at all,” said Bob. “I finally took the time to learn . . . I want to be taken seriously as a guitar player. It’s a conscious thing: either get better or forget it.”

  In Static Taxi, Bob’s playing was just as profound and strikingly enigmatic as it had always been. “The peaks and the valleys of brilliance and absurdity were so extreme,” said Reigstad. “He could fluctuate between sounding like a clown then into something that hit you in the heart, within a fraction of a second. That’s why it’s so hard to put your finger on Bob’s playing. That incline was so incredibly steep.”

  The band spent the summer of ’88 rehearsing and coming up with new material under Stinson’s direction. “Some songs we wrote note by note,” recalled Reigstad. “Bob took it incredibly seriously, yet we had so much fun.”

  They set up shop, practicing in the office of an old flour mill and warehouse on the edge of Dinkytown. Later the band moved into an abandoned railroad box car nearby; they carpeted and decorated it, ran power to it, and set up their instruments and PA inside.

  The area was filled with disenfranchised Vietnam vets, rummies, and drifters who lived in the tunnels beneath the warehouse’s grain silos. It was basically a hobo encampment. “There were these bums who always had a fire going in a barrel, and these guys were hardcore alcoholics,” said Reigstad. “They were our audience.”

  The setup was nirvana for Stinson: “As much as Bob loved trains and amps and beer, this was like heaven for him,” said Reigstad. “He was just fucking keyed to go to practice.”

  “Most people would view playing in a box car as rock bottom,” said Carleen. “But he embraced it. He saw it as a revelation to be part of this train culture, this homeless culture, and meet all these people from all over the country hanging out.”

  Although Bob’s addictions remained, in their own way the guys in Static Taxi tried to control his drinking and drugging. Bob hated Budweiser—he called it rice beer—because it always gave him a headache. “So we always brought Budweiser to practice ’cause that way he’d only drink eight or ten instead of eighteen,” said Reigstad.

  The band did its best to keep him off coke too, which only caused him to drink more. Instead, they turned him on to lysergics. “I don’t know if this was a good idea or not, but we got him more into acid, clean blotter acid,” said Reigstad. “We’d take a half hit each and then we’d play . . . ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ for five hours straight.”

  As Static Taxi developed their sound and songs into 1989, Bob tried to get some gigs and label attention, but there was always resistance in the Minneapolis rock community, usually accompanied by unfavorable comparisons to the Replacements.

  Bob brought a batch of Static Taxi demos to Twin/Tone, but the label rejected the group, saying Reigstad sang off-key. “We were hurt about the Twin/Tone thing. But we weren’t doing it for any commercial purposes,” said Reigstad. “We got the sense that we were never going to be much bigger than we were. We knew Bob wasn’t gonna go on tour or anything.”

  They made just one out-of-town trip, to Las Vegas in the summer of ’89. Mostly, they gigged in and around the Twin Cities, playing at the 400 Bar, the Cabooze, the Entry, and a number of warehouse parties.

  For Bob, Static Taxi was a success on a personal and creative level. But the band’s failure to gain any real traction was also a reminder that the Replacements had been something truly special—the kind of perfect alchemy that might only come along once in a lifetime.

  Though he pursued music with his usual passion, the bigger concern in Bob’s life was the impending birth of his first child.

  Carleen had gotten pregnant in the spring of 1988, but it wasn’t entirely joyous news. “At first, I wanna say the marriage was stabilizing,” said Bob’s mother Anita. “And then she wanted to have a baby, a
nd that kinda undid him. He came to work one day and said, ‘Mom, you know I’m not ready to raise a child.’”

  Though he’d had horrible father figures in his own life, Bob did his best to embrace the role of dad. “When I was pregnant, he’d go around wearing a pillow wrapped around his stomach to pretend like he was carrying a child, to see how it would feel,” said Carleen. “He got off on feeling the baby kick. But it wasn’t something he’d put a lot of thought into, it was more like something that had happened that he had to adjust to.”

  Bob and Carleen’s son, Joseph Aaron Stinson, was born in January 1989, the spitting image of his father. Bob was over the moon. “He loved that child to pieces,” said Anita.

  But Joey’s arrival put an enormous pressure on Bob to provide for his family, to make something of himself. “He said, ‘You made me a son. Now I’ve got to live up to that,’” said Carleen. “He felt that he had to be more successful than ever.”

  Bob did make some progress in the real world, getting a job as a cook at the downtown Hyatt’s Pronto restaurant, where he was written up in the paper for his signature artichoke pizza.

  But a part-time cook’s salary wasn’t enough to support a family. Ever since splitting with the Replacements, Bob had felt he was due some kind of payout or financial settlement. After a while he suspected there were monies owed that he wasn’t seeing. He was right: by this point, the ’Mats’ Twin/Tone royalties had been frozen in the legal tussle over the band’s refusal to sign a contract, though the label’s Paul Stark said that he continued to give Bob money personally whenever he asked.

  Bob began calling the Replacements’ management, ringing High Noon in New York. Office assistant Michelle Picardo was usually the one to field the calls. “Bob and I got to know each other really well, because he was such a good egg on the phone,” said Picardo. “He’d tell me fun stories about the band back in the day. But mostly he sounded like a desperate guy. You could tell he was having issues. He’s like, ‘I gotta talk to Gary or Russ,’ and those guys never wanted to get on the phone with him.”