By their second show, they had asked Jesperson to be their manager because, as Westerberg once put it, “we didn’t want to talk to the asshole at the bar.” Jesperson happily accepted. Jesperson could calm down the band, talk sense to them, occasionally buy them lunch when they were broke, and simply cheerlead when things got discouraging. Later that summer they played a few local club gigs to sparse crowds. When they’d finish a song, the only noise they’d hear was the low hum of conversation at the bar, tinkling glasses, and Jesperson’s loud whistle and fast, nervous clapping.
No doubt about it, Jesperson was a believer. “His enthusiasm kept us going at times, definitely,” Mars says. “His vision, his faith in the band was a binding force.”
Jesperson, a huge Beatles fan, had big plans for the band and made sure they were aware of only the finest musical influences, from David Bowie to an obscure Seventies power-pop band from Memphis called Big Star. “He gave us culture,” says Mars. “Peter was the kind of guy where you’d go to his apartment and it was hours and hours of stuff, whether it was Moby Grape or Badfinger,” recalls Bob Mould, “trying to fill your head with all this stuff. And I think with Paul, he found a cooperative subject for his dissertations on pop history.”
Bob Stinson was another eager student—he’d never really listened to the Beatles until Jesperson made him listen to Revolver. After that Bob would go down to the basement and play one channel of the album through Tommy’s bass amp and the other through his guitar amp, playing it loud and distorted—almost as if he were trying to make the Beatles sound like punk rock.
Westerberg felt his first truly good song was a number called “I’m in Trouble.” “It was an actual song with a beginning, a middle, an end, and a bridge,” he said. “Also, it was melodic and it rocked. It was everything I wanted and it was easy to write.” After that a whole slew of songs came, and mere weeks after their live debut, it somehow seemed time to record an album.
Jesperson chose a modest eight-track home studio in town called Blackberry Way. Recording commenced in the fall of ’80. The Replacements had no clout at even modest Blackberry Way, so their studio access was catch-as-catch-can. It took about six months to record the album.
“The sessions were a gas,” Jesperson recalls. “The band was exploding right before my very eyes. [It was recorded] mostly live, very few overdubs. I really could never tell you how exciting it was. And they were 100 percent unaware of how great they were.”
One day was the occasion for a saliva war. “It all started when Bob, by accident, with his intended destination being the floor, spat out a loogie which landed on my neatly pressed denim cuff,” Mars wrote. “In retaliation I shot a phlegm ball hitting my mark at the sideburn area. He then caught me with a goober on the pant leg. So I then hung a juicy one on his guitar. Back and forth the saliva flew when just then Paul, oblivious to the war inside, walks right in through the isolation door, catching the cross fire. Now he’s in on the fray, launching his own arsenal of snot. On and on it went for the remainder of the session and beyond as we dodged each other’s hawking slobber all the way to the bus stop.”
Although this was punk rock, most of the songs hit on themes (not to mention chord progressions) that dated as far back as Chuck Berry, but updated for the Eighties. “Westerberg,” wrote Option’s Blake Gumprecht, “has the ability to make you feel like you’re right in the car with him, alongside him at the door, drinking from the same bottle.”
“And I ain’t got no idols, I ain’t got much taste / I’m shiftless when I’m idle and I got time to waste” goes the chorus to “Shiftless When Idle,” one of many Westerberg songs that detailed the inglorious facts of adolescent life in the late Seventies and early Eighties—getting wasted and driving around (“Takin’ a Ride”), buying lousy pot at an arena show (“I Bought a Headache”), getting a crush on the girl at the convenience store (“Customer”), playing rock music to counteract boredom (“Something to Dü”), loitering (“Hanging Downtown”), and feeling just plain alienated (virtually every other song on the album). The lyrics detailed the dullness and complacency of middle American life while the music railed against it. But more remarkably, the songs took the adult stereotype of teenagers as lazy, maladjusted human beings and gleefully ran with it, nullifying the insult by celebrating it. You couldn’t get much more punk rock.
And there was far more poetry than virtually any American punk rocker had yet dared—when Westerberg refers to marijuana as “a long-haired girl shakin’ way past her years,” it’s a reference to getting tired of pot just as much as it’s a beautiful metaphor for the obsolescence of hippie culture.
With his perfect raw-throated adolescent howl, Westerberg was cool but self-effacing, singing about chasing girls and getting wasted, yet quite ready to admit failure at the former, and sometimes even the latter. His words didn’t take stands, just described feelings that a lot of his audience felt, too. There were no strident political exhortations, no hipper-than-thou posturing.
In fact, you could cut the self-deprecation with a knife. In the lyrics to “Shutup,” Westerberg hollers, “Well, Tommy’s too young / Bobby’s too drunk / I can only shout one note / Chris needs a watch to keep time.” The joke even extended to Westerberg’s handwritten liner notes: “Kick Your Door Down” was “written 20 mins after we recorded it”; of the throwaway “Otto,” he wrote, “We ain’t crazy about it either”; on “Careless,” he scrawled, “Don’t worry, we’re thinking about taking lessons.” Westerberg considered calling the album “Power Trash,” a phrase that stuck to the band for years afterward. He wound up with Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash.
Twin/Tone couldn’t afford to release the album until September ’81. It hardly seemed important at the time, but the Replacements hadn’t signed a contract with Twin/Tone. “They were much more innocent times,” says Jesperson. “There wasn’t any precedent for mistrust in our close-knit little circle.” A few short years later, when major labels started chasing the Replacements, Paul Stark suggested that they “get this on paper.” “And they were like, ‘Oh, now you want to sign us?’ ” says Jesperson. “Whereas in the early days, they would have been interested in signing and we would have been, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it.’ ”
“From the moment you start expending any energy or certainly finance on a band, you should get something signed on paper,” Jesperson says, with the hard-earned wisdom of hindsight. “It’s just too messy to do later on when tables have turned. When you first sign somebody, you have the upper hand usually, so it’s a better time to sign an agreement right then, rather than having the artist rise and the record company goes, ‘C’mon, you guys, you have to sign a contract.’ That’s what happened with the Replacements. It got really creepy.”
Cover bands had been the rule in Minneapolis, so for a local band that played originals to get signed—even to a local indie—was a rarity. And the bands that did get signed tended to harbor art-rock pretensions. So when the Replacements showed up at gigs in their street clothes, got sloshed onstage, played their sloppy songs with a bass player who was still in junior high, and liked to yell swear words into the microphone just to hear them come booming out of the PA, it annoyed a lot of bands around Minneapolis.
“A lot of musicians in town wanted that Holy Grail of a major label contract with lots of money,” says Stark, “and the Replacements were just kind of pissing on that, saying, “That isn’t what we want, we’re just going to do what we want to do. If we want to get drunk, we’re going to get drunk. If we want to sound like shit, we’re going to sound like shit.’
“But most local musicians who were jealous of them had no idea the amount of work this band put in,” adds Stark. “For being an antibusiness band, this band worked hard. They worked it harder than any of our bands.”
From the start the Replacements were deeply suspicious of the music business, and Stark and Jesperson felt there was only one way to deal with that. “We kept them isolated from it,” Stark says. “Th
ey had nothing to do with the business end at all. They didn’t inquire and didn’t want to.” Stark has some regrets about that now, thinking they might have gotten over their distrust had they learned how everything really worked. “But at the same time, Paul developed more of a character,” Stark says, “because of the isolation, because he wasn’t influenced by the outside as much.”
The isolation came at a cost. “They also had a somewhat inflated sense that they’d made a splash,” says Jesperson. “And if they’d made a splash, then they’d sold a chunk of records and they should have had a bunch of money coming.” Which often put Stark in the uncomfortable position of denying the band’s requests for cash. “Is it going to be used for beers or is it going to be used for gas? I had to make a lot of decisions along those lines,” he says. “You wire them $400, and $200 went to the van and $200 went to booze and drugs.”
DRINKING WAS A BIG PART OF THE REPLACEMENTS’ IMAGE. THE BAND IN A TWIN/TONE PUBLICITY PHOTO FOR HOOTENANNY,TAKEN NEAR THE STINSONS’ HOME. LEFT TO RIGHT: CHRIS MARS, PAUL WESTERBERG, BOB STINSON, TOMMY STINSON.
Stark says Twin/Tone’s attitude about the drinking and drugging was pretty much laissez-faire. “But when it starts affecting the band’s business or our business, then there’s something wrong,” he says. “In the Replacements’ case, they were able to define a wide-enough spot where drugs and alcohol were so much a part of the thing, it didn’t get in the way. As long as they had someone like Peter who would get them to show up on time.”
Against the backdrop of straight edge and the new puritanism then being advocated by the Reagan regime, getting wasted was once again a rebellious act. “The alcohol and the drug use back in the early Eighties,” agrees Paul Stark, “is almost a statement.”
Their first out-of-town gig was in December ’80, opening for Twin/Tone’s top band at the time, the Suburbs, at a skating rink in Duluth. They were very nervous. During the second song, Westerberg tried to be punk and bang the mike stand into his guitar but instead bashed the microphone into his forehead, sending blood streaming down his face. Of course, there was nothing to do but smash his guitar. “Kids were skating around as we played,” Westerberg recalled. “I think they were more puzzled by us than anything else.”
They were also trying to land a coveted opening slot for Johnny Thunders at First Avenue. Thunders had been the guitarist for the Heartbreakers, one of the earliest New York punk bands, and a particular hero of Westerberg’s. Unfortunately, a band Westerberg had never heard of called Hüsker Dü got the gig. (Despite the two bands’ ensuing rivalry, things were always pretty friendly on a personal level—eventually Westerberg even collaborated with Bob Mould on some songs; although the tapes they made were stolen from Hüsker Dü’s van, Mould says it was no great loss. “It wasn’t like you’re going to find ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ in there,” he says reassuringly. “Nobody should worry about those.”)
Hüsker Dü had already established a small following of local hardcore kids by the time the Replacements came along, but it was the Replacements who got the deal with the big local label. And to this day, there’s still some bitterness about it. “The Replacements, they played one [sic] gig and they made their album,” says Mould. “They were sort of blessed, I guess. As opposed to the rest of us who just had to play lots of gigs and save our money.”
Still, the Hüskers took the Replacements under their wing. In the nascent Minneapolis punk scene, there weren’t too many shows to go around, and Hüsker Dü often got the Replacements on the bill for out-of-town gigs. And the Replacements began to play faster and faster. “I think the speed came from doing gigs with Hüsker Dü, I really do,” says Mars, recalling his first Hüskers show. “They took the stage and I’d never seen or heard that kind of speed or energy. I thought, ‘Whoa, this is cool.’ I liked it.”
But despite the 200-mile-per-hour tempos, the Replacements were not, at heart, a hardcore band. “We were confused about what we were,” says Mars. “There was the hardcore scene that was bubbling up. We knew Bob Mould—did we fit in there? We weren’t quite sure. There was some uncertainty.” “They were never part of the punk thing,” says Mould. “They were like a fast bar band to me. They wrote original songs and stuff but… It was a different thing.”
And Westerberg just never cottoned to the hardcore milieu. “I never really liked being part of a group or a team or anything,” he said in 1984. “I want no part of it. I get a kick out of hardcore sometimes—it’s fast, aggressive. But I don’t like all the shit that surrounds it, the group, the idea. I like to be alone and have my own idea.”
In January ’82 Hüsker Dü took the band to O’Banion’s in Chicago. “Now, Minneapolis was a little tamer than Chicago in terms of that heavy punk look,” says Bob Mould. “Chicago was a lot more of a leather scene, and I just remember their eyes bugging out when they saw that.”
At the show the Replacements debuted a song called “Kids Don’t Follow.” With its breakneck pace and big sing-along chorus, it sounded like a revved-up arena-rock anthem. And to Jesperson, it sure sounded like a hit. Listening to a tape of the show on the ride back to Minneapolis, he decided Twin/Tone should release the song with all due speed. “I will do anything to get this out,” Jesperson pleaded to Stark and Hallman. “I will hand-stamp jackets if I have to.” His partners OK’d the money for the recording but took him up on his offer—to save money, Jesperson and virtually everyone he knew eventually had to hand-stamp ten thousand white record jackets for The Replacements Stink EP.
They recorded and mixed eight songs within the week. “Paul [Westerberg] and I produced them, for better or worse,” says Jesperson. “We’d give suggestions, but we really didn’t know what we were doing. We just did it because we didn’t know anybody else who would.” It was released in June ’82, just five months after the O’Banion’s show.
“Stink was our balls-to-the-wall hardcore punk attempt, obviously,” Mars says. The music certainly echoes the sound of hardcore on some cuts, but it’s nowhere near as ferocious as the actual hardcore of the time. “I couldn’t write hardcore worth a shit, but I certainly tried to sound as tough as I could,” Westerberg later admitted. The loud-fast sub-two-minute blasts “Fuck School,” “God Damn Job,” and “Stuck in the Middle” were about as hardcore as Westerberg could manage, but they were still far more melodic than even the most tuneful skinhead band. And there was nothing hardcore at all about the wistful, majestic “Go.”
With themes like school and kids, Westerberg remained fascinated with youth. “Stuck in the Middle” is about the limbo of adolescence, but it’s also about the geographical problem of being neither here (L.A.) nor there (New York). On “God Damn Job,” Westerberg yowls, “I need a goddamn job”—a distinctly unpunk sentiment. The subject of “Dope Smokin’ Moron” was all too familiar to most high schoolers. His surprisingly thoughtful lyrics made it clear that Westerberg was making a strong bid to become poet laureate of the American teenage wasteland, where suburban kids grew up in the stunning cultural silence following the baby boom, going to vapid arena rock shows, drinking cheap beer, watching too much television, driving nowhere.
Although more precisely and aggressively played than Sorry Ma, the more hardcore-oriented numbers on Stink (original title: “Too Poor to Tour”) still ring slightly false. “I think it might have been a little more calculated because of maybe not being true to ourselves and trying to fit in somewhere,” Mars admits. “I liked the stuff that we did, but attitudewise and productionwise, I think we were trying to go for something that might have been a little contrived.”
(One of the best moments on Stink is one of its most spontaneous: the EP opens with a recording of an actual Minneapolis policeman closing down a rent party the Replacements played. The loudmouth who boldly yells, “Hey, fuck you, man!” in the background is Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum.)
By the time of Stink, the band was fairly popular in Minneapolis, although they still couldn’t quite sell out the 300-capacity 7th Street
Entry. The band began playing occasional gigs around the Midwest, where they drew sparse crowds. “It was like, well, ‘There’s four people here tonight,’ ” says Mars, “ ‘let’s get drunk and go ahead.’ ” They’d occasionally warm up for popular bands like the Dead Kennedys, but people rarely came to see the opening band. “It was a slow, slow struggle,” Mars recalls. “Still, at that point, it was a good way of staying out of trouble.” Of course, many club managers they encountered would disagree.
After a show at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, a young security guard there named Bill Sullivan decided he wanted to join the Replacements’ road crew and see the world. “I approached Paul after a show and told him that I was an experienced tech, which I wasn’t,” says Sullivan, “and I told him that I drank less than Jesperson, which I didn’t.” Westerberg took a shine to the puckish Sullivan, and they took him along on their first full-fledged tour, their first trip out east, in April ’83.
Although Sullivan’s parents were upset with his career choice, his mother still packed him and the band a cooler full of turkey, ham, sandwich bread, and cookies as well as a garbage bag full of socks and underwear. “Of course, by the time we got to Detroit, that cooler was just trashed,” says Sullivan. “The turkey was swimming in beer.” Thankfully, none of the band ever drove the tour van—that was left to the roadies or Jesperson (in fact, none of the band members had driver’s licenses).
Tommy dropped out of tenth grade to go on the tour; Mrs. Stinson appointed Jesperson Tommy’s legal guardian while he was on the road. Before that, when the band would play clubs, they’d have to hide Tommy until just before show time. “They wouldn’t let him play the pinball machines or nothin’,” Bob recalled. “And you know, he’d cry.”
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