by Bob Mehr
“Maybe being a little hipper than [my] older parents, she figured, ‘Well, if they’re going to do this stuff, at least they’re under my roof,’” said Westerberg. “We wouldn’t have gotten off the ground but for Anita allowing us to play in the basement. And she had to fuckin’ put up with that noise.”
Though Dogbreath had started out as a weed-centric band, the fuel for the Impediments soon became alcohol. Westerberg wasn’t drinking when he joined; in fact, he’d been toting a bottle of grapefruit juice when he met them. “I was on one of my first spells on the wagon,” he said. “I was determined to grab the bull by the horns a little bit as far as finding a band to play with. Before that, it felt like a band just was something to do in between partying.”
Having been a drug guinea pig through adolescence—taking double hits of whatever his friends dared him to—Westerberg’s reaction to pot had become distorted. “If I drank beer and smoked weed, I would get a weird LSD-type high. So I stopped.”
Chris Mars had stopped smoking pot too. Booze offered a better buzz for the kind of fast, raucous, rowdy music they were making anyway. They drank cheap domestic brew: Mickey’s Big Mouths from the Hums liquor store around the corner, with occasional bottles of Arriba: “One of those Thunderbird–Mad Dog 20/20–Ripple lighter fluid wines,” said Westerberg.
Though the band’s drinking would come to define and even consume them in later years, in the beginning it was a perfect lubricant for the long hours of practice and their burgeoning friendship. “That was the glue that held us—ol’ Jack Daniels,” said Mars. Westerberg noted: “They weren’t heavy fall-down drunks when I met them. None of us were. We learned to be that together.”
Early on, Chris Mars passed along a tape of his tunes to Westerberg. “One of the songs, I believe, was called ‘Down in the Basement,’” Westerberg said. “There were two or three other things. They had a lot of stops and starts and chord changes.” Paul rebelled at learning them: “It’s no different than playing ‘Aqualung’ or the Allman Brothers. I said, ‘Fuck this. Why don’t I just write my own?’”
Westerberg’s immersion in punk and garage rock had slowly liberated him from his mind-set as a guitar geek. His years reading music magazines heavily informed the type of songs he would write. “I started to get a sense of what critics think is cool,” said Westerberg. “I was very hip to what they’d liked about the New York Dolls. The Dolls’ songs were classic rock-and-roll because they had beginnings, middles, and ends.”
Westerberg wasn’t sure he could really come up with anything truly original, but a Ritchie Blackmore quote in Guitar Player magazine—“You’re either a genius or a clever thief”—provided a spark. “I thought, Okay, I’m no genius, so I went and ripped off a bunch of Johnny Thunders songs and rewrote them. If Johnny can make two chords for ‘All by Myself,’ I’ll just change the key and call it something else.”
There would be other influences too: “The Who, the Raspberries, the Sex Pistols, the rockabilly revival, and all the ’70s pop radio shit I used to love,” said Westerberg. “It was all mashed in there.”
Westerberg wrote in his parents’ basement in the daytime. By summer he’d amassed nearly thirty tunes. “It was out of necessity. I figured if we’re going to have to play an hour set, as fast as we play, we’ll need thirty songs.”
“Paul’s songs were together, rockin’ numbers,” said Bob. “He basically came with all the words and maybe the bridge, and he’d stumble onto something, and I’d throw something in, and he’d say, ‘That’s it, that’s it!’”
“It was bubblegum garage music sung by a guy who couldn’t sing,” said Westerberg, “and they sort of harnessed that with their loud rock chops and made it better.”
The leitmotif of Westerberg’s first songs was searching: looking for girls, drugs, jobs, rides. Others were written as tacit rejections: of school, authority figures, any kind of community ideal. “I can’t write happy songs, so I write about the things that make me the most frustrated,” Westerberg said.
His greatest frustration was women. He’d always been consumed by romantic crushes on unapproachable figures. “Try Me” was about a curvaceous waitress he’d admired from afar; “Customer” was inspired by the clerk who sold him cigarettes. “Near my house, there was SuperAmerica, a gas station,” he said. “There was a cute girl who worked behind the counter who never had time for anything. There was always a line of five truck drivers, and you’d have to get your thing and go.”
He also mined the band itself. Bob Stinson’s history of juvenile delinquency, Tommy’s snotty adolescent antics, and the mad dashes clinging to the back of Chris Mars’s motorcycle were the basis for some of his most memorable numbers. “I figured if I’m gonna sing these tunes, it’s gotta be something they can relate to,” said Westerberg. “If I wasn’t specifically writing about them, I would use something they said, their terminology or a phrase, to sew the whole thing together.”
The band would become his muse, characters for him to play with in song, and ultimately a kind of myth to promulgate. “I could tell you right now that those things wouldn’t have gotten written without them. It’s taken me years to realize what they facilitated,” he said. “It was the four of us; it was an attitude that made those songs.”
That spring, Jef Jodell asked Westerberg to fill in on guitar with his new band, Resistor, for an opening slot at the Longhorn. He was secretly trying to bring Paul back into his band. “I figured, if the Impediments don’t work out, then we’ll be back on track,” said Jodell. Westerberg agreed—the Longhorn was the hip venue in town, the center of Minneapolis’s burgeoning new wave scene, and he hoped to make a connection there and get a show down the line. He also knew Jodell had some decent equipment and wanted him to record the Impediments’ new songs.
As they practiced Jodell noticed a change in Westerberg. “He’d increasingly take the attitude of ‘fuck it,’” said Jodell. “He’d come over to our rehearsal spot and take a cigarette and throw it in your beer. Then he’d drink the beer with the cigarette in it and say, ‘Head or gut—what’s the difference?’ It was his way of stealing your drink.”
In early March, Resistor played a Longhorn Wednesday Tiger Night beer bust. A suburban muso outfit like Resistor clearly didn’t fit in. Westerberg hung back, out of the spotlight. “I knew what they were doing was fucking corny as hell,” said Westerberg. “I clung to the amp with my back to the audience, and Jef said something like, ‘Come on, step out with me,’ so we could do back-to-back Wishbone Ash guitar solos. I was thoroughly embarrassed.”
Afterward, a guy from the audience approached Westerberg. “I like your attitude,” he said. “Lose these fuckers.”
If Westerberg had any question about throwing his lot in with the scruffier Stinson brothers and Chris Mars instead of the more polished Richfield contingent, that night erased his doubts for good. “Playing with Chris and Tommy and Bob, I felt more comfortable,” said Westerberg. “They were street-smart and were willing to take a chance and a dare. There was a feeling like, yeah, these guys are troublemakers and fuck-ups. But I can stand with these guys and I’m not going to be afraid.”
To record the Impediments, Jef Jodell borrowed his brother’s reel-to-reel tape machine, got a proper PA from his bass player, and scrounged up a mixing board and microphones. The Stinson basement was too cramped, so they found a private residence—possibly Chris Mars’s place (memories differ on this point).
They worked longest on “Try Me,” the band’s most commercial-sounding song, as well as “Lookin’ for Ya” and some others. “She’s Firm” and “Looks Like My Old Girl,” remained instrumentals or had barely audible scratch vocals. They tracked the songs with Paul, Tommy, and Chris playing live. “Bob overdubbed his guitar,” said Jodell, “because Paul didn’t believe we could get rhythm tracks clean the first time through with him playing.”
Vocally, Westerberg had not yet settled on the Johnny Rotten–inspired ranting that would mark the band’s fir
st releases, but sang in a vaguely bluesy manner. Unsure of his voice, he insisted on using a heavily flanged vocal effect on “Try Me.” Jodell mixed the songs down and gave two copies to Westerberg. Paul in turn entered “Try Me” and “Lookin’ for Ya” in a local talent contest.
The Songwriter LP was a collaboration between Minneapolis indie label Twin/Tone Records, rock station KQRS, and monthly music magazine Trax. In the late sixties, KQRS had been a groundbreaking FM outlet, but by 1980 it was a tired album-rock warhorse. Teaming with Twin/Tone and Trax was the station’s attempt to up its cachet among the new wave.
This record’s 12 songs were selected from more than 760 entries. A panel of judges evaluated over 38 hours of tapes. Among the acts chosen were the Twin/Tone-affiliated Fingerprints and the Pistons, the power-poppers Twin City Terrors, the Prince-connected duo Chris Moon and John Rivers, and the punk outfit Phil and the Blanks.
One of the many bands that would be passed over for the compilation was the Impediments. Paul Westerberg got a polite but firm (and form) rejection letter from Twin/Tone a few weeks after sending in their songs.
Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, was also the land of 10,000 rehab centers. The pioneering clinic Hazelden, which opened in the late 1940s, originally treated alcoholic priests before gearing itself to the professional classes. Hazelden would spawn a new, gentler, more all-encompassing approach to battling addiction known as the “Minnesota Model.” By the early 1970s, an influx of federal funds created a rehab boom in the state, with treatment programs popping up all over.
The members of the Dads, the new band of Paul Westerberg’s friends Mike Lasley and Steve Skibbe, had almost all been through the teen rehab system. “It was a big industry here,” said Lasley. “Any kid who got in trouble remotely related to drugs got sent to treatment.”
In April 1980, the younger brother of Dads singer Shawn Micheau was marking his six-month sobriety anniversary, so his mother let him have a party on the grounds of the family farm in Burchville. The Dads invited the Impediments to open. It was a small show—a smattering of friends and acquaintances attended—with the Dads performing outside atop a hay wagon and the Impediments set up in front of an old barn. “It was very cold,” said Skibbe. “There were not very many people there.”
The Dads had hooked into a small circuit of venues catering to sober teens. “Whenever these chemical-free clubs would open up, we’d hear about them and try to get some work there,” said Lasley. One such venue was a teen rehab center in St. Paul called Team House.
The head counselor was Mike Burns, himself a recovering addict. Burns had begun putting on regular weekend concerts at Team House, which was located in the old Assumption Church School. Soon other area treatment programs would bus in groups of newly sober kids for the shows. “It was not unusual to have two hundred, three hundred people at these dances any given night,” said Burns. “People came from AA clubs, some people came just because they’d heard about it. It was open to people from the neighborhood as well. But it was policed with the same requirements: No drug or alcohol use on the premises. If someone showed up stoned or high they were asked to leave. This is a chemical-free group of people. We can’t have anybody drinking or blowing grass.”
On a Saturday in early April, the Impediments were booked as the evening’s entertainment. It would mark the band’s first public concert.
Kevin Bowe—who would eventually join the Dads as a guitarist—attended the show; he was an eighteen-year-old resident of another treatment center called Shanti House. “It was the most surreal thing,” he said. “Here’s a bunch of sixteen- to twenty-two-year-old idiots that are crawling out of their skin—because you’re spending the first week of your life not stoned all the time. Imagine how great a band had to be to get my attention under those circumstances.”
Bowe called watching the Impediments “the weirdest musical experience of my life. They weren’t exactly good, but I just loved them. And I couldn’t figure out what I liked about them so much, but I knew they were the best band I’d ever seen. They were totally exciting.”
The Impediments had steeled their nerves for their first public performance by getting good and drunk. “We were all insecure people at that time,” said Mars. “That was a way for us to release our inhibitions and go a little bit more wild onstage.” They mostly played covers: Heartbreakers, Slade, Kinks. The audience was scandalized when they noticed that the back of Tommy’s bass had a big pot leaf painted on it. “Which, at a sober dance, was kind of indicative of things to come with the group,” said Bowe.
The Impediments had been scheduled to play two short sets, but they were caught drinking in the parking lot during the break. A buzz went through the crowd: “Everyone was like, ‘Ooh, ooh,’” said Bowe. Word soon got back to Mike Burns. “At these dances I was the big Kahuna,” said Burns. “I was judge, jury, and executioner.” Burns brought the guillotine down swiftly. He booted them off the stage, out of the building, and swore he’d have them blackballed: “The Impediments,” he told them, “will never play in this town again!”
A few days later, Westerberg got a call from Jef Jodell. Resistor had landed a monthly gig at the Paradise Ballroom in Waconia, forty miles west of Minneapolis. Would the Impediments open? Westerberg agreed, with one caveat. “We can’t be the Impediments,” he said. “We’ve already ruined that name for good. We’re gonna be the Replacements.” After Mike Burns’s threat, the band decided to change their name, just to be safe. As Chris Mars would later note, becoming the Replacements “seemed to . . . accurately [describe] our collective ‘secondary’ social esteem.”
Since none of them could drive, some friends of Chris’s helped them get to Waconia. The Paradise Ballroom was big, with a capacity of one thousand. Resistor’s gig was a Saturday night special: for three bucks’ admission, you got to drink free beer for an hour.
Maybe 150 people were scattered about the venue, getting wasted, when the Replacements went on. Half the crowd was Resistor fans from Richfield, the other half locals. Westerberg remembered playing to “eighty drunk cowboys who were sitting back with their bottles of whiskey and not knowing what to think of us.”
They opened with Slade’s “My Town.” It was chaos onstage: “We counted off the first number and probably each started a different song,” recalled Westerberg. “I remember Bob being airborne—jumping around and shit. And Tommy was scared shitless. Jodell came up and said, ‘Ya gotta turn down,’ and then all of a sudden the power went out and we were done.”
Though Westerberg recalled that the band “got about thirty-five seconds in” before being “booed off the stage,” the Replacements actually played a handful of songs. But the audience was grousing by the middle of the first number.
Jodell was in the back of the room, mixing sound and taping the gig, when the ballroom’s owner ran over. “You gotta get these guys off the stage,” the old duffer told him. “I’ve just had this table of four come up and tell me this is the worst band they’ve ever heard and they want their twelve dollars back so they can go out for pizza instead.”
Jodell tried to argue, biding for time, but eventually was forced to go up and relay the message to Westerberg. “I told him, ‘We’re gonna have to pull ya,’” said Jodell. “I think he spit on the floor or something. He was pissed.”
Being booted only reinforced the group’s defiant, contrarian impulses. “We were well aware that if we get onstage and every time we’re pissing people off to where they can’t stand to even see us or hear us, we must be doing something pretty outrageous,” said Westerberg, who wrote a “weapon song” he could pull out the next time they faced a hostile crowd, called “Shutup.”
Playing sober dances and ballroom gigs in the sticks was a road to nowhere. Somehow the Replacements needed to play Minneapolis proper, at a place like the Longhorn, where their music would be appreciated and their behavior tolerated. But they had no idea how to get their foot in the door of the club. Fortunately for the band, fate int
ervened.
“There was a lost link, this guy we only knew as Denny,” said Westerberg. “We were rehearsing one day at the Stinson house, and this guy and his friend stopped in. They heard us playing from outside, they were decked out in sort of punk military gear. And this Denny character said, ‘You guys are fucking good.’ He was probably the first person who had told us anything positive—all we’d heard was ‘Turn that down’ or ‘You suck!’”
The mysterious Denny said something else too. He told them they should make a tape and take it to this guy, a local mover and shaker. He was a deejay at the Longhorn and helped book the club some. He happened to manage the nearby record store, Oar Folkjokeopus. His name was Peter.
CHAPTER 9
Peter Jesperson never liked going to church. When he was a boy—around seven or eight years old—it annoyed him mostly because it interfered with watching Bowery Boys reruns on Sunday mornings. He loved the Bowery Boys, a motley crew of tough-talking city kids who seemed to court trouble constantly.
A few years later, another gang of working-class wiseguys captured his imagination: the Beatles. By then, Jesperson didn’t need church at all; he’d found another religion in rock-and-roll. Whatever room he had in his heart for faith, for belief, he devoted to music—discovering, consuming, and collecting it with a rhapsodic passion.
Peter Louis Jesperson was born February 11, 1954, in St. Paul, Minnesota. A brown-haired boy with green eyes and a bony countenance, he was the second son of Chester “Chet” Jesperson and Carolyn Fosnes. His elder brother Alan was almost seven years his senior, and Peter’s arrival had come as a bit of a surprise to the family.