by Bob Mehr
After the shows, even among old friends, Westerberg was sullen and angry. He’d sit on the bus and crank “Midnight Train to Georgia.” “You know that line in the song ‘LA proved too much for the man’?” said writer Bill Holdship. “He was giving us a message, I thought.”
CHAPTER 51
Steven Baker had been trying for some time to get the Replacements on board with Hollywood. In 1988 Westerberg, Stinson, and Michael Hill watched a rough cut of Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob in New York; the director wanted the ’Mats on the soundtrack. That was scotched when Westerberg piped up about halfway through: “This is shit!”
Westerberg finally consented to a movie placement a year later, when Cameron Crowe used Hootenanny’s “Within Your Reach” in the high school romance Say Anything. Crowe, a former Rolling Stone writer making his directorial debut, had a particularly keen ear for music choices, though it was the film’s star, John Cusack, who had pushed for the song.
That spring another teen film was announced: the sequel to 1979’s Rock ’n’ Roll High School. The original, directed by Alan Arkush and starring the Ramones, had become a cult classic. Rock ’n’ Roll High School Forever was set to begin shooting in August, with Sire signed on for the soundtrack and the Ramones lined up to do a cameo. Producer Jed Horowitz told the press he favored one band for the starring role: “The Replacements are leading the pack,” he said. Seymour Stein also thought it was a great opportunity, and the ’Mats were actually considering it. But Michael Hill queered the deal, taking the band aside privately and advising them against participating—wisely, as the released film turned out to be a major embarrassment. “Michael was very good for us,” said Westerberg. “We dodged a bullet there.”
Ironically, the era’s best teen film would be heavily influenced by the Replacements but wouldn’t actually feature their music. Daniel Waters began writing the script for Heathers while working as a clerk at a video store in Los Angeles. “I wasn’t actually listening to the Replacements in high school,” said Waters. “But by listening to their music, I got back to that kind of place.”
Waters’s story was a black satire of John Hughes’s sanitized Midwestern high school fantasias, as well as a comic dissection of the recent national teen-suicide panic. Just as Westerberg had tried to demystify suicide’s romance with “The Ledge,” so Waters did by mocking society’s response to it.
Waters peppered his script with Replacements allusions—from the school being Westerburg High (the spelling of Paul’s surname was changed at the urging of a film exec who felt that the name Westerberg seemed “a little too Jewish” for a Midwestern high school) to male lead J.D. (Christian Slater) and one of the titular Heathers saying, “Color me impressed.”
Waters wanted Tim’s “Swingin Party” to play over the closing credits, but New World Cinema’s $2.9 million budget wouldn’t allow for it. “I’m pretty sure we didn’t even bother asking, given our paltry resources,” said Waters. The film’s ’Mats connection was strengthened when female lead Winona Ryder bonded with the scenarist over their mutual love of the band.
Heathers did modest box office upon its March 1989 release, but it won serious attention from critics and developed a fervent cult following. In Rolling Stone’s 1989 “Hot Issue,” Heathers was named hot movie, and Ryder and Slater hot actress and hot actor. The film’s timing coincided with Don’t Tell a Soul’s release. Westerberg would later claim to have never seen the movie. He would become familiar, however, with the film’s female star.
Born just a couple hours outside the Twin Cities, Winona Laura Horowitz was the daughter of a hippie-beatnik family. She was raised on a farm located in the bluff country along the Mississippi; her godfathers were Timothy Leary and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The family left Minnesota for South America, then moved on to a commune in Northern California before settling in nearby Petaluma, where she began acting. She took her stage name, Ryder, from one of her father’s Mitch Ryder LPs.
An older cousin exposed her to ’80s American indie rock when she was twelve, and she went to her first Replacements show, also in the Bay Area, when Bob Stinson was still in the band. “They were very drunk, and pissing the audience off,” she recalled. “I had never seen anything like it. There was a sense of wanting to root for them.”
On set, Ryder blasted the ’Mats on her Walkman to prepare for scenes—ballads for the emotional stuff, rockers for the arguments. “Paul’s music was so important to me, so critical and seminal to my work,” she said. “It was this Salinger-esque thing: you feel like he’s singing directly to you and these songs are about your life.”
The Replacements played LA’s Palladium in the spring of 1989. That day Ryder bumped into Westerberg at the Mondrian Hotel. “I was completely star-struck,” she said. Westerberg thought she was “cute as hell” and invited her to the Mondrian bar. He drank; she didn’t. After an awkward silence, Ryder finally worked up the nerve to ask Westerberg about his songs, quizzing him about “Here Comes a Regular.” Their conversation ended abruptly when Paul headed to sound check.
Ryder and her boyfriend, Johnny Depp—then starring on Fox’s hit 21 Jump Street—saw the show that night. “I was dancing and jumping up and down, and he was sitting back,” she said. Ryder allowed that her fascination with Westerberg became a mild annoyance to Depp after a while.
Later that year, Ryder went to a ’Mats show in New York on her own. Afterwards, Westerberg walked her back home. “It was the first time we ever had a real conversation,” she recalled. “It was very, very sweet.”
Their socializing made at least one gossip column at the time. (The paper noted, falsely, that Westerberg was separated from his wife.) “He was married and I was with Johnny,” said Ryder. “It always felt like there was this secret-type feeling, like not wanting anyone to know. I guess it was because . . . he didn’t want rumors.”
The press would eventually begin asking Westerberg about her. “Wait ’til they hear about me and Phyllis Diller,” he told SPIN, annoyed. Nevertheless, the hearsay was torrid. “For years I felt I got this really bad rap, when in reality it was a handful of times of hanging out with him,” said Ryder. “It was not this love affair at all.”
There were glimmers of something more. “I definitely own up to having romantic feelings at certain points, but the timing just didn’t happen,” said Ryder. “Later on, Paul would joke and say, ‘Everyone thinks we had this thing. Why didn’t we just have it?’”
CHAPTER 52
In the last week of May, the Replacements headed to New York for their first American network television appearance since Saturday Night Live three years earlier. They’d been booked to play the inaugural International Rock Awards, a “tribute to the world’s foremost rock ’n’ roll artists,” to air on ABC in the United States and in forty other countries. Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, the Bangles, and Robert Palmer were also confirmed to appear.
The band was joined in New York by their wives, who weren’t particularly friendly with one other. Lori Bizer was viewed as cool and aloof by the other women, while Chrissie Dunlap was older and had her own social set. Daune Earle was the most outgoing—she even liked Chris Mars’s wife Sally Schneidkraut, but Tommy Stinson’s negative feelings toward Sally roadblocked their friendship. “Nobody socialized or had dinner together,” said Earle.
“There’s nothing worse than riding in the van or bus,” said Westerberg, “and the first thing out of somebody’s mouth is, ‘My wife thinks that . . .’” Already annoyed with Schneidkraut for meddling in band business, Westerberg would say of the couple: “It’s as if Yoko married Ringo.”
“It wasn’t the liquor that tore the band apart; it was the women,” Westerberg would claim. “They crack the little gang, three or four guys who have a brotherhood. When you have someone who’s in your ear, who you love in a different way . . . that tends to be the beginning of the end.”
Others saw the situation differently. “Chris was enough of an individual that
it was going to happen anyway,” said Slim Dunlap. “You get into your thirties and you’re in a rock band that has such a horrible, fatalistic view of the world, which could implode at any moment. . . . Chris was inevitably going to grow apart from them.”
Mars had come to see the emptiness of his relationships with Paul and Tommy and the ugliness of the gang mentality. “You had to be a Replacement when you were with the band,” said Mars. “We were like bar mates and not really close friends. . . . I don’t really know them as people.”
Chris was also dissatisfied with how the ’Mats’ affairs were being handled. The youngest of seven children, raised blue-collar, Mars knew the value of a dollar. “He was a tight-ass,” chuckled Dunlap. “And he saw all this money being thrown around. Chris saw it as, ‘Nobody’s in command here who has any practicality or sense.’”
The others responded in kind. In Los Angeles, hanging out with Bill Holdship, Stinson and Westerberg began badmouthing Mars’s playing. “That was the first time I heard that kind of dissension,” said Holdship. “They’d say smart-ass things to each other, but that was the first time I felt like there was any problems going on.”
By mid-May, “I’ll Be You” had reached number fifty-one on the Hot 100. But it would go no higher. Warner Bros. had come to the conclusion that the record wasn’t going to break into the top 40, no matter how much more money or promotional muscle they put behind it. The ’Mats’ first—and probably best—shot had missed the mark.
Though Westerberg passed it off publicly—“It’s not like ‘I’ll Be You’ is number one and I’ll have to play it for the rest of my life,” he told an interviewer—privately both he and Stinson were crestfallen. Publicist Mary Melia recalled an evening at the band’s hotel when they let their guard down. “They were plastered and kept talking to me about trying to get famous—they didn’t say it in those words exactly. I never thought they cared.”
That night, Paul and Tommy called Maxwell’s owner Steve Fallon in Hoboken and arranged to do a last-minute, unannounced show there the following evening. They hadn’t played a small club in a while, and they were itching to have some fun in a familiar room.
There was a hitch: Chris and Sally Mars already had dinner plans. “Everyone else, including me, was like, ‘Well, cancel them,’” said Chrissie Dunlap. “Her response was, ‘No, we’re going to dinner.’ I was like, ‘You don’t get it.’ I can only imagine Paul and Tommy’s reaction.”
Years later Westerberg would look back on Mars’s decision to skip out on the band and the show that night as justified. “To defend him in hindsight, he had made plans previously,” said Westerberg. “I don’t hold it against him now. But back then, it was someone else’s spouse getting in the way of what the band wanted to do. Us three wanted to play.”
Undaunted, the rest of the Replacements played Maxwell’s, taking the stage for the first time ever without Chris Mars. Monitor man Carl Davino was behind the kit. “Tommy just said, ‘You wanna play tonight?’ I said, ‘Play what?’” recalled Davino. “At that point, it’d been ten years since I’d played the drums.”
Word about the secret appearance spread quickly, and by showtime Maxwell’s was teeming with excited fans.
“Well, Chris couldn’t make it,” announced Tommy Stinson from the stage. “His mommy wouldn’t let him.”
Finding his place behind the drums, Davino stuck out among the ’Mats with his hair-metal roadie style. “Here’s Carl Bon Jovi,” joked Stinson.
“I’m thinking to myself, God I’m rusty as shit,” recalled Davino. Though he had become familiar with the songs mixing them night after night, “knowing the material and playing it are two different things. I managed to make it through the whole show anyway.”
Remarkably, Davino not only held his own but actually played with real confidence. The band was at its loose-limbed best, working up covers alongside originals as the audience sang along giddily. Maybe it was the crowd or the confines, but it was one of the best nights of the whole tour—and certainly the most enjoyable.
Westerberg and Stinson walked off the stage with their eyes having been opened. “Realizing the roadie could actually play his kick drum and had a little swing to his beat was really sorta fun,” said Westerberg. “It makes you play different. And we held that against Chris a little. He had his two beats that he played really good.”
Later that week, Westerberg and Stinson taped an on-camera interview for MTV. Asked what their future plans included, Paul’s answer even caught Tommy off guard. “We might fire the drummer,” he said with a laugh, before backpedaling and changing the subject.
Naturally, ABC wanted the Replacements to play “I’ll Be You” at the International Rock Awards. But Westerberg wanted to plug the likely next single, “Talent Show.” The network found a red flag: the second verse’s line about “feeling good from the pills we took.”
Recalled Dunlap, “They said, ‘That can’t go on the air in any way, shape, or form. If you sing it that way, we’ll have to censor it.’” Westerberg was unusually—suspiciously—obsequious about the matter. “If ya gotta bleep out the line, that’s fine,” he told the producers.
Show day began, Stinson recalled, with “an eight ball and limousine” depositing the Replacements at Greenwich Village’s National Guard Armory, the ramshackle venue where the awards were being held. Instead of dressing rooms, the Armory had a communal area to get ready in. “So we basically shared the dressing room with Keith Richards and Eric Clapton and Alice Cooper, all these people,” recalled Westerberg. “We’re huddled in the corner looking at each other, and looking at them, and thinking. ‘What are we doing here?’”
Richards was the first to arrive. Westerberg made a beeline and introduced himself: “We opened for you a few months ago.” Richards responded warmly: “He lit my cigarette, and I looked to the band, like C’mon, and everybody whipped over there. He was so charming and nice. The flip side was Dave Edmunds, who wanted to kill us.”
It was especially ironic given that Edmunds’s Tracks on Wax 4 had been one of the first records Westerberg played for Dogbreath a decade earlier. Edmunds was “looking at us like, I’m gonna get out of this chair and murder you, you fucking cunts—for no reason. I guess we didn’t look like we belonged there. We didn’t belong there.”
Stinson and Bill Sullivan commiserated with Alice Cooper as he pulled on his leather pants. The ’Mats listened respectfully as Eric Clapton laid out his Armani duds and espoused the best methods for ironing clothes. When David Bowie walked in, he spotted Stinson’s polka-dot suspenders and teased hair and cooed, “My, aren’t you the bright young things.”
The show was a lively mess. The award itself was in the shape of a golden hip-swiveling Elvis Presley (“And the Elvis goes home with . . . ”). The Traveling Wilburys won album of the year, Guns N’ Roses picked up artist of the year, and Bono and Madonna were best male and female vocalists. Most of the big winners were no-shows.
The Replacements appeared toward the end of the broadcast, just as they were soaring from a day of liquid and powder refreshment. One of the production assistants, aided by John Oates of Hall & Oates, managed to distract Westerberg long enough to get the flask out of his hands and push him onstage.
The band’s reputation preceded them. “We apologize,” came the group’s introduction, “Here they are: the Replacements.”
“What the hell are we doooin’ here?” bleated a pallid Westerberg into the microphone in his Minneapolis honk, a camera crane swooping in. Then he stuck his tongue out at a cameraman who got too close. The ’Mats’ wives watched from a table out in front of the stage. Nearby, Tina Turner covered her ears from the volume.
Sure enough, the line about “pills” was muted from the broadcast. The rest of their performance was loose and euphoric. Stinson got on the mic and poked fun at the Elvis award. They all seemed to be laughing at some private joke.
For the song’s closing “It’s too late to turn back” coda, Westerberg began to s
ing “It’s too late to take pills” instead—several times. The censors missed it completely and let it go out live on the air.
“The reaction afterward was nightmarish,” said Dunlap. By the closing all-star jam, led by Richards and featuring most of the evening’s performers, the ’Mats had already been ushered out of the building. The next morning at the hotel coffee shop, Russ Rieger sat with his head in his hands. The band waited three years to return to network TV, only to spit in ABC’s eye as well.
CHAPTER 53
Touring was scheduled to resume at the University of Wisconsin, a show Warner Bros. was set to record for live promotional radio release. The long overnight drive from New York to Milwaukee turned into a rowdy early morning episode that Westerberg would later immortalize in the song “Someone Take the Wheel.”
Merch man Jimmy Velvet and tour manager Roger Vitale were both asleep in their bunks when they were shocked awake by Never Mind the Bollocks, It’s the Sex Pistols blasting at window-rattling volume. A raging party was under way in the front lounge. Velvet turned on his video camera. Paul was making screwdrivers, then throwing the glass against the wall and chugging vodka straight from the bottle. Not to be outdone, Tommy leapt around miming to Johnny Rotten in his tighty-whiteys. Even Chris was mugging for the camera. Slim was near the front, nursing a beer, keeping one eye on the road.
As “Bodies” kicked in, Paul and Tommy began ripping out the bus’s tables and fixtures, methodically uprooting everything nailed, screwed, or glued down. The driver, a Georgia good ol’ boy who worked for the bus’s owner, glanced over his shoulder with increasing concern as the band lay waste to the lounge. Finally, he jerked the bus over to the shoulder of the interstate and became apoplectic once he realized how much structural damage they’d done.
