by Bob Mehr
Suddenly, Westerberg needed to scare up a gig. He again turned to his Marsden Maintenance coworker Steve Skibbe, whose group, the Dads, had made connections on the sober-house circuit.
Skibbe would help the Replacements line up a show with the Dads in early June at a venue in Southeast Minneapolis called the Bataclan. Located on Twenty-Sixth Street and Chicago Avenue, the Bataclan had started out as a church, then become the Pillsbury Theatre. The owner, Mike Foreman—a prominent player in the city’s musical theater scene—had recently gone through his own alcohol treatment. Inspired by the experience, he decided to turn the venue into a chemical-free meeting and performance space.
Almost immediately, plans for the Replacements’ crucial showcase hit a snag. A few days before the gig, Tommy Stinson was in an accident that nearly ended his bass playing career. “My brother and I got stoned and were climbing trees in the back of our yard,” recalled Tommy. The branch Tommy was standing on snapped, and he fell onto a picket fence below, landing right on his armpit. “I severed the muscle. It was horrible,” he said. “Luckily, it didn’t get the nerves. But I had to go to the hospital and get stitches. I was in a sling for a while.”
Not wanting to miss their chance, Chris, Bob, and Paul showed up at the Bataclan to play the gig as a three-piece. To calm their jangled nerves, they’d started drinking beforehand. Chris had also smuggled some booze into the venue via his drum bag. As he set up his kit, Paul and Bob found the basement of the Bataclan and began ramping up for the show. “I think we were down there doing some [speed],” said Westerberg.
Upstairs, Foreman caught Mars drinking. Furious at the violation of his sober sanctuary, Foreman told him to pack up and get out. It felt like a replay of the band’s first gig at Team House.
Jesperson arrived for the show a few minutes later. As he approached the Bataclan’s entrance, he saw a black-haired kid sitting on the steps, head hanging down and looking dejected.
“Oh, hey . . . you must be Peter,” said a bleary-eyed Mars, looking up. “I’m Chris, the drummer. We just got kicked out; we ain’t gonna play.”
Before Jesperson could respond, Westerberg and Stinson spilled out of the front door. “By the time we came upstairs,” said Westerberg, “Chris had already been ejected from the premises, literally tossed out on his ass and down the stairs, as Pete shows up to view the band for the first time.”
It appeared they’d squandered their opportunity to impress the Twin/Tone boss. “They’d gotten the guy from the label to come see them and figured they’d blown it,” said Jesperson. “They all felt really bad, they were embarrassed. But it didn’t faze me at all. I hate to say it, but I thought it was kind of funny—a halfway house for chemical dependency [sic], and they get caught with chemicals. It cracked me up at the time.”
Jesperson consoled the band, told them he’d use his pull to get them a gig at the Longhorn as soon as he could.
In the meantime, he continued playing the Replacements demo at the store, touting the group to everyone who came in. “He had a very specific idea for them already, before he even knew what was happening himself,” said Oar Folk employee Terry Katzman. “In his mind, I think he knew it was something special—or that it could be.” It wasn’t long before Paul, Chris, and the Stinson brothers began dropping by Oar Folk regularly. “At first, I remember Pete thinking my name was Paul Mars,” chuckled Westerberg. “I remember him being disappointed that my name was Westerberg, because he thought ‘Paul Mars’ sounded more like a star.”
Meeting Tommy—still just thirteen and radiating youthful charisma—and hearing Bob’s stories about his reform school raising fascinated Jesperson. He thought Chris seemed unusually thoughtful and grounded, a much-needed anchor for the Stinsons, while Westerberg had a canny wiseguy air about him, like he always knew more than he let on.
There was a bit of Jesperson’s beloved Bowery Boys in their scrappy manner; one could see Paul as the band’s pugnacious leader Leo Gorcey, with Bob taking on Huntz Hall’s role as the group’s resident oddball.
These South Minneapolis kids—and they all seemed very young, even though Jesperson was just a few years older—were the perfect rock-and-roll characters. They might not have hewed precisely to Beatle-esque archetypes—the cute one, the smart one, etc.—but they were charming and funny and irreverent, with an immediately evident rebellious streak.
CHAPTER 10
It would take a few weeks to crack the Longhorn’s crowded calendar, but Peter Jesperson was finally able to secure the Replacements a gig at the club. They would appear on one of the venue’s multi-band beer bust “Tiger Night” bills. Their coming out would take place on Wednesday, July 2, 1980, opening for the Dads.
The night of the show roughly forty people were spread around throughout the bar. Many of them had already been hyped on the group by Jesperson, who’d been playing their demo nonstop at Oar Folkjokeopus.
“We went from playing it in the back to playing it in the store,” said Oar Folk’s Terry Katzman. “We all got on the bandwagon; it was hard not to with Peter driving it—’cause he was very passionate. It wasn’t any question of if you were going to show up, it was mandatory. And we were all obviously as excited as he was to see what they were like in the flesh.”
The Replacements ambled onto the stage silently and counted off their first number—a new song called “Careless”—with a Westerberg scream. “Irresponsibility’s my closest friend, forget my duty, obligation,” he spat as Bob Stinson volleyed taut riffs back at him. “Tell me about the fuckin’ ordinance, tell me that we’re insubordinate.”
They played eighteen tunes in a fast thirty-five minutes, racing through the songs because of their nerves. The set list consisted of the strongest originals they’d mustered to date, plus some old ’60s garage nuggets (Syndicate of Sound, the Kinks) and punk deep cuts by 999 and the Ramones. The Johnny Thunders influence was pronounced: they also played three Heartbreakers covers (as well as “Get Off the Phone,” a Westerberg original that took its title from a Thunders song of the same name).
“It certainly wasn’t professional, but they had this reckless abandon,” said Jesperson. “You could see they were a traditional rock-and-roll band. It certainly had its punk elements, but at its roots it was very Stones-y, very Chuck Berry. And it was every bit as good [as] I thought it would be.”
Immediately, as each song ended, Jesperson would begin to clap hard and fast. Over the next several years, his rapid, encouraging applause would become a familiar sound at Replacements shows. “We’d play one of these gigs with ten people, and then we’d hear from the back of the room . . . [clap-clap-clap-clap],” said Westerberg. “We knew Pete’s clap. And bless him for trying to get the crowd going, but we found it pretty comical.”
Watching alongside Jesperson, Terry Katzman was also bowled over by the Replacements’ rough-hewn charms. “They impressed me with their haphazardness and brilliance rolled together. It was all one package,” he said. “There was this really focused thing to their sound, but there was this other part of them that was caterwauling and a lot of that was Bob.”
Bob Stinson’s unorthodox musicianship stood out as he wailed away, playing wild, dexterous solos while grinning broadly. Meanwhile, Chris Mars—mouth open, baring his teeth and breathing hard—lurched into his drum kit, as Tommy Stinson rapped eighth notes furiously, bouncing up and down like a kid who’d had too many bowls of Sugar Smacks during a Saturday morning cartoon binge.
Center stage, Westerberg—eyes pressed shut, singing up into the mic—cut an oddly compelling figure as a front man. “Paul had this presence,” said Mike Hoeger, a writer for the Minnesota Daily, who caught the show. “He set up a lot of things that first night that carried on. The way he jerked up his left shoulder, twisted and craned his neck up to the mic, and gargled out the words like a coyote; the way he shouldered his guitar and slung it around like a giant fish, a nuisance; and the way he stumbled into his own bandmates as if they didn’t exist. Or how he’d mi
ss the cue to get back on the vocals. When you watched the Replacements play, they were loose, all just kind of laughing. Almost like ‘We really can’t believe we’re here performing in front of people.’”
The band’s relative youth—with Tommy pulling the median age down to sixteen—gave them an element of novelty. “They set up a mic for Tommy,” recalled Hoeger, “not because he would sing, but because in between songs, during a lull, he would walk up and say something like, ‘Kiss my ass!’ or ‘Fuck You!’ He was so young that it was still amusing to hear himself curse over a PA. But anybody who came to scoff at Tommy for being young, once they heard him, they knew it wasn’t a joke. The kid could play.”
It was that combination of naïveté and deception—as Nabokov might have said—that made the band so compelling. “The Replacements’ energy was a beautiful thing—as crazy as it was, there was an innocence to it,” said Longhorn waitress and future Babes in Toyland founder Lori Barbero. She had gone to high school in New York City and hung out on the fringes of the CBGB scene, palling around with Johnny Thunders. “To me, the Replacements had the same rawness the Heartbreakers and the New York rock bands had, but they were so much younger.”
Unlike their big-city brethren, however, the Replacements didn’t look punk—there was no leather, Mohawks, or safety pins. Nor did they favor the emerging new wave fashions: skinny ties, cool suits, and sharp-angled coifs. Instead, they had desperately unstylish haircuts, wore Dickies work pants, and dressed in hand-me-down Pendletons and torn softball shirts. They took the stage in dirty sneakers, or what one wag described accurately—after glimpsing Westerberg’s footwear—as “cheap janitor shoes.” “They didn’t look like any other band then,” said Katzman. “They looked like they all just came off their jobs, or came in from the bar next door.”
The Replacements didn’t feel a need to dress up or don costumes (at least at that point). “We just wanted to be what we were,” said Westerberg. “Those early pictures of us wearing like baseball jerseys and running shoes and stuff . . . we had no pretense that we needed to look like the Ramones. We were hip to that. We knew the Ramones looked like the Ramones, and we loved them, but we had to be sort of individual if we were gonna get anywhere.”
Another area in which the Replacements were decidedly unlike the Ramones was in the pacing of their show. They didn’t blitz through their sets, but rather played a song, paused and mumbled among themselves, then tuned their guitars for a while. (Endless between-song tunings were common during the band’s first few months.) There was almost a feeling you were watching a rehearsal. “But once they started to play,” said Hoeger, “it was a terrific noise that they produced.”
Where other groups evinced a certain artfulness or tried to present an idealized vision of themselves, the Replacements were all rough edges and struggle. That was part of the attraction: watching them, you couldn’t help but root for the band.
“In the beginning our ‘show’ had more to do with how hard it was to play that shit,” said Tommy Stinson. “It wasn’t like we were putting on this great show because we knew how to pose and look cool. We were playing physically. There was no way not to bend and grind and move around because you had to, just to play it. That was the show: look at these four guys fuckin’ grind it out.”
When the Replacements returned to the Longhorn in mid-July, they played a similar set but without the first-night nerves. “Thank you and all that shit,” said Westerberg to a smattering of applause after their opening song, before noting, “We get more people in the basement than this.”
The show was another high-velocity mix of well-chosen covers and a growing selection of originals that ended with a new Little Richard–style burner called “Oh Baby.”
“I think that’s all we dare,” said a breathless Westerberg, before the band was summoned for an encore by the hooting audience, led by an emphatic Jesperson.
“Ain’t we professionable?” cracked Westerberg as the Replacements lit into a fiery version of “Trouble Boys” to end the night.
Over the next few months, as the Replacements began to take their act to other clubs—including the newly opened 7th St Entry, Duffy’s, and the Cabooze—they added more original material and sharpened their attack with each show.
“Maybe it was purely playing venues that were meant for bands, and that was more exciting than some of these goofier gigs we’d done before,” said Tommy Stinson. “All I remember is when people started showing up to actually see us, it meant something different. And I’m sure it wasn’t lost on Chris, Bob, and Paul that something was starting to build. After we started playing out, there was no turning back.”
Though they sometimes drank beer to excess and occasionally did speed before gigs, there was nothing particularly unhinged about the band’s performances during this initial period. Though they could be sloppy, the drunken disaster sets of lore were still years off. “We were not drunk. If anything, we did take amphetamines, at least I did, I was a sucker for that shit from day one,” said Westerberg. “But it took us a while to get into liquor and make it more of a boozy thing.”
If the Replacements had any negative reputation early on it was mostly for being loud. They were constantly battling soundmen and were sometimes given the cane by club owners for their obscene stage volume. Terry Katzman, who was working sound at the Entry, soon began engineering the band’s shows. “Peter sorta drafted me into the nightmare world of mixing those guys. He was very fussy about Paul’s vocals and wanted to make sure they were riding nicely on top in the mix. But it was hard,” said Katzman. “You’d do a sound check with the band, and then the second they went on they’d just fan [all the levels] up. So, consequently, everything I’d done was out the window.”
After the Replacements’ second or third gig, longtime Curtiss A guitarist Bob Dunlap approached Westerberg and complimented him, told him he sounded like a young Eddie Cochran. (Westerberg acted annoyed, but then went out and bought a Cochran album the next day.)
Dunlap had known Bob Stinson a bit. He’d seen Stinson trudging through the snow of Uptown while driving his cab, given him a ride, and befriended him. “He would come and see the Curt band and heckle us,” recalled Dunlap. “But Bob was a fun guy. He would always put a smile on your face.”
Dunlap was taken aback by the wild energy and sound of Stinson’s fledgling combo. “The Replacements right off the bat . . . it was like, ‘What the hell? Where did this come from?’” said Dunlap. “What could they have been listening to, to have churned that out? But Paul was always like that. He could take all these ideas and put them together in a way you hadn’t thought of.”
Lou Santacroce, who’d migrated from upstate New York to the Twin Cities, was another musician who flipped for the Replacements. “The first song I saw them do was ‘More Cigarettes.’ I heard Paul sing: ‘I don’t watch the TV / I watch the clock,’ and I thought, Okay, this guy’s got something,” he said. “I’d been listening to other Minneapolis bands. I’d heard the Suburbs, and Curtiss A, and I was knocked out. I didn’t think there was going to ever be anything better than Curtiss A. But when I heard the Replacements, that was it—it was like I’d been waiting to hear that all my life.” Newly divorced and at loose ends in his life, Santacroce immediately threw his lot in with the band, volunteering to become their first roadie.
Westerberg and the band may have been amassing a gang of admirers, but the acclaim for the Replacements was not universal. Some of the more established figures in the Minneapolis scene were dubious. “With a name like the Replacements, it dawned on us that they were there to replace us,” said Chris Osgood of the Suicide Commandos, whose band had broken up a few months earlier.
While they weren’t quite seen as “Jesperson’s Folly,” there were plenty of people, Osgood among them, who were vexed by his enthusiasm for the Replacements. “They were pretty ragged at first, a garage band—or a basement band. And there was a broad range of opinion because they were so ragged. I didn’t have the v
ision that Peter had about where the band could go,” admitted Osgood. “I immediately liked Tommy and Chris just as people. Paul never said too much to me one way or the other. And Bob sort of menaced me. He would walk around and always remind me that he was a better guitar player than I was. That being said, he was a sweet guy.”
If there was any direct competition to the Replacements, it was the other group of youthful up-and-comers on Twin/Tone, the Suburbs. “One day Peter said to me, ‘Oh, I got this demo tape’—like Paul was this rec room savant that he’d discovered,” said Suburbs leader Chan Poling. “And Paul was a great, great songwriter. And the band, they were awesome. You hate to overuse that word, but they were really something to see.”
Because of their differences—the Suburbs dressed up, played art rock, and had conceptual leanings—there was a natural inclination to pit the two groups against each other. “They were city kids as opposed to us, being from the ’burbs, so there was a sense of that. But it wasn’t that much of a different aesthetic otherwise,” said Poling. “There was a lot of alcohol and punk credos shared between us.” The Replacements would spend much of their first year opening shows for the more established Suburbs—usually to Westerberg’s chagrin, who perceived their fan base as less than welcoming.
The Suburbs were secure enough that the Replacements didn’t pose an immediate threat. But Jesperson’s embrace of the band left more than a few other local groups smarting. “Prior to the Replacements, there were a couple of bands, including us, who were in the mix for Peter and Twin/Tone,” said Steve Skibbe of the Dads. “But he saw them and that was it—literally love at first sight. There was no question in his mind that this was the gig he was looking for. He was just totally consumed by the Replacements and getting them to be the greatest rock-and-roll band since the Rolling Stones.”