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Photograph by Bob Medcraft
Bob Mehr, flanked by Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson.
The Replacements tend to inspire idolatry and mythmaking in those who love them best, yet are not that widely known outside of that hard core. The post-punk quartet from Minneapolis was extremely unlikely to inspire a deeply reported, tightly sourced, and sparely written account of who they were and how they got to be that way and what they did along their anarchic way, but that is what Bob Mehr has delivered in Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements (Da Capo Press, 2016).
According to the footnotes, Mehr interviewed “some 230 people” while researching this book, including all of the surviving band members. It should be classified as a rock ‘n’ roll miracle that anyone got all of the surviving Replacements to talk on the record for an unauthorized band bio. It’s almost as difficult to track down the former roadies and agents and radio reps that make up the transient music industry, and the Minneapolis indie rock scene that spawned them is no easy nut for an outsider to crack. (Mehr is from Los Angeles and writes for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.) Yet somehow Mehr got “some 230” of these difficult—and difficult to locate—characters to speak to him about The Replacements, and for that reason his book may well deserve the brash boast of its subtitle: that this is the “true story of the Replacements.”
It’s a disturbing story. The origins of the band, for one thing, are disturbing. Bob Stinson got out of state care for delinquent children and moved back home with his mom. He knew some guitar licks and wanted to start a band, so he forced his half-brother Tommy Stinson, still a child, to play bass. Bob was a mess, in large part because his stepfather—Tommy’s dad—sexually abused him, with no one else knowing but his sister, who suffered the same abuse. According to Chris Mars, the neighborhood kid they recruited to play drums, Bob would punch Tommy in the face when he made mistakes. Somehow this forced labor in the family basement made for a rock band so good that a janitor walking past the Stinson family home would crawl into the bushes to listen to their rehearsals through a basement window well.
Paul Westerberg was that meandering janitor. He crashed the Stinson basement, joined the band, deceived another singer so he wouldn’t join, and took over. Chris Mars, who had been writing songs for the band, would no longer have his songs played. Bob Stinson, who formed the band (as “Dog Breath”), would eventually be forced to leave it. Mars would be the next to go, after being castigated for his failure to learn the drum machine parts that Westerberg began to program for his home demos. Yet before Westerberg drove them away, they would make a series of remarkable rock ‘n’ roll records that merit this serious, unsentimental investigation into how it happened and what it meant and what it cost.
Trouble Boys is primarily a book about what it cost. Mehr mostly leaves unstated how great The Replacements were and what their work meant—he safely assumes that a reader of his book will not need to hear all of that. He does not stoop to make this catty point, but it’s also true that Minneapolis musician and journalist Jim Walsh previously published a so-called “oral history” of The Replacements (All Over but the Shouting, Voyageur Press, 2007) that features countless people gushing about how great the band was and carrying on about what it meant to them personally. Mehr sticks to the much more important and difficult task of establishing how it actually happened from the inside.
It happened because Westerberg brought ambition, hustle, and urgent song ideas to a fierce, reckless basement band. He pushed a crude demo on a deejay he thought could get them an opening gig at a local bar. That deejay, Peter Jesperson, signed them to a record deal with Twin/Tone Records, his local startup label (with a partner who hated Westerberg instantly). With the release of “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash” in 1981, The Replacements hit the road—Madison, Wisconsin was the band’s first out-of-town conquest. Along with R.E.M. and the SST Records bands, they pioneered the indie rock road circuit that young, hungry bands still hit in rickety vans to this day. After an EP and two more LPs on Twin/Tone (including the transcendent Let It Be in 1984), they upgraded to a major label, Warner/Sire for Tim (1985), the last record that featured the original lineup with Bob Stinson, but never landed that elusive radio hit. Each of their four records on Warner/Sire was less vital than the one before, with the exception of the last album, All Shook Down (1990), which was essentially a Westerberg solo effort, his best by far.
At every step along the way, their capacity for self-sabotage beggars belief. Trouble Boys becomes a book you need to avert your eyes from while reading. There are just too many head-on career collisions. Their collective alcoholism was so pronounced that they often got drunk twice a day, once on the way to the gig (no one in the band ever had a driver’s license) and again when they got to the club. If they didn’t like the vibe in the venue—or if they simply felt like it—they purposefully flopped. At times, they incited riots from the stage. They destroyed everything in sight, including their tour vans (and, later, busses) as they motored down the highway. They lit their per diems on fire and then didn’t eat. They deliberately humiliated powerful radio programmers and television executives—Lorne Michaels told them they would never work in television again after Westerberg dropped the F-bomb on Saturday Night Live. No matter how many of these stories of excess and destruction you think you know, as a hardcore Replacements fan, this book reveals many more, and much worse.
The Replacements came of age in the last days of the punk movement (though they were power popsters and classic rockers at heart), and self-destruction was part of the ethos of the era. But for these guys, the defiance of punk went far beyond a stage act to become what reads like a collective alcoholic (and, later, coked-up) psychosis. That’s not the only thing about this band that wasn’t an act. These were not privileged suburban kids who dressed up like punk rockers to efface their privilege. They were all high school dropouts from the city (and, perhaps not coincidentally, had all suffered serious head injuries when young). The hopelessness in Westerberg’s songs was no theatrical invention. Nowhere really was their home. Mars told Mehr they never got to know each other as people; it was just a stoned circus punctuated by silent hangovers. Tommy Stinson—amazingly—said he learned how to form human friendships for the first time only after he got off the road with The Replacements.
Westerberg has accused Mehr of making him out to be a villain, and the book has that effect. A Replacements fan who wants to cherish an endearing image of Westerberg from his achingly emotive songs that seemed to read their secret soul when no one else understood them should read this book at their own risk. But Mehr just reports what Westerberg’s own colleagues told him. Most famously, Westerberg forced Bob Stinson out of the band, pinning all of their collective dysfunction on admittedly the most screwed-up band member. And that was after ordering Bob to start drinking again, if he wanted to stay in the band, after Bob tried to get sober. (Bob Stinson would die from organ failure as an alcoholic drug addict less than a decade later.) Bob Dunlap—nicknamed “Slim” so that Tommy Stinson did not have to call the guitar player who replaced his brother by his brother’s name—has withering comments about being the butt of Westerberg’s relentless sour humor for days on end. It’s a mystery why Westerberg, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s great poets of the vulnerable and bullied (“You look funny, but you ain’t laughing, are you?”) could be a cruel verbal bully to the very people who played his sadly beautiful songs.
In Westerberg’s defense, he was onto his and the band’s problems from the beginning. Every record in The Replacements catalog has a song about alcohol-fueled self-destruction, and not in a self-glorifying way. He was the poet of power drinkers who never get to know one another. “They say, ‘Now don't be a stranger,’” he sang on the first record after he and Tommy kicked Bob out of the band. “It really don't matter to me. I'd be willing to wager that it don't matter much if we keep in touch.” On the band’s last record, All Shook Down, which at times sounds like a musical score to delirium tremens, Westerberg mocks himself for being a chronic (pardon the French) asshole. “You don’t suck,” he sings. “That ain’t true. Never said a word, I never had to. It was my attitude if I was rude. Old habits are hard to break.”
After the band’s breakup, Mehr chronicles, Westerberg began to address his issues with anxiety and depression, which did much to explain his demons and addictions. But, again, Westerberg came self-diagnosed from his songs. Early in their career, he matter-of-factly narrated the touring band’s twice-a-day drunks and declared them to be “treatment-bound.” By mid-career, he already knew where all the drinking and drugs were coming from. “Swingin’ Party” describes the band’s non-stop party (“here it’s never ending, can’t remember when it started”) using the startling metaphor of collective suicide by alcohol induced by fear: “If being afraid is a crime, we hang side by side.”
It’s hard to drink to that, except they did. We all did. That’s why we needed this fascinating, authoritative, disturbing book.
Find copies of Trouble Boys at your local independent bookstore; for more info, visit replacementsbook.com.
Follow this writer on Twitter @chriskingstl.
