by Bob Mehr
“Guys, this is fucking ridiculous. I mean fuckin’ reee-diculous,” ranted the driver. “I wouldn’t take my friends and come to yer house and turn the fucking furniture out.”
“This ain’t your house—is it?” replied Westerberg. “This is more our house.”
“I’m responsible.”
“You’re responsible? We pay for it, don’t we?”
“You want to pay for a whole interior to be rebuilt? It’s only about sixty grand.”
“We might just do that,” nodded Westerberg cockily.
The driver still couldn’t believe the wreck all around him. “If you want to rebuild the whole bus, fine,” he said. “You need to buy a bus that you can destruct twice weekly and rebuild.”
Paul suddenly flushed with anger: “Don’t . . . don’t mommy me now.”
“I don’t wanna be out here to be your momma. I’m not gonna stand around here and have my fuckin’ bus tore up, man.”
“It comes with the territory,” sniffed Westerberg.
Tommy tried to defuse the situation, promising to take care of everything.
“You’ve never built a bus, have you?” asked the driver.
“Not recently, no,” sneered Westerberg. “I’ve broken a few. And I’ve paid for a lot of them.”
“Paul—look, man . . . don’t tear up the fucking bus.”
“We’re makin’ a video!” Westerberg shouted emphatically pointing to Velvet’s camera, though he couldn’t even keep a straight face.
Roger Vitale had finally roused himself from bed. He took one look at the bus, then sat and hung his head.
The driver was getting even more worked up about what his boss was going to say: “I mean, tearing the fucking furniture out, that’s carrying it too far.”
By this point, Westerberg’s buzz had started to fade and he was getting grumpy.
“We ain’t done nothin’. Christ almighty. It’s some wood . . . it’s wood with screws. What did we do? We pulled some screws out.”
“If you pull it out, you take a screwdriver and you take it out—you don’t rip it out of the wall.”
“I would’ve, but I don’t have the tools,” said Westerberg. Now it had become absurdist comedy.
The driver begged for a bit of sanity: “Can you turn it down a little bit and be a little less destructive?”
“We’ll turn it up,” said Westerberg defiantly. “That’ll make us normal.”
“Just a little mutual respect on the bus, that’s all I’m asking.”
Finally, Tommy had heard enough and began yelling theatrically. “We’re not respected anywhere! We don’t have respect. We don’t want it! Now, let us turn it up and do what we want.” End of argument.
Arriving in Milwaukee, Vitale—shocked silent the whole time—was first off the bus. As Tommy and Paul trooped down its steps, he was waiting for them. “Guys,” he said, shaking his head and mustering all the disapproval he could. “I am not impressed.” Paul and Tommy practically fell down laughing. For the rest of the tour, Vitale’s line—“I am not impressed”—became a running joke. The bus driver, meanwhile, quit the business and became a born-again Christian.
At U-Wisconsin there were more new faces in the crowd than ever, which suddenly seemed to gall the band. “Paul was saying: ‘Did you see us on that stupid TV show? Is that why you came? Did you hear “I’ll Be You”—is that why you’re here? Are you the new regime?’” said Velvet.
Warner Bros. had told the band it was making a live recording, thereby guaranteeing mischief or a dud show. As a joke, or perhaps in an effort to mar the results, Westerberg asked the crowd to boo after all the songs rather than applaud. Later, when Steven Baker got the tapes in California, he discovered that Westerberg’s between-song patter included such gems as, “Here’s another one for that asshole, Mr. Moneybags Steve Baker, back in Burbank.”
“They knew I’d be listening to it, so they’d say something horrible,” said Baker. “But it was kind of endearing too—a long-distance jibe.”
Winding through Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, Westerberg was burning out. Nearly seventy shows in four months of hard road living had caught up to him. By the time of their final date a couple of days later at Chicago’s Aragon, Westerberg was openly talking about giving up the road and rock-and-roll. As he admitted to the Tribune, “It’s the first time I’ve felt old on a tour.”
Don’t Tell a Soul’s flattening sales figures were worrying the band’s label and management. Although the Replacements hadn’t warmed up for anyone—aside from the one-off Keith Richards gig—since opening for the R.E.M. tour six years earlier, Frank Barsalona dangled the prospect of a tour with another of his clients, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Encouragingly, ’Mats pals the Georgia Satellites and Del Fuegos had been part of a successful package tour with Petty a couple of years earlier.
In April ’89, Petty had released his first solo album, Full Moon Fever, which became his biggest seller. He and the Heartbreakers would be touring in July. The Replacements were offered a slot opening almost forty shows, mostly at outdoor amphitheaters and sheds, along with a handful of arenas. The ’Mats would make only a couple thousand bucks a night, the standard pittance for an opener. The trade-off was that the venues ranged in capacity from 12,000 to 20,000.
Lenny Waronker and Steven Baker both made it clear to Westerberg that playing with Petty would be good for him personally: “They put it to me like, ‘Petty’s a singer–songwriter–front-man. He’s a professional, and you can learn a thing or two,’” said Westerberg. The underlying message was that Westerberg’s career was likely to carry on beyond the ’Mats, and he needed to prepare. It helped that Westerberg liked Full Moon Fever.
Dunlap was dubious about the tour. “Paul was already reaching a point where he was complaining to me that he . . . didn’t want to do this for the rest of his life,” Dunlap said. But they’d already gone all in with Don’t Tell a Soul; what did they have to lose?
CHAPTER 54
Appropriately named, the Strange Behavior Tour kicked off in early July with a half-dozen shows throughout Tom Petty’s native Florida. Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench was already a Replacements fan. “I’d been reading all the hype about them,” said Tench. “I’m always leery of that. But a friend of mine played me their stuff, and I got into the records.”
Tench would often join them for “Nightclub Jitters” and “I’ll Be You.” “To play with them was an education,” said Tench. “With somebody like Paul, it’s deceptive. The chord voicings he uses when he writes and the way those guys play them, it’s not as clear-cut as you might think.”
Rolling Stone had dispatched a reporter to follow the Petty tour, and he captured the two bands’ initial meeting. Guitarist Mike Campbell went and introduced himself and came out of the Replacements’ dressing room laughing at the band’s cheek. “You gotta meet these guys,” Campbell told Petty. “They’re great. They were telling me how much they like your new song ‘Running Down the Drain.’”
Bonding over mutual opening-night nerves, Stinson tried to loosen Petty up with some drinks. “Nah, you’re opening Pandora’s box there,” said Petty.
Stinson asked an amused Petty if he still played “Breakdown.”
“That was the first song I ever sang with these guys,” chimed in Westerberg, fibbing to flatter him. “But I couldn’t really get the high parts. My voice won’t do that.”
“Why don’t you do the song and then we won’t have to?” said Petty.
Petty was enthused by the group’s presence, inviting Westerberg and Dunlap onstage to jam. “Tom liked having the spark of this upstart new band on the road,” said Dunlap. “He watched Paul intently every night. I don’t think Paul realized how much.” As a gesture, Petty even gave Westerberg the hat he wore in the “I Won’t Back Down” video. “I was like, ‘Oh man, thank you,’” said Westerberg. “Then I turned around and gave it to a guy for some drugs the next night.”
At Miami Arena, the Repla
cements struggled to adjust to the bigger stage’s sound and dimensions. Dunlap had already left the Keith Richards gig at the Meadowlands thinking, None of our songs work in this environment.
To tepid applause, the ’Mats brought the opening night set to a close with a car-crash rendition of “Achin’ to Be.” “Thanks,” said Westerberg. “We’ll be better by next week, but by then we’ll be in Memphis.”
Westerberg would later admit that the band didn’t go out with a positive attitude. “We played brilliantly at least twice and got no reaction,” he said. “Middle American Petty fans don’t want it, unless they’ve seen it on TV first or heard it on the radio.”
“Petty’s audience at that time just wanted to sing along to ‘Free Fallin’,’” said Dan Baird of the Georgia Satellites. “They were indifferent to the Replacements, and that’s the last thing Paul and those guys wanted.”
The response delivered a deep psychological blow to Westerberg. “We paid our dues, went to a moderately big level, then went to a huge level on that Petty opening slot,” he observed. “But it was like playing a tiny club where no one cared—except there was 20,000 of them every night. I mean, the rejection of a small club is one thing. But the rejection of a small city was tough.”
Things got worse once the tour hit the outdoor sheds. “There’d be nobody in the stands—like, twenty, thirty people sometimes,” recalled soundman Carl Davino. “Every once in a while there may have been three or four hundred people.” In the daylight, the band watched ushers showing people to their seats and looked into the faces of disinterested Petty fans.
Many nights Westerberg would stand in the wings and listen to Petty play the “The Waiting.” As the sound of thousands of fans shouting back the song’s “yeah-yeah-yeah” refrain washed over the stage, his heart sank. “That’s when it really hit me,” he said, “that maybe we just weren’t made of the stuff that makes popular music.”
The Replacements were not going down without a fight. After playing it straight to no response, they decided to go out and give Petty’s audience a taste of vintage ’Mats chaos. “We just had this attitude: ‘Well, they don’t like our music, let’s just let them remember us,’” said Westerberg.
This “anarchist” approach, as Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch described it, was partly a reaction to watching the headliners. “I love Tom Petty and his band. But they’re boring,” said Slim Dunlap. “The first show was impressive. The second and third gig, it’s less impressive; a month into it, it’s agony.” Said Westerberg, “They did the same thing note for note, word for word, every night. It was the opposite of what we were.”
Tommy was especially galled when Petty would play a few notes of a familiar hit, then coyly ask, “You don’t really want to hear that, do you?” “It was Rock 101,” said Stinson. Occasionally, the ’Mats would poke fun at Petty’s shtick. In Bristol, Connecticut, Westerberg told the crowd, “Tom Petty’s teaching us all this groovy rapport with the audience. I think I’ve got . . . it down. Whaddya think of this?” he said, striking a typical Petty pose as the audience sat silently. “They roar for him, I dunno.”
“You’ll love it when he does it,” laughed Stinson.
The ’Mats would pull out their most caustic punk covers, they’d trade instruments in the middle of songs, and Westerberg would suck on helium and sing like Mickey Mouse. The band turned their only recognizable number, “I’ll Be You,” into a tortuous two-beat crawl and even played a mocking version of “Breakdown.”
The Petty camp was starting to wonder about the Replacements. More often than not, the band was coming onstage drunk, belligerent, and playing almost ineptly on purpose. “The Heartbreakers never understood that—a guy going up there and being deliberately bad,” said Dunlap. “It was unheard of in their world.”
Their attitude was, said Benmont Tench, “too cool for school. But it doesn’t have to be fake unless you make it fake. I didn’t understand why they would just thumb their nose at the whole experience.”
One night Westerberg caught Mike Campbell and couple of other Heartbreakers watching from the wings. “So I decided, let’s just show them what we can really do,” he said. “And we sorta blew them away . . . and confused them. The next day their roadie said to me, ‘I don’t get it, man. You guys are, like, brilliant if you want to be. Why don’t you want to be?’ I didn’t have an answer for him.”
On August 5 at Nashville’s Starwood Amphitheatre, the ’Mats felt especially feisty. Before the show, the band went to the Heartbreakers’ wardrobe mistress, Linda Burcher, and began rummaging through the Heartbreakers’ wives’ things, even getting help from Petty’s wife, Jane. They arrived onstage looking like down-and-out drag queens: Westerberg in a denim skirt and white string top, Dunlap in a blue silk dress and violet sweater, Stinson shirtless in pink pants. Swigging from a quart of Jack Daniels, Westerberg started giving the crowd his heel routine.
“Last night Tom Petty told us if we fuck up again we’re fired,” he said. “Well, fuck you, Tom Petty . . . and fuck you, Nashville.”
As the baffled, then infuriated, audience looked on, the group played a few of their own songs before working up a meandering, seemingly endless version of “Walk on the Wild Side.” Later, Westerberg asked for a drum solo from Chris Mars, who responded by throwing his sticks into the crowd.
Westerberg ended the show abruptly after thirty minutes. “Boo if you have the guts,” he said, leaving the stage. The crowd happily obliged him.
When the Heartbreakers arrived onstage, Petty quipped, “The opener played a short set, so we’re going to play extra long, because we care.” The crowd cheered. “See, we’re a little different.”
The only way out of the tour, the Replacements decided, was to get fired. “That started the real behavior,” said Dunlap. “Deliberately being grating, trying to really piss these fuckers off.”
The “fuckers” in question were Petty’s veteran road crew, who had little time for the ’Mats’ attitude. “When you’re the support act, the headliner’s crew take the approach that you guys are beneath us; here’s our rules, play by them,” said Premiere Talent’s Steve Davis. “That’s the last thing you ever wanted to say to Tommy or Paul.”
A cold war commenced. If Petty’s stage manager told them they had three songs left in the set, the band might cut things short and walk off right then, or continue way past their allotted time, leaving the crew fuming either way.
The band also engaged in a running feud with Alan “Bugs” Weidel, Petty’s longtime guitar tech. Weidel would spend much of the ’Mats’ sets tuning instruments and smoking joints, blowing huge plumes of pot smoke onstage, aggravating Westerberg.
Finally, Tommy called him out on the mic: “Don’t you ever be smoking pot while I’m onstage. I don’t want to be smelling that shit when I’m playing.”
Weidel’s attitude was simple: Tough shit, kid. He’d go into the ’Mats’ dressing room just before they arrived and toke up. “I always got the impression the Heartbreakers were amused by how we would wind them up,” said Weidel.
At one point Petty’s crew “accidentally” wrecked one of Dunlap’s guitars. In retaliation, the ’Mats spread word that that they’d sprayed Weidel’s pot stash with Raid. “It got uglier and uglier,” said Dunlap. “For a jaded road crew, that’s their fun, mashing the opening band. They came up against a band they couldn’t mash.”
“I actually thought they were a brilliant band,” said Weidel. “They squandered that by not caring. I remember telling one of them: ‘All I’m doing is showing you the same amount of respect you’re giving your audience.’ It went over their heads.”
Before long, the group was taking to more basic forms of bad behavior, such as destroying dressing rooms. One such episode in Phoenix left Petty with a $5,000 bill for damages. For a while after that, the ’Mats had their dressing room privileges revoked and had to get ready on their bus.
When asked about touring with the ’Mats, Petty would later joke that h
e’d “never paid for more broken furniture in my life, but it was worth it.” The Replacements didn’t think so. They also weren’t going to get fired. They’d have to see it to the bitter end.
Before leaving for the Petty tour, the ’Mats had shot a plaintive black-and-white video for “Achin’ to Be” in Minneapolis, directed by Doug Freel. MTV gave the clip some early play but didn’t give it their full weight. In August, after just four weeks, “Achin’ to Be” peaked at a disappointing number twenty-two on the modern rock chart; it did worse on rock radio, topping out at number thirty-seven. Don’t Tell a Soul had already exited the Billboard 200 for good in July.
The failure of “Achin’ to Be” to galvanize the band’s alternative fan base was particularly damaging. “If you’ve got a second song that’s breaking out at your core, that keeps your base solid, it keeps driving sales. It helps build, or at least hold, that foundation,” said Reprise promotion head Rich Fitzgerald. “But we didn’t have that song.”
“It never seemed to me like they were going to make it in a mainstream way,” said Dunlap. “When I really like something, then I know it’s going nowhere. It’s the thing no one wanted to accept: certain kinds of music aren’t for all ears. I was not defeatist about it; I was realistic about it.”
The ’Mats only had to play forty-five minutes a night. If the band “couldn’t have fun that one hour onstage,” Westerberg figured, “we’d make sure we had fun the other twenty-three hours of the day.”
“It pushed us further into drugs and alcohol—not so much more, but in a way that was dark,” said Stinson. “From there it was irretrievable.”
Not for everyone, however: months earlier, Chris Mars had finally decided to stop drinking. “It was hard to keep up that pace for me,” said Mars. “So I just started slowing down. I found that I could play a lot better. I moderated myself. Everybody else went on and didn’t.”
It further isolated the drummer from the band. “I felt very alone,” said Mars. “There was no one I could relate to. The road crew and the band and everybody was drinking all the time.”
