Rock & roll bands in the Sixties wrote the holy scroll so many of us have lived by for these precious years. It may have started with Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and, soon enough, Elvis Presley, but when the British Invasion bands hit, everything changed into a technicolor onslaught of unbridled joy. Maybe that was because for the very first time we saw those musicians onstage as someone we could possibly be. They were playing guitars and bashing on drums, but in ways that weren’t being beamed down from above. Instead, it was coming from what seemed like next door. How hard could it be? Before, Chuck Berry was duckwalking across the stage while playing a guitar like ringing a bell? No way. Bo Diddley shaking both legs at the same time while conjuring up his juiced-up shave-and-a-haircut beat straight out of the Congo? Not in this lifetime. And as for Elvis Presley, well, that was some kind of divine inspiration deal surely the devil had a hand in and was not to be repeated.
As flat-out fantastic as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Them and Animals were in 1964, young teen-aged boys in the first-half of the decade envisioned themselves as part of that heritage. It could happen with enough practice and a full-deck of luck. Or so we thought. Those early aggregations changed everything, and once the world tuned into their power the earth shifted on its axis. And it’s still shifting.
Flash forward fifteen years from 1964 to 1979, and in Minnesota a foursome first called the Impediments were dodging the massive snowfalls to practice in whatever basements they could commandeer. It was often an unholy cacophony of noise, laced with biting humor and bitching backbeats. Those on the instruments would not be mistaken for virtuosos, but virtuosos were like a virus to be avoided in rock & roll. Feelings fed the beast that drove someone to learn enough guitar chords to buckle up the courage and start a band. There was no unrealistic demand for outrageous ability. Instead, there was a soul-churning desire to be different, to matter, to mean something in the relentless cog of society’s brutal conformity. Rock & roll was fueled by misfits, loners and those who could simply not succeed. It was stocked heavy with people like Paul Westerberg, Bob Stinson, Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars. And once they transitioned from the Impediments to the Replacements, they were glued together so tight you couldn’t pry them apart with a crowbar. They were a band, and bands became everything.
When the Replacements moved out of their basement to play corner bars and grey-walled halfway houses, early acolytes knew greatness roared among them. There was something in bandleader Paul Westerberg’s eyes that demanded attention. It was like what he saw was hit by a laser, and for that fleeting moment it was the only thing in the world that mattered. It is the defining sign of everyone from the Beatles to whatever teenager is now carving their initials in a filthy bar top: nothing else counts. In the early tightrope groups must walk to survive, almost all will fail because they are unwilling to risk their lives to survive the music wars. It is an ugly business engineered by fate so that almost all who enter end up falling on their scarred face. Luckily, that’s how it should be, because it cuts out the chaff of mediocre music. Thank goodness.
For the Replacements, there was no direct line to the golden road. Several albums, a couple of which were stunning summations of youthful yearnings, built a dead-on dedication of budding Matsmania. Johnny told Jimmy and Jimmy told Sue, and before you could sing the refrain of their youth anthem “Gary’s Got a Boner,” it seemed like the keys to the kingdom were being polished off by Sire Records and given to the band. With that gift came the kind of pressure that cracks most players, driving them to the dregs of self-destructive excess and scurrilous self-loathing. It was 1985 and the record business was becoming a blood sport so flush with money there was a mad rush to see who could spend the most. But not the Replacements. They moved into the less-than-regal Nicollet Studio in Minneapolis with producer Tommy Erdelyi, aka Tommy Ramone, to try their hand at climbing the greased golden pole. Did the band want success? No doubt. What Paul Westerberg and crew really wanted, though, was to mean something. They lived and breathed rock & roll, and respected its history like it kept them alive. Which it did. When you do that, the bar has been raised to the very top and no matter how daunting it looks, you have to shimmy up that pole, grease or no grease. The band’s debut Sire album was going to be that shimmy. There could be no looking down or going back, because there was no back to go to. Every bridge had been burned and the only future was looming in front of them, laughing at their passion and daring them to go for greatness.
Paul Westerberg had written ten songs, and with Mars and the Stinson brothers they fashioned one more. As they started recording, surely they must have felt a pressure transmitted by a growing cult dead-sure they were the pioneers for the so-called alternative rock brigade. And daring them to fail. While arena-level outfits like Fleetwood Mac and REO Speedwagon were selling out stadiums, smaller but wild-eyed rock & roll believers were throwing their passion towards the Replacements, X and a roomful of others who stood on the outside looking in to mega-stardom. None stood taller in that narrow room than the Replacements. So their first major label release was being seen as the ramrod to batter down the door for others like them to follow. As the sessions for the Sire debut unfolded, a powerful possession overtook the quartet’s spirit. New life was being born, and Westerberg’s songs gathered that life on their new album. They named him TIM.
In the fall of 1985 I was in Boston, hoping to help The Del Fuegos grab some of the press action running wild in the city. I was the publicist at Slash Records, and the young Boston band were our latest heroes. I was also moonlighting as a music writer for the short-lived L.A. Style magazine, and had convinced my editor the Replacements’ new album had to be covered. So one long afternoon that day in October I took a white label advance cassette of TIM and sat at a friend’s desk and listened to the unreleased album. And listened to it. Over and over. There was something in the band’s songs that gave me an overwhelming sense of hope. It was a realistic hope, one born of Paul Westerberg’s obvious anguish at finding himself a young man in a world that might not have a place for him. At the same time, he had an un-killable courage to face down any and all fears, through a combination of sheer strength and deluded determination. I had never heard a rock & roller take on such a mountain of resistance with the razor-sharp resilience Westerberg had. I knew there was a code to be cracked in the band’s songs, and I wasn’t going to leave that desk until I had found it.
TIM starts with a declaration of despair. “Hold My Life” is the kind of album opener which announces there will be no retreat, and no pity will be proffered. Instead it is more of a plea. The Replacements were headed for the cliff, and weren’t going to be looking back. For those willing to jump with them, the future promised to soften their fall, but not forgive their bruises. The song was an announcement that a gaggle of reckless romantics had pulled open the curtains to make their case. Rarely has a record extended such promise. Thankfully that promise, and so much more, was there for the hearing.
The next run of songs–“I’ll Buy,” “Kiss Me on the Bus,” “Dose of Thunder” and “Waitress in the Sky”–are a written laundry list of young love and existential anguish. It takes a true bleeding heart to write great rock & roll songs. It’s not about the chords or the lyrics or the studio sonics. It’s about the pain and suffering promised to those who love and lose, with the songs a suit of armor worn to deflect our harshest blows. Rock & roll is not designed for happiness. Not really. Maybe one or two find their way through the filter, but almost all the greatest rock songs are hard to to listen to. And then impossible to stop. That’s because they offer a way out of the heartbreak, even if just for three minutes. And it’s enough.
On the last song of TIM’s first side the ‘Mats tee up a home run and knock it completely out of the park. “Swingin Party” is such an endless meditation on lost weekends and dashed dreams that now, thirty three years later, the first chords still sting with the same bite of all those years ago. For anyone who’s ever wanted to be in the middle of the fun, but deep down knows it will never happen, Westerberg wrote their theme song. The majority of the band’s fans have always been those who stand against the wall at parties, watching others dancing with an easeful attitude about social niceties. Those that live and breath Replacements can only look on with jealousy, desire and guilt-inducing revenge.
Side two of the album begins with “Bastards of Young,” surely the band’s theme song. It is a roaring tower of barreling power, and inspires awe with its insights into the monstrous malady of modern life when it declares: “The ones who love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest / and visit their graves on holidays at best / the ones who love us least are the ones we’ll die to please / if it’s any consolation I don’t begin to understand them…” Westerberg goes on to sum it up once and for all: “We are the sons of no one bastards of young.” It’s the kind of ultimate sentiment built to be inscribed on the tombstones of the spiritually afflicted everywhere. It’s no accident that modern blues guru Stevie Ray Vaughan was going to record the song before he met his tragic end in a helicopter crash in 1990. Vaughan heard the scorching permanence of the song and wanted to put his hand on it.
The next three songs–“Lay It Down Clown,” “Left of the Dial” and “Little Mascara”–pour on the roar, best listened to with seatbelts, and reaffirm all the Replacements ever did. In their own hundred mile-per-hour way the songs are as lasting as anything they recorded in the ’80s and beyond. And they are also the ultimate set-up for the closing song, one that haunts humanity like some ghost from a past world. “Here Comes a Regular,” a ballad of endless sorrow, sums up in just under five minutes the often silent terror of alcoholism. It does it in a way that is as surreptitious as the disease itself, with the music giving the knockout punch at the end of the song. It is never less than devastating, and there are even moments when it is too much to endure. Because it shows without doubt that the real killer of the addiction isn’t alcohol itself, but it’s the shame that travels secretly with it. For that, there is no cure.
Breathless and without rebuttal, TIM ends with such gravity that for a moment life seems to stop as well. Still, nothing ends. The chance continues to once again grab the life offered to us, then hold on for all we’re worth. Punishing upheavals always come and sweet uplift sometimes follows, and that is the cracked secret code we can hold out for. In playing the odds, existence evens out. After favorite bands the Rolling Stones, 13th Floor Elevators, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Velvet Underground, Moby Grape, Crazy Horse and Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, it turns out the Replacements are my last favorite band. But as rock & roll has permanently branded on our hearts, there is always tomorrow. Nothing is written, and the swinging party starts again.
Bill Bentley