(In fact, Sullivan was a frequent visitor to the Replacements’ stage. At a show at the Channel in Boston, a bouncer started beating up a kid in front of the stage and Tommy jumped on the bouncer. Then Tommy was jumped by another bouncer, who was in turn jumped on by Westerberg. Then Sullivan ran out onto the stage, surely to rescue his charges from danger. No such luck—instead he just grabbed the microphone and finished the song.)
They’d also cover lightweight pop tunes like the DeFranco Family’s “Heartbeat—It’s a Lovebeat” as well as various country standards in their “pussy set,” a result of playing the hardcore circuit, opening for bands like the Effigies, Black Flag, and Social Distortion before hundreds of identical skinheads who all felt they were being nonconformists. “They thought that’s what they were supposed to be standing for, like, ‘Anybody does what they want’ and ‘There are no rules,’ ” Westerberg said. “But there were rules and you couldn’t do that, and you had to be fast, and you had to wear black, and you couldn’t wear a plaid shirt with flares…. So we’d play the DeFranco Family, that kind of shit, just to piss ’em off.”
But few hardcore kids got the point of the “pussy set”; after a show in Virginia, a horde of them retaliated by knocking over the band’s microphone stands, then went outside and bashed up their van.
That particular night also marked the debut of Mars’s rarely seen alter ego, “Pappy the Clown.” Every once in a while, even the relatively steady Mars would lose it. He’d get lit to the gills, sneak off somewhere, and put on whiteface and his loudest, silliest clothes, maybe don a goofy hat and tie balloons around his neck, and reappear only minutes before showtime. “I remember one time when Pappy showed up,” says Sullivan. “Chris—I mean Pappy—looked over at me and he held out the drumsticks and I was like, ‘New sticks?’ He shakes his head. ‘More sticks?’ He shakes his head. I’m, like, ‘What?!’ He goes, ‘New drummer.’ ”
After Hootenanny the Replacements began to attract a bigger out-of-town following, and in the spring of ’83 they kicked off their first trip to the East Coast. The tour wound through Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, but the real destination was New York, where they had dates booked at Folk City and Maxwell’s in Hoboken.
They went back the following June and played the hallowed punk bastion CBGB. Although they came out of the punk scene, the Replacements didn’t look punk—when they showed up at CBGB, “the punk rock guy was not going to let us in—we were in flannel and long hair and the punk rock guy was like, ‘What do you guys want?’ ” recalls Sullivan. “And we’re like, ‘We’re the Replacements.’ And he says, ‘The fuck you are.’ ”
Things went downhill from there—Bob got eighty-sixed from the CBGB bar almost from the moment he walked in the door, setting the tone for the rest of the night. The Replacements were the last of five bands, which meant they went on in the wee hours of the morning—on a Monday night. The Folk City show had also been a bomb. Promoters Ira Kaplan and Michael Hill had done the band a big favor by placing them on a plum bill that also included the Del Fuegos and the Del Lords, but the band successfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. “The Replacements were so loud and obnoxious that the people just cleared right out,” says Sullivan. “It was pretty uncomfortable.” Even the woman doing sound walked out, so Jesperson did his best to handle the board.
The band’s self-image as misfit/loser/yokels had gotten the better of them at two of the most storied clubs in the world’s most intimidating city. “CBGB was punk; we weren’t punk,” Sullivan says. “Folk City was legendary; we weren’t legendary.”
Things went a little better when they returned to Folk City a few months later. They had stayed the night before at the home of some well-to-do punk kid outside of Washington, D.C. “Of course, Bobby, being ever resourceful, found the medicine cabinet,” says Sullivan. “The guy had a typical mom who had a lot of problems dealing with life, so there was Valiums and Percodans and the whole nine yards. By the time we pulled up in front of Folk City, Paul was like, ‘Oh, let’s just bring half the stuff in.’ So they played with half stacks, and they were just so mellow that night. They played all the songs nice and mellow, and they just put them out. That night was a huge success. All due to mixing Valium and beer.” (Don’t try this at home, kids.)
The tour ended in a dive bar in Worcester, Massachusetts. One person paid. “And he didn’t like it,” Sullivan quips. “We had to buy him beer to keep him around.”
Despite being the biggest offender, Bob was also the first to realize that the drinking was getting out of hand and was the first to try to do something about it. The Hootenanny tour included the band’s first big show in L.A., a headlining spot at the Palace. With great difficulty, Bob had gone on the wagon for the show. He showed up ready to play—and the others didn’t. “Bobby was really, really pissed off,” Sullivan recalls. “The next morning the door of my hotel room got kicked right off the hinges. Bobby was standing there in a tutu and a top hat with a case of Budweiser and a bottle of Jack.” According to Sullivan, Bob never went on the wagon again as long as he was a Replacement.
The night after that, Bob played his most infamous show, at the University of San Diego. Dressed only in his underwear, Bob wandered into the school theater and tore down a sixty-foot curtain. “And as he’s walking onto the stage, anything he walked by—a table, a chair, a telephone—it would gather up into it,” says Sullivan. “And he gets up onstage in that thing and he drops the curtain and the underwear and played the show naked except for his guitar. He was hammered, but he was rockin’. I think he was kind of pissing the other guys off because he was really taking the spotlight that night. And the crowd was going nuts for it.
“Somebody threw a shoe at him,” Sullivan continues, “and he’s playing and this shoe is coming at him and he catches it and he spins the guitar around, pisses in the shoe, throws the shoe back, spins the guitar back around, and finishes the solo.” When Sullivan came onstage to sing Roger Miller’s “Kansas City Star,” Bob suddenly took his guitar off and jumped Sullivan from behind. “I will never forget the look on Bill’s face,” says Jesperson, chuckling, “when he realized he had a naked Bob Stinson wrapped around him.”
“At the end of the night, it was just, ‘Bob! Bob! Bob! Bob! Bob!’ ” says Sullivan. “For years, whenever I’ve come back to San Diego, it’s all any stage crew guy in the entire city can ever talk about.”
The indie touring circuit was still in its infancy, and the band didn’t always have the luxury of playing lucrative college gigs; they simply weren’t cool enough to play many of the larger clubs, either. “When we played Seattle, there was no club—there was the Central Tavern, a blues bar,” says Sullivan. “There were VFW’s, Mexican restaurants—we played a Mexican restaurant in Indianapolis—we played clothing stores.”
In Davis, California, they were booked to play a place called 617 Anderson, which turned out to be someone’s house. “And I pull into the driveway of this house and I’m like, ‘This can’t be the gig,’ ” says Sullivan. “And then four girls in little black miniskirts walk out and I’m like, ‘This better be the gig!’ ”
That night the band played in the living room, which was covered floor to ceiling in plastic; the keg was in the kitchen. “It was a pretty fun gig, actually,” Sullivan recalls.
The band’s lowest ebb probably came during an eight-date tour with R.E.M. in the summer of ’83. Audiences are not always receptive to opening bands, but then again, the Replacements were not good at playing second fiddle, either. So Westerberg decided that every night they should go out and alienate the crowd to the best of their ability. Unsurprisingly, this goal was handily achieved. The band was drinking heavily; although R.E.M. wisely gave them a minimum of alcohol, the Replacements would wait until R.E.M. was onstage and then barge into their dressing room and take all their booze.
Soon R.E.M.’s management wanted the Replacements off the tour. The rest of the band just wanted to play, while Westerbe
rg, as he put it, was “just content to go up there and pull fruit out of my pocket or something.” It all led up to one gigantic argument somewhere in Kentucky or Ohio, with crying and threats by various Replacements to fly home or even quit the band entirely. “We just didn’t realize that we should never ever open up for another band and play to people who aren’t equipped to deal with who we are,” said Westerberg. “We’d much rather play for fifty people who know us than a thousand who don’t care.”
The Replacements somehow managed to last out the tour and even managed to rub off on R.E.M., too. “[R.E.M.] benefited a lot from it—they were really stiff onstage,” says Sullivan. “By the time we were done playing with them, they all of a sudden had covers in their set. They were doing all kinds of things that they had never done before.”
In the fall of ’84, Village Voice writer R. J. Smith traveled with the band for a week through the Midwest and Canada, playing Scrabble with them in the van and making a creditable attempt to keep up with their high jinks. They played a series of dismal gigs, including a college cafeteria in Illinois, which all descended into dissolute anarchy. Conditions were bad: exhaust was leaking into the van, the rail-thin Westerberg suffered a relapse of his pleurisy, and everyone, except for Mars, was drinking heavily. “The Replacements,” Smith wrote, “are balled-up boluses of high hopes and low feelings, wildcat growls and boredom, longings they try to beat down with a stick but never quite can.”
Despite all the critical hosannas, the Replacements had not exactly hit the big time. They usually made just enough money to get to the next gig. Fortunately, an informal network of band-related floors had sprung up; the Replacements would stay with the Del Fuegos in Boston, for example, or with Naked Raygun in Chicago, and they’d return the favor when those bands were in town. Every once in a while, they’d treat themselves and all pile into the same fleabag motel room, although one guy had to sleep in the van and guard the equipment. “Actually, that was kind of nice,” Mars recalls, “because you were alone and you could sleep with nobody snoring in your face.”
Sleep was a rare and sometimes dangerous commodity. On one early tour, they traveled in an electric-company van that carried the band, three other people, and all their equipment. It was summer and they kept the sliding side door open for some air. When Mars went in back for a catnap, he’d tie his belt to the biggest amp he could find so he wouldn’t roll out onto the freeway.
“Sometimes it’s great fun, but you spend a lot of time broken down on the side of highways, sleeping on people’s floors,” says Sullivan. “You wake up and your eyes kind of focus and there’s a pile of dog shit right there. And you don’t know if it was there when you lay down or if it got dropped there while you were sleeping, but that’s what you wake up to. All these people had pets and first thing in the morning their bird was squawking or their dog was barking, there’s hair all over the floor…”
It couldn’t have helped matters that the band had a “tradition” of never cleaning out the van while they were on tour. After a few weeks they’d be knee-deep in stinking garbage.
Westerberg made up road names for everybody. Tommy was “the Brat,” Jesperson was “the Wimp,” Sullivan was “the Drunk,” and Mars was “the Chince,” so named because of his habit of squirreling away all his per diem money. Bob was “the Dunce,” although for a while after he shaved his head except for a small clump of hair, they called him Patch. Westerberg’s nickname was “the Louse,” although Bob called him Fall Downstairberg.
Tommy was called the Brat for good reason; he could be petulant and spoiled, capable of all sorts of petty cruelty. On one early tour, the band intersected with the dB’s at a show at Duke University. The band’s guitarist Peter Holsapple knew Jesperson was a big fan and gave him a copy of the brand-new dB’s single. As they pulled out of the parking lot of the auditorium, Jesperson couldn’t wait to get home and throw the disk on the turntable. “I had the single up on the dashboard of the van,” Jesperson says, “and Tommy actually knew how much that meant to me and broke it in half and threw it out the window.”
And there were times when Tommy just disappeared. During a show at CBGB in the summer of ’83, he got so annoyed at the band that he walked offstage and went AWOL for two days. The band went up to Boston without him, played a show using the Del Fuegos’ bass player Tom Lloyd, then went back down to New York to pick him up after a friend of a friend tracked him down.
Ironically, Tommy originally disdained the rest of the band’s drinking regimen. “I even remember him saying, ‘Ewww, why would I ever want to do that? Look at you guys, you look disgusting and you act stupid!’ ” says Jesperson. “And suddenly, it was like, boom, he just jumped in headfirst. He started [playing in the band] when he was twelve, and I don’t think he started [drinking] for a couple of years—he was probably fourteen before he started slamming whiskeys. He could even have been fifteen.”
Since Bob was quite eccentric and at times a scary drunk, Tommy looked elsewhere for guidance. Eventually he and Westerberg became very close, so much so that they even began to look alike. “Paul was almost like the role model for Tommy more than anybody,” says Jesperson. “He learned some really good things from Paul as well as how to get stinkin’ drunk all the time. But I’d also have to say that Paul and I had a lot to do with fathering, or big brothering, Tommy.”
Consequently, Tommy would do almost anything to win Westerberg’s approval. “If Paul broke something, Tommy would have to break something bigger,” says Jesperson. “If Paul did something bad, Tommy would have to do something worse. That was problematic, as you can imagine. Because Paul didn’t need to be egged on.”
The last line of the last song on Hootenanny is “We’re gettin’ nowhere, what will we do now?” What they did was to come out with the best album of their career.
What had made the band great was its musical approximation of the adolescent disregard for danger. But as they got older, that recklessness began to fade, if only slightly. And on the next album, Let It Be, something even better began to take its place. The band was actually growing up. “We used to tune for an hour onstage and drink two quarts of whiskey,” Westerberg joked at the time. “Now we’re down to one quart and tuning for half an hour.”
THE REPLACEMENTS AROUND THE TIME OF LET IT BE. LEFT TO RIGHT: PAUL WESTERBERG, CHRIS MARS, BOB STINSON, TOMMY STINSON. NOTE BOB’S SHINER.
LAURA LEVINE
The band had finally grown tired of playing loud and fast exclusively. “We’re losing our inhibitions,” he proclaimed early in ’84. “When we started, we were afraid; we thought we’d hide behind sort of a wall of aggression. Now we’re softening a little where we can do something that’s a little more sincere without being afraid that someone’s not going to like it or the punks aren’t going to be able to dance to it.”
The band released the “I Will Dare”/“20th Century Boy”/“Hey, Good Lookin’ ” single in July ’84. With its sunny rockabilly swing, “I Will Dare” was a nigh-perfect pop song, complete with Westerberg’s jaunty mandolin and a nifty guitar solo courtesy of their number one fan and booster, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. Later Westerberg noted that the title was a good slogan for the Replacements. “We’ll dare to flop,” he said. “We’ll dare to do anything.”
The version of the Hank Williams classic “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” was recorded live at a club in Madison, Wisconsin. Afterward Bob claimed his solo was deliberately off-key, but after the show, as the band was driving home in the van and listening to the tape, he repeatedly tried to snatch the tape out of the machine while Westerberg replayed the gloriously tone-deaf solo over and over again as the rest of the band roared with laughter.
Westerberg was acutely conscious of the fact that their new album Let It Be placed much more of a focus on songwriting than ever before. “To the Replacements fan who liked us in the beginning, it may not really please,” he said, “but there’s certainly some good stuff on there.”
There certainly was. Right off th
e bat, there was “I Will Dare.” And “Sixteen Blue” is as accurate and affecting a portrait of the woes of adolescence as has ever been committed to vinyl—topped off by a towering solo from Bob, the song is a classic. “Androgynous” is just voice, piano, and a brushed snare, a poignant profile of “Dick,” who wears a skirt, and “Jane,” who wears a chain. “And they love each other so, androgynous,” Westerberg croons, “Closer than you know, love each other so.” But “Unsatisfied” might have been the album’s (and the band’s) high point: a soaring hymn to restlessness, frustration, and ennui, Westerberg had hit upon a moving new way to declare that he can’t get no satisfaction.
All the drama was perfectly leavened by raucous numbers with titles like “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” and “Gary’s Got a Boner,” as well as a stomping cover of Kiss’s “Black Diamond.” Even an ostensibly slight song like the anti-MTV tirade “Seen Your Video,” which is just an anthemic chord sequence climaxed by the words “Seen your video / That phony rock & roll / We don’t wanna know,” is delivered with enough passion and conviction to raise the hairs on one’s neck.
While there are strong elements of metal, hardcore, and arena rock, it’s tempered and given some sort of classic resonance by undeniable strains of honky-tonk country and Chicago blues. The arrangements are sophisticated, a quantum leap past anything they’d ever done before—the songs have several distinct sections and dramatic dynamic shifts, and instruments like piano, lap steel, twelve-string guitar, and mandolin are all over the record.
They considered titles like “Get a Soft On” and “Kind of a Sewer” before settling on Let It Be. Copping the Beatles album title was the height of cheekiness, but it was also a poke at Beatles freak Jesperson. That mixture of self-deprecation and bravado—tacitly acknowledging they’d never be like the Fab Four and yet daring to cop their album title—was pure Replacements.
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