by Bob Mehr
As Anita observed, there was another reason he pressed Tommy to learn. “Bobby basically grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and was saying to Tommy, ‘You’re going to do this because you’re not going to end up like I did.’”
“I was going down that road,” said Tommy. “Before my brother taught me how to play bass, they wanted to send me away to a boys’ reform school. Next thing would’ve been grand theft auto, then . . . murder, fucking rob a grocery store or whatever. I was just a total hoodlum at a very young age, so he saved me from that.”
Within a couple of months, Tommy became proficient on the bass. “I was amazed,” said Flemal. “I was always kind of tone-deaf. But Tommy and Bob had natural ability. They could hear something once and just pick it up.” Tommy added, “I played a lot. My mom knew I was hanging out, smoking weed, but she figured, ‘You know what? He can smoke weed as long as he doesn’t go to jail.’ It was a trade-off.”
Tommy’s partner in crime, Curtis Olson, had an older sister, Andrea, or Andi—sixteen, a well-built blonde with big glasses and a free spirit. Her stepfather taught band, and she’d learned violin, French horn, and bass by her teens and was even hosting a radio show on the local community station KFAI. Like Bob, she’d attended Marshall University High for a time, then went to Southeast Free School her senior year. “I bounced around a lot,” she said.
Walking home, Andi would sometimes hear a band playing on Bryant Avenue. Then she went with Curtis to meet the Stinsons. “The first thing Bob asked me was, ‘Do you have any weed?’” she recalled, with a laugh. They were like-minded and soon became a couple. “He was a real trip. Like nobody I ever met.”
After school each day, Olson would hang out at the Stinsons’. “It was a zoo over there, with four kids from six to twenty running around. Anita took in strays too—I ended up living there for a little while myself.” She’d watch the band rehearse. “I think Bob was partially deaf already from jamming so close to the amp. He used to crank it up so loud, the dishes would rattle right off the shelves.”
The band shook the house so much, the kitchen trash can tipped over. Bob would empty the bin before they played. “It was like a daily ritual,” said Olson. “If he didn’t take the trash out before he started jamming, it would fall over. Then Anita would see the mess and yell: ‘Bobby!’”
The band didn’t yet have a name, but they were already notorious on the block. In summer, Bob, Tommy, and Robert would hang out on the flat roof of the house with their instruments, amps pointed out the windows, and blast the neighborhood . . . “until the cops would show up and tell ’em to finally shut it down,” Olson said.
Eventually, they were invited to play a couple of local backyard parties and beer busts. “They didn’t even have a drummer yet,” said Olson. “Flemal was not very good. He thought the band was just for getting chicks.”
Even when Bob and Andi hung out alone, his mind was on music. They’d go to Suneson’s to look at guitars or walk around Lake Harriet talking about riffs and records. “Back then, all he would do was drink a little beer, smoke a little weed,” said Olson. “He didn’t have any money for hard drugs; he wasn’t even into hard liquor. He didn’t like the taste of it. He didn’t talk to me much about his past. But I knew he’d been in treatment. And I knew he wanted to never go back.”
Their relationship ran hot and cold over the next couple years. “I found out that he’d slept with one of my girlfriends. He was kind of a slut. But back in those days, everybody was. People were just a little more free with themselves.”
Olson would eventually move out west to California with her parents, leaving Bob and Minnesota behind—but not before making a very important introduction. “I knew the band needed a drummer,” said Olson. “I told Bob, ‘Have I got a drummer for you.’”
CHAPTER 6
The Mars family was a big, lively brood of native Minnesotans. Patriarch Leroy Linus Mars was born in 1906, his wife Constance Mary Evans fourteen years later. Both were World War II veterans: Leroy in the Navy, Constance in the Waves, the all-female branch of the Naval Reserve.
Starting in 1948, the couple had seven children: Mary, Joseph, Kevin, John, Rita, James, and the youngest, Christopher Edward, born April, 26 1961.
Leroy Mars was a high school dropout; before and after the war, he was a self-employed painter. Though blue-collar, he was distantly related to Franklin Clarence Mars, founder of the Mars candy company and one of the wealthiest men in America. “I wrote them once, and I think they sent me ten boxes of M&Ms,” recalled Chris Mars. “That was the extent of the riches.”
The Mars family lived at Thirty-Seventh and Garfield, near where the Westerbergs had settled, and Chris’s older brother Jim was in Paul’s class at Catholic school. The Church of the Incarnation loomed large for the Mars family, as it did for the Westerbergs; Constance sang in the choir.
Much of Chris’s childhood—and later life too—was dominated by his oldest brother Joe. “He’d crack us all up,” said Mars. “He would be there to help if he could with anything you might be doing. He cared about fitness and lifted weights. He was the best fisherman of any of us.”
But in the midsixties, during his teens, Joe began exhibiting signs of severe schizophrenia. Doctors diagnosed him with a “nervous breakdown” and sent him to the St. Cloud Mental Hospital. “I was around five or six,” said Chris, “and didn’t know what was happening.”
Joe spent stretches in various institutions throughout Mars’s childhood and adolescence. “I remember visiting him in the hospital,” he said. “It frightened me.”
His brother’s problems “stigmatized him amongst his friends and, sadly, even within our family to a certain extent,” said Chris. “It was never fully talked about or understood; we would try to reach out and comfort him when he went through these periods, though we were not equipped with the proper tools to fully understand his schizophrenia—that word wasn’t even used until much later.”
Chris’s personality turned inward. “I remember suffering from some periodic bouts of depression as early as third grade,” he said. “If I look back, it does coincide with the beginning of my brother’s troubles.” There was also an abiding worry as he grew up that “it could happen to you as well.”
From earliest childhood, Chris channeled those fears into visual art. Chris would explore the family’s World Book Encyclopedia set (“Since I could barely hold a pencil”), looking for the letter P. “I would repeatedly go to the ‘Paintings’ section and study them. I would notice how light and atmosphere would play off of water and various textured surfaces in nature; how clouds and trees grew and formed; how thunderstorms would suddenly alter and blacken out the day.”
The tree-lined streets and funky back alleys of Mars’s neighborhood also captured his troubled young mind. “In summer, running around at night, there would be glowing and smoldering trash barrels up and down alleyways. I loved Halloween and the colors of fall. I would try to put it to paper from memory.”
Mars’s artistic gift was clear from the start. “As a little shit, I actually won a couple of prizes from the local newspaper for my drawings of turkeys and football players,” he said. Once, at school, he was sent to the principal’s office: “I was trying to figure out what bad thing I did that I’d forgotten. When I got there, I was praised for some drawings.”
Music came to mean just as much. Down the block from his house lived a family rock band, the Churchills. “They’d draw the police every summer and disrupt the neighborhood,” he recalled. Listening to them bash out “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” he’d notice the drummer was the loudest.
At ten, Mars got a Snoopy “toy” drum set from Sears. “The rims were held on by springs. I was real careful, but by the end of the summer I beat the hell out of it.” He replaced it with “another Sears model—but this had a real snare.”
The Who at the St. Paul Civic Center was Mars’s first concert, in 1976. “I was right behind [Keith] Moon,” said Mars. He thought they sounded
terrible, but didn’t care: “It was a show.” Though he never abandoned visual art, music came to the fore in his teens. “There’s an immediate reaction you can get from music that you can’t get from art,” said Mars, who picked up the guitar as well. “He would get interested in something and go full bore,” said his brother Jim. “That’s all you’d hear about for a while.”
Outwardly genial but inwardly alienated, Mars managed a couple years at the Catholic high school, DeLaSalle, before transferring to Central, eventually dropping out in eleventh grade. His experiences with his brother Joe had given him a sense of solidarity with people who were marginalized.
Though he gave off an innocent vibe, Mars wasn’t immune to trouble. He liked to drink and zip around the neighborhood on his motorbike. “I was in a motorcycle accident about the time I was drinking more heavily,” he recalled. “I spent a week in the hospital. I fractured my skull. The sac around my brain had a rip in it, and there was spinal fluid coming out of my nose. So it was a pretty traumatic experience for me.”
One day, while at work bagging groceries, Mars saw a magazine with a picture of the Sex Pistols on the cover. What the hell is this? he thought. Turned out, his older brother Jim had already bought the Pistols’ album. “So I wore it out,” he said. “It was something to identify to separate myself from my peers. And maybe try and get into something different. And that’s kinda how I got into music.”
Mars would jam in basements, with ad hoc groups in his teens, occasionally encountering Westerberg through his older brother. Paul had been impressed with his playing during a keg party thrown by their mutual friend Scotty Williams, and again a couple years later when Chris took over a kit belonging to Paul’s friend Kevin Patrick: “He was like a little Keith Moon,” Westerberg said. “In the back of my mind, I thought whatever band I was going to be in, it’d be good to have Chris in it.”
Bob Stinson’s group had tried out a couple drummers, but nobody wanted to play with them again. Then Andi Olson mentioned her next-door neighbor, Chris Mars. “My bedroom faced his bedroom,” said Olson. “I thought it might be better for my sleeping if I could get him to move his drum set over to Bob’s house.” She knocked on Mars’s door, and the next day Mars dragged his kit to the house on Bryant.
Instantly, Chris and Bob connected. Like Mars’s brother Joe, Bob Stinson was a big sweet lug hiding some deeper damage. Chris was equally intrigued by the eleven-year-old on bass: “Bob would strap a bass on [Tommy] and force him to play against his will,” said Mars.
Mars immediately impressed Flemal; the drummer had a well-coiffed shag haircut and peach-fuzz mustache. “He was kind of a handsome young man,” said Flemal. “I always thought of him as really intelligent too. After he left that first day, Bob said, ‘What do you think of him?’ I said, ‘He’s in.’ I didn’t hesitate.”
They began rehearsing several hours a night. Though the house was set back from the more heavily trafficked corner of Thirty-Sixth and Bryant, they could still be heard for blocks in every direction. “The cops would tell us to turn down at nine, and shut it down after ten,” said Flemal. Sometimes they’d keep playing past the curfew, prompting another police visit: “‘We told you before that you need to turn it down before ten—but you guys are getting better all the time.’”
The group’s covers paid little heed to the originals. “We did ‘Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo’ and ‘Roundabout’ at a hundred miles per hour,” said Flemal. “We weren’t trying to be a punk band, it was just natural.” The covers were played instrumentally: “There was no way you could really sing over what we were playing.” Eventually they began to include originals that Chris Mars had written, such as his Aerosmith pastiche “Dogged in the Alley.” “I think he [was] the only one brave enough to actually write something,” said Tommy.
The band needed a name, and Bob seized on Dogbreath, after asking everyone to come up with “the most disgusting thing you guys can think of.” Mars painted a gold Dogbreath logo on his kick drum, as well as a pot leaf on the back of Tommy’s Silvertone bass. By late 1978, Dogbreath was performing at keggers for friends and Bob’s Mama Rosa’s coworkers.
All of eleven years old, Tommy was now playing parties, smoking weed, and, crucially, getting female attention. “It was a self-esteem thing,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of [women] there, but they were all going, ‘Oh, look at how cute he is!’ That was pretty rad.” He added: “For the first time, as opposed to just sucking at everything and getting nothing from life except hate and failure, suddenly I’m getting positive reinforcement from something I’m doing. We all were.”
Paul Westerberg spent much of 1978 and 1979 searching. “When John [Zika] killed himself . . . I drifted for a couple years,” said Westerberg. “I was jumping from group to group. It was my job to find this perfect band out there somewhere, and if they’re not out there, dammit, I’m gonna create ’em.”
Though he’d avoided getting a diploma, Westerberg spent a lot of time self-educating. “Once school was out, I could wear my glasses till my heart was content. So I’d go to the public library every day.” If he wanted to be a songwriter, he figured he’d have to study. “I forced myself to read literature, even if I didn’t enjoy it, as a mental exercise: ‘I have to work this muscle a bit.’”
He read up on show business history, from “P. T. Barnum to Sinatra,” he said. He also digested every rock magazine and book he could get his hands on; he was a particular fan of the irreverent humor of Creem writer Rick Johnson.
Westerberg had little money to spend on records, so much of his listening and learning came from the library as well. He made odd finds there: instructional jazz LPs; an old folk record by Glenn Yarbrough; Fog on the Tyne by English rock band Lindisfarne. Sometimes he’d sell his used LPs to local record store Oar Folkjokeopus and buy new ones with the money. He also liked that he could scavenge discarded cigarettes from the store’s ashtray to smoke later. “They had the longest butts at Oar Folk,” he said.
Eventually, Westerberg’s father began to ask, “When you gonna get a goddamn job?” Paul had decided to keep his serious musical ambitions even from his mother: “I’d heard my brother say, ‘I’m gonna play my music.’ My mom’s response was: ‘Well, are you gonna take lessons? Are you gonna join the union?’ So I knew not to say that.” To appease his parents, he began looking for work.
By the late 1970s, the US economy was stagnating, prior to the major early 1980s recession. In Minnesota, the disparity between the haves and have-nots was growing wider. High-wage workers were making 3.1 times more on average than their low-wage counterparts. As a high school dropout with no trade or skills, Westerberg was firmly in the latter camp.
He went to the local labor pool and got assigned to a steel mill in St. Paul, loading scrap metal. On his first day, Westerberg leaned too close to the compacter. Someone shouted for him to get back. Just then, a piece of scrap-metal debris flew at his face, narrowly missing his eye but leaving a permanent scar.
After a stint “at the Munsingwear factory downtown, pushing around carts of wet fabric,” Westerberg started working at the Control Data Corporation’s headquarters as a janitor—in Bloomington, a soulless suburb south of Richfield that Westerberg came to detest. The gig meant having to maneuver around “skilled” workers soldering computer parts. He remembered cleaning under the work stool of a woman who, offended by his scruffy presence, fixed Westerberg with a disdainful stare.
“That was the last straw for me. It hit home: ‘You’re just a peon putting a circuit into a thing. You’re no better than me.’ I thought, I’ll be damned if I’m going to be doing this in a year.”
Soon as he had enough money for a new guitar and amp, he was done with dead-end day jobs. He was going to play music for the rest of his life. Most of all, he was determined that no one would ever look at him that way again.
Westerberg had reconnected with his childhood friend Tom Byrne, a singer who was still attending Holy Angels.
Byrne w
ould front Westerberg’s new trio—bassist Tom Billiete and drummer John Holler, and occasionally Kevin Patrick. They played first as the Mollitive Nerves, then as Oat, with a repertoire of deeper cuts by Cream, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick, and the Ramones.
Westerberg also introduced a couple songs of his own. “‘Lookin’ for Ya,’” he said, “was just a George Thorogood rip,” but the lyrics were sharper than usual for a beginner: “Half a mile from the liquor store / It’s five to eight, I could use some more.” Another tune was a nod to Phil Westerberg titled “My Brother’s in Jail.” They played at keggers, as well as a dance at the school where Byrne’s mother taught. “Tom’s mom wanted us to play dance music,” said Westerberg. “We may have done ‘Le Freak’ by Chic. That’s when I went out and smoked a cigarette.”
Byrne and Westerberg also played an open mic at a tap bar called the 38th Parallel. “Some guy approached us afterwards and wanted to manage us. We were all like ‘Oooh,’” said Westerberg. “My brother told me, ‘He’s probably gonna try to steal your equipment.’”
As Oat struggled along, Westerberg landed a gig with Marsden Maintenance, working an evening janitor gig in a downtown building that included the office of US Senator David Durenberger. “That was the best of the crappy jobs,” he said. “I’d turn on all the radios to the same station, eat the doughnuts left over at the office, and sing along.”
He would sometimes write out the band’s set lists on Durenberger’s stationery: “There’d be songs like ‘We’re Gonna Get Drunk Tonight,’ and at the top it would say, ‘From the desk of US Senator. . . .’” More importantly, the job provided him with enough cash to pick up a red Gibson ES-335 and a new Marshall cabinet.