The best place to watch a band at Portland’s 1500-person capacity Crystal Ballroom is the all-ages side. Except at a reunion show. Then, it’s just the sober section, and "all-ages" mostly means "all of the ages between 35 and 60." This past Friday, the Replacements came to Portland, having kicked off its first proper tour since 1991.
"Were you alive when this came out?" the guy next to me asked as Paul Westerberg tore into "Bastards of Young". I was alive before the Beatles broke up, so, compliment accepted, even if it came accompanied by the implication that I wasn’t there the first time, man.
Maybe that’s because I wasn’t all that hyped compared to my neighbor, who was also fantasizing that R.E.M.’s Peter Buck (who lives in Portland, and played on "I Will Dare", plays in seven or eight bands with Scott McCaughey of opening act the Young Fresh Fellows) might show up. I went to the show with low expectations, and I wasn’t the only one. People I know (on Facebook) were excited (on Facebook) about seeing the Replacements, but didn’t necessarily have a treasured memory of the great show that they saw back in the day. This was especially true in Portland, where, as Willamette Week music editor Matthew Singer recounted, the band’s 1987 gig with the Fellows was so especially awful, the words "sorry Portland" appeared, etched, in the run-out groove of the band’s 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul.
That would also be why Westerberg inserted some of the band’s Don’t Tell a Soul era B-side "Portland" (as well as another deep cut, "Nowhere is My Home") into "Talent Show", a Prince-like medley move that (as with Prince) just meant we didn’t actually get to hear a full version of the good song. But if the point of a reunion is to let fans either relive, or experience for the first time, what it was like to see a band back when it was a living organism, the 2015 version of the Replacements are delivering as well as anyone. They were good, they were awful, they were raucous, they were boring, they were indulgent, they were transcendent. It’s handy when sucking just a little bit (and poormouthing yourself, as with the tour slogan "Back By Unpopular Demand") is built into your brand.
"Few legacies are as protected against reunion-tour cynicism as theirs," Singer wrote, an assertion I tweeted about skeptically. I have friends who’ve called this group a "tribute band" and others who’ve bought plane tickets to see it in action. Certainly, however, given original drummer Chris Mars' apparent blessing and the fact that guitarist Slim Dunlap’s stroke is the very reason this reunion ever happened, their reunion karma’s solid.
Band reunions ought to be about the band, and the way they play and sound and interact together, not just the songs. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks could play Pavement’s catalog better than Pavement but it wouldn’t be Pavement. Pino Palladino’s bass playing for Paul Young and D’Angelo is godlike, but he’s not John Entwhistle.
Of course, you can't really be that much of a purist about the Replacements when Dunlap wasn’t even the original guitarist. Friday’s set highlighted the fact that, as good as the songwriting was on Pleased to Meet Me and Don’t Tell a Soul, it’s Tim, with Bob Stinson still in the band and Tommy Ramone producing, that remains the high point, the Replacements’ sweet spot between punk and craft.
The current group, rounded out by Westerberg collaborators drummer Josh Freese (A Perfect Circle, Devo) and guitarist David Minehan (the Neighborhoods), is, objectively speaking, better than the original, which isn’t always a plus. The old songs, in particular, are the ones that aren’t convincing: 33 years after The Replacements Stink!, "White and Lazy", a perfectly blues-punk move then, could have accommodated John Mayer in 2015. "Hangin’ Downtown" also got an apparently improvised blues interlude about Whole Foods, presumably the result of Westerberg visiting the grocery chain's Pearl District location, which is mere steps from the Crystal.
It wasn’t all old folks: my favorite part of the show might have been seeing two twenty-something women two rows in front of me singing every word of "Left of the Dial". No matter how up and down a Replacements show is, when you can pull out "Left of the Dial" and "Alex Chilton" as your set-enders, it's impossible for anybody who’s ever had affection for the group to walk away unhappy. Plus, what could be more appropriate than a reunion set which peaks with a song about college radio (purportedly written for a member of Let’s Active) and an encomium-turned-eulogy for Alex? Like many reunions these days the nostalgia of the Replacements reunion is not for the music per se, but for the community and people and musical family trees that existed around the music—college radio, Alex Chilton, the Young Fresh Fellows—of a bygone then. We were alive when that came out. And now we all shop at Whole Foods.