by Bob Mehr
When the SPIN story, titled “Hold My Life,” finally hit newsstands in June 1993, its 3,500 words weren’t as shocking as the photos of Stinson that accompanied the piece. The extreme close-up image of his face that opened the spread showed a man who appeared twenty years older than he was, with a lost, unsettled look in his eye. “I had no idea that photo was gonna be the way it was,” said Aaron. “That was horrifying to me. I was furious and completely melted down about it. But it’s like, who am I to blame anybody for anything? What I did was just as bad.”
Slim Dunlap would remember Bob privately feeling “devastated and betrayed” by Aaron’s piece. Chris Mars felt the article was “a bunch of bullshit. Bob is the kind of guy who wears his heart on his sleeve. He’ll just blurt out anything, ya know?” said Mars. But Stinson never disputed the quotes or contents of the story: “It’s all true,” he told the Pioneer Press.
In the aftermath of the piece, the Bleeding Hearts finished their record, but Bob’s relationship with Mike Leonard became strained by his drug use. Bob eventually moved out of their apartment. “It got harder to keep track of him and get him to practice,” recalled Leonard.
In the end, Bob was fired from the Bleeding Hearts too. “We opened for the Magnolias at the Entry, and he collected the money and took off,” said Leonard. “It was such a minor thing, a few bucks, but for whatever reason that was the final straw.” The band would play the CMJ Music Festival that fall with Magnolias’ guitarist John Freeman standing in for Stinson. Caught up in label limbo and then legal tussles, the Bleeding Hearts album with Bob would never be released.
Without a band to ground him, without music to tether him to the world, Stinson became even more lost. He would spend the last year-plus of his life drifting between homes and friends, old habits and new hopes—and evincing deeper symptoms of mental illness.
By early 1994, even Bob acknowledged he needed help. His mood swings were more extreme, his thinking had become disconnected and delusional. He’d become fixated on Kurt Cobain. He saw himself and the Nirvana front man as kindred spirits somehow. Cobain would commit suicide that spring.
In June, Bob finally checked himself into the Hennepin County Medical Center. He’d been there before and met with a psychiatrist, who somewhat cursorily diagnosed him as bipolar. For the first time in his life, Stinson began taking prescription medications for his condition.
Bob was also spending time with a couple he’d met, Ed and Lori Hoover, and eventually moved into their basement. One night Ed Hoover rented Mr. Jones, the 1992 Richard Gere film about a man battling bipolar depression. Bob watched, nodding along in recognition. “He kept saying, ‘Yup, yup. That’s what it’s like. That’s what I’m like,’” recalled Hoover. “He’d say, ‘I’ve been like this my whole life.’” Despite recognizing his problems, Stinson would only take his prescriptions for a while, then give up and return to self-medicating with alcohol and drugs.
As the months wore on his old friends began to get a sad premonition of his fate. In late ’94, Paul Westerberg ran into Bob on the street. “I was returning a video and he was on his way to the liquor store, and we stopped and talked for a second,” recalled Westerberg. “He sorta gave me that look like, ‘You wanna come? Gonna go get some beer, go back and get high, up in this girl’s apartment.’ I hesitated for a millisecond. Almost like, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ Then I said, ‘No, I guess I’ll go back home.’ It was so sad then. He was the kind of guy, you knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming.”
In January of 1995, Bob moved out of the Hoovers’ basement. Floating between friends’ couches, he soon found a new girlfriend, a woman known around town as Anna Nimmity. Bob took up residence in her apartment at 815 West Lake Street.
Claiming he’d fallen in love, Bob decided to dry out and straighten up. He seemed to be on the relative straight and narrow (“Drinking beer—and nothing else,” said Carleen Krietler) as February arrived. Slim Dunlap remembered encountering Bob carrying a bag of vitamins, saying he was going to lose weight and get healthy. “He was desperately trying to find health, because he didn’t feel good,” said Dunlap. “But when you abuse yourself for so long, there’s no instantaneous way to go back to zero and start all over.”
Whatever stability Bob found with his new girlfriend was short-lived. By mid-February, his mental issues had once again become acute. The final week of his life was a familiar replay of previous breakdowns—of his teenage troubles and the dark days before being dismissed by the Replacements.
Starting on February 9, Bob became violent toward his girlfriend, who was threatening to leave. A couple of days later he overdosed on sleeping pills and ended up at the Hennepin County Medical Center. After getting out, he began drinking again and threatened suicide with a knife during a delusional episode. On Monday, February 13, after another incident, Stinson was charged with a fifth-degree domestic assault against his girlfriend. He was booked on the misdemeanor and then released.
On Wednesday, February 15, after all the drama had faded somewhat, Bob walked down to his ex-wife Carleen’s place. He wanted to see his son Joey. Carleen remembered that he didn’t look well. “His skin was jaundiced. He was having dizzy spells,” she said. “He couldn’t maintain his body temperature—hot flashes, then cold flashes. It was scary.”
Carleen offered to drop him off at the Hennepin County Medical Center, so he could check in with his doctors. But Bob didn’t want to go. He told Carleen he was going to ask his girlfriend, Anna, to marry him. “We talked about Anna. We talked about our marriage and how not to repeat the same mistakes with her,” she said. “We talked about his recovery, life, his goals and plans. We talked about Joey.”
That afternoon Bob paid a visit to his mother Anita at the Uptown Bar. “He was in to see me at work. He told me about his psychiatrist he’d been seeing. He said, ‘I’m really gonna work on it this time, Ma.’ And I said, ‘Good for you, Bobby.’ Then he walked out the door. That’s the last time I saw him.”
On Thursday, Bob headed over to the Twin/Tone Records office on Nicollet. He wanted to get an advance on his next Replacements royalty check. Peter Jesperson was out of the office, but another employee gave him some cash, and he went on his way.
Bob ended up back at home in the Lake Street apartment that evening. Sometime in the night he put on a favorite old Yes record. He lay on the couch, listening blissfully to a Steve Howe solo, and then fell sleep.
On Saturday evening, Anna Nimmity passed the apartment and noticed that the same lights had been on for a couple of days. She decided to check in on Bob.
A little while later, Anita Stinson was home crocheting when the phone rang. “Anita, this is Anna,” said a voice on the other end of the line. “I just came from Bobby’s. I think he’s dead.”
Anita was in shock: “Can you imagine getting a call like that?” she said. Unsure what to do, she waited for her husband Tom Kurth to get home. She eventually called the local police precinct and asked them if they had any news on her son. They would only confirm that there had been an emergency call at the Lake Street address where Bob was staying. She waited and then finally rang the city morgue. They told her Bob’s body was there, that he’d been identified by his fingerprints—on file from one of his arrests. Anita went down to confirm it herself. “Until I saw him, I really didn’t believe it,” she said. In her panic, Anita had called Lonnie Stinson, paging her at a nightclub where she was out dancing with friends. “I came and got the call and I lost it,” said Lonnie. “Just screaming and screaming. I couldn’t believe it.”
Then Anita dialed up Tommy in California and told him what had happened. Despite the presence of a syringe on a table near Bob’s body, Tommy refused to believe his brother’s death was an overdose—unintentional or not. “My mom told me Bob had sobered up, ’cause he wanted to get his life together,” said Tommy. “He didn’t OD.”
The autopsy would ultimately prove him right. Though the medical examiner’s report listed Bob’s various conditio
ns (“chemical dependency with acute and chronic alcoholism; hepatic cirrhosis; intravenous narcotism with recent opiate use; bipolar affective disorder”), he would also determine that Robert Neil Stinson had died of “natural causes.”
“He’d been so beat up—from the [infection] a couple years earlier, and everything else, that his body just gave out,” said Tommy. “Did he die because he abused drugs or alcohol over the years? Possibly. Who knows how much the body can take? Did he die because my dad crushed his spirit as a fucking kid? Maybe. Who knows how much the heart can take? I think his heart gave up because he was tired. He was just . . . tired.”
As the news sank in, Tommy sat for a time. Then he picked up the phone and called Paul Westerberg.
“He didn’t have to say anything,” recalled Westerberg. “When I heard his trembling voice, I knew what it was.”
“Did ya hear?” Tommy asked him.
“Oh . . . no,” Westerberg said, sputtering.
“Yeah . . . Bob.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no.”
“I sat down and fucking cried my eyes out,” recalled Westerberg.
He spent the night at the piano in his grief, putting words to a song he’d been unable to finish for months.
In the dreams you tell me
Tell them only you were tired
Sing along, hold my life
A good day is any day that you’re alive
Hold my life, one last time
A mid the media attention and local gossip that followed there were some who tried to point fingers, to place blame for Bob’s death on the Replacements for firing him, to paint Paul and Tommy as “Mick and Keith leading Brian to the swimming pool,” said Westerberg. “But I’m comfortable with mine and Bob’s relationship. The little shit that we shared together. We were close. Even though there was jealousy and petty crap. I loved him. We loved each other. Far as what other people said . . . I learned that it can be hard to survive and take shit for it. It’s hard to stay alive and be accused of something. I think Tommy and I both learned that.”
No one in Bob’s family wanted to pin his fate on how things had ended with the ’Mats. “I don’t place responsibility on them,” said Lonnie Stinson. “I place it on Nick in a big way. I place it on all of us, his family, for not doing more to help. But it wasn’t any one thing that did him in. It was an accumulation of his whole life. From the time he was three years old and my dad told him he couldn’t come out and change the tire . . . it was always, ‘You’re never good enough; you’re wrong.’ It went on that way his whole life. That’s kind of sad, but that’s how I see him: still that little boy and yet a grown man, trying to convince people that he had value; that he had merit.”
A year or so before he died, Bob Stinson gave an interview to a Minneapolis journalist and author named Neal Karlen. Karlen was researching the subject of drugs and rock-and-roll for a book. He was having a hard time getting people to speak honestly and on the record. Someone suggested he look Bob up.
Karlen found him at the Uptown Bar, cadging drinks off strangers who knew him by his fading, once-famous reputation. “So I bought him a drink, and we started talking,” said Karlen. “We had a long conversation. He was very frank and insightful, and I got what I wanted. And then some other people bought him drinks, and I started to feel like it was turning into a geek show. I wanted to go.”
Before Karlen left, Stinson said one other thing: “I was a Replacement,” Bob told him.
“There was a kind of pride in the way he said it,” recalled Karlen. “Like that was who he was. That it was his life’s work. That he would be satisfied with that as an epitaph.”
“I was a Replacement,” repeated Stinson, almost to himself. “I was always a Replacement.”
“It’s true: we were all Replacements,” said Westerberg. “To a man, we felt that way. We lived that way. Bob died that way. It’s a burden to be a Replacement.”
Part III
In the summer of 1995, Paul Westerberg began work on his second solo album and the final record of his contract with Warner Bros.
The label paired him with the Pearl Jam/Stone Temple Pilots producer Brendan O’Brien. A jocular Georgian, O’Brien was a skilled record maker whose aesthetic appealed to rock radio. (He’d previously been tasked with mixing “World Class Fad” off 14 Songs.) Westerberg decamped to his Atlanta studio with drummer Josh Freese in tow and began recording.
Everyone around the sessions was excited by the results O’Brien was getting, but Westerberg quietly chafed against the producer, creatively and personally. After a couple of weeks, he bailed on the sessions without a word. A&R man Michael Hill tried unsuccessfully to get Westerberg to reconsider. “Probably my firing Brendan was the last straw in the label’s mind,” said Westerberg. “Like, ‘This guy has shot himself in the foot too many times.’”
Westerberg would finish the record, coproducing it himself with Lou Giordano and backed by studio pros like drummer Michael Urbano and bassist Davey Farragher. Though the album, Eventually, included some gorgeous tunes in “Love Untold” and “Good Day,” as with 14 Songs, something was missing. “I think his material flourished in the band construct, in a way it never did when he went solo,” said rock critic Chris Morris. “It was like he needed the other guys, Tommy in particular.” In the Replacements, Stinson had always been the built-in bullshit detector, an instinctive editor, who kept Westerberg’s questionable songs and musical impulses at bay. On his own, Paul sometimes failed to understand where his strengths lay—“To this day, I can’t tell my best songs from my crap,” he would admit—and he often relegated his most effective material to B-sides or the trash heap.
After so many years of trying, Warner executives seemed unsure if they could ever connect Westerberg with a wider audience. “Paul has written some great songs and if we can get those songs out to the people that should happen,” the label’s Howie Klein told Billboard magazine rather unconvincingly.
If Warner Bros. had little to give Westerberg, it was because the company itself was coming apart. After twenty-five years as the head of Warner Bros., Mo Ostin had been forced out at the end of 1994 in a corporate power struggle. Label president Lenny Waronker would soon follow him out the door, and both men would set up shop at the David Geffen/Steven Spielberg/Jeffrey Katzenberg start-up DreamWorks Records.
Ironically, it was the Replacements’ longtime product manager and ally Steven Baker who would take over the presidency of Warner Bros. In light of Ostin’s and Warnonker’s departures, Baker was desperately trying to steady a wobbly ship and keep the company’s credibility intact. That meant giving a new contract to R.E.M.—then at their commercial peak, they were about to become free agents and threatening to walk from Warners.
That summer Warner Bros. signed R.E.M. to an unprecedented $80 million deal—the largest recording contract in history. Westerberg would be asked to comment on R.E.M.’s financial windfall and ascension to the ranks of megastars. “I’ve had to mention them in every interview I’ve done since 1981,” he said wearily. “The problem is, they don’t have to mention [the Replacements]. They simply don’t have to acknowledge us anymore. They won.”
As Westerberg prepared to hit the road in support of Eventually in the summer of 1996, he began affecting a new look and manner. He was dressing up, wearing tailored suits, and donning tinted prescription glasses—the specs he’d ditched in high school because they didn’t look sufficiently rock-and-roll. He’d even quit smoking.
In interviews, he consciously punctured holes in his youthful punk image, playing up his love for John Coltrane and Joni Mitchell, suggesting that as he’d grown older he’d lost his appreciation for the Sex Pistols. He tried to put as much space between his old band and himself as possible. “I’ve distanced myself from the Replacements,” he said, “what they represent, what they are, so much that I barely know they exist.”
Westerberg put together a new solo band, with a rhythm section that couldn’t have been more removed
from the ’Mats. Michael Bland was a prodigiously gifted Twin Cities drummer who’d been a member of Prince’s New Power Generation. Westerberg had met him during the Eventually sessions and become smitten with his playing. Bland convinced Westerberg to bring in conservatory-educated polymath Ken Chastain to play bass. Unable to stomach any of Bland’s muso guitarist pals, Westerberg enlisted an indie rock ringer, calling up his old friend the singer-songwriter Tommy Keene to do the gig.
When Keene got to the rehearsals in Minneapolis, he blanched at how slick and manicured the songs, particularly the old ’Mats’ numbers, sounded. Westerberg, meanwhile, was a surprising taskmaster. “I’m thinking this is gonna be like playing with the Replacements,” he said. “But it was like joining the Buddy Rich Band. I’m getting yelled at. I could do the parts, but I had a roughness coming from indie bands. Paul was like, ‘I don’t want any of this amateur shit’—which is what he came out of.” Keene felt Westerberg was trying to change the whole way he was perceived. “He wanted to be seen as a real cat—a professional, moneymaking, on-top-of-his-game musician . . . and not as some drunken kid playing Kiss covers.”
Westerberg had signed on with Gold Mountain Management. The LA-based firm had guided the careers of Nirvana and the Beastie Boys and was known for running a tight touring operation. The first leg of the Eventually dates went well enough—crowds were enthusiastic, and reviews were good—“but then Paul began to have second thoughts,” recalled Keene. “He started to throw shows on purpose. He was reacting to this world he’d created—like, ‘This is too slick. What was I thinking?’”
Westerberg had responded to the uncertainty of his career by trying to go pro, but what he really craved was the instinctual quality of the Replacements. “I’d had a band who used to be able to read my mind, read my left foot. And now I had high-priced guys, who could only do what they were supposed to do each night,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
