Trouble Boys

by Bob Mehr

  Westerberg still hadn’t found musicians with the same fire or passion as the Sex Pistols. The closest he’d come was seeing the Doggs, an early group of South Minneapolis punks playing a house party. They had spiked haircuts, loads of attitude, and acted like a marauding gang. “It was the aggression that got me,” said Westerberg. “It keyed in my mind that this is where the shit’s going.”

  Westerberg was becoming aware of the local punk and new wave scene developing at the new downtown club Jay’s Longhorn, which was booking shows by Blondie, Talking Heads, and Elvis Costello, along with local acts like the Suicide Commandos and the Suburbs. Paul would occasionally see bands and drink at the Longhorn’s beer bust nights (until 1986, the drinking age in Minnesota was nineteen), usually with his friend Steve Skibbe, a fellow janitor getting his own band, the Dads, off the ground.

  Westerberg realized that he should be leading a band himself. “It came little by little. The Mollitive Nerves played a lot of Ramones songs, and I started singing on that stuff. But it wasn’t like I opened my mouth and thought, Here’s gold.”

  That fall, Westerberg’s “connected” uncle gifted him with a PA system. “It was like ‘Paulie’s making music? I got some amps and shit here, I’ll have some guys bring it over.’” In November he got together again with Jeff Johnson and Dave Zilka to play at his house. Johnson arrived with a TEAC cassette player and a couple of microphones. When he walked into the basement, Johnson saw Westerberg’s new PA system and microphone setup. “I thought, What’s this?” he said. “That was the first time I’d heard him sing.”

  The recording—the earliest document of Westerberg singing—is a mishmash of material: covers of the Who (“Long Live Rock”), Ten Years After (“Choo Choo Mama”), the Doors (“Roadhouse Blues”), even the Knack’s current hit “My Sharona.” “To us it was a joke, but it was fun,” said Johnson. Even in that loose atmosphere, Johnson saw that Westerberg was becoming a more serious musician.

  In January 1980, Johnson and Westerberg got together again. “It was the last time I played with Paul,” said Johnson. More and more, Westerberg was performing punk songs: the Ramones’ “Cretin Hop,” the Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet.”

  Westerberg had also concluded that he wouldn’t get anywhere with his old friends. “I would keep missing practices and stuff,” said Tom Byrne. “Paul had a vision. He was extremely driven.”

  “I’d had it with playing with guys who were half-assed into it,” said Westerberg. “I did that probably from age fourteen to nineteen. Five years of playing with guys in garages, basements, cover bands, parties, keggers. I’d already fucked around with guys who really didn’t want to go for it. All these dudes were eventually gonna go off to college or go become accountants. And it took me a long time to find guys who had no other fucking options in life. I needed desperation. ’Cause that’s where I was coming from.”

  During a cigarette break, Paul told his friends, “I just met these guys—this weird guitar player, his kid brother, and a drummer I kinda know.” There was a determination to what he said next: “We’re putting a band together.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Paul Westerberg often walked back home from his job at Marsden Maintenance. On the days when he didn’t have bus fare—and sometimes even if he did—he would hoof the thirty-plus blocks from downtown to his house in South Minneapolis, taking Bryant Avenue all the way. “I was thinking of trying to build up my lung power,” said Westerberg. “I’d read that Sinatra had swum laps. I always got good ideas when I walked too.”

  In the early fall of 1979, Westerberg was half a mile from his house when he caught a torrid wailing in the distance and followed it to 3628 Bryant Avenue. It sounded like Yes’s “Roundabout,” but really fast and screaming.

  “What got to me was the sheer volume and the wild thunder,” said Westerberg. “That was a major attraction: the balls of a band to play that goddamn loud. I mean, you’d hear bands around occasionally. But this was different. It was like ‘Holy fuck—what is this?’” He would pass the house a few more times that fall. “I think I heard them once or twice more, and then I finally decided to take a look down in the basement.” Westerberg skulked around the left side of the house. He knelt down near a little basement window surrounded by shrubs. He tried but couldn’t get a good look at who was making the noise. Yet that sound—that volume, that thunder—stayed with him.

  Had Westerberg been able to see inside he would’ve glimpsed an evolving version of Dogbreath. After a year of practicing and playing the odd keg party, Bob Stinson was trying to take things in a more serious direction. He brought in a couple different singers to sit in. Among them was Stuart Cummins, an older hippie type with an unnaturally high-pitched voice, who would sometimes join them.

  Meanwhile, Robert Flemal’s membership was becoming an issue. That fall he caught a nasty case of hepatitis A—it had broken out among Mama Rosa’s kitchen staff. “We all had to get shots—the whole family,” said Anita Stinson. “Bob was so scared: ‘I can’t go in there, Mom, that needle will go right through my arm!’”

  Flemal’s illness forced him to move back to his parents’ house in Mound to recuperate, where he stayed several weeks. Dogbreath kept on playing without him. “It didn’t take long,” said Flemal. “Spend a couple weeks away from a band, they’re thinking you’re not too into it.”

  Westerberg’s and Mars’s mutual friend Scott Williams had urged them to play together all fall, so in late November 1979, Chris invited Paul over. Williams drove him to the Bryant house, which Westerberg immediately recognized: “We pull up and I’m thinking, This is the joint!” he said. “I walked in very casual, though. I didn’t say, ‘Hey, I’ve been listening to you guys in the bushes.’”

  On this night, Dogbreath was upstairs and in the middle of a Ted Nugent song when Paul said hello to Chris. He recognized Bob too—the “stoned, weird-looking guy” he’d sometimes see riding the Bryant Avenue bus. Introductions made, Westerberg pulled a present out from behind his ear. “He gave me a joint from his brother,” recalled Bob. “He goes, ‘Smoke this!’”

  The two chatted between puffs. They’d been born just a couple weeks apart. “And whatever chemical imbalance we both shared, we bonded on that level too,” said Westerberg. Bob was also impressed with the fact that Paul had played for money: “Pitiful as it was, I had actually been paid a couple bucks.”

  As they talked, Westerberg realized he’d heard a bassist on his way up the stairs, but didn’t see one in the room.

  “Where’s your bass player, man?” asked Westerberg.

  “He’s right there,” said Bob, pointing behind him. Westerberg wheeled around and saw a little towheaded kid sitting on a chair, obscured by an amp cabinet.

  If Paul Westerberg ever experienced anything like love at first sight in his life, it was the moment he laid eyes on Tommy Stinson.

  “What’s up,” said Tommy, in a chipper squeak. His voice hadn’t even broken yet.

  “He’s my little brother,” said Bob. “He’s twelve. He’s real good.”

  Westerberg looked at the boy with the bowl haircut, blue hoodie, and Sears bass and broke out in a grin. “He just looked like . . . a star,” he said. “That’s what I saw: a twelve-year-old who sounded like a little girl and played like a motherfucker. And I thought, This kid is a fucking star.”

  Robert Flemal was still in Mound that night. Singer Stuart Cummins was absent. “It was just the Stinson brothers and Chris,” said Westerberg. He listened to them play for a while in close quarters, and it only confirmed what he’d heard in the bushes. “They were very fast and very loud and very close to the excitement that I felt seeing the Faces, or seeing the Doggs,” said Westerberg. “And I thought, Hmmm, this might be my ticket right here.”

  At that point, Westerberg was neither a singer nor a songwriter—he was a guitar player. It wasn’t quite clear how he would fit in with Dogbreath. On the verge of regaining his health, Flemal had plans on moving back int
o the house and resuming his role as the group’s other guitarist.

  Even so, Bob’s interest was piqued by Paul. The feeling was most definitely mutual. “I knew that they had the raw power that I’d been looking for,” said Westerberg, “and that they might just be gullible enough to fall for me giving a little leadership.”

  When they got together again, the band was back in the basement. Along with his guitar and amp, Westerberg also brought over a handful of records: Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers’ Live at Max’s Kansas City; Dave Edmunds’s Tracks on Wax 4; the Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady; the New York Dolls’ eponymous debut. “Basically I said to them, ‘Let’s take all this shit and kinda copy it,’” said Westerberg.

  “When Paul joined, I know he brought a direction that we didn’t have,” Chris Mars said. “We did have this reckless abandon that he was also looking for in a band. It was the right combination.”

  “I just figured, if I’m gonna make anything happen, it’s gotta be my way,” said Westerberg. “It was like: ‘Wake up! You guys are great if you do this. If you keep playing Ted Nugent, you’re not going anywhere.’”

  After working up the Heartbreakers’ “I Wanna Be Loved” and “All By Myself,” Westerberg went to the bathroom. He walked up the stairs and heard the others whispering: “‘This is friggin’ punk rock!’ . . . like I was trying to slip them angel dust or something,” said Westerberg. “Those were fighting words to them.” Though Mars knew the Sex Pistols, for the Stinson brothers “punk was way off our radar,” said Tommy.

  “It was so cool,” said Westerberg. “They hated punk bands. But they were playing like the MC5 or something. They had some type of punk energy they had no idea they possessed.”

  Westerberg plied the Stinsons with the Pistols and Ramones until they came around. Bob was unsold until he heard the Damned’s 1979 LP Machine Gun Etiquette and the high-wire playing of Captain Sensible. (“Captain Sensible! I ripped him off good,” said Bob.) “They went hook, line, and sinker once they got into it,” said Westerberg.

  Early on, though, Westerberg had doubts about Dogbreath’s lead guitarist. “I wanted to get rid of Bob from day one,” he would admit. He even talked to Chris privately about starting another band without Bob. “I wanted to steal Chris, but he wouldn’t go. I wanted to steal Tommy, too. But Chris was like, ‘It’s Bob’s band and Tommy’s his little brother. We can’t do that.’”

  Bob and Paul were immediately suspicious of each other’s tastes. “He had an awful record collection. He thought mine was awful too,” said Westerberg—particularly Paul’s affection for Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. Westerberg couldn’t stand Bob’s bad metal records (e.g., Angel).

  They bonded over having inadvertently shared a first show—Johnny Winter in 1975. “That was the common uncool factor,” said Westerberg. Both had a passion for screaming glam and AM radio pop from the early seventies, as well as a more recent rockabilly rediscovery phase.

  What brought Westerberg fully to Bob’s side was his recklessness. Unlike everyone else Paul had played with, Bob approached the guitar with total freedom. “He had fast fingers: they weren’t always well guided, but they were fast,” noted Tommy. But he was also fearless and forceful, qualities Westerberg intuitively prized: “He had the confidence not to go, ‘Oh, shucks, I fucked up there.’ If he fucked up, he would fuck up with majesty.”

  Paul’s and Bob’s loose guitar weave became an essential part of the band’s sound. “When I listen back, I’m astonished at how they played off of each other,” said Tommy. “They really worked off each other rhythmically—even though Paul didn’t listen to Yes and shit like that.”

  Besides covers, they learned a couple of Westerberg’s holdovers from previous bands. “Lookin’ for Ya” was given new muscle and speed. Though Keith Moon had been his first idol, Mars’s playing was closer to the Sex Pistols’ Paul Cook—rigorous snare work and simple, minimal fills, plus his own left-field flourishes. “He had a very unorthodox way of playing the kick drum pattern,” said Tommy. “It wasn’t always four on the floor, but it wasn’t a typical pop beat either.”

  Nor was Mars’s physical stance: he sat up high behind the kit and almost leaned down into the drums. (“I can control my foot pedal, go faster, that way,” he said.) It wasn’t an ideal position to play from, but it made it feel as though he was constantly bearing down on the beat.

  Westerberg’s unusual chording style and untutored musical mind could be vexing. “It’s always been hard to follow me by looking at my hands, because I’m not always making a real chord. You need to have an ear to follow me, and Tommy had that. He would understand you could play notes that weren’t necessarily the root.” Tommy became the de facto musical director for the band before he hit puberty. “For the next ten years I’d be asking Tommy, ‘What chord does that start with?’”

  The band spent the winter woodshedding—“Four or five times a week at first,” said Tommy. “We played loud in the basement, out-louding one another,” said Westerberg. “Bob never turned it down, and Tommy was as loud as anyone, so you had to fight to be heard.”

  During one weeknight rehearsal, as they tore through a version of Dave Edmunds’s “Trouble Boys,” they took the song’s twanging rhythm and gave it a screaming thrust. “There’s trouble boys all around me,” howled Westerberg as he and Bob traded lead and rhythm back and forth, while Chris and Tommy battered away at the beat.

  When the last note rang out and the song was over, there was silence. Looking at one another, they realized, as Paul would recall, “that we had fallen in together.”

  Paul Westerberg’s effort to mold Dogbreath into his dream combo was still going to require some work. To put himself in a position to be the undisputed rhythm guitarist, singer, and leader, he’d have to clear a path and get rid of a few obstacles, starting with Robert Flemal.

  When Flemal returned to the Stinsons’ after his illness, he immediately sensed a difference. “I remember the first couple times Paul came over, I felt like there was an invader in the basement,” he said. “I didn’t even know some of the songs they were playing. All of a sudden they started sounding more punk rock.”

  With three guitarists fighting for space, it was a mess. “[Flemal] would be hanging around and it would just get cacophonous,” said Westerberg. “He was the hardest to oust because he kinda lived there and was tight with Bob. But he wasn’t any good. It was not like a battle of the guitarists or anything.”

  Flemal realized his place in the band had been usurped, and his attentions wandered. He soon met his future wife and gave up on Dogbreath. “It’s either the girl or the band,” Bob told Robert. “The band is going places and you’re not keeping up.” Flemal said: “I never spoke to Bob again after that.”

  Although Westerberg had been singing in rehearsal, Bob felt they needed a “real” vocalist. Stuart Cummins continued dropping by periodically. “Chris would give me a ride home on his motorcycle, and I’d say, ‘Man, that fucking singer has gotta go; fire his ass,’” said Westerberg. “And Chris was like, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’”

  They soon dispatched Cummins, and Westerberg brought in his old Oat singer Tom Byrne to audition. Bob, in particular, liked Byrne. “I then did what I had to do,” said Westerberg, who told Dogbreath that Byrne didn’t care for the band. Then he told Byrne that the band didn’t really want him.

  “He told me, ‘We’ve decided to keep it a four-piece’—meaning I was out,” recalled Byrne. (In later years, even at the peak of the band’s success, Bob Stinson would still bemoan the fact that Byrne hadn’t become their singer.)

  Having kicked around with him in various lineups over the years, Byrne felt Westerberg had finally found the right group: one powerful enough and malleable enough to fulfill his vision. “Their name was Dogbreath, you know?” said Byrne. “They had no real direction. But they were good. From the cradle they were good musicians, they could play well. Paul just took them and pushed it and molded it a certain w
ay, and that created a magic.”

  The band had been playing for a couple months with people coming in and out. Then one day they looked up and Flemal was a memory, Cummins was gone, and Byrne was no more. Finally, it was just the four of them—Paul, Tommy, Bob, and Chris—and that’s how it would stay.

  The last thing that needed to be changed was the name. “At first I wanted to call us the Substitutes, after the Who song,” said Westerberg. “À la the tradition of the Rolling Stones—let’s take a great song and name ourselves after that.” For whatever reason, the Substitutes didn’t fly with the others.

  Westerberg grabbed a dictionary and tried to find something else that would fit. He got halfway through the letter “I” and stopped on a word that caught his eye. He scanned its various meanings: “An obstruction . . . a hindrance . . . an obstacle . . . a physical or psychological problem.” Perfect. They would become the Impediments.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Stinson family had found some stability on Thirty-Sixth and Bryant. But in early 1980, the property owners decided to move back in, forcing the Stinsons to pick up stakes again.

  Gary Bowman was a regular at the Uptown and heard Anita was looking for a place and didn’t have a lot of money. His family owned a two-story frame house on Twenty-Second and Bryant that he could rent to her at a discount. She warned him that her boys had a band and that it could get noisy. Bowman assured her the place was big: six bedrooms, four-thousand-plus square feet—it had actually once been a rooming house. The band could practice in the large unfinished basement. Bowman didn’t mention that the basement was also where his father had committed suicide.

  Down a rickety staircase, the basement was a cramped brick-and-concrete bunker dominated by a giant octopus furnace and surrounded by exposed piping. “The guy had hung himself from the pipes, and the boys played right next to that,” said Anita, who noted that the house was haunted. “You definitely heard things at night. But [the ghost] was friendly. He enjoyed us being there.” Despite sharing space with the undead, 2215 Bryant Avenue South would become the band’s headquarters.