While they were preparing to record their next album, Westerberg brought in a powerful acoustic ballad called “You’re Getting Married One Night.” But when he played the song for the band, it was met with a resounding silence. “Save that for your solo album, Paul,” Bob said finally. “That ain’t the Replacements.”
It was never released, but they did eventually play the song on the road, including one tense night at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey, where a gauntlet of bad-ass mohawked punks lined the edge of the stage, giving the band a massive hairy eyeball. Westerberg responded by playing this most unpunk of songs as Jesperson looked on in horror. “I thought, ‘Oh shit, they’re going to just kill him!’ ” says Jesperson. But by the end of the tune, Westerberg had even the most hardened punkers in the palm of his hand. “At least you fuckers ain’t enemies,” he said after the song ended. “That’s nice to know.”
“That’s still, to me,” says Jesperson, “a very moving moment.”
The band was now disavowing the hardcore aspects of Stink. “We’re not a hardcore band,” Westerberg said. “We write songs rather than riffs with statements.” “That was maybe the beginning of thinking, ‘Aw, I don’t know if we fit into this,’ ” says Mars. “So let’s have a hootenanny here, let’s settle down and have a hoedown and loosen it up and have some fun.”
Besides, the new material Westerberg was coming up with was all over the map, maybe because Westerberg had to write for a tough, diverse audience: his own band. “If it doesn’t rock enough, Bob will scoff at it,” Westerberg said, “and if it isn’t catchy enough, Chris won’t like it, and if it isn’t modern enough, Tommy won’t like it.”
So they decided to try a fresh approach on their next record. Stark engineered the album himself, partly because he had the twenty-four-track mobile unit and partly because Jesperson and Westerberg wanted to try somewhere else besides the modest Blackberry Way. First they tried to record on the Longhorn stage and then the stage at First Avenue, but neither worked out. They ended up recording at the Suburbs’ rehearsal space in a warehouse in Roseville, just outside downtown Minneapolis. Stark worked from the mobile truck parked elsewhere in the building; neither could see the other, so they communicated via intercom.
Very soon Stark began to learn the secrets of working with the band. Bob, for instance, couldn’t play worth a damn until he’d had a couple of beers. “But by the time he’s had five or six beers,” says Stark, “it’s too late.” Westerberg wrote in fits and starts, so the album was recorded over several sessions, starting in October ’82 and finishing up the following January.
“At that point, the band and I were playing games—I don’t think they liked me a whole lot,” says Stark, whose no-nonsense demeanor some describe as “Spocklike.” “Unfortunately I had to have a love/hate relationship with the Replacements where I was more on the hate end, being the president of the label, which is everything evil. Then when I was in the studio having to be the boss saying, ‘No, you’ve done enough here,’ or, ‘Let’s try it again…’ ”
At one session the band got annoyed at Stark’s meticulous recording style, so Mars and Westerberg switched instruments and they all improvised a bluesy shuffle—less a shuffle than a stumble, really—with Westerberg howling, “It’s a hootenanny” over the primordial changes. At the end of the take, Stark, who of course couldn’t see the band, asked them, “Do you want to come in and listen to that or do you want to try it again?” Westerberg simply declared, “No, first song, side one.” And that’s what it became.
“Hootenanny was a complete joke from their point of view—they did not care what they delivered,” says Stark. “ ‘The label wants an album, we don’t care’—that attitude. And that was fine.” But Hootenanny wasn’t just a goof—in many songs Westerberg revealed a sadder, more sensitive side that suddenly pushed his songwriting persona into three dimensions. Underneath the bravado was candid self-doubt and melancholy. Westerberg had injected a classic singer-songwriter sensibility into punk rock, which made Hootenanny a revelation. It wasn’t just power-trash anymore.
Right after “Hootenanny,” the record explodes into a hardcore-style ode to running red lights (“Run It”), then an anthemic midtempo rocker (“Color Me Impressed”), then the eerie “Willpower”; with its desolate echoed vocal, dark melody, and sparse arrangement, it could almost have been a Cure song. “Buck Hill” is a surf/B-52’s homage to a local ski slope; Westerberg reads the personals right out of the Minneapolis City Pages above the cheesy lounge jazz of “Lovelines,” while the Beatles/Chubby Checker pastiche “Mr. Whirly” is a salute to the bed spins; Westerberg even managed to turn a recent bout with pleurisy into the jaunty boogie “Take Me Down to the Hospital.” All the while, Westerberg was coming out with memorable lines: “Times ain’t tough, they’re tedious,” he sings in “Heyday.”
Like the rest of the band, Westerberg was still living with his parents because he couldn’t afford his own place. He’d write songs in the basement while his folks were away at work. “And of course, being alone you tend to get a bit… introspective,” Westerberg says. But when he brought his more sensitive material to the band, they’d inevitably turn it into a spoof, and those songs largely fell by the wayside. Westerberg got around that dynamic on Hootenanny’s striking “Within Your Reach” by simply playing all the instruments himself. With a synth, heavily processed guitar, and a drum machine (but since this was a Replacements track, the machine somehow manages to drop a beat at one point), it sounds like a cross between a Stones ballad and the electro-pop then ruling the alternative charts.
Jesperson was crazy about the song, but Bob, ever the hard rocker, originally objected to including it on the album, claiming it wasn’t representative of the band. Even Westerberg wasn’t sure about including the most emotionally vulnerable song he had yet recorded. “That’s a little embarrassing for me,” Westerberg said of the song. “I can listen to it alone and kinda enjoy it, but I still cringe a little.”
In fact, Westerberg had trouble sharing his feelings in general. “I remember Westerberg in a complete despairing moment in Ohio and I kind of tried to give him a hug and it was just like, ‘Don’t even go there,’ ” Bill Sullivan recalls. “Close, with Westerberg, is quite a few paces away.
“Minnesota boys are famous for that,” Sullivan adds. “Ask the chicks.”
Closing the album, the folky acoustic shuffle “Treatment Bound” is an extended complaint about their lack of success. “We’re gettin’ no place fast as we can / Get a noseful from our so-called friends / We’re gettin’ nowhere quick as we know how.”
But that was soon to change. Tracks off Hootenanny got played on over two hundred radio stations across the country, mostly college. And critics loved the album. “This one captures all the do-it-yourself-with-lots-of-rough-edges-who-cares-we-tried spirit that is the essence of all great independent American rock ’n’ roll,” wrote Elizabeth Phillip in Matter; a slew of critics placed Hootenanny in their year-end top tens, leading Village Voice critic Robert Christgau to deem it “the most critically acclaimed independent album of 1983.”
The musical chairs of the title track, the frequent studio banter, and the home-recorded in-joke of “Treatment Bound” were all charmingly self-effacing, but it had more than a whiff of self-sabotage. Westerberg carefully constructed the music and lyrics, then he and the band nearly obliterated most of it in a shit storm of distortion, speed, and drunken slobber. Minnesota Daily critic David Ayers rated the album highly but made the insightful observation that “it’s as if [Westerberg] can’t bear to be taken seriously, so he subverts his art with artifice.”
And yet on some level Westerberg must have burned to be taken seriously—the man had never shied away from making overt generational statements in his music and clearly recognized his own talent. But when you’ve grown up with low expectations and then the world tells you you’re great, how do you cope with it?
Says Sullivan, “Those guys used to get together i
n the van and put their hands all together and then Paul would say, ‘Where are we going?’ And the band would go, ‘To the middle!’ And he’d go, ‘Which middle?’ And they’d go, ‘The very middle!’ ” But it was all false modesty. The Replacements, it seemed, secretly believed in themselves and yet adopted a loser persona to insulate themselves against failure.
And despite their considerable gifts, failure was easily within reach. The problem was the Replacements didn’t just represent youthful aggression, energy, and confusion—they embodied it. “Without Peter, there’s nothing they could have done,” says Stark. “There’s no way that band could have held together or amounted to anything if Peter hadn’t baby-sat them during those early years.” The band’s shambolic performances were the true outcome of a living-on-the-edge lifestyle. This was a double-edged sword—sometimes they’d be exhilaratingly fierce and reckless, and sometimes things would swiftly devolve into a musical train wreck, the band drunkenly staggering halfway through the songs, trading instruments midsong, bickering, joking.
At times it seemed as if Westerberg and his merry crew were consciously emulating the notoriously sloppy, dissipated performances of Johnny Thunders, who was in turn acting out some fantasy version of Keith Richards. Westerberg, Mars, and the Stinsons were testing the bounds of the old truism about rock & roll being at its best when it’s teetering on the edge of disaster. It was riveting sometimes. And sometimes it was just frustrating. “Unprofessional?” wrote David Ayers of the band. “Sure. Thrilling? You bet. There isn’t another band going that you could see 20 nights in a row and be moved every time for a different reason.”
Alcohol was key to the Replacements’ erratic performance style, and the band was consuming it in ever-larger quantities. “If it’s a small crowd, it helps sometimes because you see double,” Westerberg cracked, “and then you can fill the joint.” But levity like that only sought to avoid the real reasons the band drank so much.
“Maybe the people who feel the need to create and express themselves also need to cloud that over sometimes,” Westerberg explained in a more candid moment. “Sometimes you don’t want to be creative. You just want to be normal and not have to worry, or think, or write. People will then turn to distractions like drugs, liquor, or whatever.”
And then there were the endless, boring miles spent in the van, the countless hours to kill between sound check and show, the presence of booze anywhere a touring band goes. “First thing we do when we finally pull up,” Westerberg drawled in “Treatment Bound,” “Get shitfaced drunk, try to sober up,” and it wasn’t too far from the truth. And besides, getting fucked up was what rock bands did, right?
It was also a backlash against the structure Westerberg had brought to the band. “I distinctly remember me and Bob looking at each other and wanting to just let loose like we used to,” says Mars. “I remember purposely changing tempos and Bob would wail off on some lead that had nothing to do with the song and we’d be grinning at each other and there’d be that little ghost of the past coming up. We’d not only buck the system as the band, we’d also buck the system of the band.”
For a group that worried about losing control of its own destiny, getting drunk for a show was a good way to ensure they’d never be successful enough to be co-opted. “We were very afraid that it got to the point where things seemed to be out of our control,” Westerberg said. “We were afraid some guy would sign us up and make us do this and that. We never really stopped long enough to sit down and realize we can do anything we want. No one can tell us what to do. We were afraid of becoming what we hated, which at the time was a self-important and arrogant band.”
The Replacements were one of the first bands to openly and directly acknowledge the confusion and uncertainty of being a professional musician. “We definitely had a fear of success,” Westerberg said in 1987. “We had a fear of everything. We were all very paranoid, and I think that goes hand in hand with the excessive drinking thing. We’d get drunk because we were basically scared shitless, and that snowballed into an image.”
Eventually the Replacements would become a sort of cartoon, typecast as a bunch of idiot savant boozers. Through the Replacements’ music and the band’s well-documented besotted pratfalls, fans could get the vicarious thrill of being a melancholic slob, a lovable asshole, a soulful drunk, a free spirit. But for the band itself, booze and drugs would exact a heavy toll.
When Westerberg pulled a disappearing act, it was usually to a bar. Bob also disappeared occasionally, but he was easy to find, too. All someone had to do was find the nearest railroad tracks. And there would be Bob, kicked back with a six-pack of beer on the embankment overlooking the tracks, watching the trains go by.
Bob Stinson was given to saying “ain’t” and using double negatives (“I’m not taking no credit or anything like that…”) but was nonetheless a bright man. “You would take for granted he was an idiot, but he was far from an idiot,” says Stark. “He probably had the greatest potential of anyone [in the band] and yet spent so much time polluting it with drugs and alcohol that you would just think he was dumb. But he wasn’t at all.” As Westerberg once said, “I don’t know if he’s the stupidest genius or the smartest idiot I’ve ever known.”
“That was the thing about Bobby—you could never tell if he knew the future or if he was unsure of the past,” says Sullivan. “Or if he even knew what time it was. He would always say, ‘Relax, it’s Tuesday.’ And everybody would look at him. Because he would never say it on a Tuesday. No one knew what the fuck he was talking about.”
“If we couldn’t find something, Bob would just go, ‘Hey, if it was up your ass, you’d know where it was!’ And we’d be like, ‘What???’ ” recalls Jesperson. “Whenever we’d be stuck in traffic, he’d say, ‘Close your eyes and floor it.’ ” The latter was an apt motto for Bob’s guitar playing, not to mention his lifestyle. Bob had a formidable dark side, especially after he’d had a few, that the band, even Bob himself, openly referred to as “Mr. Hyde.” “He was just a weird guy—he was as uncommon an individual as I have ever known in my life,” Jesperson says. “He was just unlike anybody.” “He could be really exasperating and tough to deal with, and he could be just as sweet and lovable as he was,” says Sullivan.
Sullivan kept guitar strings in a couple of World War II ammo cases, and one day while Bob was sleeping in the van, he tied the boxes to the guitarist’s shoes. “And we stopped at a truck stop,” says Sullivan, “and he got out of the van and walked into the truck stop, got a soda pop and some chips, went to the bathroom, walked back and got into the van, dragging these things the entire way, without any recognition of the joke. Would not even give you the satisfaction of going, ‘Fuck you.’ ”
And although Bob Stinson was a fantastic guitarist, capable of putting a song over the top with a thrillingly melodic solo, in some ways he remained a rank amateur. At one show Westerberg added extra dots to the fretboard on Bob’s guitar just before the band hit the stage. “And when Bob looked down to play his solo, he was completely lost,” says Sullivan, chuckling. “No idea where to go.”
Although Sullivan was almost as much of a prankster and reprobate as the band was, it was still his responsibility to wrangle them from show to show, a trying task at best—the joke within the band was that Sullivan always carried a one-way plane ticket to Minneapolis in his shirt pocket. And sometimes the craziness really did get to him. At one point Sullivan told Bob that he wanted to quit. “I remember Bob saying to me, ‘You don’t want to quit. Think of the Who’s roadies—those guys are probably making lots of money,’ ” says Sullivan. “All of us thought something was going to happen here. Because when it was good, it was really, really good.”
But when it was bad, it was really, really bad.
“They were contrary,” says Sullivan. “We were in Nashville and the whole place was packed with country music executives. They played all their punk rock—just as loud and fast as they could until they virtually cleared the room u
ntil there was nothing left but punks. And then they played country music the rest of the night.” Later that tour they played in L.A. and resolutely refused to play anything anybody could slam-dance to. “They would just torture them,” says Sullivan. “We played in Dayton, Ohio—or something like that—and these people weren’t just throwing vegetables at us, they were throwing canned vegetables at us.
“The more welcome we were, the more they pissed on the people that welcomed us,” says Sullivan. “The more unwelcome they were, the better they played, which was cool. Frustrating at times, but in hindsight it was really cool when they would play a better show at a clothing store for twenty bucks and five quaaludes than they would play at the big club in town, opening for R.E.M., because they weren’t supposed to.”
By 1983 the hipper rock bands started to understand there was a history to the music. And as a way of legitimizing themselves and aligning themselves with their roots, they’d do covers, chosen with the utmost care. The Replacements were one of the first bands to do this, only sometimes they took the idea to its logical conclusion and did entire sets of covers—and not always the coolest songs, either. And they usually played them pretty badly.
Through all of it was the unstated knowledge that the golden age of rock & roll had passed by the Replacements and their peers. They’d grown up on arena-rock junk like Kiss and Aerosmith. So, their defiance bolstered by punk rock, they decided to celebrate their fucked-up heritage. They’d do stuff like T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy,” Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business,” and Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” not to mention more hallowed material like Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Sullivan would sometimes come up onstage and sing his version of “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. “If I would not be just a roadie,” Sullivan would warble, “Working for these loadies…”
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