Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages—which had championed the band from their earliest days—delivered the most serious pummeling, from critic Burl Gilyard: “All Shook Down is the Replacements’ ghostwritten suicide note that should have been slugged The Cheese Stands Alone.”

  Nearly every Replacements story that fall found Westerberg making pointed barbs about his bandmates, but his most incendiary comments were reserved for Musician. Having put the band on its cover the previous year, the magazine had planned only on running a brief front section story on the new album. “But Paul and I got talking, and everything he said was really interesting,” recalled editor Bill Flanagan, who expanded it to a six-page Q&A.

  In “The Replacements’ Little Problem,” Westerberg further revealed his conflicted feelings about breaking up the group. “This thing runs deep and dark,” he noted of the band. “It’s not so easy.”

  The subject of Chris Mars’s drumming came up. Flanagan had privately been critical of Mars’s playing after the Beacon Theater show the previous year. Now, in a very public forum with Westerberg, he threw out a loaded question on the topic:

  Musician: From the outside it seems like Chris is not as versatile a drummer as the kinds of songs you’re writing now require.

  Westerberg: Yeah, exactly. Chris is the perfect drummer for the Replacements circa 1985. And it’s 1990. There are those songs I know Chris can smoke on, and then there’s other things that, honestly, he doesn’t have a clue. That’s why on the credits for this album you see four drummers. I mean, we didn’t bring in any guitar players. Chris is a great guy, but he doesn’t practice, he doesn’t rehearse. I don’t rehearse playing guitar or singing, but I’m constantly writing so I feel at least that I’m doing what I do all the time. He won’t pick up his drumsticks until two days before a tour. We do miss having a funkier drummer on certain things.

  Westerberg’s scathing assessment was, in fact, a calculated move to shock Mars—to “light a fire under his ass.” The term had come from All Shook Down session drummer Charley Drayton: “He used to say that him and Steve Jordan had ‘lit a fire under Neil Young’s white ass’ when they played Saturday Night Live,” recalled Westerberg. “That became me and Tommy’s thing: let’s light a fire under Chris. All of his time, he was painting and drawing, and that’s where his creative energy was going.”

  Daune Earle had watched as Stinson and Mars’s relationship turned particularly cold. “Tommy held a lot of anger that Chris just didn’t care. But he was treated like shit, so why should he? He had his art. And Sally pointed out to him: ‘What the hell is going on and why are you putting up with it?’ Tommy got really angry at Chris for listening to her.”

  Later in the Musician story, Westerberg rejected the notion of actually firing Mars and expanded his criticisms to the rest of the band, including himself. “Slim is no better than Chris and Tommy’s no better than Slim. Together when we click is what works,” he said, adding: “We’ve kept Chris around for that many years not to expose us!” Despite the attempt to lighten the tone of his criticisms, Westerberg had crossed a line.

  Some in the Replacements camp viewed Westerberg’s cutting remarks as a by-product of his uneasy sobriety. If he was at times a nasty drunk, he would prove to be an even nastier “dry drunk.” The rub was that Mars had quit booze first and hadn’t struggled quite as much to get clean. “Chris was the first to lose his appetite for that Budweiser performance,” said George Regis. “That’s when Westerberg’s public shots at him started.”

  It had been five months since the Ocean Way sessions, the last time the Replacements had functioned in any way resembling a working band. In September the group returned to Los Angeles to make a video for All Shook Down’s first single, “Merry Go Round.” With Westerberg’s okay, Warner Bros. hired Bob Dylan’s twenty-three-year-old son Jesse Dylan, who was just starting to direct.

  Filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood, it was a straight performance piece, shot in black and white and later edited to include some colorful conceptual inserts. From the opening moments, with a stone-faced Westerberg staring blankly into the camera, the video felt like a chore, lacking any of the chaotic energy or playful spark that had marked their other clips. Paul and Tommy managed a few smiles, and Slim played along gamely. Chris, miming to Charley Drayton’s drum track, was understandably less than enthused.

  The one bright moment that month came as the band went into Prince’s Paisley Park Studios to record. Warner Bros. wanted to put together a promo EP to send to radio stations. Don’t Buy or Sell, It’s Crap would feature the All Shook Down single “When It Began” and a mishmash of album cast-offs and covers, including “Kissin’ in Action” and the Dylan nod “Like a Rolling Pin.” Short a song, the band decided to cut one of Tommy Stinson’s tunes, a spiritual cousin to “Left of the Dial” called “Satellite.”

  “Satellite” was the final fleeting glimpse of hope for the band’s future. Stinson played bass and guitar and sang lead on the track, while Dunlap and Mars added their parts. Westerberg, meanwhile, acted as arranger and producer, helping Stinson flesh out the song’s chorus hook, adding backing vocals, and suggesting a couple of embellishments. It was the kind of collaboration that Stinson had long clamored for and that, surprisingly, reenthused and reenergized Westerberg as well.

  Though he’d been sounding the ’Mats’ death knell for months, Paul was still looking for ways to keep the group going. “I saw the recording of ‘Satellite’ as possibly being a new beginning for the band,” he said. “I really thought maybe we could continue on like this, taking on different roles. It would’ve been nice to do a Replacements record that way.” But, he also admitted, All Shook Down would really have to hit big to justify another ’Mats album.

  Those chances quickly grew dim. Westerberg had gone on the road with Gary Hobbib stopping at radio stations that fall, pressing the flesh and promoting the single “Merry Go Round,” which went into heavy alternative-radio rotation. But the track didn’t gain crossover momentum, and the LP got no higher than number sixty-nine, well below Don’t Tell a Soul’s peak. All Shook Down sold barely a third as well as its predecessor.

  “Merry Go Round” did reach number one on the alternative chart, but it was an illusory achievement. By the end of 1990, the landscape of rock radio was in major flux. The ’Mats had gotten caught in the slipstream between the demise of the AOR as the dominant format and the rise of alternative radio as a viable commercial entity. “They were stuck in between these worlds—they didn’t really have a base,” said Sire’s Howie Klein.

  In contrast to Warner’s current crop of fast-rising bands—Faith No More, Jane’s Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers—the Replacements of All Shook Down were suddenly out of step with the burgeoning trend toward the loud, raw, and rude. The irony was not lost on A&R man Michael Hill: his rock-and-roll “Wild Bunch,” once so edgy, were now considered too tame for the alternative world they’d helped create.

  “Back in ’85, there was a guy who worked at Warner Brothers in artist development,” recalled Hill. “I asked what he thought of Tim. He said, ‘Michael, those are really great songs, but it’s just too raw for radio.’”

  Fast-forward five years later to the release of All Shook Down: “I swear to God, this same guy comes into my office, and I ask him what he thought of that record, and he replied: ‘Michael, those are really great songs, but it’s just too polished for radio.’ That epitomized the Replacements. You couldn’t win for losing.”

  After a couple of months of drying out, Paul Westerberg was feeling strong enough to consider touring again. Besides, the Replacements hadn’t played a concert in over a year, and they all needed the money.

  The ’Mats had already agreed to appear at a special First Avenue anniversary gig at the end of December. High Noon and Premiere began booking a national tour to start in January 1991. Westerberg was apprehensive about going onstage straight even for one gig. The idea of white-knuckling through a six-month tour was terrifyi
ng. “I’ll be more ready than I am now,” he admitted that fall, “but I’ll still be very scared. I hope I can do it, but I don’t guarantee anything.”

  In November, the band began practicing regularly again. Chris Mars had come in with a renewed commitment. With no other real options, he decided to put the slights of the past year behind him and try to make things work. “I was ready to give it hell,” said Mars.

  Then Mars got his hands on a copy of Musician. Reading Westerberg’s words, his ears burned. He doesn’t have a clue. We didn’t bring in any guitar players. He doesn’t practice, he doesn’t rehearse. “Paul would say stuff when he would be drunk, and I let it slide: ‘Oh, that’s Paul just being drunk,’” said Mars. “But then things started being said after Paul had been sober for a couple months. And I thought, Well, this isn’t the alcohol, this is him.”

  Mars had held his tongue for years, but no more. “It was the first time I stood up and said, ‘I’m not gonna take any more of this shit.’”

  In mid-November, after a rehearsal, Mars—gripping a rolled-up copy of Musician—finally called out Westerberg about the article. Recalled Stinson, “He’s like, ‘I want you to call Bill Flanagan and I want you to [make] a written apology to me.’” Westerberg, who hated this kind of direct confrontation, hemmed and hawed, then grudgingly agreed: “If that’ll make ya feel better,” he told Mars. But he soon changed his mind and decided he wasn’t going to bother.

  The plan to motivate Mars had backfired. “I felt horrible about making him feel bad,” said Westerberg. “But I didn’t think a public apology was required. We wanted him to have the same enthusiasm as when we started, and it wasn’t there, obviously.”

  Stinson, for his part, was tired of Mars’s complaining, sick of his wife Sally’s meddling, and bored with his playing. “When he first started spewing, we were already thinking, ‘We’ve got to get rid of this fucker, he’s bumming us out, he’s a drag,’” said Stinson. He and Paul had gone to see the Go-Gos play at the Orpheum and talked about hiring the band’s drummer Gina Shock; failing that, they had session man Michael Blair in their back pocket. They figured Mars wouldn’t be hard to replace.

  The ’Mats continued to rehearse, or at least tried to, for a couple of weeks. But much as had happened during the Ocean Way sessions, Mars’s presence was becoming a black cloud hanging over the band. “We wanted him to quit, because we didn’t have the guts to fire him at first,” said Stinson.

  Finally, Mars forced the issue by effectively giving Westerberg an ultimatum. “If you’re not going to write that apology, I just don’t see how I can do this anymore,” he told him. “I feel really mistreated.”

  For a long time the others had assumed that any complaint Mars lodged was actually coming from Sally. But by this point Chris had been kicked around long enough. He even called Musician’s Bill Flanagan—in England on assignment—and informed him “that if Paul didn’t write an apology, he was leaving the band. And he wanted me to know that,” said Flanagan.

  Finally, said Paul, “we decided to call his threat.”

  The first week of December, Westerberg, Stinson, and Dunlap took an informal vote: “It was sorta like, ‘Chris is threatening to leave; I say we move on without him,’” said Westerberg. “‘All in favor? Aye.’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Aye.’”

  Both Westerberg and Stinson spoke to Mars on the phone and said, pointblank, that they didn’t want to play with him anymore. The brotherhood had shattered.

  Management quickly made things official: a leaving member agreement was drawn up, freeing Mars of his obligation to the band and also insuring that he would never be permitted to perform under the Replacements moniker. Once the legalities were settled, little else was said. “It was almost like, ‘Chris is out, let’s not talk about him again,’” said Russ Rieger.

  Mars went through a dizzying array of feelings: shock, relief, anger, but most of all, uncertainty. He had devoted his entire adult life to the Replacements. With a pen and paintbrush in hand, he began picking up small illustrating jobs, hoping to eke out a living until he figured out his future. “I’ll do whatever I have to do,” he told a reporter a couple of weeks after his firing. “It got to the point where, hell, a janitor job sounds more exciting than being in this band.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Paul Westerberg had barely hung up the phone with Chris Mars when he dialed Michael Blair and asked him to tour with the ’Mats. But Blair already had blocked off the first part of 1991 to record with Lou Reed and was forced to decline.

  The following day Paul and Tommy adjourned to the CC Club to ponder their options. As the pair sipped Cokes, Stinson pored through his contacts, calling Blondie’s Clem Burke, among other candidates, without any luck.

  Making his way back and forth to the pay phone, Stinson spied a familiar face across the bar. It was mere chance, but Steve Foley was in the right place at the right time.

  Born June 4, 1959, Stephen Brian Foley was the fourth of seven kids in a big boozing Irish-Catholic family from Hopkins, Minnesota—the musically fertile Twin Cities community that had spawned the Suicide Commandos, the Suburbs, and Peter Jesperson.

  From earliest childhood, Foley was always banging on tabletops. He got his first drum kit as a teenager and after graduating high school moved to South Minneapolis and fell into the city’s late seventies music scene, joining the surf-punks the Overtones.

  After a stint in New York with the R&B big band the Neighborhood, Foley returned to Minneapolis. He joined a succession of groups—Things That Fall Down, the Suprees, Routine 11—and was also mentored by Curtiss A, with whom he played off and on for a decade. By 1990, Foley—a handsome, affable figure who wore Buddy Holly horn-rims—was playing in a group called Wheelo and working as a courier driver for DHL. Though he’d seen little success from it, he was a determined musical lifer.

  That first Saturday in December, he decided to grab brunch with his bassist brother Kevin and a couple of friends at the Uptown. The place was packed, so they’d ventured over to the CC instead. That’s when they ran into the Replacements.

  Westerberg didn’t know Foley, but Tommy did and began whispering in Paul’s ear.

  Foley’s brother nudged him: “God, Steve, your ears are burnin’, man. They keep looking over here.”

  Foley got up to go to the bathroom and in passing told Westerberg he loved the ’Mats’ new CD.

  “Really?” said Paul, arching an eyebrow. “Ya wanna join the band?”

  Foley thought he was being put on. Westerberg told him: “Tommy’s got his black book out, and he’s trying to find us a new drummer—you wanna do it?”

  “Fuck yeah! Are you kidding?”

  They called Slim Dunlap to meet them at the rehearsal space, and Stinson and Westerberg hopped into Foley’s van to head downtown and audition him. As he turned the ignition, his stereo happened to be blasting “Bent Out of Shape.”

  “You’re already in!” cackled Stinson.

  Foley surprised everyone by playing the songs like he’d known them for years. Stinson loved the tight sound of his snare and the feel of his backbeat: “He had the right groove. He grew up listening to [Stax Records house drummer] Al Jackson Jr. He was very much about that same feel as Steve Jordan or Charley Drayton, the guys we were into then.”

  Westerberg liked Foley’s playing; mostly, he relished the thought of being able to say they’d picked the first guy they saw in the bar to replace Chris Mars.

  “So—tomorrow night?” Westerberg asked Foley, whose face flushed. “You wanna rehearse?”

  Steve Foley’s first show was a baptism of fire at First Avenue. Club owner Steve McClellan was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the venue with a series of year-end concerts, and the ’Mats were slated as special “secret” guests on December 30. By showtime, the club was heaving with bodies.

  As soon as the band kicked off the chords to the opener, “IOU,” spit, bottles, quarters, and trash began pelting the band, Westerberg especially. The old guard
punk scenesters and the younger kids who’d been weaned on the band’s legend were letting them have it.

  “I see glass still breaks,” said Westerberg, surveying a handful of broken bottles littering the stage. He looked haggard, his eyes sunken, his face drawn. It wasn’t the first time he’d been onstage sober, but it would be the first time without the crutch of a drink if he needed it.

  In the middle of the second song, “Bastards of Young,” the crowd doused Westerberg with beer, a cruelly symbolic act. He went back to the drum riser, grabbed a giant water bottle, and proceeded to spray the audience in front. It wasn’t a playful moment. “You could feel we’d reached our expiration date by then,” said Westerberg. “God forbid that we would not be drunk. And God forbid if we were wearing white shirts instead of plaid shirts. The backlash had begun.”

  Though he strained to hit the high notes and the band was still working out the kinks (“Two demerits,” Westerberg kidded Foley after a flubbed fill), there was still a kind of joy to their performance by the end of the set. After fifteen months’ layoff, the Replacements at least felt like a band again.

  By the start of 1991, All Shook Down’s prospects were nil. Warner Bros. had moved on to a second single, “Someone Take the Wheel,” with a halfhearted promotion. The song never got past number fifteen alternative, nor did it gain any crossover momentum.

  Promoting the tour, Westerberg seemed resigned to the fact that the album wouldn’t be breaking. “The fans who have stuck with us for all these years are the people we’re playing for. We’re not out there to sell anything to them. We’re just going to play and have everybody enjoy themselves. . . . I would say this is definitely our farewell comeback tour.”