Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Some shit on the needle, like your record . . .

  The fifth gripping week, an absolute must

  “One of the year’s best” ain’t sayin’ much

  Throwin’ us trunks as we’re starting to drown

  All . . . shook . . . down

  “That song seemed pretty insubstantial until it had that vocal attached to it,” said Dunlap. “Then it was like, ‘Whoa, man, that’s a heavy little moment.’”

  Dunlap eventually went back to Minneapolis too—fearing for his friend, but unable to do much. “I just figured, finish the record, rest up, and see how you’re doing after that,” he said.

  By the end of the sessions, Westerberg seemed like a wraith. When Litt brought Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin to add woodwinds to the album (he’d play sax on “One Wink at a Time” and “Too Much” and ocarina on the title track), Paul sat silently in the farthest corner of the room. “It felt like he was so unbelievably alone,” said Berlin.

  The speedballs didn’t help. “Heroin is the evilest stuff in the world,” said Westerberg. “I can count the times on one hand that I did it, and I still think about it almost every other day. It’s the peace that some of us seek.” Westerberg thought about buying some more dope and taking it back home, but stopped himself: “I could make the horror of losing myself in that shit brilliant enough in my mind to say no.”

  Westerberg rallied himself to join Stinson for the final touches at New York’s Skyline Studios. A number of songs still needed live drums. At Michael Hill’s suggestion, they called in Michael Blair. A classically trained percussionist who’d worked with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, Blair was versatile and ideally suited for the task. “When a band who has a drummer hires another drummer to come in, one can guess things are a little shaky,” said Blair.

  After a night drinking with Paul and Tommy, Blair got in the right mind-set, channeling the spirit of Charlie Watts on “My Little Problem,” serving up Keith Moon–style rolls at the end of “Happy Town,” and shading songs like “The Last” with elegant brushwork.

  “We got a little jazzed there for a second,” said Westerberg of playing with Blair. He and Stinson asked the drummer to join the band. Blair was living in Sweden at the time (his wife was a native of the country), but he agreed to tour with the ’Mats after the album came out.

  To fill out “Sadly Beautiful,” Litt suggested calling the Velvet Underground’s John Cale to play viola. Westerberg figured he was joking, but a couple hours later the imposing Welshman showed up at the studio, instrument in hand. “We couldn’t find [Cale] a pillow for his fiddle, so he had to get some beer rag that we had wiped the floor up with the day before, so you kinda see him holding his nose while he’s playing it,” said Westerberg. “I was absolutely floored watching John play it . . . and having him ask me about the words and saying it reminded him of Nico.”

  Cale’s fellow ex-Velvet Lou Reed stopped by as well; he was thinking of hiring Blair and wanted to hear him work. The notoriously cranky Reed listened to a rough mix of the ’Mats record and raved. “I was like, ‘Really?’” recalled Litt. “He loved it. That got me excited.”

  It was obvious the album wasn’t going to be a radio-friendly step up from Don’t Tell a Soul. Russ Rieger, as usual, wanted to bolster the tracks with more guitars. “But I didn’t want to hear big loud guitars,” said Westerberg. “I wanted to make an eclectic, spooky little farewell record that wasn’t a pretend rock record.”

  Still, Westerberg worried that the album might be too light, so in Minneapolis he cut an additional rocker at Metro Studios. “Bent Out of Shape” was a diary of desire (“I smell your hair on the clothes I wear / I miss your face”) that felt the most like a “classic” ’Mats track. Despite this, Chris Mars did not play on it; instead, Westerberg went to Georgia Satellites drummer Mauro Magellan. Only a couple of the album’s tracks (most notably “Attitude”) featured all four Replacements playing.

  Within the band, All Shook Down was the most divisive Replacements album. Mars was not a fan; Dunlap liked the material, but found Litt’s production “too zigged and zagged.” Stinson, however, loved the record. He played his advance over and over at home with his infant daughter and felt it was arguably the band’s best record. “That record was a masterpiece,” he said. Masterpiece or not, it was going to be a hard sell. But for once, Westerberg and the Replacements had bigger worries than how well their new album was going to do.

  CHAPTER 58

  Looking for a cover to match All Shook Down’s somber tone, Warner Bros. had Westerberg go through portfolios of art photographers, including Michael Wilson, a Cincinnati native who specialized in moody black-and-white street scenes.

  Wilson gave the label a packet of images he’d shot as a student at Northern Kentucky University in the late seventies. One particular photo stood out. During a Sunday in 1979, a bitter winter morning perched between rain and snow, Wilson was tooling around the college town of Newport when he came upon a pair of wet wandering dogs in the middle of the road. Their expressions—at once sad and defiant—caught Wilson’s eye as he stopped and clicked.

  Westerberg chuckled when he saw the image: “That’s the one,” he said. The picture seemed a perfect metaphor for him and Tommy. “The dogs look like they’ve seen it all before and are a little bit disillusioned,” noted Westerberg. “They might be stray, they might be lost, but don’t go try and pet them, ’cause you’ll probably lose an arm.”

  Like the animals in the photo, Westerberg and Stinson huddled together, trying to figure out what to do next. By this point, they were running the band like a tight conspiracy. After the sessions at Ocean Way, Chris Mars’s future in the band was tenuous, at best. Even Slim seemed to be drifting away, tired of the chaos and eager to return to his family. “Honestly, I was ready for things to be over,” admitted Dunlap.

  When Michael Wilson arrived in the Twin Cities to shoot photos of the band, he was told he would just be taking pictures of Paul and Tommy. “They hadn’t told Slim or Chris that there was a photo session going on,” recalled Wilson. “We spent the day in St. Paul, going to bars where they thought they wouldn’t be recognized or run into anyone they knew.”

  Wilson couldn’t help but notice Westerberg struggling with alcohol. “That was very much a topic. I didn’t know his personal history, but he was making a strong effort not to drink—or at least not drink liquor. ’Cause there was lots of beer drinking going on.”

  For Westerberg, there was no denying it any longer. After a decade of herculean abuse, his body was suddenly rejecting alcohol, his legendary tolerance reduced to nothing. At his peak, he could down a quart and a case, then play a gig. Now he’d be legless after a couple rounds. Following one daytime barhop in Minneapolis, he found himself disoriented and on the verge of a blackout. He called his wife on a pay phone to come pick him up, then passed out on the sidewalk.

  By textbook standards, Westerberg had reached the final stage of chronic alcoholism. “I got to the point where I was practically poisoned. All drunks will tell you they reach that point,” he said. “Half a beer would knock me on my ass. One half of one beer would make me so drunk I couldn’t stand. Suddenly my tolerance was gone. And I could not sober up. I would sip a beer and wouldn’t know my middle name. I was damaging my brain.”

  He confided to Tommy. “I remember him and I sitting down and having drinks when it was all dark and him saying, ‘I gotta quit, dude, or my marriage is going to end,’” recalled Stinson. It might’ve benefited them both to quit right then. But Stinson wasn’t ready to change.

  Still, Tommy knew he was not far behind his friend in terms of abuse and the damage he was doing to his own young marriage. “We were living the same circumstances,” admitted Stinson. “My life didn’t get to where his life was until later. But I knew my shit was fucked up and on par with him.”

  Warner Bros. sales head Charlie Springer, once a serious drinker, had recently gotten clean. “I told Paul I’d stopped drinking,” he said. �
��I wasn’t trying to convert him or anything. But I had one of those conversations with him where I said, ‘You know, the stuff was just killing me.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, but what a way to go.’”

  Manager Gary Hobbib might’ve confronted Westerberg about his drinking, but he too was emotionally walled off. “We never talked through his problems,” said Hobbib. “I didn’t say, ‘You’re fucked up every day of the week. What’s really going on?’ We never had that.”

  By his own design—not to mention his Catholic-Scandinavian-Midwestern repression—Westerberg had become an island. At one point, Slim Dunlap came to him, concerned about his drinking, almost in tears. “Paul is not the kind of person you can confess your fears to, ’cause he would just laugh it off,” said Dunlap. “But I was really scared for him.”

  In his alcoholic fugue state, Westerberg’s relationship with Lori Bizer was clearly slipping out of his grasp, compounded by his involvements with others. “I was feeling like there might be a fresh beginning with her,” said Westerberg. “And with her, and with her, and with her.”

  For all the distance that had grown between him and Bizer, he was scared to end the marriage. “I already felt like I’d lost the band. Now am I gonna lose my marriage? Am I gonna lose everything else? The drinking fueled all of the wrong things, whatever dumb choices I made then.”

  Westerberg began looking to other writers for guidance, devouring the novels of John Updike, especially 1975’s A Month of Sundays. Westerberg saw himself in the book’s protagonist and narrator Tom Marshfield, the exiled minister stuck in an unhappy marriage, ringing up multiple affairs, and dealing with a diminishing faith in his convictions.

  That spring Bizer had returned to the world of radio, taking a job as a deejay on the local modern-rock station KJJO. At first she was working late nights—10:00 PM to 2:00 AM—“which was terrible” for their relationship. Even so, Bizer didn’t quite perceive how bad things had gotten with Westerberg. “So much flew right over my head,” she said.

  Whether it was an act of conscience or a calculated attempt to bring things to a head, Westerberg decided to confess his sins to Bizer. “The shit hit the fan at home one day, where, as a fool, I fessed up to a little liaison,” he said.

  Paul would ultimately reveal not just his romantic indiscretions, but the full extent of his drinking problem, even his flirtations with hard drugs. “I didn’t know about the [heroin]. That was one of the things he let slip, which totally disturbed me,” said Bizer. “I didn’t expect that at all. I felt it was extreme and dangerous. That wasn’t why we split up. But it didn’t bode well.”

  At first, Bizer was furious: “Well then, we have to get divorced,” she told him. But they made an attempt to reconcile and went into couples counseling.

  In therapy, Westerberg was detached, clearly going through the motions, or worse, getting caught in further deceptions. “I discovered he was lying in counseling, which I thought was the worst thing ever. You’re obviously not working on it,” said Bizer. “My problem was more his attitude about trying to heal, which he wasn’t willing to do.”

  Bizer felt that her husband was lost to her. The couple decided to separate. That summer Westerberg moved back into his parents’ house on Garfield Avenue.

  Hal Westerberg had been retired a few years, after a lifetime of service in the auto business. In his golden years, there would be no vacation-home golf dreams in Arizona, or even a chance to take the demonstrator sign off and finally have his own Cadillac. “That’s the sad part,” said Westerberg. “He got a broken watch and a plaque and ended up with a used Buick.”

  Looking back, Paul realized Hal’s drinking had been a reverse mirror image of his own. His father would struggle through the days at work, come home and take a couple quick belts to steady his nerves, then drink himself to sleep, waking up chipper each morning. Paul would rise in an uncertain mood, drink until he was roaring, and then take the stage. Both had used the bottle as a crutch.

  “He got worse, of course,” said Paul. “It was only later on, once he retired, that I’d find him on the floor. When you take the job away, the bottle comes out at eleven in the morning. I remember one Father’s Day going and picking him off the floor. That was a bad scene.”

  Now they sat at home, father and son, whiling away the hours. “It had its nice angle at first,” said Paul. “It was good for me to get in touch with him again.”

  They spent warm afternoons together moving between small talk and silence. “He and I used to sit on the back porch, drinking beer, looking at the birds,” recalled Paul. “It just became so obvious that this was my destiny—to just sit around and do nothing. He was a great doer of nothing. But that didn’t seem like much fun.”

  All season Westerberg drank and devolved physically, refusing to heed the warning signs. “The guy was on his deathbed, just about,” said Gary Hobbib. “Which usually is the case. Something drastic has to happen before you do anything.”

  Westerberg had also reconnected with his younger sister Mary, hitching rides with her, hanging out and going to shows—anything to distract himself.

  Westerberg’s moment of clarity came when he found out that Mary had been going to Al-Anon, the support group for families of alcoholics. “That was the catalyst,” said Westerberg. “Because I knew she was going just as much for me as she was for my dad. The reality was that my dad was a fall-down drunk . . . and so was I. That’s when I decided: I gotta fix this.”

  In the middle of August, after a long night out on the town—he couldn’t even remember where or what—Westerberg stumbled home and in a moment of booze-fueled bravado decided to climb the trellis up to his second-story bedroom. “I got about two rungs up and came crashing down flat on my back.” He lay in the cool dirt for a good long while, just thinking.

  The next afternoon when he awoke, sore and hungover, Paul Westerberg took a long, deep breath and decided he was going into rehab.

  “I grabbed a phone book and looked up the numbers and everything. But I chickened out,” he said. “It was a Friday, and I said, ‘I’m not gonna have a drink tonight. I’ll go tomorrow.’ And the next day came and I got scared again. I said, ‘Well, I won’t have a drink today then either. But if I do have one, then I gotta go to treatment.’ Going to treatment scared me so much I stopped drinking.

  “I’d known lots of guys—Bob, everybody—who’d come and gone to rehab. I knew it meant sitting around with a bunch of people where everyone’s shouting and crying. Let’s see if I can buck up and put this shit down by myself. And I did. I could.”

  It would not be easy. He shook and retched and cursed and feared every day, but he did not drink. In lieu of liquor, he flooded his body with cup after cup of hot tea. He drank so much tea that, in later years, the mere whiff of chamomile would send him into nauseous flashbacks.

  A few days of not drinking became a week; a week became a month, then two.

  “I don’t think he even told me he had stopped,” said Hobbib. “If you know his personality, he’d never go out and proclaim that. It was only when I got together with him—I came out to Minneapolis and I met him at a place for tea—that’s when I realized.”

  CHAPTER 59

  Walking through the streets of Uptown, Paul Westerberg stopped at some freshly paved sidewalk. The concrete was soft enough to mark. His finger scrawled: REPLACEMENTS, RIP. All Shook Down was coming out in just a few weeks, and Westerberg was with a reporter, promoting it.

  The record’s September release occasioned the music press support: Rolling Stone, SPIN, and Musician all ran ’Mats features, though after the disappointment of Don’t Tell a Soul the stories were shorter, the placements less prominent.

  The interviews were conducted in Minneapolis. Just a couple of weeks removed from his last drink, Westerberg wasn’t quite ready for New York or Los Angeles yet.

  Struggling with his newfound sobriety, and still stinging from not being allowed by the label to go solo, Westerberg sounded rueful about the past, pessi
mistic about the future, unsure of his own desires, and generally miserable. The new-album fanfare read more like a requiem.

  At Warner Bros., executives on both coasts had attended solitary, uncomfortable listening sessions. “Paul was there and no one else was,” recalled Warner publicist Mary Melia of one such event in New York. “We were all sitting there, and he was by himself at the board. He was looking at me like: ‘Why am I here?’ It was embarrassing.”

  Though everyone acted sufficiently gung-ho about the tracks, Warner and Sire had been hoping for a slickly produced, radio-ready redux of Don’t Tell a Soul. Instead, they got a spare singer-songwriter LP. “I would’ve much rather seen them do a real band album,” said Seymour Stein. “The meetings about the Replacements weren’t as exciting,” said publicist Bill Bentley. “There wasn’t the same feeling for this album.”

  Even longtime stalwarts like Charlie Springer had lost enthusiasm. “I wasn’t as emotionally involved,” he said, “because in the end they didn’t want that emotion.”

  “In my mind, right now, there is no band,” Westerberg told SPIN. “It got to the point where just flipping through the paper and seeing the word replacement, even if it’s replacement windows, I would get a tight knot in my stomach. . . . I’ve always felt that they were dependent on me, and it’s just recently that I’ve realized that I’m dependent on them.”

  Westerberg had come to realize that it would be easier to make himself into a star than to do the same for the Replacements. He’d been the architect of the band’s intractable with-us-or-against-us ethos, but now he viewed his creation as a millstone. “The Replacements do have an attitude of we are what we are and we won’t be anything else,” he told the fanzine The Bob. “I’d like to break out of that attitude.”

  The reviews of All Shook Down had only reinforced his desire to free himself from the group. The LP’s only real raves came from Rolling Stone and, of all places, People. For many, the softer tone of Westerberg’s songs and voice undercut the album’s impact. Some strident observers took to mocking the group’s so-called “adult” direction.