And if not quite fab, they certainly were four distinct characters: Paul, the romantic loser; Tommy, the bratty pretty-boy; Bob, the classic rock & roll wildman; Chris, the quiet one. The cover of Let It Be highlights this perfectly. There they are, sitting out on the slanted roof of the Stinsons’ mom’s house—a silly place to have your picture taken—Tommy, the waifish rock imp wiping some hungover sleep from his eyes, Mars looking good-naturedly at the camera while Bob squints at it like maybe he just got caught doing something bad; Westerberg is too cool to even acknowledge the camera and looks away, studying something in the middle distance. They’re all in jeans and canvas basketball sneakers. It was a great little piece of mythmaking.
“Vocalist Paul Westerberg sings from the heart and he knows how to break it,” wrote Seattle Rocket critic Bruce Pavitt. “This is mature, diverse rock that could well shoot these regional boys into the national mainstream.”
How right Pavitt was. The dividing line between the indie and major worlds was between punk-derived music and the blues-rooted fare of the bloated, indulgent, aged superstars who had attained seemingly eternal life on classic rock radio. The Replacements were a bridge between the two. At long last here was some indie music the mainstream rock press and public could love. A 1985 issue of the indie-phobic Rolling Stone actually picked the Replacements as one of “The New Stars in Your Future.” Let It Be was highly decorated by the press corps, winning effusive praise and high standings in year-end polls. Robert Christgau gave it an A+ in his capsule reviews in the Village Voice, and his Voice colleague John Piccarella proclaimed, “The Replacements are the best rock and roll band of our time.” Let It Be placed number four in the 1984 Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll and number six in the L.A. Times’ top fifteen of 1984. All of this brought the band a sizable following from outside the indie nation.
And what’s more, girls liked them. Indie rock was primarily a boys’ club, but the Replacements were one of the first indie bands who drew almost as many girls as boys to their shows. In a fairly unsensuous rock scene, they provided a noticeable jolt of sexuality.
The drunk and sloppy act had been amusing at first, but it was getting tired fast. What with all the adoring press, things were rapidly getting more serious and the Replacements obliged by kicking out intense, much more focused, and well-behaved shows. Audiences reciprocated, and instead of the usual friendly heckling, it was now more respectful listening. The Replacements were swiftly becoming a band to be reckoned with.
Well, sometimes. When they played the University of California at Davis, they were given a fancy oak-lined conference room as a dressing room. While waiting to go on, they decided to play baseball in there—with full beer bottles as bat and ball. But they’d miss a lot, which meant the bottles would hit the wall, ripping huge dents in the wood. The damage totaled some $1,900.
Then they decided to force-feed Mars with beer, which meant that Pappy the Clown took over on drums that night. Halfway through the show, Pappy fell off his drum stool and wedged himself between the stage and the back wall. The show came to a grinding halt; then the soundman shut off the PA. Westerberg soldiered on, stumbling through a string of Frank Sinatra covers, much to the displeasure of the crowd, which had begun to trash the place. “It was real, real ugly,” says Sullivan.
Afterward an old acquaintance of Sullivan’s—“a crazy kid from my high school who was famous for biting somebody’s ear off,” says Sullivan—said he heard on his police scanner that the cops were coming to arrest the band. They frantically loaded up the van and followed Sullivan’s friend’s complicated directions for a back route to the highway to make their escape, cutting through side roads, fields, and dirt paths. After a bumpy, stressful ride, they finally made it to the highway, and everybody breathed a big sigh of relief.
Then Westerberg leaned over to Sullivan and said he wanted to go to a party back in Davis. “Eventually he convinced me to turn around and go back,” says Sullivan. “And nothing ever happened.”
The last gig of a long 1984 tour was scheduled for the Bowery club, a converted church in Oklahoma City. When the van pulled up to the address listed, all they found was a church. There weren’t even any cars in the parking lot. The exhausted band wanted to cancel the show and go straight home. But then when Jesperson knocked on the door, the club owner bounded out and and shouted, “The Replacements are here! My favorite band in the whole world! Let It Be’s the best album of 1984!” They proceeded to play a particularly shambling and yet playful, upbeat show: a few of the best songs from Let It Be, some impromptu blues jams, and a long string of tossed-off, fragmentary covers that pretty much define the parameters of their music—Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” Tom Petty’s “Break Down,” the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash,” plus a blistering version of Bad Company’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,” no doubt first honed back in Mrs. Stinson’s basement.
Soundman Bill Mack had discovered a tape recorder hidden in the balcony; apparently some fan was hoping to make a bootleg. On the ride home Mack popped the tape in the deck—the sound quality was surprisingly good and the show was a classic mess. Westerberg joked that Twin/Tone should release the tape, and the label took him up on it, releasing the cassette-only The Shit Hits the Fans in 1985. Reviewing the cassette in Puncture, one A. Korn wrote, “THIS CASSETTE IS TOTAL TRASH—but the fan’s instinct to invest his idols with supernatural power overwhelms me.” It was just that instinct that the tape aimed to demolish—or was it to perpetuate?
“If this isn’t their worst release,” wrote Byron Coley in a Forced Exposure review, “I guess it’s their best.”
Overall the band was winning favorable reviews everywhere they went, and Let It Be was already looking like a classic. Although many bands would have welcomed the acclaim with open arms, the members of the Replacements were more than a little wary. “It starts to sink in that, hey, maybe you’re on to something,” says Mars. “And then you start getting a little bit uneasy because it’s starting to go a little further than you ever anticipated.” So although the band could easily have sold out the main room at Minneapolis’s First Avenue, they elected to play multiple dates at the club’s smaller annex, 7th Street Entry.
“Probably part of that is our stiff Minnesota attitude of not calling attention to yourself,” says Mars. “I definitely shied away from the adulation.” (It’s probably not a coincidence that in many of the Replacements’ photo sessions, Mars is somehow covering his face.) “Part of it was maybe a little guilt—‘Now what, are people going to look at our little pocket-sized band and look at it differently?’ ” says Mars. “There was a little fear in that, too. Lots of mixed emotions. You kind of want to hang on to the ideals of where you started—already.”
Bob Stinson had the most difficulty handling all the attention, drowning himself in drugs and alcohol. “Bob sort of went off and became a little erratic; I’m not sure what was going on in his head,” Mars says. “Bob just went off like a rocket. Took advantage of the perks. You can never really say what came first, the chicken or the egg—is the band responsible or not? I don’t know why Bob chose to adopt some of the things that he did.”
Another complication was the yawning gap between critical acclaim and financial reward. Even as late as Let It Be, the band insisted they’d never seen any money from record sales. In fact, Twin/Tone wasn’t getting paid reliably by distributors, but even if they had, the band wasn’t selling enough records to recoup their expenses (something they would have realized if they had paid attention to their own business). On one of the Let It Be tours, shows could pay as much as $1,250 and as little as $200, but virtually all of it went toward reimbursing recording costs, hotels, gas and van, and instrument repairs. They collected a per diem (daily spending money) of between $10 and $15, and their pay basically amounted to whatever they could save from that. What booze didn’t come free, they’d mooch; they didn’t eat much.
“Selling records isn’t what we�
�re all about,” Westerberg said in early ’84. “But we’d like to make enough money to get us from gig to gig and not have a van that’s always breaking down.” Yet that was simply not in the cards for a band of the Replacements’ commercial stature. At that time, Bob Stinson worked a day job as a pizza chef.
It would be years before the Replacements made any money from their Twin/Tone sales (1989 or so). “Being in the Midwest, there was nothing we could do to develop a band past a certain point,” Stark says. “Unless you were on one of the two coasts, unless you have connections to major label distribution, there’s nothing we can do from here. We didn’t have the expertise here, nor did we have the clout and the go-out-to-lunch power that you need to have. You need to go out to lunch and spend face time with people that are going to influence, whether it be press or radio or distribution, stuff like that. I just never really cared to play that game. I came into the business from a producer/engineer point of view. I was more interested in developing groups.” Twin/Tone was still essentially a hobby. “The intention was to develop more and more back catalog,” Stark continues, “so at some point if we stopped putting out new records, we could coast on our catalog.”
So while the Replacements and Let It Be were Twin/Tone’s top priority, there was only so much the now five-person label could do. “All we did for six months was Let It Be,” says Stark. “Sales on Let It Be weren’t high enough to do the next level up, which would be to hire some independent [radio promoters] to work markets. It was time for a major label to take over.”
The Replacements knew what they had to do to win a major label deal. “You have to be pretty good every night, and not do stupid things and not break a lot of stuff,” Westerberg said at the time. “Maybe we’ll learn, maybe we won’t. I guess they’re going to have to take us like this or let us slowly rot away.” Yet by 1984 several major labels had checked out the Replacements but were reluctant to risk large amounts of money on such a notoriously wayward band.
By fall, however, the buzz was so strong that several record companies had overcome their reservations and were actively pursuing the band; at the same time, the Replacements were growing increasingly dissatisfied with Twin/Tone. Still, their appetite for self-destruction wasn’t going to make it easy for any major label. In New York they played a show at CBGB packed with music industry types interested in signing the band. They got up onstage and played nothing but shambling covers for the assembled execs. After destroying the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” Westerberg leaned into the mike and said, “Do we get a record contract now?”
“They wanted us to play our best songs as best we could,” Westerberg said later. “And we didn’t feel like it. And so they figure, “They’re a small-time bunch of amateurs.’ That’s one way to look at it, and that’s partly true. But I think it’s also the spirit that makes rock so immediate.” Or maybe they simply didn’t grasp the importance of the moment. “It’s big business, it’s not something you know about or understand,” says Mars. “I remember thinking, ‘So what, they’re a company? Why are they so big?’ It just didn’t register. I could care less.”
Eventually one major label—Warner Brothers—did decide to take them on, but it’s telling that Mars is unsure of why the band agreed to the deal. “I don’t know if we decided,” he says, “or they decided.” Perhaps the fact that their longtime rivals Hüsker Dü had recently signed to a major label helped prompt the Replacements to do the same. “When the Hüskers headlined CB’s, we had to headline CB’s,” says Sullivan. “When Hüskers got guaranteed $1,000 somewhere, we had to get guaranteed $1,500 the next time. When the Hüskers did three nights at 7th Street Entry, we had to do five.”
But their feelings about the signing were ambivalent at best. “For me, it was a lot of mixed feelings—‘Are we leaving something behind that we shouldn’t?’ ” says Mars. “ ‘Or is it a good thing to move on?’ Not having the mentality of a career musician, maybe you don’t welcome it like someone else might.”
They all went to their lawyer’s house in south Minneapolis to do the signing. The lawyer tried to get the band members to read the contract before they signed it, but none of them cared to. “It’s so funny, knowing more about the business and looking at the contract we signed and how horrible it was,” says Mars. “We had no business sense. We didn’t think in those terms.” After they signed, the cocaine was broken out, and then the band members went their separate ways to contemplate (or not to contemplate) what they had just done.
“I remember being a little unsure, and I think all of us were a little unsure because we didn’t really know how things were going to change,” Mars says. “And then, to our surprise, it didn’t really change that much. We thought we had the run of the show with the indie and maybe it wouldn’t be so easy with a major, that there would be more demands or something. I guess there was, but we didn’t play the game. So that hurt us.”
Did they regret signing to a major? “Oh, no, it was good,” says Mars. “It was instantly more tour support. Traveling got more comfortable. Those things were definitely perks. And better distribution. That was a good thing.” But even after they signed to a major label, Westerberg was still writing songs in his parents’ basement while they were away at work.
But if the major label signing didn’t hurt, the slow invasion of drugs into the Replacements camp did. Even though they couldn’t afford the stuff, some of the band members had begun delving into cocaine—there’s even a powdery sniff at the beginning of “Lovelines,” back on Hootenanny. “The thing was you didn’t have to afford it because it was handed to you,” says Mars. “That was the atmosphere. It was all around.
“Making a marriage work with two people who are relatively sober is very difficult,” continues Mars. “Now you get four people that are with each other more than a married couple would be, because you’re traveling, you’re playing, you’re stuck in the same van, and then you add cocaine and booze into the mix. To get it to be able to last for any length of time is really a feat. You do have to give up a certain part of yourself in order to make it work.”
And in order for the Replacements to continue to work, Westerberg felt he had to make some major changes. In 1986 the band fired Bob Stinson, partly for being unwilling (or unable) to play the band’s less rocked-out material and partly for being too drunk and drugged up to even try.
That year they also fired Peter Jesperson. “I couldn’t believe that it happened and I still can’t believe it happened,” says Jesperson. “It was like being thrown out of a club that you helped start.” Unfortunately, it was for an age-old rock & roll reason. “Everybody was drinking and doing more drugs than they needed to,” says Jesperson, very much including himself. Apparently, the band needed a scapegoat for it all and Jesperson fit the bill—“It probably looked worse for the manager to be fucked up than for the band members to be fucked up,” Jesperson admits. “But it was kind of like the pot calling the kettle black.”
It was even more ironic, because it seemed like the hellions in the Replacements had driven their fastidious, nice-guy manager to drink. “They certainly did,” says Jesperson. “They didn’t like it if everybody wasn’t drinking with them. Had I tried to be more of a sober manager, I don’t know that I necessarily would have lasted so long. But then, on the other hand, I did drink more than I probably should have and that was part of the reason that I got the boot. It was a classic catch-22.”
No one knew that catch-22 better than Bob Stinson. He had gone through a court-ordered thirty-day rehab program and had been dry for three weeks when the Replacements played the last gig of a five-night stand at 7th Street Entry in the summer of ’86. “Paul came over with a bottle of Champagne,” recalled Stinson’s then-wife, Carleen, “and he said to Bob, and I’ll never forget this, he said, ‘Either take a drink, motherfucker, or get off my stage.’ It was the first time I’d seen Bob cry.” Westerberg fired him a couple of weeks later.
Getting fired was just as devastating to Je
sperson, who had plucked the band from obscurity and worked with them when no one else would. “My favorite thing in the whole world was music,” he says, “and then I find a band that I think is amazing and I get involved with them as much as you possibly can get involved with an artist—I would have lay down in the road for them—and suddenly they just said, ‘You’re fired, you’re gone,’ and they didn’t talk to me anymore.”
Perhaps predictably, the Replacements’ substance abuse actually peaked after Stinson and Jesperson left. “It got worse with Tommy and Paul,” Mars told Spin magazine, “and it was to the point where I was afraid that they wouldn’t wake up the next day.” By early ’87, around the time of their second Warner’s album, Pleased to Meet Me, the band had sunk into a drug-induced paranoia. That paranoia could be extreme.
The band thought Twin/Tone was licensing Replacements records in Europe and not reporting the income to the band; they were owed, by their estimate, about $30,000. Then there was the fact that without conferring with the band, Twin/Tone had decided to release their albums on CD, a format the band abhorred. They decided to take matters into their own hands and went to the Minneapolis recording studio where their Twin/Tone masters were kept. “We got this notion—we’ll just walk in there and say, ‘We’re thinking of recording here,’ ” says Mars. “We didn’t even have to do that because people knew who we were, and we got into where they kept the tapes and looked for the Replacements and grabbed whatever we could.” And then they threw the tapes—Sorry Ma, Stink, Hootenanny, Let It Be, the whole thing—into the Mississippi River. Luckily, as it turned out, the tapes were only safety masters.
Although Pleased to Meet Me wound up selling about 300,000 copies, the Replacements were never the same without Bob Stinson. “When I left,” Bob told Spin’s Charles Aaron, “the Replacements were like a body without a face.” The band never did break through to the big time and sputtered to a close in 1991 after two subpar albums, with only Westerberg and Tommy Stinson remaining from the original lineup. The fawnings of a whole raft of Johnny-come-lately mainstream critics notwithstanding, the band never completely fulfilled its formidable promise. “You could list a hundred reasons,” Westerberg said in 1993, “but the bottom line is we didn’t go for it hard enough.”
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