The Gray Lady did a curtsy to The Replacements this past September in the form of a loving review ("Indie-Rock Antiheroes Get a Stadium Singing Along: The Replacements Play at Forest Hills Stadium") by longtime rock critic Jon Pareles; a bit of synchronicity because a month earlier this page had recited a brief prayer to The Replacements.
The letter below, written to my friend and musical mentor Oliver over 25 years ago, was a regretful sniffing-the-coffee-grounds assessment of Paul Westerberg's growing corporate soullessness.
It is hard for those who did not live as young adults through the 1980s heavily influenced by their liberal university education to understand just how enormous an influence The Replacements were. They were the sonic, existential bedrock of the generation.
Early synthesizers of Punk and Classic Rock that the record labels would later cash in with during the early 1990s heyday of Grunge, The Replacements were never a huge commercial success. They personified the Bukowski ethos that dominated the vanguard during my young-man youth: Don't try -- the vanguard as the rearguard; the artist as day laborer and malt-liquor drinker; the hipster not as Hippie or Punk -- no, sir; zero ostentation, please -- but as a woeful, drunken, puking plebeian.
The letter provides some interesting, honest testimony of when I saw The Replacements in their prime, 1985. It ends with some young-man thoughts about the passing of time.
Spring 1989
Shit, I know; it's a Yuppie concern. But I keep getting older every year, and every year I move a digit away from what I had hoped would be a wonderfully productive and fulfilling year. Yeah, you're right, that Replacements album is pretty damn frightening. Ben called me this last Tuesday and we ended up going for a long Manhattan walk, and along the way he told me that you didn't really like DON'T TELL A SOUL. When I talked to Ben I told him that I kind of liked it, side two excepted. But after listening to side one a couple times this evening, I think you're darn-tooting correct. The only song I continue to look forward to is "Talent Show." Everything else is a soulless haze. And that's exactly what's so fucking scary. The songs are fully and totally and completely soulless (except for "Talent Show" and, partially, one or two others). I say scary because what The Replacements always did have was Westerberg's disfigured honest alcoholic soul. Ben caught it pretty damn perfect once a long time ago when he said something to the effect that what made Westerberg Westerberg was how he sung those silly sappy corny songs so serious straight and strong. I can proudly measure my young adult life by those songs:
1) "Customer"; "I Hate Music"; "I'm In Trouble"
2) "Color Me Impressed"; "You Lose"; "Treatment Bound"
3) "Kids Don't Follow"; "Go"
4) "I Will Dare"; "We're Comin' Out"; "Unsatisfied"
5) "Hold of My Life"; "Left Of The Dial"; "Here Comes a Regular"
6) "A1ex Chilton"
PLEASE TO MEET ME was easy listening, but it dropped off faster than any of the other albums. I stopped playing it after three weeks. The only song I really fell for was "Alex Chilton." So I guess the handwriting was on the wall. It took me a long time before I shelled out the new one. I had read an article in SPIN on The Replacements, and it really rekindled my old love and appreciation for Westerberg, mainly because the writer, who you could tell was a young guy. Or at least that's what I imagined, that's what my imagination was telling me on one sunny March Saturday afternoon while I flipped the pages in bed -- I had bought the magazine the day before at the supermarket. The writer talked about driving up to Houston from Austin in 1985 to see the Replacements; he talked about eating SpaghettiOs cold out of the can and swigging Jack Daniels, about showing up at the show a little dizzy and seeing Tommy Stinson splashing in one of those inflatable kiddie pools while he gulped from a bottle of bourbon, about grabbing the fifth from one of his buddies and taking several prodigious mouthfuls and then promptly jetting a gash of puke right out in front of the stage, about how this was greeted with jubilation and sincere approbation, like, and these are his words (in effect), "Like someone spitting fire at a Kiss concert."
Remember, we -- you, me and Colin and Lyn -- also saw The Replacements in 1985. That was a show at the Berkeley Square, a show where Tommy Stinson kept peeking into the ladies restroom from his elevated position on stage. The band would be right in the middle of a tune, and he'd turn his head, walk over to the west side of the stage and take a long bucking cherubic giggle and stare. This was also the show, or one of the shows during that period, where Westerberg couldn't finish a single song and kept calling for a vodka on the rocks. This was also the show where I saw Bob Stinson drinking a beer before the show; he was pulling his head back to catch a Mitch Easter video that was on the monitor above the bar, and he was doing it in obvious disrespect for a slightly overweight nightclub hipster harlot who was trying her damnedest to curry the tiniest bit of his favor. And this was also the show were I wondered aloud to myself, ""Wow! Westerberg is really fucking ugly." He looked very, very bad: skinny yet bloated; stringy and piggish; anemic and seasick.
This guy, this writer, also printed a few lines from some of Westerberg's old songs; and, boy, did they sound fine. I can't remember the ones he quoted, but a few flutter in the old head right here and now, like "Pretty girl keep growing up/Playing makeup wearing guitar"; and "Yesterday's trash too bored to thrash"; and "Well, a person can work up a mean mean thirst after a hard day of nothing much at all"; and "I hate my father/Someday I won't." Man, they all register down underneath someplace beneath the pillow I sleep my head on at night, a feeling so unintentionally felt that I don't know if I'll ever be able to sort out the oomph and girth of it.
I wish I still had that article, but I lent it to the newlywed couple I've spoken of before. I lent it to them because the groom is from Minnesota and likes, mildly, The Replacements. The bride tossed it in the trash.
So after reading€ the SPIN article I was convinced, even though in my mind's eye I knew otherwise, that I should trundle down to the Village and pick myself up a copy. Anyway, getting back to the original point, it took me until just the other week to buy the sucker. And when I played it for the first time I really liked it (side one that is; I never got into side two). But you know after only a few listens it started to wear thin. And all I can attribute this to is a loss of soul which is probably more a sign of why they gave up on alcohol than why their stuff sounds so lifeless after they sobered up. They started taking a little time off, started giving themselves a little space to breathe, started respecting their ideas, started thinking of themselves as bigger than the greatness that made them great in the first place. The Replacements became what's cool, not the tunes -- just like the fucking turd-burgling Stipe boys. Poor Bob Stinson. How could he have been any more of a fuck-up than Westerberg?
Enough. This is all just so much shit in my pants because the past is gone.
That's what's truly sad. The past is gone. Flipping through my albums, fingers getting smeared with dust, a few homemade screwdrivers lighting my brow, I was stung by the incredible sadness of the whole thing. My heart began to break. So much life lived now forgotten. Life, dead and dusty, sunburned and domestically captured. The funniest thing about feeling so old among all those The dBs and The Fleshtones and Gang of Four albums is that you don't immediately die and disappear; that you're still young and you go on living.
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