Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  At his office, Westerberg laid on the charm and laid out his case. “I asked him: ‘Mo, can we have a push?’ ’Cause it was always the Cult or R.E.M. that got the handful of people to work the records. And Mo, in Mafia-style fashion, had a favor for me.”

  Changing the subject, Ostin mentioned that he had a friend, Irwin Jacobs, a Minneapolis financier, who was involved in the development of a new megamall that was going to be constructed just outside the city. There would be a groundbreaking ceremony in the summer. Ostin wanted to know if the Replacements would be willing to play the event.

  The irony was almost too much for Westerberg. The future Mall of America was being built in Bloomington, the wretched suburb where he’d spent his preband days working as janitor. Westerberg took a deep breath and gave his answer: “No—no, we don’t play malls.”

  “And that was sort of the end of meeting,” recalled Westerberg. “It’s like, Christ, I was asking for something, and he was asking for something in return. I really should’ve been smart enough to say, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ But . . . we can’t play a mall. Tiffany and [New Kids on the Block] and that kind of person were making headlines at the time playing malls. He was testing my loyalty to the fucking firm. And I didn’t have any.”

  “Certainly, we played worse things than a mall,” said Tommy Stinson. “We played a Taco Bell in Indiana at one point. But part of the ’Mats’ legacy is, yes, we were too proud to do that stuff. We just didn’t know how stupid it was that we turned it down.”

  In the short term, failing to get Ostin’s papal seal didn’t automatically doom the ’Mats record. In fact, promotion head Rich Fitzgerald insisted there was an “unlimited budget to spend at radio. There wasn’t one faucet that wasn’t turned on for the Replacements.”

  Still, the next time Westerberg saw Ostin, he was in Lenny Waronker’s adjoining office playing some new demos. Ostin came from around his desk, and Westerberg rose to meet him. With a wave, Ostin motioned for him to sit down. Then he shut the door.

  CHAPTER 50

  The Don’t Tell a Soul tour, slated to begin in Ann Arbor in early March, would encompass four legs and nearly seventy headlining shows, many in the biggest venues the Replacements had played yet.

  To make it happen, the Replacements’ insular touring party expanded dramatically, from a couple of vans to a pair of buses, one for the band and one for an expanded eleven-man crew, including longtime roadie Bill Sullivan and soundman Brendan McCabe.

  High Noon was reluctant to hand road-managing to Sullivan—Rieger and Hobbib viewed him as one of the band. “Any road manager that took the job was completely incompetent next to Bill,” said Dunlap. “A lot of the operation was thanks to Bill that it ran as smoothly as it did. He dealt with four people who were just incorrigible.”

  Nevertheless, High Noon found an established road manager in Roger Vitale. Big and bearded—Westerberg nicknamed him “Crummy Bear”—Vitale had seen his share of rock-and-roll debauchery on Aerosmith’s Rocks tour; he’d come to the Replacements after a long run with Megadeth, then deep in the throes of heroin addiction.

  But the Replacements experience was singular. “They were off the wall,” said Vitale. “Everybody was into sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, but not the way these guys were. They just didn’t give a fuck. Which was not the style I was used to working for.”

  Vitale brought in some of his own people, including monitor man Carl Davino. From Queens, with a pronounced dese-dem-dose accent, Davino had started out playing drums in local bands and wound up doing sound professionally for metal bands like Warlock and White Lion. The Replacements quickly took a shine to him. Westerberg delighted in forcing him to don a purple smoking jacket and plaid pants and man the monitor desk onstage.

  Davino gamely battled the band’s ridiculous volume. “You always heard that Motörhead was the loudest band ever, and I used to say bullshit. Motörhead was pussies compared to dese guys,” said Davino. “I’ve never been in such a loud situation. Anything could happen; every show was entirely its own entity. And something would happen every night. You knew you were in the midst of something insane.”

  The most put-upon member of the crew, however, was guitar tech Yuek Wong. A slight, unassuming figure, Wong was an incredibly resourceful road hand who would go on to work with Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. The Replacements gig was a trial by fire, as Westerberg spent much of the tour smashing guitars. As the crew bus hit a new town, Wong would immediately scour vintage guitar stores for new ones.

  For the first time, the Replacements had also decided to augment their tour income by selling merchandise. They’d signed an exclusive deal with top merch company Brockum for a $50,000 advance. Jimmy Velvet, aka Jim Sullivan, handled their account. A Rhode Island native, he’d gotten his start hustling merch for his cousin, East Coast rocker John Cafferty, then worked for everyone from Van Halen to the Georgia Satellites.

  But only the Replacements had ideas like these. Chris Mars suggested putting their faces in the shirts’ armpits, rather than across the front. Stinson wanted to sell a T-shirt that, after a first wash, revealed invisible ink saying: HA! HA! SUCKER!

  The band needed every cent it could get. The Replacements were still scrapping and still getting heavy tour support from Warner Bros.—all of which added to their growing label debt. And though they played bigger venues and earned bigger guarantees, the need to step up their payroll meant that, as Hobbib put it, “now you’re playing for fifteen thousand dollars and barely breaking even.”

  He continued: “They’d burn themselves out on the road after three weeks and have to go home for a week or two. Then what do you do with the crew, the busses, and everything then? Everybody was on half-salaries during the time they were off. It was a total waste of money.” It did little to curb Paul’s and Tommy’s profligacy. Velvet’s jaw dropped the first time he witnessed one of their stranger road rituals: “They used to rip up their per diem . . . ripped it up and threw it.”

  MTV didn’t hesitate to support Don’t Tell a Soul, putting the clip for “I’ll Be You” into its “Buzz Bin” rotation. “That was the best video they made,” said Rick Krim. “It was done in enough of an edgy way that they didn’t feel like they were completely selling out.”

  Things were equally promising for radio. Rock promotion head Michael Linehan, a committed fan, was particularly heartened by early audience-testing data the company had collected on “I’ll Be You.” “It called out well, in terms of research, which surprised me,” said Linehan, who headed Warner’s Reprise field staff, an up-and-coming division filled with regional reps who were more in tune with the band’s spirit—and unlike the earlier promo team, hadn’t yet been put off by them.

  The only spanner in the works was the band itself. At the outset, they promised High Noon and themselves they’d cooperate. “I guess I don’t want to give the record company an excuse for not getting behind this record,” said Westerberg at the time.

  Still, it was obvious there were limits to what they could or would do. Early on, Linehan booked studio time with the ’Mats to record a stack of radio liners—station IDs and commercial copy—to be read by the band. In radio, this was the coin of the realm. “When you’re a programmer and you’re thinning out your playlist,” said Linehan, “an enthusiastic liner is the kind of thing that can make a decision.”

  This was the exact sort of pandering drudgery the band hated most—audibly so. Stinson would read in a deadpan monotone, or in the midst of a take Westerberg would blanch: “I’m not going to say this bullshit.”

  Early in the tour, Rolling Stone dispatched writer Steve Pond to meet up with the band in Rochester, New York. The resulting feature story focused heavily on the ’Mats’ efforts to sell themselves and the album. Pond witnessed an awkward postconcert encounter between Westerberg and a pair of deejays from the local rock station:

  “Sorry we missed the show,” says one. “He was on the air til ten.”

  “Too bad,” says Westerberg, goo
d naturedly. “We were actually good tonight.”

  “That’s what I hear, man,” says the other. “That’s what I hear.”

  “So, are you playing us a little bit?” asks Westerberg.

  “Not yet, we’re not playing you yet,” says the first guy, pointing to his pal. “It’s up to him, he’s the music director.”

  The music director laughs nervously. “Yeah, we gonna—,” he begins and then stops.

  “We gotta . . . check out, and . . . ”

  “Well,” says his colleague, interrupting. “Good luck on the tour.”

  “Thanks a lot guys,” says Westerberg, as they retreat. “See you again, I guess.” Then he turns away and under his breath, he mutters, “Kiss my fuckin’ ass sideways.”

  Reading the piece a couple months later, the Reprise promo staff winced. “Radio guys hang together as a group,” said Linehan. “It’s like: ‘Why should we help these guys? There’s a million bands that would love me to play their record, and they’re cooperative.’”

  In spite of the Replacements’ conflicted promotional efforts, “I’ll Be You” began to gain serious momentum; that spring it was on top of both the modern rock and AOR charts—a number-one song in two different formats. With that, Warner Bros.’s radio chieftain Russ Thyret green-lit the single’s promotion to pop radio.

  Soon after, Russ Rieger got the call from Linehan: “Breaker! Breaker!”—the trade magazine Radio & Records had given the song “Breaker” status: it was making significant chart movement, quickly moving into the “Hot 100,” it apparently was headed for the top 40. “That was the first time I really allowed myself to buy in: ‘This could go all the way,’” said Rieger.

  The developing hit yielded immediate results: the Replacements watched as their fan base got bigger and younger almost overnight. “I remember being in some store and the song was playing and a group of little girls were singing along,” said Gary Hobbib. Yet the band took little enjoyment in their sudden new popularity—and on some level they resented it.

  “We were noticing the audience was doubling at our shows, and all of them came because they heard ‘I’ll Be You.’ And a couple of nights, in our own fashion, we forgot to even play the damn thing,” said Westerberg. “Once we started to get hip to it, we would play it right off the bat and half the people would leave.” Dunlap watched as Westerberg began to chafe against this new fan base: “It was: ‘Here’s your fucking hit—fuck you.’”

  More problematic than Westerberg’s attitude was that “I’ll Be You” sounded little like the rest of the Replacements’ music. “People heard this nice poppy little song, and then ‘The Ledge’ comes on next,” said Dunlap. “It was such a downturn.”

  Despite his occasional protestations, Westerberg enjoyed making his way through life aboard a Silver Eagle. Touring was confirmation that he’d beaten the system. Once, returning to the Twin Cities from a run of dates, the band’s bus arrived in the morning just as a crush of commuters was heading to work. Westerberg looked out the window and surveyed the rush-hour nine-to-fivers. “Ha!” he laughed. “Suckers!”

  The Replacements’ bus was always blasting music at ungodly volume, with Westerberg as resident deejay. That spring Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” seemed to be on a constant loop. “No matter what day it was, no matter what time, when that song came on and it got to the chorus where they do the ‘whoo-hoo!’ train whistle part—Paul would always get up and do that,” said Jimmy Velvet. “He could be in the middle of a conversation.”

  Much of the downtime on the long drives was filled with drinking. Bored to tears on a long Sunday drive to a show in Virginia, the band loaded up on muscle relaxers and Mad Dog wine and transformed the bus into a “gerbil cage,” ripping to shreds newspapers and magazines, methodically slicing open every pillow and removing the stuffing; then unspooling cassettes, spreading the tape around like tinsel.

  “Tommy got his makeup case out, and everyone started painting up, pouring beer over their heads,” said Velvet. “They were just entertaining themselves. It was funny, but you sorta looked at them and also thought, Boy, there’s issues here.”

  Increasingly, the Gutter Twins Westerberg and Stinson, like the Glitter Twins Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, lived an intertwined existence. “There’s a period where Mick and Keith start to look like each other and dress like each other,” said Westerberg. “Me and Tommy were like that. ‘I’m not gonna wear this tonight, you wanna wear it?’ We were sort of . . . girlfriends.”

  Drink, drugs, and women were never in short supply. On one occasion, they were both engaged with girls in the back of the bus when they decided they wanted to switch dates, but somehow do it tactfully. “We were like, ‘Let’s you and I start making out, then we’ll swap.’ I think it worked, if I recall,” said Stinson. “He’s the only dude I’ve ever made out with.”

  Back home with their wives, that sort of licentiousness wasn’t appreciated. “Tommy compartmentalizes things extremely well,” said Daune Earle. “So when he was gone, that was his life, and this didn’t exist. And when he was home, the other didn’t exist. As mature as he was, as self-aware as he could be, this was not an area where he was that way. There was a mix of things going on, and I was not okay with it.”

  Lori Bizer, too, understood the split nature of her husband’s existence. Westerberg would still call her dutifully each night, before or after the gig, as much for his benefit as hers. “I think he just wanted me to be able to sleep, thinking everything was all right,” said Bizer. “I think that was so he could go on and do his other things, feeling that he’d checked in with me.”

  When the Don’t Tell a Soul tour reached New York for a pair of shows at the Beacon Theater in March 1989, the ’Mats asked Johnny Thunders to open them. He’d been tickled by “Johnny’s Gonna Die,” though he was gruff about it: “I hear you wrote dis song about me, huh?” he asked Westerberg backstage after the record came out.

  Though still on junk, Thunders had been trying to reinvent himself professionally. A couple of years earlier, his erstwhile New York Dolls partner David Johansen had created a cartoon lounge singer character called Buster Poindexter and scored a novelty hit with “Hot! Hot! Hot!” Thunders, meanwhile, had hired buxom diva Patti Palladin and a horn section, creating a slick show-band version of his old punk act.

  After watching Thunders’s set the first night, Tommy Stinson threw a purist’s fit. When Thunders stuck his head into the dressing room to say hello, Stinson gave him both barrels. “Hey, fucker—what the hell are you doing?” he said. “You need to play all the hits, and don’t suck. This is a good gig and I know you ain’t getting many like this anymore. And lose Jessica Rabbit,” he added, meaning Palladin, before slamming the door on Thunders.

  The ’Mats’ own set at the Beacon didn’t exactly set the crowd on fire. “It was a miserable night for them—they were very average which, to them, was misery,” said Georgia Satellite Dan Baird, who got up to sing “Waitress in the Sky” and a truncated “Battleship Chains.”

  In the middle of “I Will Dare,” Westerberg called out for Thunders, and someone in the audience shouted, “Johnny’s gonna die!!!!”

  Westerberg snapped, genuinely pissed: “Oh, fuck off, will ya? Have a little respect.” Later the band brought out Thunders for a blues version of the ’Mats rarity “Never Been to College.”

  The energy onstage was already tense. “At one point, Tommy Stinson threw his bass at Chris Mars’s drum kit, saying something like, ‘Stay awake,’” the New York Times noted. “Mr. Mars, who had been putting real muscle into the music throughout the set, responded by flinging a drumstick at the bassist.”

  “Is it my imagination,” Westerberg asked, “or are we flopping?”

  A long night of partying at the China Club followed. Next day, come showtime, Westerberg could barely speak, much less sing. The band panicked at the prospect of blowing the two most anticipated shows of the tour.

  They went out
and opened with an oldie, “I’m in Trouble,” keeping their fingers crossed. Westerberg sang the first couple of lines in a barely audible croak. It seemed a lost cause. In the middle of the song, as he began screaming “Trouble!” his body quivered and he began to cough. Suddenly a ball of tissue and phlegm (among other residue) erupted in a mass from the back of his throat.

  “He had a hundred percent of his voice from that moment on,” said Baird. “The band was so happy that they might’ve played the best show they ever played. They burned for ninety minutes. Absolutely fucking burned. Seriously, I saw them about fifteen, twenty times, and it was head and shoulders above any of them.”

  Thunders joined them for a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” and a ragged “Born to Lose” to close the show.

  “I’d like to thank da lads,” Thunders said, getting the last word in. “And I’m sure they’d like to thank me very much.”

  A few days later, midshow, Westerberg was playing his favorite guitar, another beautiful-sounding Gibson 335. Suddenly, he grabbed it by the body and slammed the neck down on the amplifier and splintered it completely. Afterwards, soundman Brendan McCabe approached him in shock: “Paul, what the hell did you do that for? How could you wreck that guitar? You loved that thing.”

  “Well, that’s the difference between me and you, Brendan,” he told him. “You cherish things that you love. Me? I destroy ’em.”

  During two sold-out shows at Hollywood’s Palladium, Westerberg’s drained mood and mental health was obvious. “Westerberg appeared cranky at times, muttering sarcastic things about people’s expectations of the band,” observed the Los Angeles Times.

  The LA gigs were packed with industry players and celebrities, people pestering the band with opportunities: to record for soundtracks, to appear in movies. “It was happening for us. We were sensing it. And it was absolutely no big whoop whatsoever,” said Westerberg.