Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Part IV

  More than a decade of flirting and fighting, of distance and death, of half-starts and false-starts, would pass before the Replacements could be reborn.

  Following three years of professional seclusion, Paul Westerberg would finally reemerge in 2002. The seeds of his comeback were sown with the purchase of a guitar—a cherry red Gibson ES-330. Like a fifteen-year-old with his first six-string, the fortysomething Westerberg took to the instrument like a favorite, forgotten foil and began playing rock-and-roll in the basement, an activity that reignited his passion for music and helped him rediscover his muse. “I’d made my I’m-gonna-kill-myself record, that was the end of that phase,” said Westerberg. “I felt like rockin’.”

  Westerberg would release a pair of albums, Stereo and Mono, for Los Angeles indie label Vagrant, a company started by Replacements fanatic Rich Egan. That winter Westerberg had an idea for a bit of guerrilla promotion. He called up Tommy Stinson to see if he wanted to join him on a Midwest tour that February, one that would visit the cities Buddy Holly was scheduled to play before his 1959 plane crash. Stinson thought it sounded like fun; he was game. “Unfortunately, he called me back two days later and said he couldn’t do it because his cohort [Axl Rose] needed him,” said Westerberg. “So the idea lasted about half a minute.”

  Paul then roused Slim Dunlap and asked him to come on the road and to make an appearance together on The Late Show with David Letterman. Slim agreed, and they began rehearsing. Then, suddenly, Westerberg stopped calling, stopped coming over. Something Dunlap had supposedly said—allegedly disparaging of Paul’s new songs—had gotten back to Westerberg. The tour never happened. Paul and Slim began an estrangement that would last nearly a decade.

  Promoting Stereo/Mono (the records would be packaged as one set), Westerberg seemed eager to wipe away the memory of his softened solo years and remind people of his role as the architect of the Replacements’ sound. “I’m not trying to say it was all me all along, but when Tommy was twelve and Bob didn’t know a major chord from a minor and Chris didn’t know what beat to play, I would suggest this beat, and this chord and that. And they were my band. It belonged to them too,” he said. “But they didn’t sound like the Replacements before I started playing with them.”

  The cycles of life had begun to intersect for Westerberg, as he found himself simultaneously caring for his infant son Johnny and his ailing septuagenarian father Hal. “Not to get too gruesome,” Westerberg said, “but when you’re wiping your little boy’s ass and then having to do the same to your father, that changes you. It turns you into an adult.”

  Even during the final years of his life, when Paul was playing nice sit-down theaters in Minneapolis, Hal Westerberg hadn’t gone to see his son perform. “I’m perfectly fine that he never came to my office and watched me work, you know. It kept it pure that I was his son, that I was no more than the little boy he played catch with, who now plays catch with his son. I was never looking for his applause. I never needed it, never wanted it, and never got it,” laughed Westerberg.

  Hal’s final years were difficult ones. “He had emphysema, he broke his back, had facial cancer,” recalled Paul. They gave Hal last rites on Halloween 2003. “And he lived eight or nine days more. I was with him at the end.”

  Paul sat there as his father gasped his final breaths and held his mother Mary Lou as they watched the hearse drive off with his body. “Maybe I should’ve worked with dying people,” mused Westerberg. “’Cause everyone was coming unglued and I managed to stay levelheaded. I think I took the whole thing too easy. Then again, I started smoking cigarettes after that. He dies of emphysema and the first thing you know I’m smoking again. That’s one for Freud.”

  Westerberg would remain busy after the comeback of Stereo/Mono. In 2003 he released the concert documentary DVD and soundtrack Come Feel Me Tremble and put out Dead Man Shake, a blues album credited to his alter ego Grandpaboy, for the Mississippi label Fat Possum. (As part of the deal with the company, Westerberg requested that his payment include a switchblade, a revolver, and a bottle of whiskey.) He followed up with his fifth album in two years, Folker, in the fall of 2004.

  He would make a series of in-store appearances, then do a solo tour in 2002, before heading back out on the road with a full band (drummer Michael Bland, his neighbor and the onetime Dads’ guitarist Kevin Bowe, and his new pal, Jim Boquist, formerly of Son Volt, on bass). Touring brought back familiar boredom and temptations. Dealing with chronic back pain and the drudgery of the road, Westerberg had begun abusing prescription pills—he’d tellingly dubbed his band the Painkillers. After more than a decade on the wagon, he started drinking again in 2003. “I drank for seventeen years and was sober for thirteen and then have started to casually drink again,” he admitted. “I have no solid answer other than the fact that every article on me would usually start with ‘The former hard-drinking front man. . . . And it’s like, I might as well do what I want to do ’cause I’m never gonna live that down.”

  But the booze fueled his old insecurities. By the middle 2000s, a new generation of ersatz Westerbergs had emerged in the music world. Watching TV or flipping through magazines, Paul would see the latest rock singer-songwriter rage, some kid wearing his old haircut and bad attitude. “How can you like him better than me?” sang Westerberg in a track off Folker. “How can you like him? After all, it’s me.”

  He would confide his confusion to his friend, the writer, Bill Flanagan. “Paul said what upset him when he saw people imitating him was that first his ego would say, ‘That guy is imitating me,’” said Flanagan. “And then the other side of him, his insecurity, would go, ‘No, that guy never heard of you. Nobody ever heard of you. You never had a hit record. You’re just some guy sitting in his basement in Minneapolis.’ The whole thing kinda made him question reality.”

  A one-off Replacements reunion nearly happened in October 2004, at a benefit for Soul Asylum bassist Karl Mueller, who was battling cancer. The Twin Cities music community had rallied around the much-loved Mueller, and Westerberg tried to get the ’Mats to perform. “A couple of them were unavailable,” reported Westerberg, who played the benefit with Jim Boquist instead. “I was . . . disappointed that we didn’t. We never did anything good in our life for anybody. It would’ve been a nice thing to do for Karl.” (When Mueller died the following year, Tommy Stinson would honor his widow Mary Beth Mueller’s request and join Soul Asylum on bass, recording and touring with the band over the next several years in between his Guns N’ Roses commitments.)

  By 2005, the festering ill will between Westerberg and Stinson became public as Tommy promoted his first solo album, Village Gorilla Head. Westerberg had made disparaging comments in the press about Stinson joining GNR, and Stinson was still smarting. “Westerberg’s gone out on a limb to say a bunch of nonsense that’s made me look bad, that’s made Axl look bad, that’s made [Rose] feel bad. . . . It’s just lame.”

  Tommy would tell reporters he found it far easier to work with his current bandmate in Guns N’ Roses than his old Replacements partner. “He keeps pulling out the ‘Paul Westerberg’s more difficult to deal with than Axl Rose’ line,” said Westerberg. “And I think, ‘Yeah, of course. Wouldn’t Van Gogh be more difficult than Norman Rockwell?’”

  When he wasn’t serving up one-liners, Westerberg was busy coaching his son Johnny’s youth sports teams or serving as his school’s playground monitor. After a while the kids knew him well enough that he stopped wearing the orange vest that came with the gig. Though he was living out his Mr. Mom years, reminders of his former life were never far away. “I was helping coach my son’s basketball team,” recalled Westerberg. “I had this SpongeBob [Square-pants] hat on, and this kid came up to me and said, ‘Why are you wearing that? That’s not cool. You’re supposed to be cool. You’re a rock star.’ And I was like, ‘I’m the coach, dude. Go do a lap.’ If I’m here, I’m not Steven fucking Tyler, y’know?”

  At the end of 2005, through a
series of labyrinthine label acquisitions, the Warner Music Group ended up with rights to the Replacements’ Twin/Tone albums, and their entire catalog was finally placed under one roof. Warner’s reissue division, Rhino Records, hatched plans for a career-spanning retrospective and wanted new ’Mats songs as an enticement for fans. They offered Westerberg and Stinson a deal for the band to reunite and record.

  Westerberg and Stinson ended their feud and agreed to do it. They did not invite Slim Dunlap to participate. (“He acted like he didn’t care,” said his wife Chrissie, “but he was hurt.”) Westerberg would, however, extend an olive branch to Chris Mars. The two former friends had finally patched things up, after running into one another in the street in Minneapolis. “He’s doing great with his art, and he’s quite a nice guy now,” said Westerberg.

  Though he’d made it clear he didn’t want to play, Mars would turn up for the Replacements’ reunion session at Minneapolis’s Flowers Studio in December of 2005 to lend his support. Josh Freese had flown out to play drums. “And Chris, he was still a Replacement,” said Westerberg. “The first thing out of his mouth to Josh was something like, ‘Man, you almost played that really good.’ That’s what we missed. You don’t have to play the drums. You can just bring the attitude.” The band would record a pair of nostalgic rockers, “Message to the Boys” and “Pool and Dive,” for the comp, titled Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was?

  The following year, when Westerberg was in Hollywood recording the soundtrack to the animated feature Open Season, he invited Tommy to the sessions to play bass on a few songs. Westerberg and Stinson would appear onstage together for the first time in fifteen years that September at the premiere of the film, held at LA’s Greek Theater.

  Tommy, Paul, and Josh Freese were scheduled to play a couple of songs from the soundtrack before a screening for studio brass, VIPs, and their children. “It was totally bizarre,” recalled Freese of the gig. “Right before we were gonna play, Tommy pulled out a flask of something, and Paul lit up a smoke. We’re smoking and drinking. Meanwhile, four feet on the other side of the curtain are all these kids with cotton candy waiting to see us.”

  After the second number was over, Westerberg kicked into a raucous unplanned version of the Replacements’ “IOU,” panicking the event’s organizers, who’d planned and timed the program down to the second. The three of them blasted away in front of a visibly flummoxed audience. “You could see people in the front row plugging their ears and covering their kids’ ears,” said Freese. “Everyone was confused and kinda pissed off.”

  If it was to be their only reunion, said Westerberg, “then it was a perfect way to go out.”

  Tommy Stinson continued to balance his many professional obligations with Guns N’ Roses (whose Chinese Democracy was finally released in 2008 after a decade of labor), Soul Asylum, and his own solo career. Amid all that, he would find stability in his family life. His daughter Ruby had grown up well, thanks to her mother Daune. Ruby would be the first Stinson to go to college, graduating from the Parsons School of Design and getting a job working for rock-and-roll fashion designer John Varvatos. She would also launch her own pop singing career on the side, with Tommy helping to produce some tracks for her.

  Stinson also started a new family, siring another daughter, Tallulah, with Philadelphia musician Emily Roberts in 2008. The couple would eventually marry and leave LA for Pennsylvania, before settling in Hudson, New York. The artsy, bucolic community was the place that Tommy hoped to finally plant roots in. “I want to have a real home,” said Stinson wistfully. “It’s kind of weird to be transient your whole fucking life.”

  In 2008 Rhino Records finally reissued all eight Replacements albums in expanded editions, produced by Peter Jesperson. As they listened and approved bonus tracks for the project, Westerberg and Stinson began spending time together in Minneapolis. Out of those visits came the first serious discussions about a ’Mats reunion. Rock festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza were making big six-figure offers for the band to re-form.

  After dismissing the idea for years, Stinson had come around to a reunion. “We’ve got unfinished business, if we want,” he said. “And if Paul and I can hang out and play together and enjoy each other’s company, why not do it? At least until I hate him again.”

  Stinson was understandably wary. Westerberg had stung him privately and in the press over the years. “Paul tends to make jabs without meaning to make jabs or hurt anyone’s feelings or be an asshole, but it comes off like that,” said Stinson. “We all have to be accountable for the shit we say and how it affects people. If you want to go down that road, you lose friends.”

  Westerberg felt there was something else standing between their reunion: the ghost of Bob Stinson. “The answer to the million-dollar question is yes, when Bob died, something died in me and Tommy, and we’ve never been the same since,” said Westerberg. “And it’s always been awkward, and it’s always been unsaid and unsayable and strange and weird between us.”

  Regardless, in late 2008 they tried rehearsing in Minneapolis with Michael Bland on drums and Jim Boquist rounding out the lineup on guitar. Westerberg was once again sober. “Every time I feel like having a drink, I just take a deep breath,” he said. “I might overdose on oxygen soon.” Stinson felt that Westerberg was unfocused, almost bouncing off the walls. “It wasn’t booze, or lack of it, it was just that he hadn’t played with anyone else in a few years,” said Tommy.

  “I’ve run out of confidants—and confidence,” said Westerberg of a ’Mats reunion. “There’s no one I can really turn to and ask, ‘What do you think I should do here?’ I’ve gone each and every way with it, and I really don’t know anymore.”

  Each year, like clockwork, the reunion offers came, the money got bigger. But as he turned fifty, Paul Westerberg worried whether he could measure up to his younger, more inchoate self. “When I listen to those first few Replacements records, I hear myself, and that guy is closer to being born than I am to his age right now,” he said. “And I think, Could I go out and do that again?”

  The Replacements myth had become daunting, even to Westerberg. The band had become a hip touchstone for successive generations of music fans. They developed a romance as beautiful losers—“a band that could, but didn’t,” as a 2006 New York Times headline described them. “The fact that we came up short is the thing that’s kept us interesting. That is part of the attraction. We’ve retained this mystique,” said Westerberg, who would demur, again and again, refusing reunion offers.

  He would go eight years without playing a show, almost as long without releasing a real record (though he would put out a spate of smaller digital releases online). He almost never went out to socialize, hardly ever left Minneapolis. “I’ve kind of removed myself from humanity,” Westerberg would say.

  “It’s a sad thing for me to see him not doing anything,” said Tommy. “He’s a very talented guy. I fucking admire him, he’s my brother. He’s been my brother my whole life, you know? My brother was my brother, but so was Paul. And it’s like watching your brother just fading away, alone in his basement.”

  Over the next few years, death would brush up against the Replacements repeatedly.

  In August 2008, the band’s latter-day drummer Steve Foley died. After the ’Mats and Bash & Pop, Foley had stepped away from music and gotten a job selling cars. Following a rough personal patch, when he’d gone through a marriage and rehab, he seemed to be doing better, but somewhere along the way he got lost again. He was felled by an “accidental drug overdose”—a mix of prescription pills and methadone—at the age of forty-nine. Before the end, he would reflect fondly on his brief, memorable membership in the Replacements: “Some days I walk down the street and go, ‘God, I was in that fucking band?’ Unbelievable.”

  In August 2009, after months in failing health, producer Jim Dickinson died in Memphis. He had continued talking to Tommy Stinson, encouraging him from his hospital bed, until the very end. Six months later, Alex Chi
lton died from a heart attack in New Orleans. Having made him myth in song, Westerberg would eulogize him in print in the New York Times. “The great Alex Chilton is gone—folk troubadour, blues shouter, master singer, songwriter and guitarist,” he wrote. “Someone should write a tune about him. Then again, nah, that would be impossible. Or just plain stupid.”

  Others who’d been part of the ’Mats’ circle—Suburbs guitarist and album designer Bruce Allen, the band’s early roadie Tom Carlson, longtime soundman Brendan McCabe—all passed on as well.

  Amid the funerals and farewells, the Westerberg-Stinson relationship would continue to run hot and cold. There would be periods filled with calls and intense contact, and then nothing. “We can go years without seeing each other or talking, but there’s a closeness I have with him that I have with no one else,” said Westerberg.

  “Sometimes the phone rings and I’ll hear that so-and-so just croaked, like the call came with [Chilton]. But the call I always fear is the one telling me that Tommy is gone. I guess in my own macabre way . . . if you ask, ‘Who do I love the most?’ well, if something were to happen with him, I don’t know that I’d recover from that.”

  Bob Stinson’s son Joey had not been expected to live past the age of four. Somehow he had persevered through his myriad health conditions, including a bout with cancer.

  Even with the aid of home nurses, caring for Joey eventually became too much for his mother Carleen Krietler, who’d remarried and given birth to a daughter. She would be forced to give up her son. “Carleen reached a point where she couldn’t handle Joey anymore,” said Anita Stinson. “Everyone faulted her for that . . . but with Joey it was a twenty-four-hour-a-day thing. It would’ve been overwhelming for anyone.”