by Bob Mehr
“Well, it’s a hootenanny!” sang Stinson, “for the fucking last time you’ll ever hear it.”
Westerberg, cigarette dangling and limbs flying, played double-time as Foley soloed giddily.
“Well, it’s a hootenanny!” bellowed Stinson. “Twenty minutes of this!”
Tommy was riffing now on the Sex Pistols’ adieu, which Johnny Rotten had capped with: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
“Yeah, you were robbed,” Stinson bellowed at the audience. “And I was robbed at birth. And I’m stillllllll being robbed!”
Pounding the kit, Paul motioned Ousley over to the riser, then thrust a drumstick in his face: “Get up here and play.” They made an awkward exchange, but Ousley took his place on the stool and managed to keep the beat.
Westerberg then walked to the side stage and directed the other roadies to grab the instruments, one by one. Foley handed his guitar to Esbeck. Slim gave the bass to Jimmy Velvet.
Tommy, in the center, was still going, the only actual Replacement left onstage. From the wings he could hear Westerberg cackling. “There was this look of ‘Oh, that bastard,’” said Esbeck.
As the roadies played on, Stinson unstrapped the guitar, set it against the amps, then ran all of its knobs up. Feedback erupted.
Exiting, Tommy slowed and gave a shy little wave on his way to the wings. It might have been the first shy thing he’d ever done onstage.
The “replacement Replacements” jammed for another minute longer. Velvet strutted around the stage, while Esbeck and Ousley tried to keep a groove. The song finally fell apart, as Stinson’s guitar continued echoing like a siren.
Backstage, WXRT deejays Frank E. Lee and Tom Marker provided a play-by-play on the air. “What a wild conclusion,” said Lee. “The crowd is still hungry out there.” For a moment it looked like the band might oblige the audience with an encore. But just as quickly, they disappeared.
After a short while, Lee told the audience, “I believe . . . they’re not going to be back.”
As Ousley and the others transitioned out of momentary rock stardom, the event’s staff accosted them. “We started packing up the gear, and some city officials came running up at me: ‘Hey, they’re supposed to be onstage for ninety minutes!’ I’m going, ‘Dude, they’re not coming back.’ Backstage, all you see is a cloud of dust and the band’s bus leaving.”
The ’Mats’ career had ended with a final middle finger: one last chance to get it all wrong.
Dunlap’s first post-Replacements act was to find his wife Chrissie and put her on the coach. “I thought I’d be flying home with Peter and Maggie,” she recalled. “But Slim said, ‘No, you’re coming home with me on the bus.’ I was like, ‘Really? I’m allowed on the bus?’ He said, ‘It’s the last show—what are they gonna do?’”
Dunlap was once again where he belonged: with his wife, headed back to his kids, no regrets. “I knew I’d never be at that level again,” he said. “But I did everything I could do to make that band as good as I could. And then I was done.”
Steve Foley climbed aboard the bus with a deep sense of loss. On the ride home he blasted a cassette of All Shook Down over and over again. It provided the sad soundtrack as he knocked back endless Heinekens and tried to process what he’d just been through. In the morning, he’d wake up back in his small South Minneapolis apartment and start collecting unemployment. In a way, Foley would spend the rest of his life trying to recover from his seven months as a Replacement.
As Tommy hurried to board the bus, he saw Paul headed toward a waiting limo. “See ya around, huh?” hollered Stinson.
Westerberg looked back. He lingered for a second, thinking of that moment a dozen summers ago when he’d first laid eyes on the little boy playing bass, and of all the years and miles and heartbreak since.
Westerberg nodded. “Yeah, dude . . . see ya around.”
Westerberg got into the car with Kim Chapman and headed for the hotel. They spent the night in a suite surrounded by windows with sweeping city views and watched fireworks explode all over Chicago. The next day Westerberg did something unusual: he took in a museum, visited the zoo, and enjoyed the city. His mantra had always been “We’re on tour, we’re not tourists.” The tour was finally over.
Tommy rode back to Minneapolis lost in thought. He had sacrificed more than anyone for the Replacements. He’d given up his adolescence, his relationship with his brother, and much of his sanity. The band—his identity—was gone now.
When he got home, his little daughter Ruby and wife Daune were waiting. “He was lost for a long time, just so super-depressed,” she said.
The Silver Eagle pulled away from the Stinsons’ house. On the tour bus’s destination board, bands proudly displayed their names as a marker of their renown.
On this bus, the sign in the window read simply: NO ONE YOU KNOW.
EPILOGUE
We were pioneers and the pioneers don’t get it. Somebody’s got to start it and somebody’s got to pick it up, and maybe water it down, crank it up, do something to it and make it work. We were five years ahead of our time, we were ten years behind.
PAUL WESTERBERG
Part I
Bob Stinson wasn’t exactly devastated about the breakup of the Replacements. “Actually, he couldn’t hide his glee,” said Slim Dunlap. “It would be hard if you were Bob not to gloat a little. He had no hatred, but you could tell he enjoyed the fact that the band didn’t quite pop without him.”
But Bob had little opportunity for schadenfreude, as his own life was coming apart. In late 1990, his wife Carleen Krietler took their two-year-old son Joey and filed for divorce. Bob was still prone to periodic mental snaps, sometimes violent—like the incident with Carleen that had landed him in jail in ’85. “It was a self-protective impulse on my part with the baby,” she said. “I loved Bob, but I couldn’t live around the threat of some freak-out incident, worried about him hurting me or hurting the baby. Or killing himself.”
Sadly, Bob was doing just that with his increased drinking and drug use. Though he’d managed to play with Static Taxi for the better part of three years, by the summer of ’91 the group was collapsing under the weight of Bob’s new addiction to heroin.
Throughout 1991 and 1992, Bob’s weight fluctuated wildly and his appearance worsened. His family tried to help, but Bob was petrified they would force him into rehab, and ultimately their concern did little to influence his behavior. “He really wouldn’t listen to anybody,” said Static Taxi’s Ray Reigstad. “I look at what he was doing as self-medicating and trying to feel normal. At the time, he was talking a lot, reviewing all the things that had happened to him in his life.”
Two decades after their flight from Florida, the specter of Nick Griffin still cast a dark shadow over the Stinson family. “I didn’t find out until I was thirteen what a rotten, fucked-up guy he was,” said Tommy Stinson. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with him once I knew what he’d done to my brother and sister.” As she hit her teen years, Tommy’s younger sister, Lisa Stinson, became curious about the father she’d never known. Griffin was still living in Florida, and there was some contact between them—a couple of calls and a letter—just prior to his death in 1989. “I was glad when he died,” said Tommy, “as you would be for someone horrible as that. It wasn’t no skin off my back.”
In later years, when the subject of Griffin’s abuse would come up, Bob would say he’d forgiven him, that he was unaffected by what had happened in his childhood. “He’d tell you it was no big deal,” said Krietler. “It was someplace he didn’t want to go.”
After thirty years of estrangement, Bob and his sister Lonnie did make an effort to establish a relationship with their birth father, Neil Stinson. A taciturn figure, he had remained a roofer in Mound. Bob would make occasional trips to visit the man who’d rejected him as an infant. “It was tough, because Neil was very pensive and aloof, it was hard to get words out of him,” said Carleen. “But he always had
a big bear hug for his son. You could see Bob just fill with gratitude when his dad would hug him. It was good for him to have that, finally. But, by then, it wasn’t enough to fix everything, you know?”
Chris Mars had been licking his wounds since being fired from the Replacements at the end of 1990. Collecting unemployment, taking freelance illustrating gigs, and getting his fine art career off the ground, Mars also was making music. He briefly played drums with the Twin Cities cover band Golden Smog, an all-star collective featuring members of Soul Asylum, the Jayhawks, and Run Westy Run.
In the meantime, Mars’s wife Sally—now acting as his manager—began shopping demos of his solo material to labels. To their surprise, they found a taker in Smash Records, a subsidiary of the major label Polygram.
Recorded at Paisley Park in Minneapolis, with Mars handling most of the instruments, his debut, Horseshoes and Handgrenades, was greeted with pleasantly surprised reviews upon its release in April of ’92. There had been little expectation for his post- ’Mats career, and critics were generous, overlooking his limitations as a vocalist and seizing on his knack for shaggy alt-pop hooks instead.
The lyrics on the album read like an open letter to his former mates in the Replacements. “Monkey Sees” was a direct shot at Tommy Stinson, casting him as Paul Westerberg’s obedient pet: “Like a bent disciple, carbon clone . . . always within reach, on the keeper’s leash.” (Asked by a reporter that fall if he’d heard Chris’s album, Tommy replied tartly, “Chris who?”) Tracks like “Ego Maniac” and “Popular Creeps” took aim at Westerberg and Stinson for their cliquishness and mistreatment of Mars and his wife Sally. “Talking bad about us when our backs are turned,” sang Mars. “Riding high until the day they get burned / Who’s gonna love them when they’re unknown?”
Uncharacteristically, Westerberg refrained from blasting back at Mars. “I tried to take the high ground,” he said. Still, asked where his relationship with Mars stood, he didn’t mince words. “I don’t talk to Chris,” said Westerberg. “Don’t miss him. We don’t miss each other.”
Following the Replacements’ Grant Park finale, Slim Dunlap was ready to get off the road for good. But an offer to play with Dan Baird of the Georgia Satellites kept him out for a couple more tours in late ’91 and early ’92. After that, he came home and took a job delivering sandwiches.
Dunlap’s old friend Peter Jesperson had been urging him to make a solo record for a couple of decades. “It took him about that long to get the confidence,” said Dunlap’s wife Chrissie. “He was so used to being the sideman, deferring to Curt [Almsted] and then Paul.”
Jesperson signed him to Twin/Tone’s Medium Cool imprint, coproducing Dunlap’s The Old New Me—a loose and lovable Americana LP, a grab bag of Slim songs, stories, and styles. Westerberg guested on the album, and the lyrics were rife with references to Dunlap’s ’Mats experience. The wistful “Ballad of the Opening Band” was inspired by the vagaries of the Tom Petty tour: “Now the dream world of every little opening band, it soon gets shattered when the headliner takes command.” He would romanticize the alliance between Paul and Tommy on the lilting “Partners in Crime” (“We’re on a fast cruise headed to the bottom . . . having one hell of a time”). Dunlap would also fire back at Chris Mars on the cutting Dylan-esque boogie of “Ain’t Exactly Good”: “I got your new CD and, man, what a cover / As for the rest of it, I wish I hadn’t bothered.”
Released in 1993, it would be the first of two solo records for Dunlap. (Times Like These would follow three years later.) He toured in support of the discs, playing clubs and dives on both coasts, and would spend hours before and after shows regaling fans with tales, sometimes very tall, about the Replacements.
His solo career might’ve been small stakes compared to what he’d experienced during the ’Mats’ height, but Dunlap relished it all. “Every time I get done playing, and I go to settle with the club owner, I ask, ‘How much do I owe you?’” he said. “I feel like I have no business being paid, no matter how meager it is. It’s too much fun to call that work.”
As the lesser-known Replacements stepped into the spotlight, Paul Westerberg pulled back from the world.
Back in Minneapolis, he broke things off with girlfriend Kim Chapman. “He’d never been on his own,” said Chapman. “Never bought his own furniture. Never cooked for himself. So he retreated from the relationship to try that. It was what he needed to do.”
Free from booze, the band, and any personal attachments (his divorce from Lori Bizer would also become final), Westerberg sought solitude instead. He rented a little bungalow in South Minneapolis and lived a simple, ascetic existence. “I was alone for the first time ever, and I enjoyed it,” he recalled. “I had a piano, a rug, a rocking chair, and a couple good books. I learned how to play saxophone. I started gardening. Soon after that, I began writing and the stuff just poured out.”
Producer Matt Wallace had come to Minneapolis and set up a simple home studio for him to use and demo songs. A new positivity emerged in Westerberg’s writing—the brooding spirit that had marked the material on Don’t Tell a Soul and All Shook Down lifted. “I finally brought my guitar and equipment up to the first floor,” said Westerberg. “I’ve always recorded and written in the basement. This [was] the first batch of songs that were written actually looking out the window.”
Over time, solitary living would lose its appeal and Westerberg would settle into a new significant relationship. “Oddly enough,” he said, “I ended up with a girl I had known for a long time.”
Laurie Lindeen was the front woman for the Twin/Tone-signed pop-punk trio Zuzu’s Petals. She was a Wisconsin native—a dishwater blonde with sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks—and a self-described “high school overachiever” who had moved to the Twin Cities to play music and pursue rock-and-roll stardom.
Those plans had been complicated when, at age twenty-four, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis—which she discovered after suffering paralysis en route to a Replacements concert. She and Paul had first met when the ’Mats played Madison back in the old days, and they ran into each other again in Minneapolis in 1991 at a Soul Asylum show. The Westerberg she encountered seemed far removed from the hell-raising figure of legend. “He retires around 10 p.m. and wakes up bright and early to either walk or bike,” Lindeen would write in her memoir, Petal Pusher. “He grocery shops and cooks . . . he meditates and reads. He quit drinking and drugging and yet is still fun.”
Lindeen thought it might just be a passing “rock star” fling, but it soon became something more, despite her reservations. “I’m falling in love with you,” she told Westerberg, “but, you know, you have a terrible reputation. . . . I can’t set myself up like this.” Westerberg pointed to his sobriety. “I am living proof that people can change,” he said. “I’ve changed.”
“I surrendered,” wrote Lindeen. “This might be . . . where I make a deal with the devil, but who cares—there are thousands of girls out there who would love to have such a dilemma.”
Their relationship—marked by myriad joys and dilemmas—would last for the next two decades.
The end of the Replacements left Tommy Stinson bewildered. Back home with his wife Daune and daughter Ruby, he tried to make some sense of the experience, what the last dozen years had meant, but couldn’t find easy answers. “Tommy went into a deep funk that neither of us recognized at the time,” said Daune. “Not that the band was stable, but there was a certain security to it. When it was over, he drank heavily and just kinda checked out. And then there was problems with us too.”
Tommy pondered his options, even briefly considered going back to school to get his GED, before deciding to move forward with a new band for Warner Bros. With Steve Foley on drums, his brother Kevin Foley on bass, and ex-Phones/Figures guitarist Steve Brantseg, Tommy formed Bash & Pop. In the fall of ’92, the group headed to Southern California to record an album, with the trusted Tom Petty and Keith Richards collaborator Don Smith producing.
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sp; Though it started as a band project—and would feature a roll call of noteworthy guests, including the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench—Stinson ended up cutting most of Friday Night Is Killing Me on his own, singing, playing guitar and bass.
An uncredited contributor to the project was Paul Westerberg. After about six months of silence between them following the ’Mats’ finale, Paul and Tommy had resumed talking and rekindled their friendship. Westerberg joined him in the studio in LA to add backing vocals to a couple of tracks. Despite vague insinuations in the press, Westerberg had nothing to do with writing the material—though Stinson would allow that his influence was inevitable: “When you hang with someone for so many years, you pick up a lot.”
Friday Night would prove the best of the Replacements members’ solo records. It’s an album without polish or pretense, but full of Stinson’s heart, soul, and spirit. “It’s just me and my guitar and my guts basically, and you can hear that,” said Stinson, who basically learned how to sing during the sessions, even taking vocal lessons to improve. “I don’t mind growing up in public. I’ve been doing it all my life.”
By the time the record came out in the spring of 1993, Tommy’s marriage to Daune Earle had reached an end. He’d become seriously involved with indie label A&R woman Kelly Spencer and followed her out west. “I moved to LA ’cause I was in love,” he said.
“He left for California, left me with a three-year-old. There was a lot of anger and hatred on my part,” admitted Earle. “He didn’t have a lot to do with Ruby, was kind of in and out of our lives. That affected us, and him, greatly for a long, long time.” (Stinson would express regret for leaving his young family—“I hurt people I wish I hadn’t,” he lamented in 2008—and would do his best to make it up to Earle and his daughter in later years.)
Beyond his new relationship, Stinson’s move to LA was also motivated by concerns for his career, a desire to place himself in view of Burbank-based Warner Bros. “I wanted to be closer to the record company—to keep an eye on them,” he said. “It didn’t really help.”
