by Bob Mehr
A frustrated Westerberg soon began turning over the whole crew. “He fired the lighting guy onstage. Fired the monitor guy onstage. He went through five bus drivers,” said Keene. “He fired the T-shirt guy because he didn’t know who else to fire. That was the joke: ‘Who’s getting the ax today?’ It was a circus.”
In early June, Eventually’s first single, “Love Untold,” peaked at number twenty-one on the alternative chart, then slipped off entirely a few weeks later. In an effort to keep the album’s flagging momentum going, Westerberg consented to play a series of industry events.
He appeared at a gathering of radio execs in Boulder, going on before the headliner, punk poetess Patti Smith. In the middle of the show, the soundman asked Westerberg to cut his set short; Smith was demanding to start her show early. Paul flipped him the bird and kept playing until they cut the power off. Afterward, in their shared dressing room, Smith went on a star trip and laid into Westerberg. He looked to her guitarist Lenny Kaye, a ’Mats fan, for help. But Kaye just stared at the floor. Finally fed up with Smith’s diva act, Westerberg cut her off—“Why don’t you go write another one of yer fuckin’ limericks”—and slammed the door behind him. “The sad part,” said Westerberg, “is I never got a chance to tell her we shared a birthday.”
One of the final dates of the tour saw Westerberg and the band playing the “Big Day Off,” a massive outdoor radio festival at a speedway in western Massachusetts. The bill was filled with flavor-of-the-moment alternative bands like Poe and Goldfinger, and the audience comprised teenagers who were skipping school and had never heard of the Replacements.
With his pressed suit and slower songs, Westerberg became an object of scorn for the young crowd, who’d learned rock concert comportment by watching the mud-slinging at Woodstock ’94. “These kids were just yelling shit and throwing stuff,” said Keene, who got hit with an orange, while Westerberg was pelted with a water bottle. “It was almost surreal.”
Westerberg reverted to old instincts, instructing the band to serve up a Replacements-style “pussy set.” Confused at first, they went along, playing “Kiss Me on the Bus” and “Color Me Impressed” as slow as possible before Westerberg cut the show and stormed off. “At that point,” he said, “it was pretty clear my fifteen minutes of fame was up. I was an absolute nothing.”
As painful as Bob Stinson’s passing had been, in a sense it freed Tommy Stinson. “From the time my brother died, everything negative died with him. And there was a lot of stuff. A lot of bad stuff early on, and stuff with the Replacements—just the fucked-up drugs and arguments and bullshit. It all went away. And all I could remember was how awesome my brother was. I think my mind just had to do that.”
After his brother’s loss, Tommy would find comfort in familiar faces from his past as well as new friends.
Out of the ashes of the latter-day lineup of Bash & Pop he formed a new group called Perfect, with drummer Gersh Gershunoff, guitarist Marc Solomon, and bassist Robert Cooper (and later, guitarist Dave Philips). They gelled quickly, becoming a real band in a way that Bash & Pop had never been—and there was none of the brooding or passive-aggressive behavior that had marked the Replacements.
For Stinson, who’d been living a kind of arrested rock-and-roll adolescence for so long, his adult life really began once he finally shed the baggage of his old band. “It’s a real weird thing, but the Replacements were very antisocial people. Except when we were with ourselves—then it was a gang mentality,” said Stinson. “In LA with Perfect, I learned what it was like to be a friend, and I started having friends. It’s nice to have people you can call and talk to and hang out with—other than Paul. Not that he was a bad thing, but we’d gone our separate ways.” At thirty years old, Tommy Stinson had “finally started figuring all that regular life stuff out.”
At Bob’s funeral, Tommy had reconnected with his long-estranged friend Peter Jesperson. He’d moved out to Los Angles to run his Medium Cool imprint, under the umbrella of Restless Records, which had signed a pact with Twin/ Tone. “Peter turned up at [a Perfect] show, and much to my surprise, he liked us,” said Tommy. “That was sort of the catalyst for our relationship starting over again. And my brother’s death had something to do with it as well. I felt sort of an urgency to keep track of friends who really meant something to me.”
Jesperson would eventually sign Perfect to Medium Cool, which released their debut EP, When Squirrels Play Chicken, in the summer of 1996. Though it had been shattered a decade earlier, Peter and Tommy would restore the deep bond that had existed between them. Stinson would stand as the best man at Jesperson’s wedding the following year and remain family from then on.
In late 1997, Perfect traveled to Ardent Studios in Memphis to record, and Stinson would reunite with the paternal producer Jim Dickinson. “This whole thing is a return in a way,” said Stinson about the sessions, which began almost eleven years to the day after the Replacements started tracking Pleased to Meet Me. “Tommy has blossomed,” noted Dickinson. “He is a different person. He’s managed to learn an awful lot about what he does . . . and in a way, he’s still the nineteen-year-old punk that I knew years ago.”
Returning to the Twin Cities from tour, Paul Westerberg found himself followed by a black cloud. “I’ve flirted with depression all my life,” he noted. “I stopped flirting and had a full-blown romance with it.” Faced with such feelings, he did what he always did: wrote songs. “I had a good two months, almost like a hermit at home,” said Westerberg, who turned out a batch of strange, disquieting material during this spell.
He thought work might provide relief, but when the songs stopped, the darkness remained. The few friends he talked to during this period were getting disturbing signals about his mental state. Tommy Keene remembered Westerberg calling him up, sounding suicidal. By the time Paul’s old friend Julie Panebianco came to Minneapolis to visit, Westerberg was in a near-catatonic state. “We went to dinner and I didn’t say a word,” he recalled. “I didn’t talk for a couple months. It was scary.”
Bob Stinson’s passing and the culmination of his Warner Bros. contract represented the end of something bigger in Westerberg’s mind. “I started playing guitar in bands when I was fifteen. I had a dream, and for twenty years I’d pursued it,” he said. “It dawned on me that my dream came true. Maybe it didn’t play out like I thought it would, but I’d lived my dream. At that point I realized I didn’t have another one. And that was somehow terrifying.”
After avoiding it for much of his life, Westerberg finally decided to seriously seek professional help. “I went to a couple bohunk psychiatrists until I found the right guy,” he said. His therapist would listen to Westerberg explain his professional neuroses, how he’d watched as his avowed musical disciples, like Johnny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, had taken his influence and outstripped him, selling millions of records.
“There was a point when . . . I did think that everyone on the radio sounded like me,” he said. “Not in a crazed way, but I could hear me in a lot of other artists. So I was telling this to the guy I was seeing, and he thought I was paranoid and out of my mind,” laughed Westerberg. “He’s sitting there taking notes. I think he was just writing the word loon on his pad.”
His doctor did some poking around and realized Westerberg wasn’t delusional; he had influenced a younger generation of artists, but felt somehow shut out of that success, alienated by the very thing he’d created. “Just having him understand that was validating,” said Westerberg.
Beyond the talk therapy, Westerberg also got on prescription medication for his depression and anxiety. “After a lifetime of self-medicating, doing it on my own with alcohol and street drugs and prayer and self-help and whatever else, the [doctor] told me . . . ‘There are things that are made to help people like you.’ That kinda saved [me].”
Westerberg would still struggle, having to alternate between antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. “There’s no cure for
either together. ’Cause one offsets the other. That would be a whole other journey for me.” He would document that journey on an indie EP he released under the pseudonym Grandpaboy that year. Among the tracks was “Psychopharmacology,” a song that spelled out his new dilemma: “I need somethin’ to calm me down / I need somethin’ to keep me focused / Narcoleptic and paranoid, borderline hopeless . . . ADD, PCP, F-U-C-K-E-D, that’s me.”
With Westerberg’s time at Warner Bros. officially at an end, A&R man Michael Hill would produce a beautiful farewell to the Replacements in the form of a two-disc, “best of” and rarities compilation of the Sire years, titled All for Nothing/Nothing for All.
When the comp came out in the fall of 1997, it felt like a tombstone for the band. Westerberg declined to promote it, leaving an annoyed Tommy Stinson holding the bag. “Paul won’t speak—which is very hypocritical,” Stinson told an interviewer, dodging questions about the Replacements’ legacy and the prospects of a reunion. Tommy’s message on the ’Mats was clear. “We’re over,” he said. “Forget about it. Get a life.”
A few months later, as part of department downsizing, Michael Hill would be laid off after fourteen years at Warner Bros.
In early 1998, Tommy Stinson’s band Perfect had finished recording its debut with Jim Dickinson, and they were waiting for Restless Records to come up with a marketing plan and release date. Though the company had sunk a small fortune into recording and mixing—upward of $200,000—Restless president Joe Regis suddenly lost his enthusiasm for the project. “He decided he wasn’t going to put it out ’cause they didn’t hear a radio hit,” said Stinson. Peter Jesperson, who was handling A&R for Perfect under the Restless umbrella, was so incensed by the decision that he severed ties with the label in protest.
In spite of his personal triumphs, Tommy was feeling beaten down after another failed experience trying to lead his own group. “You work and you work and you work . . . and nothing,” he said. “By the time the Perfect thing was falling to pieces, I was so fed up. I just wanted to go play bass with some band and hang out.” That opportunity would soon present itself.
After becoming the behemoth of the rock world in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Guns N’ Roses was starting over. By 1998, singer/leader Axl Rose had decided to reboot the multi-platinum band. Several members of the group—including guitarist Slash and drummer Matt Sorum—had left or been dismissed, so Rose enlisted a new lineup to begin work on the album that would become the long-gestating epic, Chinese Democracy.
This new version of Guns included Paul Westerberg’s band drummer Josh Freese. As Guns was working on new material, founding bassist Duff McKagan decided to leave the group. “We needed a bass player, and I thought of Tommy,” said Freese. Stinson tried out at GNR’s rehearsal space. “They actually filmed me doing the audition,” Tommy recalled. “I didn’t pretend like I was playing a show. I just played.”
Whatever he did impressed Axl Rose—no one else was auditioned. Despite their different musical backgrounds, Rose and Stinson found common ground. “He knew about the Replacements. He told me that he and [GNR tour manager] Del James had come to see us in some club back in the day, and they were not impressed,” said Stinson, laughing. “He and I both had a chuckle about the fact he wasn’t a ’Mats fan and I wasn’t a Guns fan.” A couple days later, Stinson got a formal contract offer to join Guns N’ Roses as its new bassist.
For Stinson, the job meant much-needed financial stability—he could finally take care of his daughter Ruby properly. As good as he’d proven to be during his stint as a telemarketer, Stinson was best suited for only one job. “I never got much of a formal education. But playing bass in a loud rock-and-roll band?” he said. “I got a fucking doctorate in that shit.”
Paul Westerberg felt his life needed a bigger purpose than music. His therapist encouraged him to start a family. Despite coming from a big Catholic brood, none of his siblings had any children. Westerberg was reluctant to start a family, recalling how his own parents had been preoccupied and ignored him during his troubled teen years. He’d articulated that ambivalence on an Eventually track called “Mamma-Daddy Did”: “Decided not to raise some mixed-up kid, just like mamma daddy did.”
His first wife, Lori Bizer, had wanted children during their marriage, “but I would not have been ready,” he said. “I always felt like while you’re still on the road it’s not right to have a family,” he said. “If you got a little one you should be there for ’em.”
After Eventually, Westerberg decided his days on the road were over. “I always said I’d quit if it was no fun, and it was no longer fun—touring at least,” he noted. “I was at the point where it was like one more tour and I wouldn’t be returning—in a pine box maybe.”
In the fall of ’97, Laurie Lindeen got pregnant. Their son, John Paul Westerberg, came into the world the following May.
Westerberg would become a devoted stay-at-home dad to his little boy. Once a nocturnal rock-and-roller, now he was “fine with staying up all night to give him a bottle. I used to put him in this little backpack and play the guitar and walk around.” The birth of his son, he said, “brought me back to life.”
The material Westerberg had written during his post-Eventually malaise was striking, unlike anything he’d created before. “A different kind of song [had] started coming out,” he said. Westerberg continued creating spare, mostly piano-based pieces that were closer to Stephen Sondheim than the Rolling Stones.
Capitol Records president Gary Gersh—the industry veteran who’d worked with David Bowie and signed Nirvana—heard these demos and signed Westerberg to the label in 1998. Gersh, who would personally serve as his A&R man, encouraged Westerberg to leave the rock-and-roll ghost of the Replacements behind for good. “Don’t just be another guy with a guitar,” Gersh told him, throwing in a new Steinway concert grand as part of the Capitol contract.
Gersh suggested that Don Was coproduce the album with Paul. Was had become an ardent fan of Westerberg’s 14 Songs while sharing a flat with Keith Richards as they worked on the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge in Ireland. Westerberg immediately hit it off with the jazzy, low-key Was, who recognized his creative dilemma. “Paul’s got a difficult lot in life coming out of the Replacements,” he said. “The thing that’s a blessing is, his music means a lot to people. The curse is, you feel like you can’t veer too much from the path that people expect you to be on. I’ve seen it happen with Iggy Pop and even with the Stones. You continue to grow as an artist and as a human being, but people wanna freeze you in a moment from your past.”
Westerberg’s new album—with the multiple portmanteau title Suicaine Gratification—would be a radical departure: light on guitars, heavy on trenchant self-examination, lyrics painted with impressionistic strokes. Was felt that Westerberg had written an autobiographical concept album. “But a guy like Paul will purposely make that trail disappear,” said Was. “He reveals something deep inside and then turns his back.” Westerberg would admit as much in the album’s opening track, “It’s a Wonderful Lie”: “I’ve been accused of never opening up / You get too close, then I keep my mouth shut.”
Westerberg had sabotaged his own career plenty, but this time it was bad luck that doomed Suicaine Gratification. The day the album was being mastered, Gary Gersh resigned from Capitol, forced out over philosophical differences with parent company EMI. Westerberg was suddenly left without his biggest ally. Capitol’s new regime didn’t understand or embrace his strange new record—they wanted to know where the rock guitars were, where the single was.
When Suicaine Gratification was released in February 1999, Westerberg did his best to promote it in the press—he’d made it clear at the outset that he wouldn’t be touring in support of the LP. Largely misunderstood by fans and critics, and effectively orphaned by the label, it sold a major-label career-worst 52,000 copies for Westerberg. The reaction to the album, he said, “felt like the last straw.”
He would quickly escape from Ca
pitol; the label actually paid him off not to record the second record guaranteed in his contract. “Best deal I ever made,” he said. Soon after, Westerberg shed himself of all his professional ties, leaving his management company and eventually letting go of longtime lawyer George Regis.
He was ready to leave the major labels and the music industry behind and disappear from public view. “I figured,” he said, “that nobody can really miss you unless you go away.”
With the ’90s ending and a new millennium about to begin, the Replacements’ lives were as far removed from one another as could be.
Chris Mars’s fine art career, his real dream since childhood, had finally become a reality. His surreal Hieronymus Bosch–inspired paintings would soon be displayed in museums and galleries, selling for tens of thousands of dollars apiece.
Slim Dunlap remained a proud journeyman, working a tough shipping job at a warehouse and playing little local gigs for handfuls of fans on the side. He and his wife Chrissie were mostly counting down their days to retirement, golden years they planned to spend together playing golf, taking boat rides, and enjoying their grandchildren.
Tommy Stinson was mired in the morass of making Chinese Democracy—a project that grew more strange and byzantine as the years wore on. While a succession of record producers and band members came and went (and sometimes fled), Stinson remained GNR’s bedrock. He would become Axl Rose’s trusted musical lieutenant and right-hand man. It was a role he was accustomed to playing.
On New Year’s Eve of 2000, Paul Westerberg marked his fortieth birthday, ensconced in a quiet domestic life with his family, his backaches, and his mood pills. He would once again retreat to the basement to make music alone, amid memories of what was gone and thoughts of what still could be.
