Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  “He just always felt like there was money for him. There was royalty money he wasn’t seeing and he wanted to find it. And he indicated Tommy wasn’t talking to him—nobody was really talking to him. He had nobody to really vent to within the Replacements family except for me. And I was just the one taking the phone calls. It was very sad.”

  The need for money became more pressing when Joey fell ill in the fall of ’89. Though a colicky baby, he’d been given a clean bill of health after his birth. Nine months later, however, he developed a high fever that doctors initially thought was the result of pertussis, or whooping cough. He was rushed to the emergency room and put in the children’s intensive care unit with a 106-degree temperature. Bob and Carleen were told that if his temperature didn’t come down quickly, the chances of survival were grim—a prolonged fever in an infant could result in serious complications.

  Eventually, doctors were able to use a high-powered antibiotic to save Joey’s life. But the nearly six days of high fever he suffered through had caused irreparable brain damage. It took a while for the symptoms to fully reveal themselves. “Joey wasn’t developing speech and motor skills,” said Carleen. “By his second birthday, Anita and I took him to the neurologist, who broke the news to us that Joe was a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. And that he probably would never talk or walk. The geneticists, the barrage of doctors we saw, no one could ever answer the question: ‘Why? Why Joe? Why us?’ So I quit asking.”

  Joey’s diagnosis was a shattering moment for Bob. “The stress of Joe’s situation was probably enough to break any father. Joe’s illness was especially overwhelming and made him feel . . . fatalistic. It’s a hopeless feeling when you’re out of control.”

  For Bob Stinson, his son’s fate was just another in a long line of inexplicable heartbreaks in his life. He’d long ago quit asking: “Why?”

  CHAPTER 49

  In the final weeks of 1988, the Replacements prepared for their first concert in a year and their biggest gig to date: an arena show with Keith Richards.

  Premiere’s Frank Barsalona had landed the group a one-off slot opening for the Rolling Stones guitarist at Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey on December 17. Richards had released his first solo album, Talk Is Cheap, that fall, and the show would conclude a tour with his band, the X-Pensive Winos.

  Meeting the Replacements in New York was Warner Bros. publicist Bill Bentley. A laconic, bespectacled Texan who’d worked with acts like Lou Reed and Elvis Costello, Bentley and East Coast publicist Mary Melia would wage the press campaign for Don’t Tell a Soul.

  Staying at the Mayflower near Central Park, the ’Mats were drinking in the hotel bar when Paul Westerberg got into a contretemps with Richards’s longtime press agent, Charlie Comer. “We thought he was a roadie,” recalled Westerberg. “The whole talk was ‘Could we please have the PA on for the show? We know it’s not gonna be at star volume, but could we have it turned up a little bit?’” Their drunken palaver quickly turned nasty. Finally, an angry Comer told Westerberg, “Listen, laddie, you just be sure to show up on time and play.”

  “Fuck you, man—we’ll go on whenever we want to,” replied Westerberg.

  “It was a silly argument,” said Bentley. “But I thought it was gonna turn into a fistfight. I actually had to get the band out of the bar.”

  The negative vibes carried over as the ’Mats began bar-hopping through Manhattan in a chauffeured limo provided by Warner Bros. At a certain point during the night, Tommy unexpectedly started in on Paul, voicing his festering resentments. Mostly, his anger had been directed at outsiders Tony Berg and Matt Wallace. But inequities over publishing credits, financial recompense, and creative control had become more pronounced.

  In the limo, Stinson began hectoring Westerberg: “It’s not your band, you know. It’s our band. . . . You think you’re better than us? Why are you getting all the fuckin’ money anyway?”

  Westerberg finally responded, coldly: “You can’t write a song. That’s the difference. If you can write a song, let’s see the songs. You think it’s easy to write a song? It’s not fuckin’ easy.”

  A nervous Bentley looked over his shoulder and saw Westerberg and Stinson kicking at each other angrily. “I thought somebody was going to get hurt. I told the driver, ‘Keep going—if they tear up the car, we’ll pay for it.’” The encounter shook the publicist: “It didn’t feel like they were an all-for-one band anymore. It felt like Paul . . . and them.”

  The following night, on time, the Replacements sauntered onto the arena stage for their forty-minute slot. Westerberg was slightly agitated: the band’s wives had been flown out for the occasion. “Paul was mad at me that night,” recalled Lori Bizer. “I came in dressed really crazy. Julie Panebianco and I were hanging out and being nutty. He didn’t like me being outgoing.”

  Contrary to Westerberg’s fears, the sound levels were fine, but there was something unusually hesitant about the band’s performance. “‘What are we doing here?’ you might ask yourself—we ask ourselves the same question,” said Westerberg, as the ’Mats opened with hard-charging versions of “IOU” and “Bastards of Young,” before premiering several songs off the forthcoming album. They even serenaded Richards—who was turning forty-five the next day—with “Happy Birthday” before dedicating “Unsatisfied” to the man who’d written “Satisfaction.”

  Despite his obvious discomfort, Westerberg was uncharacteristically giddy about sharing a bill with a hero. Backstage, the Replacements mingled with Richards’s coterie. Tommy chatted with Stanley Booth, author of the seminal The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones; Memphian Booth had heard all about the band from his good friend Jim Dickinson. He had been knocked out by the ’Mats’ performance and bantered about maybe writing a book on them. Slim Dunlap, meanwhile, huddled with author and essayist Fran Lebowitz.

  Bill Bentley’s crucial assignment that night was securing a photo of the ’Mats with Richards for Billboard. Keith was in a private room, so Bentley enlisted Richards’s official tour photographer, Paul Natkin, to help. “I told the band to just hang out at this table they were at, and when Keith was through cutting his birthday cake, I would ask him,” recalled Natkin.

  He returned fifteen minutes later, as promised, with Richards in tow. “The only one left was Slim, who was sound asleep at the table,” said Natkin. “Keith and I just looked at each other, smiled, shrugged, and went back to the party.”

  With Don’t Tell a Soul complete, the ’Mats offered Slim Dunlap, who’d been essentially a hired hand, full-fledged membership in the group. “I was de facto in the band every night we played. Why do you have to change the LLC to make it legitimate?” said Dunlap. “I told them, ‘Don’t bother bringing me into the corporation, it’s a waste of time and money.’”

  Westerberg remembers Dunlap practically laughing at the suggestion. “Slim, smart son of a country lawyer that he was, knew he’d just be incurring a quarter of our debt to the record company. He declined, wisely.” Having effectively worked as a session musician on Don’t Tell a Soul, Dunlap was owed several hundred dollars an hour, for many hundreds of hours. “They remunerated me fine,” said Dunlap. “I never really saw the band as a chance to get wealthy, anyway.”

  Chris Mars was raising more pointed questions about finances. More specifically, his new bride was raising them. Sally began regularly asking High Noon for updates on budgets and earnings. Westerberg regarded her sudden involvement as an annoyance; Stinson considered it a greater breach of band protocol. Tommy’s relationship with Chris had already grown distant, and now it began to sour.

  Stinson had his own financial concerns: his wife Daune Earle had become pregnant that winter. At the time, the couple was still living in a shoebox apartment on Bryant, and Stinson was unhappy about it. “After ten years in a band,” said Stinson, “you want to know you did it for something. Suddenly, your singer has a house and looks pretty happy. And you’re fucking living in an apartment. It’s like, ‘What the fuck? My br
other started this goddamn band.’”

  High Noon arranged for Stinson to buy a modest place on Thirty-Ninth and Lyndale. “It wasn’t like suddenly I could afford to buy a house—because I couldn’t,” said Stinson. “I borrowed the money from the band, or what ended up turning into band money.”

  On the eve of Don’t Tell a Soul’s release, Stinson’s concerns were more about the future than about money. Much of the album’s fate was contingent on Paul’s cooperation with the label in promoting the record—always a dicey proposition. “Tommy was freaked out,” said Earle. “This is all he knew since he was twelve. He always wanted the band to grow, and Paul didn’t.”

  “That was not a subject to talk about,” said Lori Bizer, who, having worked for labels and in radio, understood the ramifications of her husband’s actions. “He continued to shoot himself in the foot a lot of times—not show up for interviews or blow people off. And they were people who were fans. He let a lot of people down.”

  Much as Stinson might’ve wanted to push Westerberg, said Earle, “he couldn’t break rank with Paul.” Stinson and Westerberg’s union had evolved dramatically, but the former began to think there would always be an inequity in their relationship. “Tommy maybe realized that this is all it’s ever going to be with Paul,” said Earle. “He was never going to take him seriously.” During their entire marriage, Earle said, she never heard Stinson utter a single negative word about Westerberg.

  The irony was that, in many ways, Stinson was far better suited to being the Replacements’ leader—a born performer and bandleader with a gregarious personality suited to the outside demands of stardom. Warner Bros. knew it too and would often seek Tommy out for the duties that Westerberg was too ill-tempered to handle. “They went to Paul for the serious things. And Tommy was the cute one, the happy one, the rock star,” said Earle. “That’s how he was regarded. Which, to him, was an empty thing to be.”

  Part of the great compromise to promote Don’t Tell a Soul was making a more conventional video. “We would watch [director’s] reels for hours and hours with the guys, and they just hated everything,” recalled Randy Skinner, once again in charge of producing a Replacements promo clip.

  The band finally settled on the team of Doug Freel and Jean Pellerin, who’d done a number of memorable glam-metal videos for the likes of Def Leppard and Poison, as well as Joan Jett and the Georgia Satellites. Filmed on a soundstage in Silverlake, “I’ll Be You” was shot in color and featured the band performing the song, though they made little effort to lip-synch to the track. “They did not want to fake that,” said Skinner. “It was a huge thing for them.”

  The video is a catalog of old ’Mats tricks—switching instruments and clothes, destroying gear—as well as a few bits of comedy (including a very real and painful Westerberg fall from atop Chris Mars’s drum kit). It wasn’t “Thriller,” but for the Replacements it was a quantum leap forward.

  For the album’s package, Warner Bros. went in a more serious direction, hiring fine-art photographer David Seltzer, known for sumptuous black-and-white imagery and ghostly multiple-exposure photos. Seltzer and Warner art director Kim Biggs traveled to Minneapolis to shoot the band at its rehearsal space, which Biggs described as “like a Dumpster. . . . I think the ceiling was actually falling apart. There was urine and feces on the floor.”

  To top it off, the band began to dress up in drag. “I thought, Well, this is an interesting group,” recalled Seltzer. “Nobody said anything; we just went about our business.” Eventually, after collecting some pictures of them in fishnets and lipstick, Seltzer had all four strip to the waist and then took a series of portraits, merging several into ethereal-looking group shots.

  The image that best caught the record’s (and title’s) mood was a solo shot of Westerberg with his finger to his lips. High Noon was careful not to overlook the rest of the group: the back cover composite featured a massive Stinson in the foreground, with Dunlap and Mars in sharp focus and Westerberg all but blurred out.

  High Noon and Warner’s publicity department hoped again to broaden their reach with features and items in mainstream publications like Newsweek and People. In December, Mary Melia sent an internal memo to Bill Bentley and PR vice president Bob Merlis, outlining the potential pitfalls of a broader media campaign: “Usually one-on-one they’re great, but when the four of them get together, it’s ‘wipe carbon paper on the walls’ time. So, here’s hoping.”

  Finally armed with a properly playable ’Mats clip to take to the network, the band and High Noon went for a formal dinner that winter with a contingent of MTV executives at New York City’s China Grill. “We almost got kicked out ’cause the band was throwing martinis on each other,” said MTV’s Rick Krim.

  As Rieger and Hobbib stood talking up the prospects of a fruitful partnership between MTV and the Replacements, Westerberg turned to Krim and whispered conspiratorially: “They’re not really our managers. Don’t listen to anything they say.”

  When Westerberg first heard R.E.M.’s Green, released in November, three months ahead of Don’t Tell a Soul, he breathed a sigh of relief. “Our record is better than theirs,” he told Julie Panebianco, with some hubris.

  That competitive streak ran both ways. “I know when I would listen to one of their records,” said R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, “if our record kicked their ass, or their record kicked our ass, I could tell—though I’d never tell you which I thought was which.” By the time Don’t Tell a Soul hit stores, Green had already gone gold and was nudging toward platinum.

  The ’Mats’ early album press augured well. Ira Robbins wrote Rolling Stone’s three-and-a-half-star lead review, preparing listeners for a downshift: “More than half of the songs on Don’t Tell a Soul are built on acoustic guitars; layers of harmony vocals, keyboards and modest studio effects are part of the sonic overhaul.”

  SPIN, however, took an opposing view in a three-fer review (with R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet). “Art is pretty much what kills this Replacements album,” wrote the magazine’s senior editor Joe Levy. “It’s not just the worst Replacements album ever, it completely sucks. And part of the reason is that they’re trying for the first time to be craftsmen with a wide range of artistic expression.”

  Other critics complained about Chris Lord-Alge’s high-gloss mix. But “sellout” charges had been leveled at the Replacements as far back as Hootenanny. Speaking of old fans who’d felt the group had abandoned them, Westerberg told the hometown alt-weekly Twin Cities Reader, “They can go fuck themselves.”

  “The Last, Best Band of the ’80s,” trumpeted the cover of Musician magazine’s February 1989 issue, over a photo of the smiling Replacements. Inside was a six-page feature penned by Minneapolis writer Steve Perry.

  This was no small matter: Musician was then at its zenith. “In 1988 we decided, ‘Let’s see how many magazines we can sell,’” said editor Bill Flanagan. “Every issue of 1988 had a big star on the cover: McCartney, Bono—we had the biggest year we ever had.” By contrast, they decided that 1989 would be “the ‘hip’ year,” said Flanagan. “We had the ridiculous vanity of thinking just as many people would buy the magazine.”

  The Musician cover line became a subject of contention at the magazine’s office—namely, whether a comma should separate “last” and “best.” “I fought very hard against it,” said Flanagan, who envisioned it as a semi-joke. “There had already been so many ‘Best Bands of the Eighties.’ Every two years there was one: it was the Police, then it was U2, then it was R.E.M.”

  “What have we got—eight, nine months left to be the best band of the eighties?” cracked Westerberg. “They could have said ‘best band of the nineties.’”

  That winter Warner Bros. sponsored a Don’t Tell a Soul listening party in New York, at Carmelita’s Reception House, an East Fourteenth Street bar that had supposedly once been a bordello. The night was chaos: the Replacements drank heavily and hid from the assembled guests for most of the evening. Eventually someone set off stin
k bombs. “We thought it was someone from the bar because they wanted to get rid of us,” recalled Mary Melia. Westerberg had to be practically carried out by Julie Panebianco in the middle of the party, only to return later.

  When Flanagan arrived at Carmelita’s, Westerberg was sitting alone on the steps, looking glum and wasted. “I said, ‘So, Paul, are you happy?’” recalled Flanagan. “And Paul said, ‘Well, I’m drunk, anyway.’ He didn’t really say it as a wisecrack. I thought, Wow, maybe this isn’t going to end well for them.”

  By early 1989, the Replacements had reached the radar of Warner Bros.’s chairman, Mo Ostin, who visited the Carmelita’s party in New York. “I don’t think I paid the proper respect to Mo,” recalled Westerberg. “We didn’t quite understand the significance of him coming all the way for this.”

  That winter, doing press in California, Westerberg was summoned to Burbank for a visit with Ostin. The band’s rebel stance had become a selling point for Tim and Pleased to Meet Me. But ten years into their career, it was time to change course. Westerberg figured he was capable of doing the dance. He was aware that “if Mo wants to spend fifty million dollars to promote something, he’ll do it. It’s nothing to him.”

  With his salt-and-pepper beard and oversized glasses, Ostin had the unassuming air of an accountant—the job he’d trained for at UCLA. After working as comptroller for the jazz imprint Verve, Frank Sinatra tapped him to head his Reprise label in 1960. Seven years later, Ostin took over the newly merged Warner-Reprise operations, turning the company into the jewel of the music business over the next two decades. Having worked closely with Sinatra, Ostin was well versed in the Sicilian culture of favors and fealty.