With no contractual commitment to SST, they could have given Flip Your Wig to Warner Brothers but decided it would have been unreasonably short notice for SST, for whom they still felt deep loyalty and respect—as Mould later put it, “We just kind of owed them one.” Warner thought they were crazy—the album was the band’s most accessible ever. Hart and Norton say they followed Mould’s lead on the decision; Hart hints that Mould unsuccessfully tried to use Flip Your Wig as a bargaining chip to pry an even better deal out of Warner.
They started recording their major label debut Candy Apple Grey four months after completing Flip Your Wig. Warner was not happy that they had lost the brilliant Flip Your Wig and gotten Candy Apple Grey instead, a record that was not a patch on the previous three albums. Even the cover art was weak.
Hüsker Dü’s major label signing was swiftly followed by the Replacements’, and indie-style rock enjoyed a short-lived mainstream heyday: for a brief while you could see Hüsker Dü on the Joan Rivers Show and the Today show, and the Replacements on Saturday Night Live. “We thought, and rightfully so, I think, that we could change things if we could have a higher platform to speak from. It was with the best of intentions,” says Mould. “We were hyperaware of what we were trading off.”
Unfortunately, Hart began using heroin during a long break after the Candy Apple Grey tour and eventually became a full-blown addict. Mould went completely sober right around the same time. “I was a really bad drinker and really bad with speed,” Mould admitted. “I said, ‘It’s just time to stop this shit because I’m not going to make it to thirty if I keep it up at this rate.’ ” Sobriety cast a wedge between him and Hart, but Mould also had his beefs with Norton. “Some people got less interested in the band as a means of expression and more interested in the band as a paycheck,” Mould said, apparently referring to Norton, then taking aim at Hart: “Some people had to go off and follow their muse and follow their vices a little farther down the road.”
Hart had turned to heroin as a respite from the stress of being in such a stormy band, but soon after he started, he’d found another reason to escape: in mid-1986 he’d taken an HIV test and come up positive. He didn’t tell anyone in the band.
Despite all the strife, Warner gave Hüsker Dü its enthusiastic promotion and support—even Bob Merlis, the label’s courtly VP of publicity, was once spotted in the mosh pit.
By the time of 1987’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories, Hart and Mould were feuding openly. Hart accused Mould of making sure Hart never had more than 45 percent of the songs on an album. Since Mould had eleven songs he wanted to include on the next release, Hart insisted on contributing as many as possible, which meant releasing a twenty-song double album. Although not happy about it, Warner honored their commitment to the band’s creative freedom but also insisted that the band’s mechanical royalties would be paid as if Warehouse were a single album.
The band had hired Mould’s close friend David Savoy to run their office, and when Warner insisted the band hire a proper manager, the twenty-four-year-old Savoy got thrust into mediating between an increasingly conflicted band and its label. In the spring of ’87, on the eve of their first tour to promote Warehouse, Savoy jumped off a Minneapolis bridge to his death. The devastated band went ahead with the tour anyway, but Hüsker Dü never got over the blow.
After Savoy’s death, Mould, who had been calling the shots through Savoy anyway, assumed the managerial role. Even though an established manager would have given the band more clout at the label, Mould was unwilling to relinquish control; the band even turned down the advances of Cliff Burnstein, an already successful manager who soon copiloted Metallica and many other bands to platinum Valhalla. One can only wonder what would have happened had the band taken up Burnstein’s offer.
Warehouse sold about 125,000 copies in the U.S.—it hit the label’s sales target, and yet with various promotional expenses, the band made little more than they would have with less sales on SST. The major label gambit had failed. “As it turned out, it didn’t make that big of a difference in the long run,” Mould admitted years later. “The sales went up, but not enough to justify, you know, to say it was the smartest move ever made.”
The problem was not with the label or even the band’s feuding; it was with the music. “They wrote pop songs that were very dense and very layered and very loud and very compressed,” says Panebianco. “They still sound different. It just sounded different from anything anybody played on the radio then or before or since. It was too aggressive for regular radio.”
So Hüsker Dü became sacrificial victims of the industry’s unfamiliarity with this “new music.” They were like the first pancake that always gets thrown away. “[We were] truly thinking we’re changing things when in fact we’re on Warner Brothers and the AOR guy still doesn’t know what track to lead with,” says Mould. “And doesn’t that sound like REO Speedwagon? What’s the difference, really? That’s usually a good time to fold up your tent and start over.”
It all came down to one sad episode before a show in Columbia, Missouri, on December 11, 1987. Hart was trying to beat his heroin addiction with methadone and was keeping a bottle of the drug on ice in a dressing room sink. Unfortunately, the bottle leaked and its entire contents spilled down the drain. Hart played the show, but it didn’t look good for the next night, the last show of the tour, by which time he would be going through withdrawal. The next day Mould and Norton told Hart they’d understand if he wanted to cancel that night’s show. Hart said he felt fairly good and wanted to play. But Mould had already canceled the show, as well as the band’s appearance at an AIDS benefit Hart had helped put together at New York’s Beacon Theatre.
Hart quit the band four days later, followed shortly thereafter by Mould.
Hart has asserted it wasn’t his drug addiction that broke up Hüsker Dü, claiming that Mould had grown weary of the compromises required in a band of equals and was increasingly taking charge. “It just became that it was easier to be around Bob,” Hart said, “if you were playing a part of Bob’s game.” Besides, Hart felt that Mould’s songs were getting increasingly “square.”
Norton agrees that the realities of the band’s own success, more than Hart’s drug problem, were its undoing: “Being together for nine years, the amount of touring that we did, the pressures of being on a major label, the more demand for your time, the less time you have for yourself,” he says. “Then definitely maybe some of the steam started going out. Because the energy was being sucked from different places, whereas before it was just the three of us, let’s get in the van and go blow the doors off this town.”
The bottom line was that Hüsker Dü had become what the band had never wanted it to be: out of control. “The band was like a train speeding uphill and downhill, and nobody could get near it or they’d get run over,” said Mould, who claimed it was he who quit the band first. “Certain people would try to be the conductor and certain people would pull the brakes. And nobody could get on or off. When it finally hit down in that valley and slowed down, Bob jumped off. Bob got off the train… and it’s the best thing I ever did.”
Hart has no regrets either. “No matter what bitter kind of monster it turned into, there were some very satisfying moments,” he said. “I can’t think of anything else I would have been better off doing for that amount of time.”
Six months after the breakup, Hart learned that his HIV test had been incorrect. He was fine.
In the end, Mould felt Hüsker Dü had been done in by their own greatest success: Zen Arcade. Looking back on the band’s career in 1990, Mould said the landmark album was “the beginning of the end.” “It was the best record we ever made, but it was the one that we emulated. And when we went to Warner Brothers we couldn’t change because we would have sold out,” Mould told The Bob zine. “God, that was a weird situation. People really wanted to hold on to the past. And in a way I think it made us want to, too. It’s weird. I’m certainly not ashamed of anything the band did, b
ut, boy, looking back it’s like, we could have done more. Something else should have been done.”
CHAPTER 6
THE REPLACEMENTS
I GUESS YOU COULD SAY WE’RE A SLOPPY ROCK & ROLL BAND THAT TRIES TO STRADDLE THE LINE BETWEEN COMEDY AND TRAGEDY.
—PAUL WESTERBERG
Within the Eighties indie scene, the Replacements upended a lot of perceptions about what was OK. While their crosstown rivals Hüsker Dü toed the line in terms of left-wing politics and SST-style pragmatism, the Replacements couldn’t give a hoot about any of that—they never booked their own shows or drove their own van, and the closest they got to a political song was… well, they never even got close to a political song. Instead, the band’s leader Paul Westerberg wrote the kind of heart-on-the-sleeve rock songs, not to mention witty wordplay, that were almost totally absent from the underground.
Southern California punk rock bands like the Descendents and Circle Jerks had already done the young, loud, and snotty thing, but the Replacements did it in a way that folks from outside the community could understand; along with R.E.M., they were one of the few underground bands that mainstream people liked. It was anarchy without the rage; not only did they lack pesky political baggage, but their music was catchy and had obvious roots in classic rock bands like the Faces and the Stones. And, hey, a couple of them were even kinda cute.
The Replacements made a career out of a prolonged adolescence, although it was an awkward adolescence. Along the way, they magically metamorphosed from a raucous bunch of post-teens into the band that produced the landmark Let It Be, one of the best rock records ever made.
And if indie rock was becoming predictable even by the early Eighties, this band was nothing if not spontaneous. They’d screw up a gig at the drop of a beer can; they’d toss their instruments around the stage, hand them to members of the audience to play, or stumble through an hour and a half of cheesy covers. Sometimes they demanded that unless the audience threw money onto the stage, they’d keep playing badly. With their self-deprecating, even self-destructive style, they pioneered the “loser” sensibility that has been imitated in various ways ever since. Even their name implied they were second best. And yet on a good night, they were one of the best rock & roll bands one could ever hope to hear. The Replacements rocked hard.
The son of a Minneapolis Cadillac salesman, Paul Westerberg had attended a Catholic school for problem kids, but because he skipped graduation (he refused to wear a cap and gown), he never got his diploma. “The years thirteen to eighteen were pretty much hell,” Westerberg said in a 1983 interview. “I was nervous, paranoid, and frustrated. I did my share of drugs. I didn’t know what I wanted in life.”
Luckily for Westerberg, his life began to take direction after he experienced a rock & roll epiphany in 1974, when he was fourteen. He’d just gotten a guitar and learned the three basic chords G, C, and D. And on his TV were power-poppers the Raspberries, playing their hit “Go All the Way,” whose chords were… G, C, and D. Westerberg was floored. It was not, as it turned out, hard to rock.
Westerberg eventually joined a cover band, but he really wanted to play the songs he’d been writing. “I knew I was on my way,” Westerberg said. “I could tell this… magic.” Inspired by the Ramones, the New York Dolls, and the Sex Pistols, he formed a band as soon as he got out of high school. He got a job at a steel mill, then worked as a janitor in the office of Senator David Durenberger. He’d write out set lists for his band on Durenberger’s stationery. “There’d be songs like ‘We’re Gonna Get Drunk Tonight,’ ” Westerberg said, “and at the top it would say ‘From the desk of U.S. Senator…’ ”
In 1978 nineteen-year-old Yes fan and onetime juvenile-home escapee Bob Stinson saw his eleven-year-old half-brother Tommy starting down the same bad road he had traveled. So he gave him a bass and an amp just to keep him off the street, and they started jamming together. That year Bob met Chris Mars, seventeen, a soft-spoken high school dropout with a dark peach fuzz mustache. “We were all kind of long-haired dope-smoking teens,” says Mars. “We’d light a joint and if the wind blew, your hair would singe.”
With Mars on guitar and then drums, they started playing songs by Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, and a high-speed instrumental version of the Yes warhorse “Roundabout” in the Stinsons’ mom’s basement. They called themselves Dogbreath and they were driven by an imperative as old as rock & roll itself: “What do you do to keep yourself out of trouble and away from the factories?” said Mars.
One day Westerberg was walking home from work when he heard a band blasting in the Stinsons’ house; they were so loud they rattled the windows. They sounded pretty good—a bit rough around the edges perhaps, but not bad at all. Almost every day after work, Westerberg would walk by the house, hide in some bushes and listen. Westerberg didn’t know that the drummer was in fact his recent acquaintance Chris Mars. Mars knew Westerberg played guitar and by coincidence got the rest of the band to go see him play one night. Dogbreath didn’t care for Westerberg’s Tom Petty and Bad Company covers, but they invited him over to jam anyway. He was delighted to realize that this was the band he’d been listening to in the bushes.
When Westerberg arrived, he asked, “Where’s the bass player?”
“He’s sitting right there,” Bob replied, gesturing toward the twelve-year-old boy across the room. “Tommy was so little,” Westerberg said. “He came up to like half the size of his amp. I’ll never forget it.”
The Dogbreath guys had never heard punk, but that didn’t prevent them from dismissing two Westerberg originals as “fuckin’ punk rock.” Then they tried to get Westerberg to sing “Roundabout.” Being a young man of refinement and taste, he refused.
Dogbreath soon got a singer who “was really shit,” according to Westerberg, “a hippie who had, like, a lyric sheet, sat down, and read the lyrics.” Then they fired the hippie and Westerberg started, in his words, “yelling into the mike and stuff,” but Bob didn’t like that either, so they got another singer. But Westerberg really wanted to be the singer and, as legend has it, took the new guy aside one day and said, “The band doesn’t like you. I think you’re great, but they think you suck.” The singer soon quit and Westerberg took his place.
Basically, the Stinsons’ band was a good excuse to get drunk and party. “Rehearsals” consisted of taking a little speed and drinking and then maybe playing some songs as an afterthought. They’d play until Mrs. Stinson stomped on the floor.
Still, they balanced out each other well—the volatile, raucous band and the relatively disciplined, focused Westerberg, who showed up to practice in neat, clean clothes and insisted on playing songs until they got them right.
The rest of the band soon discovered first-generation English punk rock like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Damned and cut their hair, leaving their suburban stoner identity behind, if only in appearance. “[Punk] was the perfect new sound vehicle by which to express our mentally ill, late adolescent attitude,” Mars wrote in an unpublished memoir. “With the unbridled instability of the band already in place, punk—or something like it—proved the most logical direction to take ourselves.”
The band realized they needed a better name than Dogbreath. Westerberg felt they should think in terms of taking the place of something—“Like maybe the main act doesn’t show,” Mars wrote, “and instead the crowd has to settle for an earful of us dirtbags.” Mars came up with “the Substitutes,” which lasted the few minutes it took Westerberg to come up with something better: “the Replacements.” Everybody liked the name. “It seemed to sit just right with us,” Mars wrote, “accurately describing our collective ‘secondary’ social esteem.”
A commercial FM radio DJ and a fabulously nice guy, Peter Jesperson was also the manager of the only hip record store in town, Oarfolkjokeopus, the locus of Minneapolis’s rock community since the mid-Seventies. A noted music connoisseur around town, Jesperson also spun records at the Minneapolis new wave/punk club the Longhorn and had cofoun
ded Twin/Tone Records with local recording engineer Paul Stark, who owned a twenty-four-track mobile unit, and sportswriter and sometime rock critic Charley Hallman in January of ’78.
When Westerberg handed Jesperson a four-song demo tape in May of ’80, it was only to see if the band could get a show at the Longhorn. As it happened, Westerberg was eavesdropping on Jesperson’s office just as he put in the tape, only to run away as soon as he heard the opening notes of the first song, “Raised in the City.” Had he stayed, he would have heard Jesperson play the whole song through and then rewind it and play it again. And again. And again. Jesperson was blown away. “If I’ve ever had a magic moment in my life, it was popping that tape in,” says Jesperson. “I didn’t even get through the first song before I thought my head was going to explode.”
He called Westerberg the next day and asked, “So do you want to do a single or an album?” Westerberg was astonished. “You mean you think this stuff is worth recording?” he asked. The Replacements had barely played out yet and they already had a record deal.
The classically oriented Stark trusted Jesperson’s opinions about rock music completely, but, being an immensely practical man, he wanted to know more about the band. “It wasn’t a question of whether they were good,” says Stark. “The question from my point of view was are they going to be able to travel, are they going to be able to record, can they write songs in a timely manner?”
The Replacements’ first gig was in June ’80 at an alcohol-free coffeehouse in the basement of a Minneapolis church. Tommy had recently injured himself falling out of a tree, so the remaining three members played the show. They were so nervous that they got drunk on whiskey-and-Cokes—and maybe took a few pills, too—and when someone smelled the alcohol on their breath, they were thrown out of the building and told they’d never play in Minneapolis again. Jesperson arrived to find a dejected Mars sitting on the church steps, his head in his hands.
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 25