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"I signed a deal. I was a millionaire for one whole day. The money was gone in an afternoon": Paul Westerberg on The Replacements, going solo and the love of rock'n'roll

Replacements lynchpin Paul Westerberg is one of the most lauded songwriters of his generation

A maverick, unpredictable loose canon, Paul Westerberg is one of the most lauded songwriters of his generation. With his band The Replacements, his genius for writing rowdy yet often melancholic tunes was matched only by the band's reputation for booze-soaked performances, where the 'Mats – as their fans called them – would stumble drunk through shows, occasionally abandoning the stage completely. In 2004, as he prepared to release his sixth solo album, Folker, he sat down with Classic Rock for an interview.

His hair is still solidly dark. He sits in his favourite chair, flicking through the sports pages, checking the baseball results. His son’s visits are more regular now, almost regimented; from every other day to every day, now that they almost see the end when they won’t be able to spend their afternoons like this any more. His son brings his grandson to see him, too – three generations sitting there in one room. He looks at his son and he feels regret, thinks he could have been a better father, been around more, drank less. His son tells him to forget it; he means it, too, he doesn’t want this to end with regrets. His son is writing a song about him, and wants him to still be around to hear it, wants it finished before his father is gone for good.

“That song [‘My Dad’] is like a photo in a way, like a snapshot of my dad towards the end,” says Paul Westerberg, on the phone from his home in Minneapolis. “There’s a photo on the new album with me on his knee as a kid, and that’s the first photo you see when you open it up. That’s him in his prime. It’s strange how small his life became, you know: the TV, the bible, the newspaper. While he was ill, towards the end, I was there with him every other day, and then every day. I’d sit and hold his hand. The song was written before he died. I was hoping he might hear it, but he didn’t. He passed in November.”

It’s been more than a decade since Paul Westerberg released his debut solo album, 14 Songs . His then label, Sire/Reprise, knew the value of his past, and hedged their bets on his future with a cover sticker on it that read: ‘The voice and vision of The Replacements’. And, just in case you’d missed the point, ‘Replacements’ was about three times the size of the rest of the type.

It wasn’t an empty boast; The Replacements’ dishevelled splendour leaned heavily on Westerberg’s sometime cock-eyed songwriting genius. With him often irascible and drunk, their live show was a firecracker waiting to go off. Not that it always did. They could explode wildly or implode gracelessly, it didn’t seem to matter a damn to them. Producer Scott Litt ( R.E.M. , Nirvana , Patti Smith ) tells a story in the liner notes of The Replacements’ posthumous best-of collection, All For Nothing , that illustrates their reckless, utterly careless, self-destructive bent.

Setting off to meet them in a darkened conference room in the Warner Bros. office in New York, Litt was literally tackled by all four of the band as soon as he walked in. They’d smeared the walls and themselves in black ink from carbon paper they’d found in the street. Litt concludes: “As a result of my mugging in that conference room, my knee still hurts when it rains.”

It is indicative of the ardour and adoration The Replacements inspired in others that Litt agreed to work with them a little over a year later. Even if he did wince every time there was a downpour.

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When the inevitable split finally came, the band left Westerberg – initially (even though the credits on All Shook Down read more like a solo album than a band record) he was wary of going out on his own.

“I didn’t feel comfortable at first,” Westerberg says. “But the demise of the ’Mats was long and slow, so that when it happened it was fine. “I remember that we were in Copenhagen, and Tommy [Stinson, bassist] saw this poster for one of our shows, and it was billed as ‘Paul Westerberg and The Replacements’. He tore it down and went, ‘Fuck this’. I think that was it for him. “It was odd, I really felt butterflies going up there on stage on my own for the first time.”

Westerberg’s latest solo album, Folker (“It basically means I like folk music, I’m comfortable with the genre. I still love rock’n’roll, though. That’ll always be a part of me”), combines his lilting melancholy with equal amounts of cynicism and ribald laughter. He says the album is not quite folk. And it’s not. It sounds like a Paul Westerberg album: arch, emotive and succinct.

Perversely, it opens with a jangling ad called Jingle (Buy It) that sounds like a disdainful poke at consumerism.

“Actually,” Westerberg says, “ I’m still trying to get it used for the Converse campaign. The whole campaign is home-made ads, so I shot half an hour of my feet and my son’s tennis shoes, and they’re pitching that. That song was written to be on TV as a commercial, as a tongue-in-cheek thing. I’ve come to terms with songs being used to sell cars or beer or whatever, so I thought why not come right out and say it.”

The Replacements always were a contrary bunch. Initially they were signed to the Twin/Tone label (they would eventually sign to Sire). Disenfranchised by their deal, they heard a rumour that the label was going to reissue their early albums on CD. So the band – drunk, naturally – convinced the label’s receptionist that they were at the offices to work on remixes, got hold of as many master tapes as they could find, and threw them in the river. They later claimed they were hopeful that another Minneapolis native who lived downstream in a big purple house – Prince – might see them floating past, rescue them, play them, and reconsider the way he worked.

“I heard that Ryko were looking to do a new best-of and looking for some tapes,” Westerberg says today. “Those tapes may or may not be in the river. What can I tell you ? We were boneheads, we had no control and we had no money, so we’d destroy stuff. We weren’t criminal, we were dumb.”

When not making Paul Westerberg albums, he has found time to cultivate his Grandpaboy alter ego. Paint-splattered and with sunglasses that look like cheap Confederate flags, he cuts a troubling figure. In a certain light he looks like the ghoul at the end of The Blair Witch Project might. Distorted and cruel and guaranteed to give children nightmares, Grandpaboy is the more raucous, bellowing extreme of the Paul Westerberg canon. He released his first EP in ’97, and has managed two more albums since: Mono (released as a CD set with his Stereo album) and Dead Man Shake (released concurrently with his Come Feel Me Tremble album in 2003).

“Grandpaboy gave me something that the solo stuff didn’t,” Westerberg explains. “It took the pressure off being Paul for a while. And it fooled people who didn’t know me at all; some people had no idea it was me. I was wondering, ‘Do I have any worth? What happens if I change my name?’”

By the time of his second solo album, 1996’s Eventually , Westerberg felt as though he was running out of options. The 14 Songs album had received good press, and the shows – including a short run of sell out shows in London – got rave live reviews. But it had been three years since its release, and the label, looking at Westerberg’s radio hit with Dyslexic Heart , from the Singles soundtrack, were expecting something more.

“I was aware that I’d worn out my welcome at Warner Brothers,” he says. And I will admit that I tried to write a hit song, you know, something like Love Untold . And I go back now and listen and I still like those songs, I’m not ashamed of them. But I did try to get on the radio.”

To hard-core Westerberg fans it was verging on heresy. Slick production, however, does nothing to dent the songs; especially the touching Good Day that he wrote for his former bandmate Bob Stinson (brother of former Replacements and Guns N’ Roses bassist Tommy), whose ongoing substance abuse had led to him being fired from The Replacements in 1986 and then to his untimely death nine years later.

By the time Westerberg released 1999’s Suicaine Gratifaction , no one was surprised to find that he’d moved to the Capitol label. Courted by label head Gary Gersh (who helped sign Nirvana) and produced with the help of Don Was, Suicaine Gratifaction was a stark and arresting album. This being Paul Westerberg’s story, it simply couldn’t last. There’s a chuckle and a brief, hacking cough.

“Of course, Gersh had gone the day I mastered the record,” Westerberg says. “He called me at the record plant and said he was no longer with the label. I was about to tell him how great I thought the record sounded. That album really felt like the last straw. And all along he’d wanted me to make this raw record, he’d been with me through the entire process, and then it was like: ‘Where’s the single, Paul?’ I think he was warming me up for the A&R men he knew I’d have to deal with when he’d left.”

Stereo followed in 2002, but by then Westerberg had been worn down by the vagaries of the music business, and – as a fully fledged family man – with the idea of touring. Money had come and gone (“I’ve never really worried about money. I’ve had enough to get by. I was a millionaire for one whole day, and then came the manager, the taxman and I bought a house. This was around the 14 Songs album. I signed a deal with Warner Chappell. The money was gone in an afternoon, literally”) and one final festival show was destined to drive him off the road.

“We were at some outdoor show and we were way out of our element,” he says, recalling the shows the band were playing in support of Eventually . “It was full of kids, and I got hit with a can right off the bat. So I turned round to the drummer, Josh Freese [now with the Foo Fighters ], and we just played this blues jam for about 20 minutes and then walked off. And I just thought I’ve had it.

“The guy who threw the can actually flew to Minneapolis and apologised to me. All his friends had been badgering him because he threw the can, and he came to me for my forgiveness."

His self-imposed exile from touring ended with a solo club and in-store tour that more or less charted the route The Replacements had taken all those years before. He gave his merchandise guy a video camera and recorded it all, which became the DVD and album Come Feel Me Tremble . The solo shows made Westerberg his first money as a live act ever. With no band to pay, he turned a profit every night (“But, saying that, I don’t want to end up in a position where I have to go out solo just to survive”). However, he has already put a band together for some November shows in America.

“The last time I went out solo I did actually relish the contact with the fans. But it’s odd with some of them – there is a small faction of stalkers. The FBI were looking into some people who wrote cryptic things to me. People think I’m singing directly to them sometimes. I’m here to tell you I’m not.”

While Westerberg celebrated the release of Folker , former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson released his own album, called Village Gorilla Head . He'd been a member of Guns N’ Roses for years, so you can see why he might have the time to make a record. There were rumours of a Replacements reunion tour for a while, but it turns out that the two most photogenic former members weren’t even on speaking terms any more.

“No, we’re not in touch. We were leaving messages for a while, and now we’re not talking, I guess,” Westerberg says evenly. “He took offence at something, I guess. The line from his camp is that I’m a lot more difficult than Axl. We’re soul brothers – he doesn’t hate me, but I think if we were going to play together then it may have happened by now. Hell, we could be in the same room and they’d have to lead us by the hand to each other. It’s like brotherly love: we’re not friends, but there’s love there.”

Still occasionally beset by both anxiety and depression, Westerberg has undergone periods of counselling, and is currently on medication, a side effect of which makes his eyes sensitive to light, hence the semi-permanent shades which many assumed was a pose – albeit a good one. He has also started to have the odd drink again.

“People are obsessed by that. But I wrote all of my best tunes sober, even if as a band we were drunk. I don’t drink in the day. I go through those Mats [Replacements] songs now, and they were written in the afternoon, when people were at work. There are some moments on there, some stuff’s fuelled by drink, but that’s like guitar solos that I’d put on late at night.

“With the counselling there was a point where I was having some kind of meltdown, and I did think that everyone on the radio sounded like me. 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. He’s sitting there taking notes, and I think he was just writing the word ‘loon’ on his pad.” He cackles loudly.

“Then he went and asked around about me a little bit. When he found out who I was it got better, and we had a relationship from there. And I feel a lot better now. I’ve sort of come around, and it’s anxiety that rears its head more than depression, but I suffer with both. And it’s hard to treat both. I don’t know what it is. Everyday life, I suppose. Before your call I was drinking coffee, and my heart’s pumping and I’m nervous. For no good reason.”

By the time you read this, Folker will have been released and you’ll be able to see how magnificent it is for yourself. Right now, though, Paul Westerberg is sitting at home; he can hear his son out at the back of the house, his wife’s upstairs. Sometimes he thinks about his dad, other times he strums absently at his guitar.

“I’m 45, and I’ve gained a little weight and I don’t give a damn, and I don’t dye my hair any more,” he says before we hang up. “I saw Ron Wood, and [keyboard player] Ian McLagan’s hair is pure white, but Woody’s is jet black and. You’ve got to get a little grey in there. And as soon as you have a kid, that stuffs irrelevant anyway; he’ll love you whatever, so you let go a little bit. I’m getting to be middle-aged here, with a son, and I don’t regret it a bit."

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.

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I promise if the old guy ever comes out of retirement this joint will be hopping. In the meantime this is an archive of sorts.

The Replacements

Euphoric Recall: A Half Century as a Music Fan, Producer, DJ, Record Executive, and Tastemaker

Tim (Let it Bleed Edition)

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

Sorry, Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash (Deluxe Edition)

The Complete Inconcerated Live

Dead Man’s Pop

Bandcamp Stuff

For Sale: Live At Maxwell’s 1986

The Sound Cloud Stuff

Trouble Boys

Waxed Up Hair & Painted Shoes: The Photographic History

Songs for Slim

My Road Now

Grandpaboy’s Last Stand

PW & the Ghost Gloves Cat Wing Joy Boys

Bored of Edukation

3oclockreep

The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting

Petal Pusher: A Rock & Roll Cinderella Story

Open Season

Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was?

Besterberg: The Best Of Paul Westerberg

Dead Man Shake

Come Feel Me Tremble

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

Suicaine Gratifaction

All for Nothing/Nothing for All

Melrose Place

All Shook Down

Don’t Tell a Soul

Pleased to Meet Me

Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash

Not very frequently updated blog.

The Bible, Road Maps, Pornography, Anything You Wanna Read

Behind the Sound: Replacements’ ‘Tim’ gets remastered

Men Explain The Replacements to Me

Replacements’ gear for sale to support Slim Dunlap

I Bought a Headache

Here Comes a Regular as the Cheers theme

Is This Thing On?

‘Mats Releasing ‘Unsuitable for Airplay: The Lost KFAI Concert’ for Record Store Day 2022

‘Paul Westerberg’ by Bedroom Eyes

Review: dead man’s pop.

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Achin’ To Be
As Far As I Know
Baby Learns To Crawl
Born For Me
Eyes Like Sparks
Here Comes A Regular
Left Of The Dial
Making Me Go
Meet Me Down The Alley
Waiting For Somebody
Wild & Lethal

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About The Replacements

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The Replacements: The Greatest Band That Never Was

By Jon Dolan

T here are days when time can get a little abstract for Paul Westerberg , and his schedule gets squishy. The 54-year-old alternative-rock icon might wake up in his home in suburban Edina, Minnesota, rake wet leaves, then take some Percocet and lay on the couch to ease his bad back. He might change outfits a few times (“Prince is like that too,” he jokes, “it comes with the craziness”). Or, just to avoid the anxiety of picking out clothes, he won’t change at all (he claims to have worn the same socks for two weeks straight). If he has to make a trip to the local food co-op to stuff his Army backpack with groceries, he’ll do it on a bike, even during the brutal Minnesota winters. Westerberg doesn’t like to drive “Speaking as one of the five most nervous men in the world,” he says, “I’d prefer not to die behind the wheel.”

Today, however, Westerberg only had time to put on one outfit, because he has practice with the Replacements , who are playing a run of shows this fall. “It was good to wake up and go, ‘God, I’m late,'” he says. “‘I have somewhere to go.'”

Here, in a South Minneapolis rehearsal studio, Westerberg, wearing a black vest over a white T-shirt and black jeans, fiddles with guitars on a green sofa. Bassist Tommy Stinson , a very youthful 47, is pacing around the room, gabbing about the night before with Josh Freese, a Southern California session vet who is the band’s third drummer. Stinson ducks into the kitchen off to the side of the room, pouring himself a “dose of courage.” “Top of the morning!” he says, raising the cup.

After a couple of vague jokes about needing performance enhancers (“Want to freshen up? Step into my office!”), Freese counts in and they rip into one of their most beloved songs, “Alex Chilton,” a tribute to the co-founder of Big Star, who died in 2010. Westerberg starts bouncing and swiveling at the mic, his thick, raspy voice straining at the chorus: “What’s that song?/Yeah, I’m in love/With that song.” Stinson wheels his low-slung bass; they end on a dime, surprising even themselves.

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“Fuckin’ great!” shouts Stinson.

“Fucking splendid!” counters Westerberg.

“Never sounded better!”

“Fucking fucker!”

“Cunt!”

F rom 1979, years before Nirvana, to 1991, the Replacements had the best shot at bringing the fury and values of punk to a mainstream audience. The four records they made for Minneapolis’ Twin/Tone Records, culminating with the 1984 classic Let It Be , balanced trashy jokes and heart-splitting brilliance, chaotic thrash and aching melody – from the ranting hilarity of “I Hate Music” (“It’s got too many notes”) to the proud-underdog zip of “I Will Dare.” They influenced a generation of rockers, from Kurt Cobain, who sang as though he had listened to their anthem “Bastards of Young” on a loop, to Jeff Tweedy and Billie Joe Armstrong, who said that “if it wasn’t for [them] I might have spent my time playing in bad speed-metal bands.”

Live, they careened toward the edge of self-destruction. “There were these really powerful and beautiful songs,” says Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, who saw them half a dozen times while growing up in Minnesota, “but there was this other chaos always threatening to derail that.” Some shows had Ramones-like velocity and reckless intensity; others were tragicomic affairs where they would drunkenly attempt Black Sabbath and Jackson 5 covers, rarely from start to finish.

Their self-sabotaging attitude didn’t change when they got their first hints of stardom. At their only Saturday Night Live appearance, in 1986, the Replacements drank all day, swore onstage, swapped clothes between songs and fumbled through “Kiss Me on the Bus,” earning the ire of Lorne Michaels, who, as legend has it, banned them for life from the show. “When they were good, they were very, very good, and when they were bad, they were awful,” says Seymour Stein, who signed them to Sire Records. The band’s partying “was scary then, and in retrospect it’s even scarier now.”

The embodiment of the band’s genius and limitations was Tommy’s older brother Bob Stinson, the original lead guitarist. Offhandedly virtuosic, the round-faced, balding Bob would play shows wearing a dress or a diaper or a garbage bag. “He would be onstage in a trench coat and nothing else,” says Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum. According to R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, a friend, Bob seemed to barely know the names of the songs (Westerberg would just tell him to play “the fast one, or the sort-of-fast one”). Bob hung on through the band’s excellent 1985 major-label debut, Tim . But his unreliability began to get in the way of Westerberg’s ambitions, and he was kicked out of the group the following year. “It was the hardest fucking day of our lives,” says Tommy. In 1995, Bob died at age 35 of organ failure related to years of substance abuse. He had been sober for two weeks. “When he was ready to stop, his body gave out,” says Tommy. “That kind of sucked, didn’t it?”

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Westerberg asserted himself as the band’s songwriting auteur on the Replacements’ final albums – 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me , 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul and 1990’s All Shook Down – but the band wasn’t quite sure how to mature. All three had great moments, but they lacked the fire of the group’s earlier punk records. “You’re the young new thing,” says Westerberg, “and then you’re not. So you try to grow, in kind of a juvenile way – you think you’re the Beatles or whatever.”

After the band split up in 1991, many expected Westerberg to find success as a kind of alt-rock elder statesman. He had a modest splash with the song “Dyslexic Heart,” which appeared on the 1992 soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles . But his 1993 solo debut, 14 Songs , sold poorly, and subsequent releases continued the trajectory.

Westerberg says he thought about working as a producer or trying his hand as a Nashville songwriter, but he has learned over the years that he “doesn’t work well with others.” “He was doing stuff in the basement by himself, instead of making records with other people,” says Stinson about Westerberg. “The artistic palette just kinda dries up. But I think he’s gotten around that corner.”

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The Replacements Are Still a Puzzle

By Elizabeth Nelson

The Replacements album cover for Tim on a white background

The year was 1985, Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America was in full swing, and the Minneapolis-based Replacements were making moves. Following a string of critically beloved and commercially overlooked releases on the tiny local indie label Twin/Tone, the band members were preparing their first LP for the Warner Bros.-backed major label Sire Records. Their songs were ecstatic, romantic, literary, and heartbreaking. Their brand was chaos: live shows that were transcendent or tragicomic depending on the drugs involved; albums that interpolated brilliant Stones-adjacent youth anthems and devastating country weepers with slapdash Kiss covers and improvised jams where no one played their actual instrument. Some wag once termed the Replacements “The little engine that could but didn’t fuckin’ feel like it.” But the band cared too much, and now the industry they collectively both mistrusted and fetishized was knocking at the door, proffering an opportunity. The resulting LP was “Tim,” which has been given the deluxe-reissue treatment, in the form of a five-disk set called “Tim: Let It Bleed Edition.” Some forty years later, the album feels like a five-alarm blaze, prophesying an era of corporate-driven consensus and the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing sector.

The Replacements’ studied unprofessionalism had always been a point of pride, and possibly an aesthetic hedge. In a time of carefully crafted consumer products, here was a band so aggressively untamable that no one could ever accuse the group of selling out. In a world full of glossy fakery, its self-vandalizing, clown-school bloodletting was the genuine article. Or at least something genuine. And yet, unlike more avant-garde-influenced peers such as Black Flag and Sonic Youth, the Replacements made music that was a populist offshoot of influences like Rod Stewart and Marc Bolan, swaggering performers who had ridden meat-and-potatoes rock to global fame. However attitudinal the Replacements might have presented themselves, it didn’t take a great deal of squinting to see the possibility of the band as arena fillers. The lead singer and songwriter Paul Westerberg was a punk-rock Jackson Browne, a pugilistic but ultimately heartsick poet with matinee-idol looks. The bassist, Tommy Stinson—thirteen when he joined the band, all of eighteen when “Tim” was tracked—appeared to be assembled in a rock-star factory, with the lank frame and chiselled beauty of a spare member of Duran Duran. Warner Bros. didn’t sign the Replacements because the members oozed cachet. The company signed them because it saw dollar signs.

Thus “Tim” commences with a binary choice. The opening track is called “Hold My Life,” and the decision is between fame—or at least a life-changing increase in notoriety—and something like a tactical retreat from the limelight. “Time for decision to be made,” Westerberg intones hoarsely over a driving pre-chorus: “Crack up in the sun / Or lose it in the shade.” A sentiment worthy of Jay Gatsby himself. By the end, the Replacements did a little bit of both.

“Tim” is a great group of songs, possibly the best set that Westerberg has ever strung together for a single LP, but the revelation now is how powerfully the album captures the spiralling class anxieties of the era. As a hardscrabble collection of high-school dropouts and juvenile delinquents, the Replacements’ four members came by their umbrage and fatalism organically. “Jail, death, or janitor,” was Westerberg’s diagnosis for the range of plausible outcomes for the band members, and, indeed, in the group’s early days, he served as a janitor in the Minnesota senator David Durenberger’s office, an interloping pawn in the corridors of power. Class consciousness always figured into the Replacements’ catalogue— including the looking-down-the-nose partygoers of “Color Me Impressed” and the golf-obsessed surgeon concerned with making his tee time on “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out”—but on “Tim” that rage and resignation deepens. Likely because Westerberg has always nervously eschewed the significant political content of his own work, the press and biographers have been slow to characterize “Tim” as what it truly is: a great working-class treatise whose thematic and musical DNA runs through the Stones’ “Beggars Banquet” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

Take, for instance, the joyously buoyant third track, “Kiss Me on the Bus,” an amorous flirtation and an echo of the Stones’ “Factory Girl” that depicts two paramours who will need to make their emotional intentions clear within the insoluble strictures of public transportation. “Hurry, hurry!” Westerberg implores, while looking for a kiss. “Here comes my stop!” Or its transport-centric companion piece “Waitress in the Sky,” which on its surface is a mean-spirited broadside against flight attendants but was actually a blow-for-blow description of the kind of abuse that Westerberg’s sister Julie experienced as a flight attendant. “A real union flight attendant, my oh my,” goes the sneering chorus. “You ain’t nothing but a waitress in the sky.” The invocation of union allegiance as a source of ridicule is not coincidental. In 1981, Reagan had christened an era of scorched-earth anti-union policy by firing en masse the striking air-traffic-controllers’ union PATCO . As safety nets for the working class and working poor were dismantled throughout the eighties and nineties, a fashionable stance among the emergent class of Milton Friedman- and Ayn Rand -informed right-wingers was that labor organization was a hubristic overreach at best and a Communist plot at worst.

On the enduring deep cut “Swingin Party,” a ballad partially about being economically outgunned in every social circumstance, and partially about the futile exertions of the under-credentialled, looking for work is presented as a zero-sum choice between abject poverty and a life of stultifying dullness: “Pound the prairie pavement / Losing proposition / Quittin’ school and going to work / And never going fishing.” On the track “Little Mascara,” Westerberg demonstrates a trait that was glancingly rare among male songwriters of his era, the ability to write credibly about women. The story of a struggling young mother trapped in a loveless marriage and still dreaming of some way out, “Little Mascara” evokes Tennessee Williams in its depiction of a gifted individual circumscribed by their social context. When he sings “For the moon / You keep shootin’ / Throw your rope up in the air / For the kid you stay together / You nap him and you slap him in a highchair,” the sublimated implications of multigenerational trauma are made explicit. On some level, and to varying degrees, all of the members of the Replacements had been born into a cycle of abuse, addiction, or depression. In “Little Mascara,” you wish the best for the mother, but your heart breaks for the baby. Fear and sadness will be the psychological foundation on which they’ll have to build a life.

Loudest of all, there’s “Bastards of Young.” A generational howl of fury that commences with a literal scream. Here is the unvarnished offspring responding to a boomer generation that, having first controlled the cultural narrative, increasingly controls the political one. “God what a mess / On the ladder of success,” Westerberg contemptuously sings, taking sport at the rapidly receding myth of American upward mobility. “You take one step / And miss the whole first rung.” Like Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” it is a perfect American song, capturing a time, place, and energy that resonates and reoccurs throughout history.

To the band members’ frustration, and also possibly their relief, “Tim” did not prove the kind of commercial breakthrough that would soon be achieved by R.E.M. The album’s famous, strangely echoey production by the former Ramone Tommy Erdelyi was neither particularly radio-friendly nor organically punk-adjacent, and confused just about everyone. The front cover looked a little bit like L. Ron Hubbard’s “ Dianetics .” In a legendary bit of reckless self-sabotage, the band was so drunk and powerfully loud on a “Saturday Night Live” appearance that it remains unclear to this day whether the performance represented a shameful low or a resounding victory. “Tim” peaked at No. 183 on the charts, there being something faintly comical about even bothering to enter the Billboard 200 at such a vaguely insulting level.

And yet, on the occasion of the expansive new reissue, the cultural relevance of “Tim” is at an all-time high. “Bastards of Young” has become a calling card of sorts for misfit stories with a socioeconomic subtext, having been featured in Season 2 of the FX restaurant drama “ The Bear .” The new box set is preoccupied with fixing perceived mistakes: a new mix, a new remaster, a counterfactual history of an awkwardly perfect album. There’s lots of fun stuff on the updated version well worth hearing—scrappy tracks from a demo session with the band’s spiritual mentor Alex Chilton, a typically wobbling and bracing 1986 live set from Chicago—but the perverse net effect is of taking a defensive stance to an LP that never truly needed defending. The new Ed Stasium remix is fine, but it was never really Erdelyi’s heavy hand that prevented “Tim” from attaining its commercial aims. The original mix sounds no more gated or dated than “Born in the U.S.A.,” which never had any difficulty connecting to a mass audience. In the 2003 documentary “Come Feel Me Tremble,” Westerberg is asked his opinion of “Tim” and offers a typically gnomic and incisive verdict: “Coulda been.” Whether he is invoking Marlon Brando ’s “coulda been a contender” monologue from Elia Kazan’s social-realist masterpiece “On the Waterfront” intentionally or just by osmosis doesn’t really matter.

After “Tim” was released, the members of the Replacements descended into interpersonal drama even more extreme than their accustomed standards. The guitarist Bob Stinson—Tommy’s older brother—was dismissed for reasons of excess consumption and increasingly erratic behavior, which is a bit like censoring a sheep for being part of the herd. The longtime manager Peter Jesperson was jettisoned for thinking too small or thinking too big or maybe some combination of both. Remarkable music followed from there. “Pleased to Meet Me,” from 1987, a masterpiece recorded at Ardent Studios with the Memphis legend Jim Dickinson, further sharpened the band’s sonics, centering Westerberg on guitar. “Don’t Tell a Soul,” released in 1989, was the band’s last big swing and featured its most commercial sound ever, a handful of good songs, and the closest thing the unit ever had to an actual hit, the keening “I’ll Be You,” which peaked at No. 51. “I’ll Be You” referenced the group’s travails with typical self-deprecation. “A dream / too tired to come true / Left a rebel without a clue.” An opening tour for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers exposed them to a huge new audience, and it did not go well. Once it became clear that the Petty crowd was disinterested in both its music and its antics, the Replacements played worse and worse every night and tried to quit the tour, only for Petty himself to insist that the members honor their contracts. Petty later borrowed Westerberg’s “rebel without a clue” formulation for “Into the Great Wide Open,” a tune about a talented but vain and erratic songwriter maladroitly navigating the music business. It became a smash.

The Replacements—or at least Paul and Tommy backed by other musicians—staged a successful series of reunion dates between 2013 and 2015 where they were received by ecstatic festival crowds, singing along with every word. This seemed to spook the notoriously skittish Westerberg, who is a bit of a hermit, like his hero Ray Davies, back into hiding. Chris Mars, now a visual artist, prefers to keep his distance from his old mates. Bob Stinson died of organ failure in 1995, at the age of thirty-five. Tommy Stinson turned out to be the true lifer, doing time in Guns N’ Roses and animating his own version of the Replacements’ underdog ethos as front man of the roots-rock band Bash & Pop. Having started working as a literal child, he never stopped.

“Tim” ends fittingly with the ritualistic holding pattern “Here Comes a Regular.” It’s a barroom ballad that would fit as easily on Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours” as it would on Merle Haggard’s “Serving 190 Proof.” The song is distinguished by its epochal opening couplet: “A person can work up a mean, mean thirst / After a hard day of nothing much at all.” A final last call from a freighted time when both a band and a nation hung in the balance. ♦

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I’m in Trouble: 40 Years of the Replacements’ ‘Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash’

Celebrating the incendiary 1981 debut of one of the most influential and adored American rock bands of their era

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You had to squint to see it, but that was Peter Jesperson’s way. Where others heard rough promise, harsh noise, or outright mediocrity, he perceived embryonic genius. Anyone can go back to the Replacements’ earliest demos and retcon them to fit the legend that would ensue. But only Jesperson heard it all at once, in the back room of the Oar Folkjokeopus, the much-beloved Minneapolis record store he managed. Even band leader Paul Westerberg was surprised by Jesperson’s response to their demo tape. He’d dropped it off hoping to land an opening gig at the local punk club the Longhorn, which Jesperson helped book. Jesperson had something bigger in mind: the band would release a record on the hip local Twin/Tone label, which he co-owned. “You think this shit is worth recording?” replied a dazzled Westerberg.

“I’ve said it before,” Jesperson recalls to The Ringer over Zoom, “but if I’ve ever had a magic moment in my life, it was hearing that demo. The light bulb went off and I knew for certain: This is something to pursue.”

It’s been 40 years since the Replacements’ first LP, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash , was released. Eighteen exhilarating tracks spread over a martially efficient 37 minutes, the coming-out party for what would become the favored band of those covetous of success and suspicious of its implications. It came 10 years after T. Rex’s Electric Warrior and 10 years before Nirvana’s Nevermind —a weigh station between those generation-defining landmarks of anxious swagger. It was released the same month as the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You , an album whose pure-trash aesthetics and deep emotional core make it a weirdly appropriate companion piece. It is the jumping off point for the Charles Dickens–meets–Hubert Selby Jr. story of four sensitive degenerates from go-nowhere-middle-class Minneapolis who bonded over a love of loud music ranging from Rockpile to Yes. Born to Run for the ADD crowd.

“I bought a headache”

“Just total chaos,” marvels Dave Pirner, whose band Loud Fast Rules opened many early dates for the Replacements before changing their name to Soul Asylum. “So incredibly loud. They just didn’t give a fuck.”

First known as Dogbreath, and then the Impediments, the Replacements were fortunate to arrive just as the Twin Cities was establishing itself as the flourishing epicenter of American music in the ’80s. As Jesperson and his partner at Twin/Tone, Paul Stark, nourished an ambitious punk and New Wave scene, the supernova known as Prince had emerged from Minneapolis’s northside, a geyser of overflowing talent that brought the music industry out to see what other miracles the Midwest had to offer.

“I loved the Suburbs and the Suicide Commandos,” Pirner recalls, name-checking some of the pioneering local acts who paved the way. “I loved Curtiss A. Of course I loved Prince. I guess I thought every city must have all of these cool bands around. I didn’t know any better.”

Even amid a surfeit of talent, the Replacements cut a memorable figure. Buttressed by Westerberg’s warehouse of hook-and-humor-laden anthems, the rest of the band’s lineup seemed to have emerged from some shadow history of Middle American vaudeville. There was bassist Tommy Stinson, whose matinee idol looks were already in evidence at the preposterously tender age of 14. Drummer Chris Mars was an affable, shaggy-haired figure who always played faster than the beat, which was never an easy task. Tommy’s older brother Bob was an introvert off-stage and a Falstaff on lead guitar on it, his playing as brilliant as his comportment was madcap.

Taken together, they were adorable, needy, and most especially truculent. Even a relatively easy glide path to Minneapolis’s hippest label did nothing to dull the raging, anti-authoritarian edge that defined them. Pirner recalls one other crucial advantage the Replacements held over the competition: “I remember many shows where there would be five people in the audience and no matter what, Peter Jesperson would be in the back screaming and hollering and applauding after every song. There were lots of great bands. But they had a manager .”

“I hate music / It’s got too many notes”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, recording the Replacements’ maiden LP proved a diabolical challenge. With the band new to the studio, turned up to the highest volume imaginable, and disinclined to do more than one or two takes, just getting a usable bass and drum track was nothing short of a wing and a prayer. A few different venues were tried before the band and Jesperson settled on scene fixture and Blackberry Way engineer Steve Fjelstad. He had the temperament and pedigree to bring something resembling order to the proceedings.

The finished product is a perfectly hectic guided tour through the taxi rides, strip malls, fleeting crushes, and petty drug deals that characterized the lives of teenage dirtbags all over the margins of Anytown, USA. A majority of the songs are under two minutes and none is longer than three and a half. “Hangin’ Downtown” sounds like a book report on “Penny Lane” delivered by the slowest kid in class. “Something to Dü” is a good-natured jab at their scene rivals Hüsker Dü, a charmingly provincial artifact from a time when no one ever would’ve imagined that both bands would endure through history. And then there’s “Johnny’s Gonna Die,” a slow-burn reckoning with misguided hero worship inspired by an especially tragicomic Twin Cities performance from the desolate rocker Johnny Thunders. “There was that moment in late ’80 or early ’81, we had all gone to see him play,” Jesperson recalls, “and he was in really bad shape. The show was barely watchable, he was so messed up and junk sick and all that.” The following day Jesperson checked in with Westerberg, who told him the title of his new song. “I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ All the songs that had been coming in at first were rockers. That was really the first slow one that entered the picture.”

A minor-key wake for a man Westerberg considered a role model, “Johnny’s Gonna Die” is as outwardly dispassionate as it is grimly perceptive: “Everybody stares and everybody hoots / Johnny always needs more than he shoots.” It’s Kafka’s A Hunger Artist by way of Max’s Kansas City—a portrait of a performer whose public suffering became inextricable from his work, and those who callously egged him on. It was a prophecy of not only Thunders’s future but the Replacements’, as well.

“Forgot my one line / So I just said what I felt”

As the group collectively mastered their brand of revved-up, working-class glam, Jesperson found himself the repository for an entirely different side of Westerberg. Simultaneous to rattling off scads of Slade-inspired burners, it transpired that Westerberg was leading a kind of double life as a Jackson Browne–style folk singer. Like a Victorian with a shameful habit, Westerberg protected this information from his bandmates at all costs. But he confided in his manager.

“Paul used to drop off cassettes of his acoustic stuff at my apartment,” Jesperson says. “He’d come in the middle of the night and drop something off and then vanish before I could see him.”

Over time, Replacements records would become a Faces-like mixture of rockers and heartbreaking ballads, but that would require a couple of more years for Westerberg to become comfortable with his more contemplative side. In the meantime, only Jesperson knew, and the responsibility could be daunting.

“When I started hearing the ballads,” he recollects, “it was revelatory to me and honestly at one point—I think it was when I heard the song ‘You’re Getting Married’—I was literally frightened. I wondered if this might be beyond me to be able to help somebody with a talent of this magnitude.”

The dual arrangement acting as both the Replacements’ manager and the sole repository for Westerberg’s most closely guarded emotions resulted in a rapport with the frontman that could feel startling in its intimacy.

“It was an odd situation and something that I took very seriously. I think for a while I was probably as close as he came to having a best friend and, you know, I don’t think Paul really has best friends.”

“I’m shiftless when I’m idle / And I got time to waste”

In 1981, America was shaking off the hangover of the scandal-plagued ’70s by virtue of the caffeinated buzz of Reagan-era jingoism. But not everyone was feeling the rush. As multiplexes became the province of pumped-up Rambos and Rockys exporting American exceptionalism, a different sort of archetype was taking shape in the shadows. In June 1981, Ivan Reitman’s comedy Stripes created the blueprint for Bill Murray’s cinematic persona, another Midwestern wiseass whose aggressive nonchalance served as a tissue-thin veneer covering up a simmering class-based rage.

The subtext of both Murray’s and the early Replacements’ rebellion is rooted in the suspicion that the top-down happy talk of the early ’80s was on some level even more pernicious than Vietnam or Watergate. In Stripes , Murray’s character is so thoroughly down-and-out that he resorts to joining the Army as a means of keeping afloat. That he is completely unfit to take orders is the gist of the joke, his eventual triumph the ultimate karmic turn of the wheel. By releasing their first LP, even on a small independent label, the Replacements perceived they were joining an army of sorts: the music industry. They were resolved to be untrainable on any terms.

That often meant going to war with the very folks trying hardest to help them. Jesperson recalls the roots of what would become an increasingly contentious relationship between Westerberg and Paul Stark. “I think that with Paul Westerberg, once he understood that Paul Stark kind of held the purse strings ... when bands sign a record deal, they often think ‘Oh, OK, now we’re going to make meaningful cash,’” recalls Jesperson. “They know they’re signing with a small Minnesota/Minneapolis-based label or whatever. They didn’t think they were gonna get a million-dollar advance or anything, but … I think that they did think, ‘OK, now we’re gonna have money. We can buy new equipment.’ Well, we didn’t have that.”

But for the Replacements, anything more than modest advances were not forthcoming. In the pained tone of any small business owner anywhere, Jesperson explains: “We were strapped. We needed money to press records and to be able to publicize and market them.” Twin/Tone was dancing as fast as they could, but events were moving faster.

Jesperson surmises: “Paul Westerberg needed somebody to rail against because that fed his writing and his attitude and his words. It was uncomfortable. But I think there were also advantages to it.”

“We’ve lost my good thing now”

Minnesotans ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bob Dylan to the Coen brothers have long excelled in depicting the fleeting pleasures and sundry humiliations involved with climbing the slippery ladder of American success. In many ways, Westerberg is rock ’n’ roll’s Fitzgerald—a chronic and careful curator of his own mythology whose main themes revolve around the ethically armored but inherently self-sabotaging commitment to mistrusting acceptance of any kind.

“I think it was very hard for Paul to play the game,” Jesperson says, “because if he really was trying hard and failed, he thought he would look ridiculous. Whereas if he could sort of try, but look as if he didn’t give a shit, somehow that preserved his integrity.”

At its core, this is what makes the Replacements a source of fascination four decades after their debut. While their petulance could be aggravating, it nevertheless represented a genuinely nuanced attempt at threading the needle between self-actualization and brazen ambition, at a moment when notions of rebellion in music, art, and politics were rapidly being colonized into a high-gloss consensus-building machine.

The idea of success and failure as a zero-sum game is the great lie driving the lunacy of our current age. Bad attention is indistinct from good attention and material gain under any circumstance is viewed as evidence of wisdom and virtue. All of Paul Westerberg’s best songs—“Kiss Me on the Bus” or “Left of the Dial” or “Alex Chilton” or “Achin’ to Be”—concern the middle-class striver who maybe hasn’t grasped the brass ring, but remains ennobled by the successes they achieve on their own terms. Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash commences the group’s decade-long rearguard action against contemporary America’s prosperity gospel.

“Kick your door down”

In the end, everything and nothing happened. They recorded three LPs and an EP and a few singles for Twin/Tone before they were lured away by the majors. They recorded four good-to-flawless records for Sire. They played and behaved badly or brilliantly, according to how well their medicine went down. Everybody stares and everybody hoots. They fired Bob Stinson. They fired Peter Jesperson. They turned a golden opportunity to open for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers into an unmitigated catastrophe and broke up shortly thereafter. Following decades of poor health and struggles with dependence Bob Stinson died at 35. They reunited, sort of, in 2013 for Chicago’s Riot Fest.

On their 2014 reunion tour, Jesperson was shocked to hear they were booking the 15,000-seat Midway Stadium in the Twin Cities. The still-concerned former manager felt the need to relay the message that they were wildly overshooting. “Then they put up tickets on sale a week later,” he recalls, “and they sold out in eight minutes.”

All that celebrated summer it continued.

In venue after venue and festival after festival, legions flocked to witness the reformed spectacle of the Replacements. It didn’t endure, but the sense of redemption was palpable, even valedictory. The shows were uniformly great and they uncorked a brilliant “Alex Chilton” on The Tonight Show . They were there for a good time, not a long time. The payday was right. Children going on the millions went to see them.

Mainline nostalgia meets critical mass meets runaway box office. Was it possible they’d been playing the long game all this time? You’d have to squint to see it. But that was always their way.

Elizabeth Nelson is a Washington, D.C.–based journalist, television writer, and singer-songwriter in the garage-punk band the Paranoid Style.

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By Ryan Dillon

It’s a big-time bummer when your favorite band or artist is breaking up, except if you hear that your favorite band is going on an “indefinite hiatus”. That’s just a tease and borderline rude, and when that artist goes on indefinite hiatus no matter how long, fans still hold out hope that their social media feed might tease a new album or tour.

Then again, 2022 has seen previously unthikable comeback stories. From Joni Mitchell making her triumphant return to the live stage at the Newport Folk Festival, Rage Against The Machine brought their rap/rock sound back to life after 11 years of silence on their Public Service Announcement tour, ABBA returned as holograms and released a new album after 40+ years, and Roxy Music set out to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their debut.

Unexpected reunions are becoming more common as this era of nostalgia keeps a chokehold on pop culture but there are still bands holding out. Glide has compiled a list of the bands/artists we hope to see make a return sooner rather than later.

Paul Westerberg

It has been a few years since we saw Paul Westerberg of The Replacements performing in the flesh, his last true show was in 2015 as The Replacements abruptly ended a two-year reunion jaunt. Since his critically acclaimed band broke up for the first time in the early 90s, Westerberg has been busy on an off. He launched a solo career in 1993 with the release of 14 Songs a nd went on to release six more critically acclaimed solo albums. While his last release was in 2016 with Juliana Hatfield as The I Don’t Cares, Westerberg has become internet-savvy and taken his career on a new path. He has released albums under the name Grandpaboy and most recently in 2017, he took to Soundcloud as User 964848511 to release a few loose singles and joined Bandcamp as Dry Wood Garage for a few more undercover releases. While his live appearances have dwindled, there is no lack of new music from Westerberg.

Frank Ocean

The ever-elusive poster child of R&B, Frank Ocean is one of the most sought-after and mesmerizing artists of the past two decades. His two official studio albums, 2012’s Channel Orange and 2016’s Blonde are considered essential to their genre. Besides a slew of singles since the release of Blonde and a select few festival appearances, Ocean has been awol. His last live appearance was at Finland’s Flow Festival in 2017. He was set to perform at 2020’s Coachella festival before the organization behind the country’s biggest festival canceled the whole show. Ocean has since started HOMER, a jewelry company based out of New York City, and just celebrated the 10-year anniversary of his debut album. No word on any music or shows at the moment but if his next album is released just like Blonde , it can happen any day now.

Grace Slick

An integral part of the west coast psychedelic movement, Grace Slick’s songbook speaks for itself. Being one of the driving creative forces behind Jefferson Airplane and later Jefferson Starship, she is one of the first female rock stars and has left a legacy worthy of any and all praise thrown her way. Since her retirement from the music world, Slick has become a visual artist, her paintings and memoir are critically acclaimed and brought yet another chapter to her storied life. As far as music is concerned, Slick has not graced us with a live performance since 1991, and by the looks of it, has no intention of coming back.

Randy Meisner

As one of the founding members of the acclaimed Eagles, Randy Meisner’s heartfelt bass stylings have injected themselves into music on many a well-known Eagles song. His celebrated career is made up of his concise songwriting and uncanny approach to basslines. After his infamous departure from the Eagles, Meisner took off on a solo career and released seven albums from the years 1978-2005. Although he had a solo release in 2005, his last live performance was in 2000 at the Fred Wallace Benefit in California. Although he joined his former Poco bandmate Richie Furay on a zoom concert in 2020, Meisner has become a recluse since his last live performance 22 years ago.

Steve Perry

Steve Perry has cemented himself as one of the most prolific lead singers in recent history. His time in the world-renowned rock band Journey was fruitful, to say the least, scoring massive hits and heading out on worldwide tours. Perry’s membership in Journey has been shaky, leaving the band in 1987 only to rejoin the band between the years 1995-1998. His solo career was maintained during his off periods with the band and he recently made a bold comeback with 2018’s Traces album.

While his classics with Journey and famed solo career keep us in our stereos, it has been over three decades since Perry performed live- although Journey has been doing big business with Arnel Pineda on vocals for the last 15 years. He toured for his sophomore album For The Love of Strange Medicine in 1994 and 1995, the last show of that tour took place in Puerto Rico. Yet in one of the most unexpected cameos of all time, Perry also made a rare appearance at a 2014 Minnesota Eels, this marked the golden voice frontman’s first live appearance in 19 years. Although the rust was there, Perry still sounded like Perry.

Dickey Betts

The Allman Brothers Band was groundbreaking and changed the way bands were structured having two guitarists, and Dickey Betts shared the lead guitarist spot with Warren Haynes for a majority of the past 1990 Allman Brothers Band and earlier with the pioneering Duane Allman. Betts had moderate success as a solo artist in bands such as Dickey Betts & The Great Southern and The Dickey Betts band over the 80s and 90s. His last live performance was back in 2018 with the Dickey Betts Band in Scranton, PA during their short tour during that summer fittingly named The Summer 2018 Tour, yet Betts was also a no-invite for The Brothers big NYC show in March 2020.

Michael Stipe

Besides a few short appearances for environmental benefit shows, the famed frontman of R.E.M. has been silent in recent years. Since the 2011 official break up of his acclaimed band he started in college, which Stipe said will never reunite has recently as of 2021 worked with Coldplay’s Chris Martin on a cover of “In The Sun” by Joseph Arthur for an EP dedicated to the relief fund for Hurricane Katrina. Stipe has also worked with Courtney Love and Big Red Machine for select singles. His last performance was a digital appearance in 2020 at Pathway to Paris: World Environment Day and his last time performing in the flesh was the year prior when he opened for Patti Smith at Webster Hall in New York.

Tina Turner

Despite one of the most turbulent careers in music history, Tina Turner has proven herself as one of the most celebrated musicians as well. With over 100 million records sold worldwide and a resume of chart-topping singles, Tina Turner is considered one of the most successful artists of all time. Starting out as a member of The Ike & Tina Turner Revue show with her infamous husband, Tina Turner went on to have a wildly successful solo career with hits like “What’s Love Got To Do With It”, “Proud Mary”, “Private Dancer”, and a laundry list of more smashes. She officially retired from music in 2009 after the completion of her “Tina!: 50th Anniversary Tour”, the last stop taking place in England at the Sheffield Arena.

Jimmy Page

Another artist that has earned the right to hide from the spotlight is Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. Page’s time in Led Zeppelin has cemented him as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, landing him at number three on Rolling Stones’ “100 Greatest Guitarists of all Time” list back in 2015 along with a long list of other achievements. Following the big Led Zeppelin 02 reunion show in late 2007, Page made waves with the 2008 documentary film It Might Get Loud a longside The Edge and Jack White. He makes a rare appearance here and there, like his appearance at Le Grand Journal in Paris where he performed “Ramble On ” by Zeppelin in 2014.

Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson

Two of the founding members of Rush never truly said farewell but had to know it was coming a few years after their last show to celebrate their 40th anniversary It is claimed that the band stopped their touring career early due to drumming icon Neil Peart’s reluctance to touring, which made the drummer’s 2020 painful death a final nail in Rush, as each member is simply not replaceable.

Since the loss of Peart, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have thrown themselves into side projects, see Lifeson with Envy of None while Lee went solo and found solace in writing a book on the bass instrument. Without Peart, the remaining members of Rush are left with a long and accomplished legacy, but fans would love to see Geddy and Alex do a new musical adventure.

CAUSTIC COMMENTARY: The Lemon Twigs, Kamasi Washington, Camera Obscura, Jessica Pratt, Mdou Moctar & More

2 responses.

” there is no lack of new music from Westerberg”

Not true, he hasn’t released anything in years, or done anything live.

And it’s just as well, luv him, but Paul’s voice is totally gone, let him retire in peace…

Steve, Please explain your knowledge of Paul’s voice ‘being gone”??? Huge fan here! Miss his creative songwriting.

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The Replacements

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The Replacements are a rock band hailing from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States who formed in 1979. They remain one of the most influential rock bands of the 1980s, inspiring everyone from Green Day through to The Gaslight Anthem with their melodic, blue-collar punk rock.

There’s a great irony in the fact that The Replacements began with an older brother trying to keep his younger brother out of trouble. Not least because the band that the two of them would later form would become one of the most notorious bands in the history of indie rock but also because Bob Stinson, the older brother, would later become its alpha hell-raiser. Against all probability however Stinson’s gambit worked, and his eleven year old younger brother Tommy was convinced to stay off the streets by his brother’s gift of a bass guitar. The elder Stinson was already a known guitar player around his native Minneapolis and found a like-minded musician in the form of fellow guitarist Chris Mars.

Stinson and Mars decided to form a band together, with Mars drumming and Tommy being recruited to play bass in their band Dogbreath. However, none of them could sing, so they were soon looking for a vocalist. Paul Westerberg was a friend of Mars’ who lived near the Stinson’s house and would regularly hear them rehearsing in there as he came home from work. He had no idea that Mars was drumming for them so when Mars asked him to audition as the vocalist for his band, he didn’t realize what he was getting into until he saw where they were going to audition him, the Stinson’s house.

Westerberg joined the band as the singer and rhythm guitarist, however Mars and the Stinsons used their rehearsal time as more of an excuse to get high. It was Westerberg that saw the potential that the nascent group had and made them practice regularly. The band booked their first show at a local church hall and, realizing that they were going to take the band (semi) seriously, they changed their name to The Impediments. Unfortunately, Tommy was too young to play, and rather than find another bassist, the band decided to get wasted, play and see what happened. The band were promptly banned from the venue and nearly arrested for drunk and disorderly behavior.

The band still had a whale of a time though, and while seeking another venue to play, Westerberg sent a four-track demo of their songs to Peter Jesperson in May 1980. Jesperson DJ’d at a local venue and Westerberg was hoping that he could get the band a gig there. What he didn’t know was that Jesperson had recently founded a record label called Twin/Tone Records. What’s more, he adored the demo tape so much that he was more interested in offering the band a record deal right off the bat than one measly gig. The band signed a contract with Jesperson and made him their manager after only their second gig.

Jesperson obviously saw something in them that most did not, as he accompanied the band to all their early gigs and was more often than not the only one clapping after they finished their songs. However, since Twin/Tone was such a small label, they couldn’t afford to release anything the band made until August 1981. The upside of that was that it gave the band lots of time to work on their debut album “Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash”. The bands relationship with their manager serves as a good metaphor for their early years, where they were confronted with indifference from most and idol worship from a select few that soon worked their way into the bands inner circle.

It wasn’t until the April 1983 release of their second album “Hootenanny” that the band began to catch some wider attention. The record received critical acclaim from all who heard it, and by the month of the album’s release the band had attracted enough of a following to embark on their first national tour. However, the band seemed dead set on making their lives as tough as possible, up to and including trying to alienate the audience as much as possible during eight dates supporting R.E.M, pretty much the biggest indie rock band in the world at the time.

Their 1984 album “Let It Be” won the group a major label contract with Sire but the band still didn’t want to capitalise or compromise. Even playing an entire slot on Saturday Night Live wasted and out of tune. Soon after the release of their major label debut, 1985’s “Tim”, Bob Stinson was fired for the band for his unwillingness to play on their new material and for his uncontrollable drinking. They carried on as a trio to record and release 1987’s “Pleased To Meet Me”, but for many, the jig was up.

Even though the band were just starting to have hits by the end of the 1980’s, the band were becoming a vehicle for Paul Westerberg. Their final effort, 1991’s “All Shook Down”, was a solo album of his in all but name, and Chris Mars left the band shortly after its release. In 1990, the band began their farewell tour, which lasted until their last show for twenty two years, in Chicago’s Grant Park in the summer of 1991. The bands break up lasted until 2012, where Westerberg and Tommy Stinson got back together minus Bob Stinson and Mars. Unfortunately, Bob Stinson tragically passed in the interim.

Backed by Josh Freese on the drums and Dave Minehan on the guitar, the band are back and playing the best shows of their entire career. Ones that feature more than a little of the ramshackle spirit of their heyday but finally, they’re a band ready for the audience they have. With the kind of back catalogue unrivalled by most of their inspirations, let alone their peers, The Replacements are a band that come highly recommended.

Live reviews

Paul Westerberg cares, as shown by the curses hurled at the cool new guitarist who was all over the place tonight: "PLAY IN F**KIN TIME / PLAY IN TIME, F**KER!" And Tommy cares too, as shown by the kiss he planted on Paul's lips. Tommy's pixie face now looks like he has eaten a lemon and likes it very much. Paul deflected the sentimentality of the kiss and then his expressing reciprocal feelings for Tommy, qualifying it with a "kind-a" and an immediate part piss-take dedication of a pointed song to "your brother".

Wide range of ages at this Amsterdam concert. There was evidence of the older members of the audience regaining their youth to the age level of the young portion. It couldn't only have been the latter that made up what seemed like a third of the audience in a huge mosh pit. The crowd were jubilantly 23 years old and seeing the best band in the world in their prime. Paul's voice loosened up a few numbers in, and the songs were high after high lasting 2 hours. It was, and the remaining concerts will be, one of anyone's events of the year!

Amazing too that it could be so good in spite of the guitarist. Westerberg repeatedly cursed him for it. But Dave made up for his playing on the night by his attitude, which was perfect. He really looked the part - playful and wild - but maybe he'd made the classic mistake when coming to Amsterdam: playing a gig after taking something. He told the audience, "I'm dying up here!" And despite avoiding Paul's baleful looks cast in his direction, he sounded at least injured. But it's somehow right - another story to add to the Replacements' folk history, for instance in Jim Walsh's great Replacements book, subtitled 'an oral history'.

Paul was wearing a very very cool t-shirt with a letter spray painted on each side. It turns out he has been wearing shirts with different letters back and front each night of this reunion tour, and all the letters put together make: "I have always loved you. Now I must whore my past."

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The much anticipated return of The Replacements in 2012 has left every diehard fan with a huge grin on their face. Paul Westerberg still delivers that raspy vocal performance loaded with intense emotion that we all love to hear. Although the stage presence of The Replacements has matured since their performances in the 80’s, they still deliver the highly enthusiastic shows filled with energy that made them so renowned in the 80’s underground scene. The Replacements are no longer performing drunk and smashing their instruments on stage, but they are playing with more focus and dedication to their music then they were in the past. Westerberg is able to still translate the raw emotions of his teenage angst driven lyrics to the audience, and he does so with great precision. Tommy Stinson is still laying down the heavy rhythms on the bass guitar that acts as a strong foundation for the songs.

Over the years of The Replacements’ disbandment and reunion, they have managed to gain a larger fan base as well as a stronger appreciation from their diehard fans. At most of the festival dates that The Replacements have been playing they are acting as a headlining act and packing out their allotted space with masses of fans. Every fan, old and young, is passionately belting out all the lyrics to such classic hits as “Bastards of Young”.

The Replacements are still continuing to impress their audiences with the jangle pop influence of Big Star that they are so renowned at playing. The Replacements have had a huge impact on music influencing many notable bands and pushing the envelope by making different styles of music, and to see them live is nothing short of spectacular.

Minnesota rockers The Replacements delighted fans in 2012 with news of their reformation after over ten years away from the live circuit. Now fans old and new are making the most of the opportunity to see this celebrated rock outfit live performing classic material from albums including 'Don't Tell a Soul' and 'Pleased to Meet Me'.

Although the band formed in the late 70's, the members still launch themselves onto the stage with purpose and energy and seem delighted by the rapturous reaction they receive. They deliver a vibrant live show where they put the focus on the music and themselves as musicians. It is a show devoid of gimmicks and tricks and instead relies on heavy bass notes, blistering percussion and killer riffs.

There is also the appeal of underground cult hits such as 'I'll Be You' and 'Takin a Ride' to keep the crowd singing and clapping along. A masterclass in what makes a classic rock show, the band rattles through a setlist featuring almost all of their singles discography before finishing on an anthemic rendition of 'Bastards of Young' which leaves the audience is a state of elation long after the gig is over.

The concert was great, I had a blast, the Mats were incredible. The energy of Westerberg was amazing. Just a great fucking rocking band. I loved the mix of Replacements and Westerbergs solo stuff. Awesome band, loved them. Heard that there were better shows from other people, but they did not disappoint, I thought they rocked.

Spectacular show...like rock is supposed to be. Careless. Unruly. Ridiculously tight guitar rifts. Really nice mix of the post-punk stuff and the poppier tunes. Acoustic Skyway was beautiful. Never mind blew the roof off early and Alex Chilton closed the show as expected. Westerberg is a madman...and a genius.

If you have loved the Replacements you will love the show. Go see them while you cAn. They may either never tour again or tour for the next ten years. Who knows? Great selection of their classics. Great energy. Felt as fresh as when we first heard them.

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Paul Westerberg

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The immensely entertaining but sadly out of print alt/indie/college-rock reader Alt-Rock-a-Rama featured a hilarious chapter, written by Replacements drummer Chris Mars, called "Eight Really Dumb Things the Replacements Did". That list-- which included stories of stink bombs, eyebrow shaving, hot pepper eating, and the like-- could have been doubled, or even tripled, but if it weren't for Paul Westerberg's songs even such notorious behavior might have been long forgotten. It's fitting, too, as few songwriters are as adept at infusing even the most slap-dash seeming punk track with loads of pathos and personality, and at his best Westerberg remains near peerless in the pantheon of heartbreakers.

"Lonely, I guess that's where I'm from," he once sang, but if you include all the people Westerberg and the Replacements have impacted or influenced, he's got plenty of company. We caught up with Westerberg on the phone, speaking from his home in Minnesota and holding court on a career that often settled for glorious failure while the suckers and sell-outs walked off with all the fame and success.

Pitchfork: This past endless winter made me consider how much the weather in the Midwest plays a role in people forming bands. How did cold weather affect your development as a songwriter? Do you think you would have written the same songs had you formed the Replacements in Hawaii?

PW: Good question. We'll never know, but I suppose I would have. But I would have written less. The sheer volumes of songs have come from the hours of cold and darkness that one spends inside with the lights on. We make our own fun here, sort of. It's not like a constant summer day, like in L.A. I wouldn't get as much done if I was in a warm climate like that.

Pitchfork: People tend to form bands for a few set reasons. Maybe to make money or maybe because they think they have something to say, but it seems mostly because they're bored.

PW: I could add the perennial "women and girls." And instead of "boredom" there's the realization that there's no other road out. It's your only salvation, or your only skill or your only love.

Pitchfork: Which of those things applied to the Replacements?

PW: I was determined to front a band and get the hell out of the basement. Money wasn't an issue. Like, let's go make lots of money! We never thought that was going to happen. But I kicked around in so many little teenage bands-- I was 19 at the time that I met the other Replacements. By then my supposed friends were off in college and stuff, I'd been through crappy day jobs and stupid garage bands. I was determined to make it as a musician.

Pitchfork: Did you feel at all left behind by your friends who left town?

PW: No, because I didn't have that many friends at the time, and the ones that I had were all quasi-musicians. Sort of cats, layabouts, whatever. There was the occasional guy we played drums with whose dad wanted him to be an accountant. The line was sort of drawn in the sand, the guys who were going to put their picks and sticks behind them and move on to something else. I knew in my gut that this was what I had to do and what I was going to do.

Pitchfork: By the early ‘80s, especially overseas, there was this sense that punk had broken through to the mainstream, but at the same time in America, there didn't seem to be much of an idea as to how big it could be. It felt like uncharted territory.

PW: That's true. I can't say it never caught on, but it caught on about 11 years later, with Nirvana and Rancid and stuff like that. At first I thought, what a pile of shit that is. Then I realized, time-wise, that's very pure and innocent. It was a lot like someone aping early rockabilly in 1974, which people were starting to do. And it was valid.

Pitchfork: The kinds of bands you grew up with, stuff like the Stones or Kiss, how did that translate into the first Replacements record? It doesn't really sound like any of those sorts of acts at all.

PW: Having a diverse sense of taste-- or lack of taste-- I loved so many different things. I was drawn to the stupidity and excitement of glam, I had a thorough upbringing in rhythm and blues-- the Temptations and all that stuff, from my sister, the Beatles and the Stones. Each sibling had their own niche, whether it was singer/songwriter or blues or whatever, so I picked up on all that. But the first thing I embraced on my own was popular AM radio. Either utter shit or sometimes great.

Pitchfork: And occasionally both.

PW: Yeah. I mean, Brownsville Station ["Smoking in the Boys Room"]? How corny and dumb can you get? But it's one of the greatest little rock'n'roll songs ever.

Pitchfork: The death of AM radio really changed the way a lot of people were introduced to music.

PW: Yeah. The pop music they just rammed down your throat. You heard the same songs over and over.

Pitchfork: I know the Hüsker Dü guys have talked about using punk and hardcore as an entry into a certain scene, until they felt comfortable and confident enough to write more melodic and ambitious songs. Did you intentionally follow a similar path?

PW: We tried, I think. I don't think we succeeded. Stink was our nod toward that genre. We sort of made our first U.S. tour and realized we weren't the fastest or the loudest by a long shot. We could look the look and have all the black clothes and everything, but we decided we weren't invited to that party, more or less. We sort of threw our own.

Pitchfork: Grant Hart told me how once the punk scene started closing ranks, groups like Hüsker Dü went the other direction: growing their hair out, playing barefoot, doing Byrds covers, that kind of thing.

PW: Out of that came the cream of the crop, pretty much. We had our share of opening for the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, or 7 Seconds. It was good times, it was fun. Some of them were cool. The Effigies were one of the bands that realized what they were, and what we were, but were cool with the fact that we were outsiders within a sort of outsider element. There were guys who knew what they were doing, and there were guys who just wanted to be part of the scene.

Pitchfork: Have you had a chance to look at the art of the new Replacements issues?

PW: Yeah, I've been waiting to see the art. I don't see a lot of "art" there. [ chuckles ] I saw the rough stuff. I thought it was OK. It was not quite the sparkling package they could have done. I think they'll do a better job on the next round, with pictures and things available. I know there are a lot of photos available from people who took them way back when, but I'm not sure anyone went through the trouble to find them. It's the same old stock photos and stuff.

Pitchfork: There's a great quote from you in the Hootenanny notes, back from 1983, saying: "I think this is the first album that sounds just like us."

PW: I remember reading that, and I guess I remember saying that. It's true. It's the first record that really defines our-- everybody stands up, we're going to sit down. Everybody goes left, we're going to go right. There's an obstinacy to us. But also it was back to the influences that were more than just straight punk rock. Punk rock was the key that opened the door, but we played our little white blues and stuff. We liked all kinds of stuff.

Pitchfork: The implication is that Hootenanny is the album you were working toward all along.

PW: In retrospect it seems easy to say that. But each album we made was the one we were capable of making and wanted to make at the time. We wouldn't have made Sorry Ma after Let It Be . We couldn't have. Each one was a progression or, depending on your opinion, a sidestep or tumble forward. I don't know what.

Pitchfork: That's partly what's kept the music exciting. It doesn't sound like you played with any sort of agenda.

PW: No, no.

Pitchfork: But at the same time, you're clearly doing more than just having fun in the studio.

PW: Yeah. The wealth of "bonus" songs-- some of them are good-- show that we definitely had good stuff. I don't think it was until we got to a major label that...at the beginning we were given sort of carte blanche to go in and do what we wanted. It was only after a few years that they wanted us to play...it was funny. They wanted us to play sort of hard rock at first, so we could tour with the Cult. By the end, they wanted us to play punk rock, because it was coming back in style, but I was more interested in upright basses and steel guitars. We never were in stride with what was hip at the moment.

Pitchfork: In a lot of ways you guys got a real bum deal. When you were on, you disappointed the people who came to see you sloppy and falling down. When you were sloppy and falling down, you disappointed the people who came to see you on. You could never make everybody happy.

PW: I don't know when-- what year, what time-- that happened, but it definitely came to that point, where it was a lose/lose situation for us to get up there. Lots of times we would try to balance it. We'd get up there wasted, but by the end of the set we'd sober up. We'd bring it together at the end! [ laughs ] The theory was that people would remember the last thing they saw. We made our grave for us to lay in. We'd horse around, and then everybody wanted that. A few of us got tired of it. Some of the band was very serious, and others wanted the care-free early days. I was sort of caught in the middle.

Pitchfork: Even to this day, when somebody says a band is influenced by the Replacements, often times they're just talking about alcohol intake. Certainly, no other bands sound quite like the Replacements.

PW: Yeah. It's the label they put on you if you don't come up with one. The bands we toured with-- R.E.M., every band I ever knew-- drank and took their share of substances. They just weren't known for it. I guess we were the first-- Christ, we weren't the first band to get up there loaded.

Pitchfork: The Faces beat you to it.

PW: And even the Faces...I've seen clips of them where Kenny [Jones], the drummer, is not out of it, and [Ian] McLagan is not out of it. Maybe you'd get one or two guys out of it. But we'd get the whole band bombed. [ laughs ] I remember a guy in New York, when we first went there. Maybe it was Handsome Dick Manitoba [of the Dictators] or somebody. He said "I've never seen more loose screws in a band in my life." That pretty much summed it up. There's usually an anchor somewhere. We were afloat.

Pitchfork: There's an element of tragedy to it, of course, but there's got to be a tiny part of your brain that's proud of all that, and maybe also a small part that's a little embarrassed.

PW: Yeah, but I'm embarrassed about things I did yesterday. I have no regrets as far as the things we did.

Pitchfork: Every album you guys released, someone would say, "oh, look, Paul is finally showing is sensitive side." But even as far back as Sorry Ma there are songs like "If Only You Were Lonely".

PW: It's almost the other way around now. "Paul shows his rocking side." I created Grandpaboy simply to have an outlet where people wouldn't go "where are the ballads, where's the Paul stuff?" Well, this is the Paul stuff. Paul is "I'm in Trouble" and Paul is "If Only You Were Lonely". I've been that way since the beginning. I like both sides. That's probably the Beatles, the Stones and the classic rock bands. They had those great ballads. I thought it was all part of the mix.

Pitchfork: There's some unspoken rule that you're not supposed to cover Kiss and write a song like "Unsatisfied". But why not?

PW: Exactly. We wore plaid and stripes, tutus and sneakers. Everything was almost. There would always be an addition to the outrageousness that made it comical.

Pitchfork: The myth is that you were tentative about introducing those ballads to the band.

PW: That's true. That's where [manager] Peter [Jespersen] came in. He was maybe five or six years older than me, and his background was as a disc jockey in a nightclub, on radio, and working in a record store. He obviously knew all different kinds of music, so if I had something that was overly light-- not light, that's a bad word. That stuff's heavy, even though it's not loud. But some of the more confessional stuff I would play for Pete simply because I would have no one else to play it for. Not necessarily to get it on the record, but sort of to get it out of my system. We formed as a rock and roll band, and that was the path we chose to take. Whenever we deviated from it we felt, unless everybody was into it, there was tension.

Pitchfork: Was there ever a sense that you were writing songs that maybe even you yourself weren't quite old enough to understand?

PW: Maybe at one point. I think I grew a great deal from my teenage experience early on. Plus, having Tommy be 14, it was easy for me to write kids songs. Chuck Berry wrote about teenagers when he was 33. A lot of my stuff was the opposite. I used to write things that might have sounded better coming out of an older person's voice or vision. But that's the weird dichotomy. Hence, "grandpa-boy." I'm an old man, but I'm a boy. A really old boy!

Pitchfork: Do you agree with the assessment that Let It Be was the breakthrough?

PW: Technically, it was. But they each...time may tell that All Shook Down was a breakthrough. It didn't sell very well. But Let It Be was Hootenanny spruced up a little bit, with maybe a little more attention to the playing. We didn't have to record in our jackets in the winter. Hootenanny was very hurry up and get it done.

Pitchfork: Was the band affected by the bigger budgets you eventually got?

PW: No. With Matt Wallace, we'd do 48 takes but use take two. That's why I've always said he was our best producer. After a couple of weeks he realized that first take we came rolling in and did was the one that captured it rather than have us play 50 takes hoping the 50th would be great. It was not that way with us, and still isn't for me.

Pitchfork: A lot of people seem to pick the Replacements album they heard first as their favorite, since your songwriting is so consistent from record to record. If someone heard Don't Tell a Soul first, I could even imagine that being their favorite Replacements album.

PW: That has its fans. Dave Minehan [of the Neighborhoods and Westerberg's band] always told me that album was by far his favorite. It was of the time, that's for sure. We had the record done and it sounded very much like us. But they brought in someone else in the era of mixers. That's like making a film and having someone else come in and edit it. It can change everything. That's what he did in the mixing process, with that large echoey drum on everything. We struggled against that, but they hired him, it cost a lot of money, and now we're stuck with a record that sounds like 1989.

Pitchfork: Well, every other album that came out then sounds the same.

PW: You go back to records-- just classic records, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" or whatever-- some records are timeless, and some absolutely sound of their day. The whole quiet/soft thing, with Butch Vig and the Pixies or whatever, that certainly reeks of an era. But the trick is to try and make it timeless. The only way that I've found, the closest way, is doing it in a hurry without thinking about it.

Pitchfork: So do you think the farther you go from those early no-frills records, the farther you go from what suited the Replacements best?

PW: Well, those early ones, those songs were very rehearsed. I was in a totally manic phase for a couple of years. We used to go into rehearsal, and I was sick of jamming. I had done that since I was 14. We'd go in, and after a few days or a week or so, we'd start honing the songs, getting them down, the introductions and the endings and stuff. That sort of went by the wayside as the years went by, simply because we didn't have the time. You'd make a record, go on tour, then you'd get done with the tour and have to hurry up and come up with songs to go into the studio. Then you start introducing new songs in the studio. You don't have that time to rehearse them.

Pitchfork: Did you feel that you couldn't afford to remain idle?

PW: It just got to be a big business cycle, make a record, promote a record, go out and tour and play those songs. Then come back, take one breath, and go in and record a record again. By the time I could even write half of it, the band had maybe heard one or two of the songs at soundcheck where we would fuck around a little. But the first record...it's like they say, you've got your whole life to make the first one and six months for the second. By the fourth or fifth record there was not a lot of time to sit around. We stopped rehearsing. We stopped getting together and rehearsing. We'd perform, and that would take it all out of us. Then we'd be done touring and we'd be sick of each other. We'd never call each other up and hang out.

Pitchfork: Talking to Tommy a couple of years ago, I got the impression that after all that hard work, after all those miles on the road, that what he's doing right now [as a member of Guns n' Roses] is in some ways his reward. Finally play arenas, get kept on a retainer...

PW: If you talked to him more recently you might get a different vibe. But you know, that's fairly true. It was a couple of years ago that he probably felt that. But now he's thinking more artistically. I heard a batch of his songs he sent me. I added a few things and sent it back. He wants to be more of an artist now. That's just the way it goes. You're a performer for ten years straight, then you want to go home and actually write a tune or whatever. But he more than any of us is sort of built for the stage. If he goes without performing for a long time then he can't stay still.

Pitchfork: He's a little younger.

PW: But when I was his age, 40 or 41...I was ready to hang it up at about 35. And I did. But I came back five or so years later. I needed six years off from facing an audience. I remember one show specifically, some college, and the applause stopped before I could even make it to the wings. I told myself, I've got to get the hell out of here. Nobody can miss you unless you go away. That's how it starts when you're a little baby band - you have no real applause. You get past the boos and jeers and bottles, then get to the point where the applause was so thunderous...it'd get to the point where we had given two encores and were in the dressing room, with Chris putting his hands over his ears, shouting, "tell the fuckers to go away!" Sure enough, they did.

Pitchfork: Famously, the last show the Replacements ever played, here in Chicago, was marked by this real sense of deflation. Like a balloon losing its air.

PW: We had to do that show, too. That was a make-up for what I did on radio. I thought I was on some college station, and of course I was on [Chicago radio mainstay] XRT. I played "Little Village" by Sonny Boy Williamson, with all the "motherfuckers" in it and everything, and we got in so much shit for that that we had to come back and play the Milwaukee Fest, too! [ laughs ] Not all bands know it when it's happening, but that last tour was our traveling farewell. It was not very fun, and by the end we knew it. By then, it was Steve [Foley] on drums and Slim [Dunlap], who apparently cared less about the band than he pretended to back then. He and I were already going our own ways. Tommy wanted to go solo. Everyone thinks it was me, but that's not true, really. That's essentially how the band sort of broke up. There was nothing I wanted to do other than what I was doing. It's not like my first solo record didn't sound "Replacements"-y. The shock was that Chris' and Tommy's records didn't sound more different from the Replacements.

Pitchfork: It's out of your control, but people always look to the singer as the leader of the band.

PW: It was that one fucking poster in Europe...if they ever make a movie about us, that was "the moment." The German promoter comes in and shows us the poster with me, "Paul Westerberg and the Replacements." In German or whatever. Tommy ripped it in half and said "that's fucking it" and stormed out. I thought, there it is, we're done.

Pitchfork: The reunion rumors have been pretty strong as of late. A couple of years ago you were supposedly approached to play Coachella...

PW: I guess so. I mean, we've been offered...Chris, he doesn't want to play. He's moved on with his life to the point where he won't move back and do this. So that leaves essentially Tommy and I. I don't think we would go back and use any of the other Replacements guys. We'd probably find someone else. That's what's kept us wondering, the magic question: who's going to come and play the lead guitar? We could dismiss it, like we did on Pleased to Meet Me . That was our fucking Let It Bleed , where I played all the guitar. But I don't know.

Pitchfork: People hear the records, and they hear 1981, or 1985, or 1989, but here we are in 2008 and it doesn't seem all that long ago.

PW: It's true. I've listened to all the stuff, and I'm constantly recording and playing down in the basement, and my voice is starting to sound really good lately. There's cracks and scratches in my voice that have been there since I was 19. It hasn't changed that much. It hasn't changed like Robert Plant, having that voice and now singing an octave and a half lower. Mine's a little different, but that screaming voice is still there. It's just a little embarrassing to put on for 40 minutes straight.

Pitchfork: Do the Replacements make you any money?

PW: A little bit. They asked me if they could use "Can't Hardly Wait" for a Toyota commercial. I sort of hemmed and hawed, because basically they don't have to ask my permission. They own the mechanicals, and they own half of the publishing, so if I say no they can do it anyway. That kind of stuff will generate a little income for me, the writer. The records have actually picked up in the last ten years, as far as sales go, so for as much as we put into them we're certainly getting it back. We never made any money on tour. None of us came out of the school of economics. We took it for granted that a rock and roll band gets ripped off. We've tried to shake that tree a couple of times, but what can we do? We never signed a contract with Twin/Tone. That haunts us this day. We were 19, 20-- Bob and I, the oldest and the smartest, we didn't know anything about contracts and shit like that. You look back, when you're sort of idle in your middle years, and think, we should have made some money.

Pitchfork: Is what your music has meant to so many any consolation for missed opportunities?

PW: Oh, yeah. I listen back, and I hear what's there, and I know in my heart, in my gut, that we were the real deal. No one can take that away. You can call us buffoons, or clowns or whatever. But when we wanted to, we were as good as anybody.

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A Trainwreck Turned Triumphant: The True Story of the Replacements

The definitive replacements tell-all has arrived, flying the gold star others glaringly lacked: “told with the participation of band members,”.

The shit-faced, substance-abusing anti-rock star trials and tribulations of ’80s American indie contrarians The Replacements is the stuff of legend, an epic yarn that has spearheaded a small stack of books.

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Veteran music journalist Michael Azerrad devoted a chapter to the slop-rockers in his underground rock history lesson Our Band Could Be Your Life before their Minneapolis pal/writer Jim Walsh documented the lifespan of the Paul Westerberg -fronted basement punks via the oral history tome All Over But the Shouting , followed by its unofficial companion piece, Waxed-Up Hair and Painted Shoes: The Photographic History .

The definitive Replacements tell-all has arrived, flying the gold star others glaringly lacked: “told with the participation of band members.”

Now the definitive ‘Mats—as the hardcore believers nicknamed their sloshed heroes—tell-all has arrived flying the gold star those aforementioned books glaringly lacked: “told with the participation of band members,” specifically resident recluse Westerberg and his partner in crime and high jinx, bassist Tommy Stinson .

Written by ‘Mats fan lifer, and The Commercial Appeal music critic, Bob Mehr, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements is 435 often hilarious and downright heartbreaking pages-worth of a merry band of misfits dead set on destruction: its own.

Mehr’s seamless, no-filler approach traces the booze-soused family tree and lineage of each of the Replacements—Westerberg, Stinson, and his late, great guitarist brother Bob Stinson and drummer Chris Mars —and their improbable path from noisemaking outcasts jamming in the basement to ruling the college-rock roost, culminating with the band’s disastrous major label stint.

It was no small feat wrangling Westerberg—the raspy-throated, brilliant tunesmith who effortlessly cranked out heart-on-flannel-sleeve soul searchers and underground rock-defining anthems like “Unsatisfied,” Within Your Reach,” “Bastards of Young” and “Can’t Hardly Wait”—from his home basement studio to lend his trademark self-deprecating wit and surprisingly razor sharp recollections to Trouble Boys .

“I think they realized that at some point they were going to have to grapple with the legacy of the band, what the experience had been and meant to them and what it continues to be. I got lucky in that sense.”

Westerberg is famously ornery, but as Mehr tells it, he not only became a trusted confidante of the singer-songwriter but luckily caught him in a reflective period.

That dynamic is echoed throughout Trouble Boys as Westerberg, Tommy Stinson and an eclectic cast of characters from the ‘Mats camp including Mars, later-period guitarist Slim Dunlap, longtime band manager Peter Jesperson , family members, record execs, booking agents, roadies and producers recount the monumental self-inflicted fuck-ups and stadium-sized alcohol intake that stained their climb and downfall, even as they, alongside college-rock brothers in arms R.E.M., Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum, became the face of the ’80s alternative rock scene.

Particularly gut-wrenching—and one that takes up a big chunk of this hugely influential band’s self-destructive opus—is the picture Mehr paints of cross-dressing tortured genius and Yes super-fan Bob Stinson. Trouble Boys begins at the guitar godhead’s funeral in 1995 and later explores his tormented childhood at the hands of his stepfather, the institutional and rehab stints, the downward spiral that saw his own brother Tommy kicking him out of the band he himself founded and his post-‘Mats struggles with severe addiction.

We caught Mehr at home in Memphis to talk the beginnings of Trouble Boys , how he earned Westerberg’s trust, his own Replacements fandom and their triumphant, yet short-lived reunion.

How did you hatch the idea for Trouble Boys? The idea came to me in 2004. The kind of epiphany moment was when I went to interview Westerberg in Minneapolis for the first time. I had talked to him and did some interviews on the phone but this was our first face to face. It was a really good interview, he was really open. It was those big life events that make you a little bit more reflective: his own father had recently passed and he had his own kid who was growing up. So that’s how our relationship started. It was a good place of openness to begin a biographer-subject relationship.

That same day I was in Minneapolis, I called Peter Jesperson , their longtime manager who’s been living in L.A. for the last 20 years, and he happened to be there, taking down the Twin/Tone offices. He was like “Come on over” so I went over there and there’s like boxes and boxes of Replacements stuff—band files, studio logs, old receipts, clippings, basically stuff from the road. I saw history come alive before my eyes.

I then had more time to kill before heading home. I went to have a drink at the Uptown Bar—which is sadly no longer there—and Tommy and Bob Stinson’s mom, Anita Stinson, was working there. She was behind the bar still.

That day, I had the experience of talking to the creative side of the band, the business side of the band and the family side of the band. Looking back, the book certainly, or the foundation of the book, was all there and kind of born in that moment.

Which of Westerberg’s records was out at that time in 2004?

It was his Folker album and the period he was putting out a bunch of stuff for Vagrant [Records] . When we eventually started working on the book in earnest, we continued on in the same way, just in terms of being at a good place of him reflecting on his life and being candid about things in a way that wasn’t agenda-driven but really kind of genuine and more reflective.

I read Stinson would participate in the book only if Westerberg did.

[Laughing] Yeah, yeah. I had sent a formal proposal to Paul through his manager, Darren Hill, who’s always been a big advocate for me doing the book. He liked that and was receptive to it but it didn’t go much further. I then had dinner with Tommy at Peter Jesperson’s house. Tommy has a long history and deep trust with Peter and Peter was another huge advocate for me doing the book. So, under this banner, Tommy said, “Yeah, I’ll do it if Paul will do it.”

I think in the past that’s often been his [Tommy’s] way of getting out of doing things because Paul generally won’t agree to stuff or just won’t respond. I followed up a few months later when I was doing a story for SPIN on the Replacements and the reissues that came out in 2008. I met Paul at his home and we did talk and did the interview. Afterwards, he said, “Let’s talk about the book.” I laid out really what it was face to face. It wouldn’t be a thing where it wasn’t going to be authorized but it was just going to be with their participation and support but not with their control. They both really stepped up. At any point in the five or six years I was doing this, they could have decided, “Nah, I don’t want to do this” or “this isn’t going to work out.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSJYZyouek&w=420&h=315]

Yes, Westerberg and Stinson have both refused things like reuniting for years before finally caving so it must have been a big deal when they agreed to participate in Trouble Boys .

Right. Or the fact that they were so candid in a way that wasn’t always going to reflect well on them or be flattering to themselves. That took a lot of, courage is a weird word, but they didn’t have to do any of this. I think they realized they have some trust in me, but also I think they realized that at some point they were going to have to grapple with the legacy of the band, what the experience had been and meant to them and what it continues to be. I got lucky in that sense—that the timing was right, too, in a lot of ways. Enough time had passed from the band splitting up to Bob passing away where I could go to them with the idea for this and they would agree.

What did you find in those Replacements boxes at the Twin/Tone offices? Was there a treasure trove that came in handy as you put together the book?

I got it and went through it. Seeing receipts from the road [laughing] like gas station receipts doesn’t really tell you much but it all informs the book in a way. Then there was clips of old fanzines, newsletters or just newspapers, that was really useful to have. In some cases it would just be a torn page—I wouldn’t even know what it was. I tried to track down as much as I could. And then certainly studio logs and early press kits.

The Replacements during their short-lived reunion tour.

Did any undiscovered photos turn up?

It was a lot of detective work. What I did in terms of finding new photos that hadn’t been out there was I’d find these old college newspapers or these fanzines, see who had taken the photos, punch their name into Google and search them out. Thirty years later, I’d come calling saying, “Hey, do you still have those Replacements negatives?” That’s how that stuff ended up in the book. Even if I didn’t use the stuff directly, it led me to other things that I did use directly in the book where there was photos or information or interviews or tracking people down. Did Westerberg and Stinson keep any Replacements mementos? Tommy didn’t really have anything to give me. Paul actually did come in one day with a file of stuff. It was a few pictures. I got other stuff from him as we went along—family photos and things like that. But he had a small thing of Replacements material that I looked at but a lot of it was some of the same stuff Jesperson had. It was cool he had hung on to a few things.

They don’t strike me as the types who would hold on to band paraphernalia. No, but the one thing Paul did have, and it’s up on my website , was a photo of him and Tommy backstage in Austin with the late Ronnie Lane. He was a big Faces fan. That was something that was cool. There was also a tentative sequencing for Let it Be that he had written on notebook paper and a few set lists. Fortunately, Jesperson was a real pack rat when it came to—or “archivist” is probably the nice way of putting it—collecting that stuff. He kept, I don’t want to say everything, but just tons of stuff, so it was an amazing repository of material to draw on to start and that made things a lot easier.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg9WUm3mYAs&w=420&h=315]

Were you bummed when in the midst of writing Trouble Boys , Jim Walsh’s All Over But The Shouting came out? Do you think it stole your thunder? Jim is a friend and he actually contributed some material to my book. I think he was writing a book that was really from a specific perspective. He was a contemporary of the Replacements. He was in bands that they opened for and that opened for the Replacements in the early ’80s and he was a Minnesotan and lifelong guy there. It was an oral history from that perspective from someone who experienced the phenomenon firsthand and from a local regional perspective, too. In some ways, he was the first person who dipped their toes in the water of the Replacements.

My thing is a different kind of animal because I have the participation of the band but also I’m coming at it with an outsider’s perspective and a curiosity. I’m telling a story from the inside with an outsider’s view so my book is distinctive in that way.

Did you feel out of your element because you weren’t born and bred in Minnesota? Yes and no. Not out of my element, I lived in the Midwest—I spent two years in Chicago so I understood a little bit about that. I am from California originally so it wasn’t that the idea of Midwesterners was totally foreign to me; I had spent a fair amount of time in Minneapolis anyway. I think what it did was I was painting with a blank canvas; I was building this story from scratch so I had to learn about these things, about the regional aspects and cultures and socioeconomic conditions of that time, as you would with any kind of research-based biography or history.

In a way, the fact that I wasn’t clouded by any personal biases or views probably helped. It was a piece of investigative work like any other story would be.

Chris Mars is a notoriously reclusive-type figure who long ago moved on from the Replacements, putting his focus on his visual art career . How hard did you pursue Mars to be involved in the book?

I pursued him pretty hard. In fact, I had done an interview with him in 2008 when I was working on that SPIN piece and I proposed to him, loosely, the idea for the book project. I made many subsequent efforts to get him involved and others did too. But I think with him it’s a hard, fast rule at this point in this life. He’s moved on to this very successful art career and when you are in that world and have reached the level he has, you don’t want to be seen as a rock and roll guy or a drummer for this quasi-famous band. You want to exist on your own merits and have that reputation as an artist be what it is. That’s my understanding of why he didn’t participate.

The way Paul puts it in the book is Chris regards the band almost like his paper route as a kid: he had a paper route as a kid, he was in a rock and roll band on his way to becoming a serious artist, which he always wanted to be. I had to respect that decision ultimately.

I would have loved to have had more input from him but at the same time I did do that interview with him and I was forwarded several long, unpublished interviews with him. It just becomes another challenge to make him whole and a fully fleshed-out character in the book. The same thing with Bob Stinson; obviously, Bob wasn’t around for me to talk to but I had to sculpt him as a piece of the book just the same.

“If you go back and look back at your life in the painstaking way that I forced [Westerberg] to [laughing] you can’t help but to have some regrets, look at some things nostalgically or sadly, people you have lost or mistakes you’ve made.”

Do you think Mars not participating isn’t about his art career but he still carries resentment on how he was treated by Westerberg and ultimately kicked out of the band?

I don’t know, but the evidence I have is that is not the case. He participated in the Songs for Slim thing although he did it by himself and he signed some stuff with Paul. The last couple of years with Chris in the band weren’t always the happiest and the way it ended certainly wasn’t so maybe there’s lingering animus there.

Ultimately, the guy has moved on to a different life. He talks about it. He says, “You know, I’ve lived two lives.” He’s so fully ensconced in his current life that I don’t think he wants, or needs, to go back to that old life—not to get on stage with them or to participate in a book about them. But I hope that he still comes through in the book and his experience because he was an integral part of the band, at least for a number of those years while he was in it before he started to fade out of the picture.

What about your relationship with Westerberg?

We established a working relationship and as acquaintances. It wasn’t probably until I really started the book and more seriously talking about it in ’08 or ’09 that we developed some kind of a significant relationship.

Did you actually witness Westerberg becoming more reflective about the band and him finally coming to terms with the legacy of the Replacements?

It’s funny because the book took so long and so much happened along the way, including the band reuniting, that I think his feelings about it changed over time. That was part of my research—to always go back and synthesize new and old material. What was Paul saying in 1985 about a certain topic compared to what he’s saying in 2011 and see what feels more true.

In hindsight when you are reflective, your opinions can be shaped to change differently and so much of this book I was trying to be in the moment in terms of telling their story. There’s a fine line going back and forth between those two approaches. I think we developed a trust certainly. At any point, he could have said “no” and shut me out and there were certain points that he probably wanted to.

I think, ultimately, both him and Tommy saw that I was doing the work that, in between the times that I would go talk to them every year, I was interviewing hundreds of people and taking the process and the project very seriously. I think they ended up sensing that and they were going to be serious with their part of the process as well.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvggqOHKPco&w=420&h=315]

Did you get a vibe from Westerberg that he had regrets about how he operated in the Replacements, particularly their self-sabotage M.O.?

I think a lot of that was present maybe more early in the process of doing the book. I think the reunion validated the legacy of the band and Paul’s feelings about it. I think for him, certainly in the ’90s, the band cast a very long shadow and in some ways was a millstone around his neck.

In the 2000s when he kind of went away and then came back as this indie artist back in his basement making interesting solo records, he started to ease up. By the 2000s and by the time of the reunion, both him and the band were in a better place in terms of accepting and valuing what it is they had gone through and what they had created. I think his feelings about the band have changed over time, and in some ways always will, because the band has a life of its own even beyond anything he and Tommy have to do with it.

In general, of course, you go back and look back in your life in the painstaking way that I forced him to do [laughing] and you can’t help but to have some regrets, look at some things nostalgically or sadly, people you have lost or mistakes you’ve made. Can you peg one thing as the Replacements biggest fuck-up that prevented them from being in a similar stratosphere of success as R.E.M?

I feel like, and it’s probably my tendency too, to try to unlock that mystery with a single, easy answer. People tend to blame it on the band and the element of self-sabotage and the things that would impede their career. But I don’t think it any one reason why during their actual original career why they didn’t become successful. There was probably half a dozen reasons.

You could point to things as big as the state of rock radio at the time, the fact that they were one of the early alternative bands being marketed and people at the record company and in the business in general hadn’t figured out how to do that—they were still working very much a conventional ’70s model even though they were in the ’80s in terms of how you broke bands.

“I don’t think it was any one reason during their actual original career why they didn’t become successful. There was probably half a dozen reasons.”

Some of it might have been production on particular records or timing of the way things that are released. It boils down to timing and during their career the Replacements’ timing wasn’t great.

Certainly, they didn’t help themselves. Ultimately, their moment and their victory was a much bigger one and one that has come over these last 25 years since they broke up. To see where they’re at now that, in 2013 or 2014 or 2015, they could go and fill a sports stadium like they did in Minneapolis or in New York and have 10 or 15,000 people singing back their songs to them, I don’t want to say they were playing the long game but that ended up being the case. Their success came over time rather than in that moment.

Do you think the reunion was genuine or a cash grab, or a little bit of both?

I think it was pretty genuine. In the whole time I was working on the book, as early as ’08, there was always talk about the reunion. It was certainly there in the background and the offers would come in.

Paul wouldn’t commit to doing it, in part because he was worried about damaging this legacy that had grown in their absence after they had broke up. I think part of it was it might have felt mercenary but what ultimately happened and drew them together was the fact that they first got back together in 2012 to work on the Songs for Slim project. Slim had suffered a stroke and they were working on raising money for him. I think it gave the reunion effort a noble cause to go out.

I think also Paul and Tommy realized at that point there’s some sense of their own mortality. I mean, Slim’s alive but [they saw] how frail and delicate life is. How many more years and how many more chances will they have to do it? The bond between them, musically and personally, was really strong that they weren’t not going to get back together and do something at least for one more go ‘round. I think just the stuff with Slim, the passing of Bob and then Steve Foley kind of made them think, “Well, it’s now or never so let’s do it.”

The reunion came to fruition in 2012 while you were still working on the book. Did you think to yourself “Score!” knowing how a Replacements reunion would add such a crucial dimension to the story?

[Laughing] I was thinking of it more as it giving me an ending for the book. I didn’t have what felt like an ending. It was ’91 and they had done these little things here and there together over the years. But it certainly felt like it was more of a real ending for the book—potentially. Of course, when I started in late-2013, I didn’t know how it was going to turn out and that’s why the book ended up dragging on and I needed to see, well, where is this gonna go?

Obviously, by last summer, it ended at a natural point so I was like, “O.K., at least this is a full stop period even if it’s not the end of their story necessarily, it makes sense for purposes of the narrative.” I did go to a bunch of the [reunion] shows and I thought they were amazing. I was lucky and certainly excited but at that point I wasn’t completely done with the book. It became a weird thing like, “where is thing gonna go?” [Laughing]

Let’s talk about your history and fandom with the Replacements. When did you first discover them?

I saw them before I really heard them. I happened to catch the Saturday Night Live appearance in January of ’86 as a kid. Even though I didn’t know who they were, I knew instantly that I loved it. I could tell, even at that point, there was something so different and weird and powerful about their energy and the way they conducted themselves on that stage and in that moment. That stuck with me for a couple of years; I always remembered this band. Then a couple of years later when I got into the records and with Pleased to Meet Me , it all made sense.

When did you first see the ‘Mats live?

I didn’t see them until the last two tours because I was still too young. When I saw them on SNL I would have been 11 or 12. I did see them twice actually, high school age. I saw them open for [Tom] Petty in ’89 and on the last tour in ’91. I did see them a couple of times and basically was just a fan, and like most Replacements fans there’s no such thing as a casual Replacements fan; I was pretty hardcore. Eventually, I started writing about them and their solo projects when I became a music critic in the lat-’90s. So I worked my way up to the position of being the person who might be able to get to tell this story.

In putting together the book do you think you missed the boat by having not seen them live until Don’t Tell A Soul was in ’89? No, there was enough footage where I saw interviews with Bob [Stinson] late in his life to very early footage of the band that I had access to where I got the visual component and I understood it. Ultimately, it was about people who were there and people who were affected in that moment and how they understood it. If I grasped that, and so far everybody has said that I did nail it—both the early Minneapolis stuff and the later Warner Bros. years stuff—then I’m happy with it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFKKEeDshrc&w=420&h=315]

You hit on the show in ’89 when the ‘Mats played the Beacon Theater in New York for Don’t Tell A Soul and Johnny Thunders opened up. There’s a whole episode with Thunders in the book. It was a funny thing because Tommy had a whole thing with Thunders playing his songs a little straight. At that point, Thunders was doing a little bit more of like a cabaret act, having seen the success David Johansen had with the Buster Poindexter thing. So Thunders was playing with Patti Palladin and playing with a horn section. Because Tommy was a little bit of a rock and roll purist, he wanted the real Heartbreakers Johnny Thunders. There’s descriptions of that plus the Replacements had a whole legacy with Thunders going back to “Johnny’s Gonna Die.”

I assume Westerberg must have been stoked having Johnny Thunders tabbed for an opening slot.

Oh, yeah, because going back, he wrote that song [“Johnny’s Gonna Die”] and originally the Replacements, very early on, were trying to get a gig opening for Gang War, Thunders’ band with Wayne Kramer [MC5]. They didn’t get it but Paul went to the show that night and Thunders was so out of it. That was the inspiration for “Johnny’s Gonna Die.” Then nine years later they got Johnny opening up for him. Do you wish you had seen the ‘Mats with Bob Stinson?

Oh, sure. Of course I would have love to but all these shows you write about, research, you hear bootlegs of or board takes, there’s some things I would have loved to have been at. But I feel like after doing the book and spending seven years with these people, these stories and with this music, I’ve lived the experience.

Finally, how did you decide on the band pic that graces the cover of the book?

That’s a photo by a guy named Greg Helgeson. He’s really the first photographer who shot them. He did the earliest photos of them and the band shots for the label for Twin/Tone and he shot the photo that was used on the first album cover, Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash . He had a bunch of stuff and a lot it that people hadn’t seen.

That photo actually had been used for a limited promo poster that was probably from about 1984. They printed maybe a hundred so it’s not something that has been widely seen. There’s just something so powerful about their eye contact and how young they look. You can see Bob’s tattoo and Paul’s cigarette, their haircuts, Chris’ peach fuzz growing and just Tommy looking he’s about 10 years old. Visually, it was the one that jumped out and said, “Yeah. That’s the cover.”

Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements is out now via Da Capo Press .

Bob Mehr will be appearing at these two local events:

On Saturday, June 4, at 8 p.m. see Bob Mehr in conversation with Replacements A&R man Darren Hill at Little City Books (100 Bloomfield Street, Hoboken, N.J.), plus ‘Mats music performed by Freedy Johnston (with Dave Schramm), Glenn Morrow’s Cry for Help, The Dead Wicks, Jennifer O’Connor and more.

On Wednesday, June 8, Bob Mehr will be in conversation with musician/comedian Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Bob Mould Band, Scharpling & Wurster) at The Strand (828 Broadway, NYC) .

A Trainwreck Turned Triumphant: The True Story of the Replacements

SEE ALSO : Inside the Save Venice La Primavera Gala With Ava Dash

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Paul Westerberg: The Art of Self-Destruction in 12 Easy Steps

How do you build a name for yourself (and your band) by trying your best not to succeed? If you have any doubts, you just may try and ask Paul Westerberg , the force who lead The Replacements , one of the best and most creative bands of the ’80s American indie rock scene.

It seems that both Westerberg and his then bandmates were trying to live and play their music by the motto, “dysfunctionality equals authenticity.” The group was known for their chaotic and unpredictable live performances, which often resulted in them being booed off the stage.

Paul Westerberg: The Art of Self-Destruction in 12 Easy Steps | Features | LIVING LIFE FEARLESS

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, The Replacements built a devoted following among music fans who appreciated their raw talent and DIY attitude. As Rolling Stone notes, “[t]hey were the scream of a generation that didn’t even know why it felt like screaming – attacking the status quo with equal parts drunken abandon and divine inspiration.”

Known for their chaotic and unpredictable live performances

No wonder Trouble Boys , Bob Mehr’s book about the band, bore such a title, and in the tradition the band operated, the planned film based on the book never came about.

Westerberg has continued his career as a solo artist after The Replacements disbanded in 1991, and he has remained true to his iconoclastic spirit. For example, in 2005, he released an album called Come Feel Me Tremble , which consisted of 31 tracks that were recorded in just six days.

He has also collaborated with a number of other musicians over the years, including The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and quite a few others.

Give up on your dreams, they’ll only disappoint you anyway.

When did it all start? Actually, while Westerberg was working as a janitor at a Minneapolis printing plant. He started writing songs and playing them at local clubs with his friends Tommy Stinson (bass) and Chris Mars (drums). The Replacements were born.

The band’s first album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash , was released in 1981 when Westerberg was just 21 years old. It was a raw and unpolished record that perfectly captured The Replacements’ DIY punk aesthetic. The album’s standout tracks included the anthemic “I’m in Trouble” and the raucous “Kick Your Door Down.”

Despite its lo-fi production values, Sorry Ma was an instant underground classic, cementing The Replacements’ reputation.

Talking about the band’s beginnings, Westerberg told an interviewer: “They didn’t even know what punk was. They didn’t like punk. Chris had hair down to his shoulders.”

Peter Jasperson, the co-founder of Minneapolis’ Twin/Tone Records, was enamored with the band, pleading with the label to release their song “Kids Don’t Follow,” even if he had to print the jacket himself. As the story goes, the partners agreed to fund the recording, but Jesperson and virtually everyone he knew had to hand-stamp ten thousand white record jackets.

The Replacements finally had their record ( Stink , 1982), and though it didn’t sell well, the group’s live shows were becoming the stuff of legend. The band’s wild onstage antics and willingness to play any gig offered – no matter how sleazy the venue – quickly gained them a devoted following among Minneapolis music fans.

Let go of the past, it’s not worth holding onto

The Replacements began to distance themselves from the hardcore punk scene after the release of Stink . “We write songs rather than riffs with statements,” said Westerberg later on.

Many fans wondered how their follow-up, Hootenanny got its name. It turns out that Stark, one of the co-owners of Twin/Tone who recorded the album had a meticulous approach to recording, widely contrasting the band’s haphazard approach at the time, something that was quite frustrating for Westerberg and co.

In one session, Mars and Westerberg switched instruments, and the band began to improvise, with Westerberg repeatedly shouting, “It’s a hootenanny.” The band then declared it to be “side one, track one” of the new album. The Replacements would often play songs live before they had time to learn them properly, which gave their concerts a sense of spontaneity. Hootenanny was The Replacements’ most successful album, selling over 200,000 copies.

The Replacements would often play songs live before they had time to learn them properly

While The Replacements were on tour to promote Hootenanny , Bob Stinson was kicked out of the band due to his increasing alcoholism. His replacement was Slim Dunlap, who had been The Replacements’ soundman and occasional guitar player since 1981. The tour ended with The Replacements playing at Max’s Kansas City in New York with The Ramones.

By the following year, and their fourth album, Let It Be , Westerberg and The Replacements were further letting go of the past. The album, which featured the Westerberg-penned anthems “I Will Dare” and “Unsatisfied,” established The Replacements as one of the most exciting punk indie bands around, with the punk tag slowly dropping into the background and Westerberg and the band finding inspiration elsewhere, from heavy metal and blues to power pop.

Don’t be afraid to alienate people with your choices

Tim , the album that followed in 1985 was The Replacement’s first release for a major label (Sire). The change in labels brought with it a more polished sound, but The Replacements were still The Replacements. The songs were as raw and personal as anything Westerberg had written before, and the album included one of The Replacement’s most enduring songs, “Bastards of Young.”

And then came Pleased to Meet Me . It was an album that was met with absolute acclaim and is now considered one of the rock music masterpieces. Westerberg was the dominant figure on the album, with his singing, guitar playing, and primarily, his ever-expanding songwriting.

As far as the acclaim goes, the last two albums under The Replacement tag, Don’t Tell A Soul (1989) and All Shook Down (1990) didn’t fare so well, as far as critical acclaim was concerned, at least at the time. The band was falling apart, and it was practically all Westerberg under The Replacement tag.

A Weekend at Wrestlemania 40: Jason Kelce, Terrible Parking Lot T-Shirts, and More at Night 1

It was thought at the time that the two albums were good, but they lacked the power of the earlier records. As time passed by, there was a complete re-assessment of their quality, and now they are considered to stand proud in Westerberg’s and The Replacement’s canon. The Replacements disbanded soon after All Shook Down .

Embrace your darkness, it’s a part of who you are

Westerberg’s first solo album, 14 Songs , was released in 1993. The album was a direct result of the break-up of The Replacements. It possibly stands at the top of Westerberg’s solo work and seems to be one of everybody’s favorites. The songs are classic Westerberg and they show his true genius as a songwriter. The album is dark, introspective, and at times, very personal.

After 14 Songs , Westerberg released Eventually in 1996 and Suicaine Gratifaction in 1999. These two albums were not as well-received as his debut solo album, but they, as ever, included great songs, that like with all Westerberg material, simply stick, both musically and lyrically.

Westerberg quit the major-label circuit for three years before staging a comeback in 2002. The two albums, Mono and Stereo (under his alter ego Grandpaboy ) were released on Vagrant Records and received critical acclaim. The albums are both full of great songs, but Westerberg’s fans had to search a little harder to find them, as the albums were not as readily available in stores. These albums were followed by another three-year break and then Westerberg returned with Come Feel Me Tremble , which was again met with positive reviews, though not to the extent of Mono .

In 2005, Westerberg released two EPs, Open Season and Folker . The former EP included the song “Help Me Rhonda” which is one of Westerberg’s best-known solo songs. The song is classic Westerberg .

In December 2005, Westerberg reconvened with Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars to record two new songs for the Replacements’ compilation titled “Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was?” which was released in 2006.

Westerberg abides by the motto create something beautiful from the ruins

As AllMusic notes, in 2013, The Replacements were booked as headliners at the Riot Fest music festivals being held in August and September in Toronto, Chicago, and Denver, with Westerberg and Stinson , joined by guitarist Dave Minehan and drummer Josh Freese. The Riot Fest appearances were well received by critics and fans, and it led to a run of festival appearances and occasional stand-alone dates. While the band posted a 24-minute jazz-influenced instrumental called “Poke Me in My Cage” on SoundCloud and performed a new song, “Whole Food Blues,” on-stage, plans for a reunion album were scrapped when Westerberg and Stinson were unhappy with the initial sessions.

From there on, Westerberg concentrated on recording soundtracks and often presented his solo work only through his online site. In late 2015, Westerberg announced that he had formed a new band called The I Don’t Cares with Juliana Hatfield, Their debut album, Wild Stab , was released in January 2016.

While he is not in focus these days, it seems that now, as he did throughout his whole solo career, Westerberg abides by the motto create something beautiful from the ruins. That self-destruction never really comes about.

All wrong… Bob out of the band at Hootenany? I stopped reading this BS article right there… Fuck man, do the research… actually it’s just common knowledge… fuck me…

Getting older has its downfalls for sure. Being a huge Mats fan back in the day and now – reading this is near the top of the list why getting old sucks. So many things wrong with this article that I’m going to just say “ignore this, put on a Replacements shuffle from whatever music app you have, and drink a beer”.

This is hilarious. It is written by an AI. And… it is terrible in the way that it shows how empty we’ve become. Empty, mindless content that only appeals to a Mats fan in that it fools them into reading, only to discover it might as well be a collection of random words spit out by an AI or, worse, by an absolute idiot.

Good lord, why did you even bother writing this. You don’t know who was in the band, when they were in the band. Just ridiculous. First saw them in Seattle, promoting Tim, and Bob Stinson rocked. The band deserves better than this awful blurb.

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Paul W. Smith: Join me for our annual Pure Michigan Tour

"Outta’ my mind on a Monday moanin'"

Hard to believe we are already into the second week of May. In a month, we will be halfway through a year that seems as if it just started!

"Time flies when you are having fun," and we are definitely having fun. From an incredible Detroit NFL Draft to the upcoming bigger and better than ever 2024 Movement Electronic Music festival (here, in the birthplace of Techno, May 25-27), right into the blazing Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix presented by Lear (May 31-June 2).

No time to catch your breath, and that seems to be just the way we like it.

Today we start the 21st Annual Paul W. Smith Pure Michigan Tour at our favorite beloved national historic landmark, the iconic Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. We are happy to kick off their 138th season and hope you can experience their "Season of Connection" and the wonder of the Grand Hotel.

We will be on Sheplers Mackinac Island Ferry to Mackinac City, and on to the sweet spot between Charlevoix and Traverse City as we broadcast Tuesday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. nestled among Lake Michigan, Elk Lake and Bass Lake at Shorts Pull Barn in Elk Rapids.

The Great Lakes Bay Regional Convention and Visitors Bureau, "GoGreat.com," has invited us to do our show Wednesday from downtown Saginaw as they prepare for the 2024 Memorial Cup presented by Dow. This 104th Memorial Cup Championship will determine the champion of the Canadian Hockey League.

And if it’s Thursday, it must be Ann Arbor and the historic Michigan Theatre.

We finish up Friday at the Detroit Golf Club with Mark Hollis getting us ready for The Rocket Mortgage Classic.

Paul W. Smith is host of “Focus” on WJR-AM (760) from noon to 2 p.m. Monday-Friday.

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May 1, 2024

Introducing amtrak borealis trains with expanded service between st. paul and chicago via milwaukee.

New passenger train arrivals and departures in a partnership with Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois

ST. PAUL, Minn., and CHICAGO – Tickets are now available for a second daily Amtrak service between the Twin Cities and Chicago, via Milwaukee: new state-sponsored Borealis trains originate from St. Paul at midday and from Chicago in the late morning. Travelers seeking a more comfortable, sustainable and productive choice than driving will have double the current rail options, starting May 21, 2024.

Amtrak Borealis coach fares start at $41 each way between St. Paul and Chicago for adults, with everyday discounts for children ages 2-12, students , seniors, veterans, military personnel and families, groups, and others.

Amtrak Borealis trains will offer Coach and Business Class in addition to a café car featuring regional items. Customers will enjoy wide reclining seats with ample legroom, no middle seats, free Wi-Fi, and views of the Mississippi River between St. Paul and La Crosse, Wisc., in daylight in both directions across Wisconsin.

The trains will make the current Empire Builder stops between St. Paul and Milwaukee and Hiawatha stops between Milwaukee and Chicago (see schedule) . Another benefit of the Amtrak Borealis service is a new eastbound Amtrak origination from Ramsey County’s Union Depot in St. Paul.

“A second daily passenger rail service connecting St. Paul to Chicago via Milwaukee is a welcome addition to our transportation system, providing more choices and travel flexibility for passengers,” said Commissioner Nancy Daubenberger , Minnesota Department of Transportation. “We appreciate our partnerships with communities, federal, state and local governments, the host railroad CPKC, and Amtrak that were needed to get this service on-track, and to provide another safe, reliable transportation option. We look forward to continuing these partnerships as we work toward further building out passenger rail options in the Midwest.”

“This route includes eight stations in Wisconsin, and doubling the frequency of the service will better connect the many businesses, universities and tourist attractions along this corridor,” WisDOT Secretary Craig Thompson said. “This expansion is thanks to the work WisDOT was able to do together with Minnesota, Illinois and Amtrak, as well as the opportunities provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We will continue to work with federal and state partners to explore more passenger rail options in Wisconsin.”

“We are proud to collaborate with neighboring states and our federal partners to offer more Amtrak service in the Midwest,” said Illinois Transportation Secretary Omer Osman . “Ensuring passenger rail that’s safe, reliable and accessible is one of the many reasons Illinois continues to distinguish itself as the transportation hub of North America under Gov. JB Pritzker.”

The new service is sponsored by the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Amtrak now operates 29 state-supported routes with 18 state partners.

“Through the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor Identification Program we are working with grantees on dozens of other possible new Amtrak routes,” said President Roger Harris. “Thanks to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, interest from state transportation departments and others for new or expanded Amtrak service across the country is at an all-time high.”

“This is a win for passenger rail expansion in America, and more importantly, it’s a win for a growing number of Americans who rely on passenger rail and benefit from it,” said Federal Railroad Administrator Amit Bose . “Investments in rail have long helped Midwesterners and the region’s economy, and this new service will mean additional access for people traveling between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois while contributing to economic growth.

“The Federal Railroad Administration applauds the strong partnership between the states and Amtrak, and through President Biden’s infrastructure package, we know even more progress is underway,” Bose added.

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Rep. Gwen Moore, Wisconsin

“I will always support increasing access to clean, affordable, and efficient transportation options. Improving inter-city train services in Wisconsin and across the nation brings many economic benefits. I’m excited for the job opportunities and improved tourism that an additional daily train will bring for my constituents and others traveling throughout our region, as well as the improvements to our region’s collective carbon footprint. ”

Rail Passengers Association

“There were years when it seemed as if today’s announcement would never take place, and yet here we are today celebrating a new round trip that will transform transportation in this busy corridor,” said Jim Mathews, Rail Passengers’ President & CEO. “Passenger trains mean trips that are taken off of highways and out of the sky, saving lives, limiting pollution, and opening up new possibilities. These new trains also mean new trips that would not have otherwise taken place at all, producing direct returns for the communities they serve.”

The Association produced an economic-benefits analysis in 2019 suggesting that some 60% of passengers for the new service would come from diverting automotive trips as those passengers leave their cars behind, limiting pollution, and easing congestion. The Association estimated that 90,000 people who would otherwise use personal automobiles would be taken off the roads every year, saving $32 million across the region in highway maintenance costs alone.

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Marc Magliari [email protected] Amtrak Corporate Communications 800 562.1904

Julie Bartkey [email protected] Minnesota Department of Transportation 612 759.0499

John DesRivieres [email protected] Wisconsin Department of Transportation 608 266.5599

Scott Speegle [email protected] Illinois Department of Transportation 312 793.2794

PHOTO/VIDEO: Amtrak Executive Laura Mason Tours Harrisburg Track Renewal Project May 3, 2024
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Created in 1976, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) oversees transportation by all modes including land, water, air, rail, walking and bicycling. Its mission is to connect and serve all people through a safe, equitable and sustainable transportation system. Stay connected to MnDOT through our Social Hub .

About WisDOT

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) was officially established in 1967. It provides leadership in the development of a safe and efficient multimodal transportation system for the people of Wisconsin and the state’s many visitors. Learn more about WisDOT at wisconsindot.gov and connect with WisDOT on Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , LinkedIn and YouTube to stay up to date on the latest transportation news in Wisconsin.

The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) has statutory responsibility for the planning, construction, operation and maintenance of Illinois’ extensive transportation network, which encompasses highways and bridges, airports, public transit, rail freight and rail passenger systems. This vast transportation system supports the fifth largest state in the nation and more than 100 million visitors annually. IDOT’s Stay Connected page serves as an interactive hub to facilitate transportation news, events, video and photo galleries, and to promote information through social media platforms targeting all transportation stakeholders.

Fashionable ✅ Sustainable ✅ Our friends at @PUP_indy upcycle leather Acela seats to create a range of products like bags, wallets, and glasses cases!

Service Adjustment: As of 7:20am PT, Due to equipment issues, Cascades Train 502 is now canceled. Customers will be re-accommodated on Cascades Train 504. We apologize for this inconvenience.

Service Adjustment: As of 2:05 pm ET, Due to ongoing mechanical issues, All customers for Train 143 will be accommodated onto Train 195 and Train 91 from New Carrollton (NCR) to Washington (WAS).

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Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper: Freaks on Parade 2024 Tour 2024 (Saint Paul) | Xcel Energy Center

Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper are teaming up for an electrifying concert experience that you won't want to miss. Get ready to embrace the darkness and join the Freaks on Parade 2024 Tour. This epic event will be held at the renowned Xcel Energy Center on August 25, 2024. Located at 199 Kellogg Blvd, Saint Paul, MN, 55102, the venue is the perfect setting to immerse yourself in the haunting melodies and captivating performances. Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper will take the stage to unleash a setlist that will send chills down your spine. Brace yourself for hits like "The Triumph of King Freak (A Crypt of Preservation and Superstition)," "Dead City Radio and the New Gods of Supertown," "Superbeast," and "House of 1000 Corpses." As the music fills the air, you'll find yourself transported to another realm, where the macabre meets the melodic. This concert promises to be an unforgettable experience that will leave you craving more. Tickets for Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper: Freaks on Parade 2024 Tour are available for purchase starting from February 2, 2024, at 16:00 and will be on sale until August 26, 2024, at 02:00. Don't miss your chance to witness these two iconic rock legends come together for a night of unforgettable performances. Mark your calendars and get ready to join the dark side on the Freaks on Parade 2024 Tour.

Provided by aurembiaix | Published May 7, 2024

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COMMENTS

"I signed a deal. I was a millionaire for one whole day. The money was
A maverick, unpredictable loose canon, Paul Westerberg is one of the most lauded songwriters of his generation. With his band The Replacements, his genius for writing rowdy yet often melancholic tunes was matched only by the band's reputation for booze-soaked performances, where the 'Mats - as their fans called them - would stumble drunk through shows, occasionally abandoning the stage ...
Paul Westerberg
Besterberg: The Best Of Paul Westerberg. Folker. Dead Man Shake. Come Feel Me Tremble. Stereo. Mono. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. ... The Lost KFAI Concert' for Record Store Day 2022 'Paul Westerberg' by Bedroom Eyes. Review: Dead Man's Pop. I am not Paul Westerberg <3 Jodi Chromey ...
Paul Westerberg Tour Announcements 2024 & 2025, Notifications, Dates
Find information on all of Paul Westerberg's upcoming concerts, tour dates and ticket information for 2024-2025. Unfortunately there are no concert dates for Paul Westerberg scheduled in 2024. Songkick is the first to know of new tour announcements and concert information, so if your favorite artists are not currently on tour, join Songkick ...
The Replacements Concerts & Live Tour Dates: 2024-2025 Tickets
The band was wild and full of life, featuring vocalist and guitarist Paul Westerberg and Chris Mars the drummer as well as the Stinson brothers Bob playing guitar and Tommy playing bass. They were infamous for their hard drinking lifestyles and their ragged stage performances, notorious for coming to shows too drunk to play very well at all, or ...
Paul Westerberg Concert & Tour History
73 Concerts. Paul Westerberg (born December 31, 1959) is an American musician from Minneapolis, best known as the former lead singer and songwriter of The Replacements, one of the seminal alternative rock bands of the 1980s. Since The Replacements broke up in 1991, Westerberg has recorded several solo albums under his own name as well as the ...
Paul Westerberg Says The Replacements Just Played Their Final Show
During the Replacements' reunion tour over the past two months, Paul Westerberg has worn a white t-shirt every night with a letter spray painted onto the front and back, spelling out two ...
Paul Westerberg on the Replacements Reunion, solo tune
Plus: Hear Westerberg's new solo tune, 'My Road Now'. By Rob Tannenbaum. October 9, 2012. Paul Westerberg of The Replacements. Michael Buckner/Getty Images. When Paul Westerberg called Rolling ...
The Replacements: The Greatest Band That Never Was
T here are days when time can get a little abstract for Paul Westerberg, and his schedule gets squishy.The 54-year-old alternative-rock icon might wake up in his home in suburban Edina, Minnesota ...
Paul Westerberg
Paul Harold Westerberg (born December 31, 1959) is an American musician, best known as the lead singer, ... who had replaced Bob Stinson three years earlier to tour in support of Pleased to Meet Me), made minimal contributions. Mars left the band soon after the album was released. After touring for the album (which was critically well-received ...
Paul Westerberg Tickets, 2024 Concert Tour Dates
To purchase Paul Westerberg tickets on SeatGeek's desktop website, head to the official Paul Westerberg page or type the artist or team name in the search bar. Once you're on the Paul Westerberg, you can browse upcoming events and select the event you want to attend. When you select your ideal event, you will be shown a list of tickets and ...
The Replacements Are Still a Puzzle
The lead singer and songwriter Paul Westerberg was a punk-rock Jackson Browne, a pugilistic but ultimately heartsick poet with matinee-idol looks. ... An opening tour for Tom Petty and the ...
Paul Westerberg
Get the latest news on Paul Westerberg, including song releases, album announcements, tour dates, festival appearances, and more.
The Replacements (band)
The Replacements were an American rock band formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1979.Initially a punk band, they are one of the main pioneers of alternative rock.The band was composed of the guitarist and vocalist Paul Westerberg, guitarist Bob Stinson, bass guitarist Tommy Stinson, and drummer Chris Mars for most of its existence. After several acclaimed albums including Let It Be and Tim ...
The Replacements' 'Sorry Ma …' Turns 40
All of Paul Westerberg's best songs—"Kiss Me on the Bus" or "Left of the Dial" or "Alex Chilton" or "Achin' to Be"—concern the middle-class striver who maybe hasn't ...
The Final Hurrah: Paul Westerberg, Frank Ocean, Michael Stipe, Steve
Paul Westerberg It has been a few years since we saw Paul Westerberg of The Replacements performing in the flesh, his last true show was in 2015 as The Replacements abruptly ended a two-year reunion jaunt. ... Although he joined his former Poco bandmate Richie Furay on a zoom concert in 2020, Meisner has become a recluse since his last live ...
The Replacements Tour Announcements 2024 & 2025 ...
Paul Westerberg cares, as shown by the curses hurled at the cool new guitarist who was all over the place tonight: "PLAY IN F**KIN TIME / PLAY IN TIME, F**KER!" And Tommy cares too, as shown by the kiss he planted on Paul's lips. ... Songkick is the first to know of new tour announcements and concert information, so if your favorite artists are ...
Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)
The latest in the band's series of expanded and repackaged editions comes in the form of the group's 1987 fifth LP, Pleased To Meet Me, the moment in which Paul Westerberg's punk impulses, pop ...
The Billboard Q&A: The Replacements' Paul Westerberg
Paul Westerberg: To me, they were all just one big long song, one big long sort of thing. I guess "Hootenanny" is the one where we came to the decision — or, I did, at least — that this ...
Paul Westerberg
Former Replacements leader Paul Westerberg holds court on a career that often settled for glorious failure while the suckers and sell-outs walked off with all the fame and success.
The Replacements: Our 1989 Interview
Ever since Paul Westerberg, Songwriter, started getting sensitive on us with "Swingin' Party" and "Here Comes a Regular" on Tim, and especially on Pleased to Meet Me's "Skyway" (a ...
A Trainwreck Turned Triumphant: The True Story of the ...
It was no small feat wrangling Westerberg—the raspy-throated, brilliant tunesmith who effortlessly cranked out heart-on-flannel-sleeve soul searchers and underground rock-defining anthems like ...
Paul Westerberg: The Art of Self-Destruction in 12 Easy Steps
The band's first album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, was released in 1981 when Westerberg was just 21 years old. It was a raw and unpolished record that perfectly captured The Replacements' DIY punk aesthetic. The album's standout tracks included the anthemic "I'm in Trouble" and the raucous "Kick Your Door Down.".
PWHL Minnesota Tickets May 16, 2024 Saint Paul, MN
Buy PWHL Minnesota tickets at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, MN for May 16, 2024 at Ticketmaster. PWHL Minnesota More Info. Thu • May 16 • 7:00 PM Xcel Energy Center, Saint Paul, MN. Close Menu. Search Artist, Team or Venue. Clear search term. Submit Search. We're Here to Help.
Paul Skenes' four strikeouts
Pirates No. 1 prospect Paul Skenes strikes out four batters over 4 1/3 innings for Triple-A Indianapolis. News. Rule Changes Probable Pitchers Starting Lineups Transactions Injury Report World Baseball Classic MLB Draft All-Star Game MLB Life MLB Pipeline Postseason History Podcasts. Watch. Video Search Statcast MLB Network ... Tickets. All ...
Edwin Uceta K's Paul DeJong, seals win in 9th
Season Memberships Single-Game Tickets Randy Land Salute to Service Suites Group Tickets and Party Areas Premium Seating Ticket Packages City Connect Flex Pack Rays Ballpark Pass Student Tickets Request an Appointment Mobile ... Edwin Uceta K's Paul DeJong, seals win in 9th White Sox @ Rays. May 6, 2024 | 00:00:06. Reels. Share. Season 2024 ...
Paul W. Smith: Join me for our annual Pure Michigan Tour
Today we start the 21st Annual Paul W. Smith Pure Michigan Tour at our favorite beloved national historic landmark, the iconic Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. We are happy to kick off their 138th ...
Introducing Amtrak Borealis trains with Expanded Service between St
PAUL, Minn., and CHICAGO - Tickets are now available for a second daily Amtrak service between the Twin Cities and Chicago, via Milwaukee: new state-sponsored Borealis trains originate from St. Paul at midday and from Chicago in the late morning. Travelers seeking a more comfortable, sustainable and productive choice than driving will have ...
Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper: Freaks on Parade 2024 Tour 2024 (Saint
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"I signed a deal. I was a millionaire for one whole day. The money was gone in an afternoon": Paul Westerberg on The Replacements, going solo and the love of rock'n'roll

Classic Rock Newsletter

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I promise if the old guy ever comes out of retirement this joint will be hopping. In the meantime this is an archive of sorts.

Euphoric Recall: A Half Century as a Music Fan, Producer, DJ, Record Executive, and Tastemaker

Tim (Let it Bleed Edition)

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

Sorry, Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash (Deluxe Edition)

The Complete Inconcerated Live

Dead Man’s Pop

Bandcamp Stuff

For Sale: Live At Maxwell’s 1986

The Sound Cloud Stuff

Trouble Boys

Waxed Up Hair & Painted Shoes: The Photographic History

Songs for Slim

My Road Now

Grandpaboy’s Last Stand

PW & the Ghost Gloves Cat Wing Joy Boys

Bored of Edukation

3oclockreep

The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting

Petal Pusher: A Rock & Roll Cinderella Story

Open Season

Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was?

Besterberg: The Best Of Paul Westerberg

Dead Man Shake

Come Feel Me Tremble

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

Suicaine Gratifaction

All for Nothing/Nothing for All

Melrose Place

All Shook Down

Don’t Tell a Soul

Pleased to Meet Me

Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash

Behind the Sound: Replacements’ ‘Tim’ gets remastered

Men Explain The Replacements to Me

Replacements’ gear for sale to support Slim Dunlap

I Bought a Headache

Here Comes a Regular as the Cheers theme

Is This Thing On?

‘Mats Releasing ‘Unsuitable for Airplay: The Lost KFAI Concert’ for Record Store Day 2022

‘Paul Westerberg’ by Bedroom Eyes

The Replacements Verified

concerts and tour dates

About The Replacements

The Replacements: The Greatest Band That Never Was

Editor’s picks

Q&A: Paul Westerberg on the Replacements Reunion

Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee Are Playing Rush Songs Again — For Their Ears Only

Greg Tate Receives Posthumous Pulitzer Prize

Tommy Lee Wins Round in Helicopter Sexual Assault Lawsuit

Brazilian Funk Is Going Global. Why Aren’t More Artists Breaking Through?

David Gilmour's Final 'Comfortably Numb'? Watch the Pink Floyd Icon Play 'The Wall' Classic in 2016

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The Replacements Are Still a Puzzle

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I’m in Trouble: 40 Years of the Replacements’ ‘Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash’

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“I bought a headache”

“I hate music / It’s got too many notes”

“Forgot my one line / So I just said what I felt”

“I’m shiftless when I’m idle / And I got time to waste”

“We’ve lost my good thing now”

“Kick your door down”

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