Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Bill Sullivan was gone—he’d taken over the road operation for Soul Asylum, just signed to Columbia. “I think Bill hopped in when it was fun and he hopped off when it wasn’t,” said Westerberg. “I don’t blame him. But I was captain of the ship; I had to go down with the fucker.”

  To keep Westerberg on the straight and narrow, High Noon hired Robert Bennett, a veteran tour manager who had handled a fresh-out-of-rehab John Hiatt and survived tough nuts like Miles Davis. “Tommy Stinson’s first words to me were: ‘Oh, you’re the guy they’ve sent out to get us to stop drinking,’” recalled Bennett. “I said, ‘Not at all—what are you having?’ Tommy made it clear he wasn’t gonna be slowed down by anybody.”

  The rest of the crew, handpicked by Bennett, were Hiatt veterans and included soundman Steve Folsom. Early in rehearsals at Paisley Park, said Folsom, “Paul asked me where the guitar channels were on the mixer, and then he just pushed them all the way up as loud as they could possibly go: ‘Don’t touch those for the rest of the tour.’”

  The crew included several holdovers from the 1989 tour, including Carl Davino as production manager, guitar tech Yuek Wong, and merch man Jimmy Velvet. One T-shirt design of Velvet’s said it all: an image of a woman leaning against a sign that read WELCOME FUNERAL DIRECTORS and underneath it, THE REPLACEMENTS.

  The “traveling wake,” as Westerberg dubbed the tour, began in California. The ’Mats tapped the Seattle power-pop combo the Posies, newly signed to Geffen Records and Premiere Booking, to open the first month of shows.

  Led by singer-songwriters Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer, the pair had grown up witnessing the ’Mats in all the band’s glory. “The two shows they did with Young Fresh Fellows at the beginning and end of the Pleased to Meet Me tour were mind-blowing, life-changing, the greatest rock shows I’ve ever seen,” said Stringfellow. A couple of years later, the Posies opened for the Replacements at Seattle’s Commodore Ballroom and Stringfellow made an ill-advised attempt to drink with them that ended with them vomiting in the alley behind the venue: “Slim patted me on the back: ‘Don’t worry, kid. Someday you’ll learn how to drink.’”

  The clean and sober Replacements took the stage of Freedom Hall on January 15, 1991. Ironically, the venue—on the campus of UC Davis—had been the scene of some of the Replacements’ most debauched, drunken antics. “Good evening, suckers,” said Westerberg.

  The band blasted through its set with a power that seemed to surprise even them. After the ravages of the past year, Westerberg’s voice was finally back, stronger and more commanding than ever.

  For the first time the band was working with a proper set list: “I Don’t Know” into “I Will Dare” into “Achin’ to Be,” usually followed by several All Shook Down songs before Westerberg ceded the spotlight to Tommy singing “Satellite.” The rest of the show mixed “hits,” a few ballads (including an “Unsatisfied”/“Sadly Beautiful” mash-up), and a few covers (often T-Rex’s “Raw Ramp”) near the end, before the final encore.

  The second show, at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, came on the evening the United States launched airstrikes against Iraq, marking the start of the Gulf War. President George Bush was scheduled to address the nation from the Oval Office. As the band sat in their dressing room watching the speech on television, antiwar protests raged outside on Market Street.

  The weird vibe spilled into the show. From the back of the room, someone kept shouting for Chris Mars.

  “Chris Mars died, I’m sorry to inform you,” said Westerberg. “Was he ever living?”

  Though they played brilliantly at the Warfield, the crowd was strangely unmoved. Midway through the gig, Stinson chuckled to Foley: “Welcome to your first flop, Steve.”

  By the time the tour reached Southern California, highlighted by a gig at the Palladium in Hollywood, Paul decided to start tending to his fans. “I do remember Paul having more of an aura of a rock star at that point,” said Bill Holdship. “I remember seeing him signing autographs, doing stuff that he always seemed to hate in the past.”

  Finally clear-eyed, Westerberg could accept what had always unnerved him: the intensity of people’s connection to his songs. “I used to not be able to deal with some of the fans,” he said. “The ones who come up with tears in their eyes, saying, ‘You changed my life.’ At one time, I didn’t want the responsibility. I couldn’t even take care of my own life.”

  After the show, a handful of VIPs were led up into the Palladium’s balcony to hang out with the ’Mats. Another writer chum, Chris Morris, walked up to Westerberg, who was sitting alone. “He looked like all the air had been let out of him—just completely bummed out,” said Morris.

  Barely two weeks on the road, Westerberg had lost his enthusiasm for the tour. By the time the caravan reached Texas in late January, he was sniping at Foley, struggling to face down rowdy crowds with his new, more delicate songs, forcing himself through the gigs. “It came thundering down on me that, sober, I could face my feeling, which was ‘This is not any fucking fun,’” said Westerberg. “It wasn’t so much that I needed the alcohol to face the audience; I needed the alcohol to mask the disillusionment.”

  There were five more months of shows to go.

  At the tour’s outset, Tommy had given the impression, publicly at least, that the Replacements would show solidarity with Westerberg. “I’m looking forward to the sober thing,” Stinson told Rolling Stone. “Hell if I know what or how I’ll do it, but if Mötley Crüe and Aerosmith can do it, why not us?”

  Dunlap was only too happy to swear off the sauce after years of rough living and started pounding non-alcoholic O’Douls instead. But Stinson was soon boozing full tilt, perhaps more than ever before. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt: he was drinking for me now as well,” said Westerberg, who wouldn’t even drink orange juice—if it sat too long it could ferment into alcohol.

  Though Paul didn’t let on, Tommy’s heedlessness did bother him. “He would crack the bottle right before we’d hit the stage, and say, ‘We’re on.’ I’d be thinking, Well, we’re not on until I’m on.” Stinson enlisted Steve Foley as his new running buddy. “Steve was the new guy, but he was also my pal,” said Stinson. “We found ourselves in some pretty goofy situations.”

  There seemed to be an underlying edge to Stinson’s behavior. “Sometimes it felt like he was doing it to jab Paul,” said soundman Steve Folsom. “Especially dragging Steve Foley into it—hard. Steve was in over his head trying to party with Tommy.”

  Downtime between gigs had once been a playground of mischief and excess; now the preshow lulls took on a heavy air. “Paul would stay away from Tommy as far as I remember,” said Davino. Inevitably, things turned frosty between Paul and Tommy. In Canada, a drunken crowd member lurched onto the stage. “Hey, dude,” drawled Westerberg, “you know how to play the bass?”

  It was a joke, but a pointed one—after all, the bass player was the only one Westerberg hadn’t replaced.

  The first week of February brought a not entirely triumphant two-night stand at downtown Minneapolis’s Orpheum Theatre. In Jon Bream’s Star-Tribune cover story, Westerberg sounded the usual pessimistic notes about the ’Mats tour and future—and its history. “I don’t take a view anymore that this band is special, unique and we’re going to change this and that,” said Westerberg. “I think I may have fooled myself earlier thinking the band was more important than we actually were. We’re just a rock ’n’ roll band; we have songs and as long as people want to hear us, we’re going to go out and give it a try.”

  Naturally, Chris Mars’s split came up. Mars had played a couple of times with local cover band, Golden Smog, and toyed with the idea of forming a new group with Bob Stinson: the Replaced. It was a nonstarter: Bob, said Mars at the time, was “a little heavy on the sauce these days.”

  To the Star-Tribune, Westerberg claimed that the drummer had left on his own accord. Mars noted that he planned on attending one of the Orpheum gigs: “It’ll be kind of fun to see
what we look like.”

  Chris and Sally did come for the first show. He immediately walked to the merch booth, where he scanned the tour T-shirts that now featured Steve Foley as the fourth member. “Look,” said Mars, somewhat incredulously, “I’m not on the shirts.”

  Chris and Sally’s seats were ten rows from the stage. It was strange being in the crowd, seeing a decade of his life from the other side. He soon got bored and left. “But then, I got bored onstage when I was playing too,” said Mars. “I think we all got bored.”

  For longtime friends and fans, Mars’s absence was a shock they couldn’t get over. “Steve Foley was a great dude and a great drummer, but you can’t replicate that thing they had with Chris,” said local musician turned rock critic Jim Walsh. “It was like seeing your mom go out with someone else.” The Magnolias’ John Freeman kept thinking: “Is this really the same band I saw at the Walker Art Center?”

  Listening to recordings of the shows, it’s hard to understand such complaints. The Orpheum gigs were among the best performances of the 1991 tour—arguably the best shows the band had played in Minneapolis in half a decade. But for the true believers, the memories had come to overwhelm reality.

  Like Mars, Bob Stinson had also turned up at the Orpheum. He spent much of the show trying to muscle his way onstage, only to be dragged down the aisle by security and kicked out of the venue several times. “All the cops there at the Orpheum knew him—they were on a first-name basis,” recalled Stinson’s friend Mike Leonard. “They kept letting him back in, but were telling him, ‘You can’t keep trying to get onstage, Bob.’”

  If he had, there wouldn’t have been much for him to do. Of the roughly thirty songs the ’Mats performed, only a couple were associated with the elder Stinson. Even the few Twin/Tone-era tunes were essentially solo Westerberg pieces, such as “Within Your Reach.” Pockets of the crowd chanted for old punk favorites like “Fuck School”—pleas Westerberg strenuously ignored.

  CHAPTER 61

  Watching the Replacements every night for a month, the Posies’ Ken Stringfellow came away feeling that the danger of their unpredictability was lost, much to the band’s detriment. “In 1987 they were the best thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s incontestable. In 1989, I recall the shows being really great. In 1991, the shows were sometimes a little tired. The peaks weren’t really coming; neither were the valleys.”

  “That doesn’t ring true to me,” said Slim Dunlap. “I thought Paul was a better singer; he certainly remembered the words better.”

  Even sober, Westerberg felt the need to defend his past drinking and the band’s checkered reputation. “You guys wouldn’t let it lie,” he railed to a reporter for the Washington Times that spring. “It was the band without an image, who just so happened to take a drink all the time. . . . To us, it was a stumbling block.”

  Around the Midwest and South into February and March, the tour played out like a final act of penance. “I wasn’t savvy enough to pick up on that at the time, but it seemed like they were making a lot of amends,” said Stringfellow. “They would go to Tipitina’s in New Orleans, and as soon as they walked into the venue they would start apologizing to people. Like, ‘We’re really sorry for last time.’ Slim had mentioned that he had actually vomited on the statue of Professor Longhair in the entrance.”

  Still, the band remained partly unrepentant. As always on the road, the ’Mats would be deluged with cassettes from fans and local bands; these ended up in a special box. “They’d dance on the box, jump on it, stomp on it, do all this stuff,” recalled tour manager Robert Bennett. “Then they’d start pulling out the tapes and see if any of them still played. And if one of them played, they’d play it as loud as they could.”

  There were darker behaviors too. For all his attempts at reaching out to his fans, sometimes Westerberg couldn’t keep his nastier impulses at bay. “There were the typical stories you heard—some kid coming up and saying, ‘I’ve always loved your music,’ and Paul lifting his straw out of his iced tea and blowing it in the kid’s face,” said Bennett.

  Nor was Tommy immune to such petulance. Before a show at George Washington University, a fan gave Stinson a custom bass guitar he’d made for him. “The guy probably built five guitars a year and had built one for his hero,” recalled Steve Folsom. “The guy’s sitting down front, and Tommy came out and played it during the first song on the show. Then he smashed it and threw it in the guy’s lap.”

  Eventually new drummer Steve Foley became Westerberg’s chief target onstage. One night, vamping on “Hey, Good Lookin’,” Foley missed a cue for a turnaround.

  “Oh, Chris would’ve got that,” muttered Westerberg into the mic.

  “This gig does not come with instructions,” said Stinson, jumping in to defend his friend. “He’s doin’ all right.”

  In Atlanta, Westerberg, feeling that Foley was running out of gas, stepped to the drum riser and started smashing his Les Paul Jr., sending chunks and splinters of guitar flying everywhere. Foley simply bit his tongue each time.

  “I was tempted to tell him to fuck off,” said Foley. “But I let it go. Being a new guy, it was like, ‘What the fuck have I gotten myself into?’”

  By the middle of the tour, Foley was feeling overwhelmed. Besides suffering Westerberg’s onstage abuse and trying to keep up with Tommy after the shows, he was having a hard time with the ’Mats’ deafening stage volume.

  “I remember him sitting in a bar one night just saying, ‘Is it supposed to sound like paper is tearing when people are talking to me?’” said Bennett. “His drum monitor was so loud, and he was suddenly thrown into a situation where he was destroying himself.” Dunlap felt for Foley—though he was also relieved not to be in Westerberg’s crosshairs anymore.

  For much of the tour, Westerberg flew between gigs. After years of flinging himself around, he’d developed chronic, persistent back pain—though it was clear to everyone that he didn’t want to be trapped on the bus with the band anymore either.

  He’d also met someone. Kim Chapman was a black-haired, green-eyed beauty who resembled a young Elizabeth Taylor. Raised in the South, her parents divorced when she was a kid. After her mother remarried and settled in Texas, she grew up in a combined “Brady Bunch” family. Chapman had studied philosophy and psychology in Dallas at the University of Texas and planned to pursue a law degree. Then, after a bad breakup, she fell hard into the city’s wild eighties party culture—a scene fueled by music, dancing, and drugs (coke and ecstasy in particular) at places like the Starck Club.

  In 1987 Chapman was popped on a felony possessions charge. She caught a lucky break from a sympathetic judge, receiving deferred probation rather than a life-crippling conviction. She stopped drugs cold; by 1990 the twenty-nine-year-old had decided to pursue acting and art. “I was intent on not letting anything I’d done in those few years mar my future,” said Chapman. “I wasn’t really dating or doing anything.”

  Out one night at Trees, a club in Deep Ellum, to see the band Hagfish, her friend nudged her: “Oh my God, that’s Paul Westerberg!” He was in town with Gary Hobbib visiting radio stations to promote All Shook Down.

  Chapman didn’t know the Replacements, but she went up and introduced herself. “He told me he was recently separated and had recently gotten sober,” she recalled. “We talked about everything—it ran the gamut. It was very little in terms of music or his public persona.” Westerberg asked her to join him on his promo tour that night. She refused and left without giving him her number.

  A few months later, when the ’Mats passed through Dallas, they hooked up again. He spent the night at her house after the show. The next morning she walked into the kitchen and found Westerberg wearing one of her summer dresses, cooking breakfast. Things quickly grew serious. “It’s the only relationship that either one of us had to that point where alcohol or drugs hadn’t played a part—which was significant,” said Chapman. “We’d both quit the same way—decided, ‘I’m changing my life.’�
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  Chapman was an unrepentant new ager: she meditated every day, attended a progressive Unity church, and generally had a pure, positive light about her. “How did a guy like me end up with someone who’s so ‘Up with People’?” Westerberg asked her one night.

  They talked constantly on the phone, and Westerberg soon began flying her out to gigs. They met in Austin and Cincinnati and frequently, between dates, in Chicago. “If he was in a city for more than a couple days, I’d join him and we’d hang out,” she said.

  They would share afternoon tea or watch TV downing Caramello bars and Barq’s root beer (“We were on a sugar high,” she said). Chapman could sense Westerberg’s uncomfortable vigilance about his sobriety. He’d scan labels to make sure nothing he ate had even a trace of alcohol. “I wouldn’t have a drink because if he kissed me, that was enough for him,” she said.

  The relationship became an oasis: Kim reinforced Paul’s decision to get sober and provided a respite from the band’s turgid final days. As he became less optimistic about the ’Mats, he became more open about the other parts of his life and future. “He wasn’t sharing who he was becoming with the band,” said Chapman. “He felt: ‘I gotta keep up that gruff facade.’”

  In the Twin Cities, Westerberg was still living at his parents’ house or staying in hotels. Between tour legs, he would decamp to Dallas with Chapman instead of going home. “That was probably the best time we ever had,” she said. “I know he enjoyed the freedom of just being able to be himself there. That was where we started planning our life together.”

  After Chapman visited him during a gig in Missouri that spring, Westerberg told her, “I know what I have to do now.” When he returned to Minneapolis, he asked Lori Bizer for a divorce.

  It was perversely fitting that the third and final single from All Shook Down was “When It Began”—a nostalgic song about the early, happy days of the band. In Los Angeles, the group shot footage for a video that combined live performance with a narrative featuring the ’Mats as Claymation characters. It went to number four on alternative radio that March, then fell out of the top 20—the Replacements’ last gasp on the charts.