Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  That winter, All Shook Down was nominated for a Grammy Award in the newly established category of Best Alternative Music Album. The ’Mats already had a gig scheduled in Montreal on February 20 and couldn’t attend the ceremony at Radio City Music Hall. The band and High Noon soon began hearing rumors that Chris Mars—who’d technically played on the album and received a formal nomination—was attending the ceremony and, if All Shook Down won, planned on accepting the award and badmouthing the band on live television. “It could’ve been Chris spreading the word around Minneapolis just to be antagonistic,” said Russ Rieger.

  Though Mars and his wife Sally did attend the Grammys, the award was presented as part of the pre-telecast, and Sinead O’Connor ended up taking home the trophy.

  In late March, the Replacements went abroad for the first time in four years, spending a month in Europe and Scandinavia, their longest-ever tour overseas. Few, if any, of the 1,000-plus-capacity rooms and smaller clubs would be filled; some were practically empty.

  Most of the European press focused heavily on Westerberg. Melody Maker’s feature included a full-page image of him, but no pictures and hardly any mention of the rest of the band. Westerberg would recall a gig in Germany where the promoter came in carrying a poster trumpeting an appearance by “Paul Westerberg” and, in smaller print, “the Replacements.” Tommy Stinson tore it in half: “That’s fucking it,” he said, storming out.

  At Den Bosch in the Netherlands on April 12, Westerberg walked off before the encore. “It was a shitty show, the wrong vibe,” recalled Stinson. “Things were very depressed.” Tommy, bombed, stumbled back onstage by himself, strapped on Westerberg’s guitar and began playing a song he’d recently been working on, half-improvising the lyrics. Foley joined in, playing a martial beat as the chorus kicked in: “Friday night is killing me . . . It’s killing me again.”

  Standing there buzzing in the spotlight, Tommy started to believe that he could do this himself—write songs, front a band. He’d spent the last few years clinging to a romantic idea of him and Paul together against the world. It was all he’d known since he was thirteen. He’d never wanted to let it die. But in that moment he finally decided to let go.

  Late in the European tour, Warner Bros. forwarded the band some backlogged fan mail. The correspondence included an anonymous letter addressed to Tommy—a nasty diatribe castigating him for his continued drinking. Stinson was pissed at first, but then began to think perhaps he’d been acting callously. “It really hit home,” he said.

  For the first time in a long while, he and Westerberg sat down and talked.

  “Does it bother you that I still like to drink?” Tommy asked him.

  “No—fuck no,” Paul assured him. “You do your thing. I do mine.”

  Privately, however, Westerberg was struggling with his addiction. He’d been calling Chapman from all over Europe, leaving worrying messages: “Paul [was] sounding really distressed and said something to the effect of ‘needing mental assistance,’” she recalled.

  Near the end of the tour in London, the ’Mats set up for a couple of gigs at the Marquee. In town to promote her new film Mermaids, Winona Ryder showed up. Afterwards, hanging out with Westerberg at the Central Park Hotel, she noticed scores of empty NyQuil bottles strewn about the room. It was the dry drunk’s end-run play: desperate, Westerberg had downed loads of the cold medicine, getting high off the alcohol in it. Afterward, as the nasty blue-green residue covered his mouth, he felt sick and guilty.

  A few nights later, during the final European show at the Olympia in Dublin, Michael Hill showed up to see the band. The gig was a riotous affair. “It was their first time over there, and the Irish kids were just going nuts for them, the crowd was just getting loaded and loving it,” said Hill. “Here’s the ultimate Irish drinking band, in a sense—probably next to the Pogues—and there was Paul in the middle of it, sober and miserable.”

  After they returned to the States, a May–June run through the Southern and Western states was next. Though a late summer Australia-Japan jaunt was discussed, Westerberg shot it down. He was running on empty already; he also wanted to preserve those opportunities for his inevitable solo career.

  Tommy, meanwhile, started working up demos of his own songs. He’d gotten positive intimations from Michael Hill and Seymour Stein that Sire might be willing to pick up the solo option in his contract. He’d even started thinking about putting a new band together; Steve Foley was already in.

  The band weren’t the only ones planning for a post-Replacements future. Unbeknownst to Gary Hobbib, Russ Rieger had begun talking with London Records about becoming the label’s president.

  By now, the Replacements were crossing out dates on the calendar, grabbing a few final laughs where they could. In Portland, they arrived at the Fox Theatre and found that someone had spray-painted the wall behind the venue: PAUL WESTERBERG IS GOD (à la the famous sixties London graffiti: CLAPTON IS GOD). Tommy posed for pictures in front of it, kneeling in mock prayer.

  In Cincinnati, the band’s old pal Dan Baird, who’d quit the Georgia Satellites a few months earlier for a solo career amid a farrago of bad feelings, jumped onstage for “My Little Problem.” He nailed Johnette Napolitano’s part. “It was as high as I could possibly sing,” said Baird. “I think I made Slim and Tommy nearly throw up laughing.”

  Backstage, Baird sensed a resignation among the ’Mats. “They weren’t screaming at each other, they weren’t crying. Slim was going, ‘I don’t know how much longer any of us can carry on with this.’”

  Earlier in the year, while hanging out in the lobby of New York’s Mayflower Hotel, Westerberg almost didn’t recognize the man who complimented him on All Shook Down—he spoke with a British accent and looked like a disheveled rabbi. Soon Paul was chasing him down: Elvis Costello, then in his hirsute Mighty Like a Rose phase.

  A few months later, Costello offered the ’Mats a run of summer arena and shed dates opening for him—eight shows in mid-June, from Cleveland’s Nautica Stage to New York’s Madison Square Garden. Though the Heartbreakers disaster still lingered, there was less risk in Costello’s offer—only two weeks, and a hipper crowd. The concerts with Costello were memorable mainly for how unremarkable they were. At Toronto’s Kingswood Music Theatre—the site of their last date with Petty—it was hard to know who was more apathetic, the audience or the band.

  With the end in sight—the band’s calendar was filled only through early July—it was a challenge to muster any enthusiasm. The Madison Square Garden date began with an indignity. “To go to the gig, they brought us in some crappy van,” recalled Westerberg. “And they wouldn’t let us in. We went to the artist entrance, and it took us twenty minutes to convince security we were the opening act.”

  Things didn’t get lively until the end: in a mini-encore of “Hootenanny,” Stinson hollered the title refrain repeatedly while the band sped up and slowed down the groove several times as a goof.

  Costello watched from the wings. He could appreciate Westerberg’s current situation. Having been the archetypal “angry young man” with a taste for alcohol himself, Costello had moved away from his much-beloved band, the Attractions, after a decade as his creative desires evolved. “There’s something about the daredevil nature of certain kinds of groups like the Replacements that can’t really be sustained or revived,” he said. “You have to move forward.”

  CHAPTER 62

  After being jettisoned by the ’Mats, Peter Jesperson stepped back from the music business for a time. Though he remained a partner in Twin/Tone, he had little to do with the label during the latter half of the eighties. Mostly, Jesperson spent those years numbing himself with drugs and booze. Eventually his money ran out, and so did the drugs, but he continued to drink more viciously than ever.

  Much as the pain of being booted out of the ’Mats’ inner circle lingered, Jesperson had been hard-pressed to totally avoid the band. By the time of Don’t Tell a Soul, he’d built back up a tentative frie
ndship with Paul Westerberg. However, he remained estranged from his former “little brother” Tommy Stinson. He simply couldn’t shake the image of Stinson’s smirking face that day at the Uptown when they’d dumped him. “I held a grudge against Tommy for a long time because of that,” said Jesperson.

  Jesperson eventually returned to helping advise the Minneapolis groups A Single Love and Bad Thing, then managing Toronto’s 13 Engines, led by singer-songwriter John Critchley. The band signed with EMI label SBK Records and would record at Los Angeles’s Sound City with producer David Briggs.

  While waiting at the airport with Critchley to head to the session, Jesperson began to get the shakes. He lied and told Critchley he was going to the bathroom. Instead, he found a bar in the terminal and quickly downed a beer and several shots. Then the feeling dissipated. “That was the first time I knew that I had a real problem,” said Jesperson.

  After the 13 Engines sessions, Jesperson crumbled further and became unable to handle dealing with labels and attorneys and business matters. It felt like a replay of the Replacements. Rather than wait to be fired again, he called Critchley and said, “I just can’t do this anymore.”

  Jesperson soon found a new project, the Leatherwoods, led by Kansas-to-Minneapolis transplants and longtime Replacements fans Todd Newman and Tim O’Reagan. Jesperson made them his “comeback” Twin/Tone signing in 1990.

  Jesperson played the band’s demos for Westerberg, who was taken with the combination of Newman’s songs and O’Reagan’s voice. Westerberg (under the pseudonym “Pablo Louserama”) wound up playing on the record, Topeka Oratorio, and cowriting a couple of songs, including the album’s standout, the bubblegum jangler “Jamboree.”

  By the fall of 1990, Jesperson had become bloated and would wake up shaking worse than ever. In November, he decided to check into a rehab facility in suburban Brooklyn Park. Once he stepped inside and saw the white walls and rows of metal beds—the place was set up like some archaic sanitarium—he decided to leave immediately, but the hospital forced him to stay for the state-mandated seventy-two hours. When he got out, he had the DTs again and headed to the nearest convenience store, shotgunning beers to keep steady.

  The first weekend in March 1991, Jesperson’s body finally forced him to stop. After a long Saturday night partying with friends and a Sunday spent in a hungover fog, he suffered a seizure at his apartment. He couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, but he must have fallen flat on his face, which became purple and swollen. Though he didn’t know it yet, he’d come down with an acute case of pancreatitis—his organs had turned toxic from years of abuse.

  As his roommate Peter Bystol headed to work that morning, Jesperson asked him to grab a pint of Jim Beam on his way home. Bystol, haunted by Jesperson’s appearance, rang up Peter’s best friend, Dave Postlethwaite. Together they went over and demanded that he go to the hospital immediately. Jesperson didn’t fight.

  As they were about to admit him to the Hennepin County Medical Center, Peter suffered a second seizure. The medics strapped him to a gurney, cut off his clothes, and wheeled him into the ER, where he had yet another seizure—his third in under twelve hours.

  Jesperson came to eight days later in intensive care. A doctor stood over his bed, staring. “I want to tell you two things,” he said. “First, it’s a miracle you’re alive at all. And second, it’s an even bigger miracle that your brain isn’t completely damaged after what you’ve been through.”

  “I remember thinking: I am done,” said Jesperson. “Absolutely done. Whatever I need to do—I am never gonna have another drink as long as I live.”

  As a precaution, Jesperson entered the treatment program at St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Center—the same rehab center Bob Stinson had attended years earlier. Jesperson devoted three weeks to getting clean and exploring the reasons for his descent. Chris Mars and Slim Dunlap came by and visited as Jesperson began to take stock of his life.

  “One of the things I realized was that there were a whole lot of people in rehab that had it really bad, who didn’t have anything to get out for, anything ‘to live for.’ I wasn’t like that. I knew exactly what I was gonna do when I was done with that place.”

  Upon release, Paul Stark welcomed him back to Twin/Tone full-time. Jesperson set up his own imprint at the company called Medium Cool and began signing new bands again. The label would release albums by the Leatherwoods, Athens’s Dashboard Saviors, and singer-songwriter Jack Logan. It would mark the start of a successful return to the music business, and a second act for Jesperson. The Replacements were behind him at last.

  CHAPTER 63

  By summer, everyone in the Replacements knew it was all over. The last item on the ’Mats’ docket was a concert in Chicago—a free July 4 show sponsored and broadcast by radio station WXRT, part of the city-staged “Taste of Chicago” festival, for thousands of sun-baked drunks in Grant Park. By the start of their late afternoon set, the crowd had swelled to nearly 25,000, the biggest audience they’d ever played for.

  It was as good a place as any to bring the curtain down. Westerberg dreaded the thought of a big “farewell” concert in Minneapolis. In fact, the ’Mats didn’t want any formal announcement or fanfare about their swan song.

  About a week earlier, Slim Dunlap had told Peter Jesperson, “We got this thing in Chicago and nothing booked after that. You might want to think about coming.” Though he was just a couple months out of treatment and still somewhat fragile, Peter decided to go.

  Jesperson, his girlfriend, Uptown Bar booker Maggie Macpherson, and Chrissie Dunlap all flew down to Chicago. Passing the airport newsstand, Jesperson spied the latest issue of SPIN. On its cover, crouching in shades and gripping a guitar, was Paul Westerberg. “In Search of the Soul of Rock ’n’ Roll” was the story’s headline; the magazine had chosen Westerberg as the music’s living embodiment. Asked if he envisioned making another record with the Replacements, he was direct: “No. The way I’m thinking right now, no.”

  Arriving at the band’s downtown hotel, the group walked into Slim Dunlap’s room as he ironed his stage clothes. He seemed almost chipper. “It was not a dark day for me,” said Dunlap.

  Paul was holed up with Kim Chapman. She remembered Westerberg feeling antsy, eager for the end. It seemed he had something special planned for the final gig. “He not only wanted to draw a line in the sand, but demarcate it with piss,” said Chapman.

  WXRT’s Johnny Mars, the victim of the on-air “Little Village” prank four years earlier, introduced the group. “Speaking of institutions . . . our third band and headliner, some people have said belong in one,” said the deejay.

  The band was greeted with a roar. They looked odd in the daylight—naked somehow. Dunlap and Foley gleamed in their crisp white outfits, while Paul and Tommy wore loud print shirts and looked bedraggled.

  Westerberg grabbed the mic. “We’ve had quite enough out of you, Marrrs,” he said in mock approbation.

  The show would not turn out to be a Viking funeral; it was more a muted bon voyage. The sense of closure was obvious from the opening jangle of “I Will Dare.” “Meet me anyplace, anywhere, anytime—I don’t care, meet me tonight, if you would dare . . . one last time,” sang Westerberg.

  Most of his ad-libs that day centered on the finality of the occasion. During “Achin to Be,” he closed his eyes and cooed: “I been achin’ eleven years now.” On “Happy Town,” he cracked Tommy up by singing: “Who knew . . . First Avenue was bound for Happy Town.” Knowing the concert was being broadcast live, Westerberg unleashed a torrent of “fucks” between verses on “Bent Out of Shape.”

  Despite a strong opening salvo, the show quickly devolved into a sloppy and occasionally perfunctory performance. “Now you can see why we’re hanging it up,” joked Dunlap after a messy pass at “When It Began.” Next up was “Someone Take the Wheel.” “Here’s another one you don’t wanna hear,” said Westerberg. “Frankly, neither do I.”

  As the breakdown for “Talent
Show” approached, Westerberg paused. For most of the tour he’d been playing a fast Chuck Berry riff to kick the song back into the chorus. On this day, though, he stepped back and started up a mournful refrain on his Stratocaster. Soon the melody came clear: Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.”

  In the crowd, Peter Jesperson felt a lump in his throat. “That was the moment where I went, ‘Wow, this really is it,’” he said. “When Paul played that I went, ‘Okay, I get it. This is the end.’” Jesperson clapped hard and fast—a solitary, hopeful sound that had rattled around the Longhorn eleven years earlier now washed away among 25,000 others.

  The ’Mats turned out one last perverse coupling of covers: the Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet” and Hank Williams’s “Hey, Good Lookin’,” with Dunlap on vocals. The set’s penultimate song was a momentous “Can’t Hardly Wait”; the “’Til it’s o-ver” refrain had never sounded quite so cathartic.

  During the last half of the gig, Westerberg kept asking stage manager Jeff Ousley and guitar tech Scott Esbeck how long they’d been playing—“Every ten minutes or so,” said Ousley. “He had something planned out.”

  The last time Westerberg asked, Esbeck read his watch incorrectly. He told Paul they’d been playing for seventy minutes; they’d barely played fifty.

  With that, Westerberg signaled the closing number. They did their old musical-chairs act, switching instruments for the two-chord shuffle of “Hootenanny”: Paul moved to the drums, Tommy strapped on his guitar, and Slim grabbed the bass, handing Foley his guitar.