The Replacements Thread

[PigSooie]

i tell you this, for any mats/paul/tommy fans that have never checked out that 'open season' soundtrack...pure (at time orchestral) power pop bliss. my kids only know it as the 'boog music', but they dig it as much as i do.

 

 

I have never heard of this. I'll have to check it out.

[Calexico]

I just don't get the adulation heaped on this band. They were really nothing special to me. Certainly no Husker Du.

[EL the Famous]

i love 'em both, but the only thing they had in common w/ the Du was being from the same city. completely different bands and, personally, i always thought paul's lyrics were 10X better than bob's. for starters.

 

plus, i identify more w/ the traditional rock influences that went into the mats...stones to kiss to slade to big star to etc.

 

to each their own.

[Calexico]

to each their own.

 

 

Oh for sure and long may it continue that way. It's just that the music mags always fawn over the Mats and never even mention the Huskers. I remain irked.

[EL the Famous]

i'm sorry to hear that.

[Calexico]

i'm sorry to hear that.

 

 

I hear your insincerity and I (hardly) treasure it.

[EL the Famous]

i'm sorry to hear that.

[John Smith]

i tell you this, for any mats/paul/tommy fans that have never checked out that 'open season' soundtrack...pure (at time orchestral) power pop bliss.

 

I agree fully on this sound track. It is good stuff from Paul.

[uncool2pillow]

i love 'em both, but the only thing they had in common w/ the Du was being from the same city. completely different bands and, personally, i always thought paul's lyrics were 10X better than bob's. for starters.

 

plus, i identify more w/ the traditional rock influences that went into the mats...stones to kiss to slade to big star to etc.

 

to each their own.

Love 'em both, too. I might take issue with you on the lyrics. I listened to a lot of Replacements in HS. The lyrics then slayed me. On songs like Unsatisfied, Color Me Impressed, and dozens of others it was like he was writing about my life. Now, they no longer have the same meaning, except in a nostalgic (almost painful) way.

 

I think Bob's words were more "abstract" and could speak to dozens of different situations. I think he wrote the lyrics that way on purpose as a gay man trying to write songs about relationships that all people could relate to. Hell, a lot of his songs that were probably about romantic problems I applied to other relationships (work, family, friends). Because of that, I think the lyrics are more timeless than Westerberg's.

[EL the Famous]

i hear you. as i said earlier, i'd never take anything away from bob and/or husker du. to me it's the antihesis of 'abstract' in westy's lyrics that still slay me to this day. but, again, to each their own.

[GtrPlyr]

I like both bands, but I don't think Bob or Grant ever wrote anything as moving or powerful as Paul's best songs. Paul probably injected more of himself in his songs, than Bob, but that doesn't make the songs less timeless. On the contrary, some of his biggest heart-on-sleeve songs are probably his most timeless (Unsatisfied, Here Comes a Regular, Can't Hardly Wait...) Another thing that puts the Mats ahead of Husker for me is their versatility in sound and mood. They could go from humor to pathos lyrically, and musically they touched upon everything from punk, rock, folk, country, to blues and hard rock. Husker Du was more same-y same-y from album to album in comparison.

[Sir Stewart]

I like both bands and have never thought to pit them against each other.

[John Smith]

I like both bands and have never thought to pit them against each other.

 

A pit fight, I like it. Replacements vs Husker Du in the pit. Two bands go in, one walks out. I'll put my money on the replacements, because there are more of them and Grant is likely to go against Bob and side with the mats while Norton will just not be interested.

[uncool2pillow]

I like both bands, but I don't think Bob or Grant ever wrote anything as moving or powerful as Paul's best songs. Paul probably injected more of himself in his songs, than Bob, but that doesn't make the songs less timeless. On the contrary, some of his biggest heart-on-sleeve songs are probably his most timeless (Unsatisfied, Here Comes a Regular, Can't Hardly Wait...) Another thing that puts the Mats ahead of Husker for me is their versatility in sound and mood. They could go from humor to pathos lyrically, and musically they touched upon everything from punk, rock, folk, country, to blues and hard rock. Husker Du was more same-y same-y from album to album in comparison.

You're right about the lack of stylistic variety in the Huskers, which is why Bob's Workbook is (almost 20 years after its release) still my favorite album of all time. I think Paul's lyrics are timeless, but for me, timeless for teenager suffering from angst. Adult angst is very different, at least for me. That's why Bob's lyrics still affect me in a way that Paul's don't.

 

God love 'em both though. Can't imagine surviving a lot of rough spots in my life w/o 'em.

[cryptique]

You're right about the lack of stylistic variety in the Huskers, which is why Bob's Workbook is (almost 20 years after its release) still my favorite album of all time.

Thanks. I was trying to decide what to listen to.

[imsjry]

Thanks. I was trying to decide what to listen to.

 

I may be alone in this, but I would rate Bob's 2008 release up there with anything else he's done. Give that a few spins as well.....

[myboyblue]

For my money, Westerberg is the best lyricist in the business. There has been no band/artist that has stuck with me like the Replacements.

 

That, and "Let it Be" is likely the best vocal performance I've heard.

 

P.S. I love the "Open Season" soundtrack as well.

 

Signed,

fanboy

[Calexico]

Norton will just not be interested.

 

 

He could cook up a fierce nice after fight meal though.

[Shakey]

"Pleased to Meet Me" is one of my top 5 albums of all time.

 

Also, Tommy Stinson's "Village Gorilla Head" is a surprisingly fantastic record. Full of power pop hooks and melodies.

[ih8music]

Westerberg's lyrics resonate with me better than anyone else out there - both back then and now. While I agree that many (though not all) of the most memorable Replacements songs dealt with teen angst, that's certainly not the case for Westerberg's solo career. "baby learns to crawl/watching daddy's skin" gives me chills every time. (Tweedy is the only songwriter that comes close to Westerberg for me)

 

I think a lot of the mats-love among music journalists is leftover sentiment from the mid-80's when REM & the Replacements were both seen as the "college" bands most likely to cross over and make it big. When REM did it, everyone assummed the mats would follow... and when that didn't happen, in part due to their own antics, it only added to the 'lovable losers' mystique that surrounded the band.

 

And I also agree - Tommy's "Village Gorilla Head" is a must-listen. Solace for the fact that he's the longest-lasting employee of one Axl Rose.

 

btw, I also love the Huskers and don't see any point in comparing the two... makes as much sense as comparing them to the Minutemen, another band from that era i love.

[turtlegirl37]

Anyone know of a legitimate source to download Westerberg's 49:00? Thx.

[Analogman]

Check Kathy's site - maybe she can point you in the right direction.

 

'We kicked a lot of doors open'

Shambolic, gifted and drunk - the Replacements staggered their way to the edge of fame in the 1980s, only to realise they didn't want it. But their sound - and influence - lives on. By Graeme Thomson

 

The Replacements ... They were so wasted at some gigs they even forgot to play their own songs. Photograph: Laura Levine/Corbis

 

Paul Westerberg is recalling the Replacements' finest hour. "There was one night in Madrid in the mid-1980s where these Gypsies followed us. Thirteen Gypsies who couldn't speak English and had no idea who we were, but they came down until they were practically touching us and, boy, we won those people over. We were the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world that night."

 

It's a classic Replacements vignette, a tale of casual magnificence tossed to obscurity. The most gifted, explosive rock'n'roll band of the 80s routinely threw their most glorious moments to the wind, preferring instead to grace crucial gigs with a selection from their vast catalogue of monumental screw-ups: clanking through a set of drunken, off-key Jackson 5 and Cher covers to an audience of influential industry suits, or performing at stadium volume in a prestigious folk club until even the sound engineer gave up, leaving them playing to an empty room.

 

"There were times when it was done in the spirit of things and was really funny, and there were times when it was just pathetic," says their former manager, Peter Jesperson, who put out the early Replacements records on his TwinTone label. "They bit the hand that fed them and shot themselves in the foot time after time." According to Jesperson, the Replacements were simply "unable to pretend".

 

"We wasted a lot when we used to drink," agrees Westerberg today from his hometown of Minneapolis, where he lives with his wife and their 10-year-old son. "Sometimes it made us fearless and sometimes it made us ridiculous, but it's all part of what made us great. We were what we were supposed to be."

 

The Replacements formed in Minneapolis in 1979 and disbanded in 1991. Seventeen years after they limped into port for the last time, listing more than slightly, their entire back catalogue is being reissued with the requisite bells and whistles. Despite Westerberg's apparent ambivalence at such an orderly piece of rock curatorship, the timing is neat, with the likes of the Hold Steady, Green Day and the Decemberists publicly lauding the band and often specifically referencing their music. "We kicked a lot of doors open from what I hear now on satellite radio when I flip the dials with my son," he agrees. "I hear that voice and that garage band feel, although a lot of it sounds crap and forced."

 

The reissues also shed fascinating light on the troubled evolution of the band. In the beginning, the Replacements - singer and songwriter Westerberg, drummer Chris Mars, bass player Tommy Stinson and his stepbrother Bob on lead guitar - were just four more high-school dropouts exploring, as Westerberg puts it, "the American Midwestern punk ethic of No Future" through a jagged howl of teen alienation. Their 1980 debut Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash is an 18-track, 40-minute classic of its kind, raw and ruthlessly tuneful, its despair laced with the same sense of all-too-knowing dumbness patented by the Ramones.

 

Though he would never deny his inner idiot - witness the song Gary's Got a Boner for ample proof - as Westerberg became a more confident songwriter, his horizons widened and the sense of emotional empathy with his subjects deepened.

 

Listening to the demos stretching back to 1979 that accompany this year's rereleases, it's clear that from the very start there was a bruised butterfly of a balladeer straining to emerge from Westerberg's grubby punk chrysalis. Peter Jesperson recalls that, while he was listening to Johnny Thunders and the Sex Pistols and writing songs like Shut Up and Fuck School, Westerberg was also obsessing over Joni Mitchell and "slipping me these solo piano and acoustic guitar demos on the QT. It was like this incredible secret. One time he said, 'It's like world war three going on in my head all the time.'"

 

Westerberg's creative division caused considerable internal tension. Tommy Stinson recalls that the band, particularly Bob Stinson, were uncomfortable playing Westerberg's more introspective material. "We were full of testosterone, drugged-up drinking kids, and here's Pauly with some fucking torch ballad. It was like, 'Who wants to hear that shit, dude?'"

 

Looking back, Westerberg can see the irony. "It's funny now to see [the reissues] with all my home demos considered deluxe, extra bonus, blah blah blah. At the time those songs were looked at like, 'This isn't rock'n'roll. Take this back home, Paul, and keep it in your basement.' Twenty years later, of course, that's the stuff they're trying to sell. It was frustrating at the time, but I lost myself in the whole fervour of the noise, the loud amps, loud clothes and louder girls. That was as much a part of me."

 

As they quickly established themselves as one of America's foremost alternative rock bands, they also earned a reputation for being notoriously undisciplined, usually drunk and downright wasteful. "People would come up to me and say, 'Man, I saw you once, it was the greatest show I ever saw - you were so fucked up you didn't even play any of your own songs!'" recalls Tommy Stinson. "And I'd think, 'Why would that be a great show? What made that so good for you?' Chances are it was terrible."

 

Following 1984's Let It Be, their fourth album for TwinTone and arguably their peak, the Replacements made the leap to a major and signed to Sire. As they watched contemporaries and tourmates such as REM slip into the mainstream, they, too, engaged in sporadic attempts to "serious up". Bob Stinson - a heavy drinker - was by 1985 no longer stable enough to make a regular contribution and was sacked - "The most painful thing I ever had to deal with," according to his brother - and the loss of his wild guitar runs levelled the sound out into something a little less primal and thrilling. Though the songwriting was frequently still superb, the later albums suffered from trying to perform an impossible balancing act: trying to make records that might sell without losing the sense of unpredictable wildness that was what made them attractive. Westerberg nailed the dilemma in the song I Don't Know, from the Replacements' second major label album, Pleased to Meet Me: "One foot in the door," runs the chorus, "the other one in the gutter."

 

"We embraced the idea of having a hit, but the thing that always got us was our personalities," says Stinson. "We were oil to the industry's water. We just couldn't play that game. Fundamentally speaking we were all doing it for age-old reasons - girls, drugs, fame, fortune - but as you go along and you see people like REM getting successful, and you see what it turns them into, you turn away from it a little bit. There may have been a subconscious self-destructive streak, sure, but when you see what happens to people, and what they have to do to get there, you realise it's maybe not worth whoring yourself out." Jesperson reckons they were simply "scared shitless" of success.

 

The Replacements fell apart in instalments. Following Bob Stinson's departure, Chris Mars left in 1990, having made only sporadic appearances on the band's final album, All Shook Down. At the end, only Stinson and Westerberg were left standing, surveying a few golden chances that had slipped through their fingers.

 

"Like any good, young, stupid idiot of a band, we had no idea when we were at our peak," says Westerberg. "A serious amount of money was thrown at us later on, but we were really drunk. Ten thousand people would show up to hear [the song] Alex Chilton and could not believe the kind of monstrosity we were on stage. The label didn't know what they had, but sadly I don't think we did either until it was too late. When we started to slide downhill we thought, 'Oh my God, is that it? How come there's less people this time? How come we have to play a club instead of an arena?' I'm totally fine with it now. I can laugh at it. We just weren't cut out to be pop stars. We got to the party and we saw it wasn't for us."

 

Yet despite Stinson's current day job playing bass in Guns N' Roses and Westerberg's increasingly off-radar solo pursuits, you sense that neither has quite succeeded in putting the Replacements to rest. The day before we speak, the pair were playing together in Minneapolis (with a new drummer and guitarist in tow; Bob Stinson died in 1995 while Mars has retired from music), kicking around the ashes of the Replacements' past and contemplating its future. They played old hits-that-never-were like I'll Be You and Can't Hardly Wait, some new Westerberg and Stinson songs, and "a little medley of Rocky Top Tennessee and Won't Get Fooled Again which I thought had something going," says Stinson.

 

It was, says Westerberg, "fun-ish". Stinson concurs. Promoters are waving tempting sums under their noses for a reunion tour and few fans would begrudge them a second tilt at it, but there's an obvious reluctance to commit to anything. Westerberg claims he's unafraid of the band's legacy - "none of this is sacred, holy stuff" - but acknowledges "there's a missing element. Tommy has become very grown up and efficient, and I feel I have to bend the other way to add the extra let's-make-fools-of-ourselves element to make some magic. I sat there and pondered for a moment and said the unspeakable words: 'Perhaps this requires alcohol.' And at the moment I'm not drinking."

 

Instead, after Glen Campbell covered the Replacements' Sadly Beautiful on his new album, Westerberg is busy writing songs for the next Campbell record - "I called my manager and said, 'Tell Glen I'll be his next Jimmy Webb' and he took the bait" - while Stinson has his finger in "too many fuckin' pies". At 48 and 42 respectively, they're adopting a tentative wait-and-see approach. "Certainly Tommy and I could go around as the Replacements and draw 10 times more and make some money," says Westerberg. "But I'm not there yet, I gotta say." Perhaps the same strange, self-defeating spirit of skewed nobility and fool's honour that prevented the Replacements ever fully grasping the nettle of fame and fortune may yet prevent them from clearing up any unfinished business.

 

 

[turtlegirl37]

Thanks for the tip, Analogman. Myboyblue was kind enough to post it on sendspace for me, so I've got it.

[PigSooie]

Has this been posted before?

 

The Replacements Bible

[EL the Famous]

Has this been posted before?

 

The Replacements Bible

 

it has, but it's been a long while. that thing is a great read.