Photo by Greg Helgeson
The Replacements are feted as the most gloriously alcoholic band of their generation—Midwestern fuck-ups writing heart-on-sleeve anthems who craved the spotlight, but did just enough damage to ensure they’d never reach it. They signed with a major label, but bucked at playing nice with industry figures, purposely tanked do-or-die shows, antagonized producers until they quit. They wanted to be great on their own authentic terms, even if it turned out to be an act in self-sabotage.
But over the last decade, the Replacements have reissued their albums, reunited to headline stadium shows and music festivals, even played "Fallon." Their niche as an influential band has led to a real wave of interest—a wave that drives Bob Mehr’s new biography, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, the most comprehensive book about the band to date. It’s the first to involve founding members Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson, who join hundreds of subjects related to the band to color a timeline stretching more than 50 years. (Drummer Chris Mars, who has since become a successful painter, declined to participate.)
Mehr struck up a connection with Westerberg during his career as a music journalist, and upon interviewing him in 2004, found him in a reflective mood that hinted at the possibility of doing a Replacements book. In 2008, he approached Tommy Stinson about participating. Stinson agreed, with one caveat: He would only talk if Westerberg was involved, as though that would never happen. But with Westerberg eager to talk about the band, the project began. The book took six-and-a-half years to complete, as Mehr conducted hundreds of interviews and waited to see how their 2013 reunion would pan out.
Trouble Boys begins like The Adventures of Augie March, with troubled childhoods in deadbeat Minnesota. There’s a raw passion for music that drags them into the industry, and prevents them from conforming to a bland success. There are the tumultuous studio sessions and out-of-control shows, and encounters with rock luminaries like David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Tom Petty, and Alex Chilton (whom the band wroteits best song about) to show how close they were to the A-list. They seek out radio hits, but squander opportunities out of intransigent pride. It’s a fascinating, and often maddening, read. You want for epochal songs like "Bastards of Young" and albums like Let It Be to make them at least as popular as R.E.M., but it never quite happens.
Mehr brings the band’s members to life, showing how they grew over the years. Westerberg begins as a paranoid snot, and emerges as one of the greatest living songwriters. Tommy Stinson joins the Replacements right as he’s hitting puberty, and matures into a bonafide rock star. The tragedy of Bob Stinson, whose abusive childhood predicted a tough life that ultimately led to an awkward departure from the band and an early death, is rendered in painful detail. Despite his lack of participation in the book, Chris Mars' life isn't neglected; neither are those of sidemen Slim Dunlap and Steve Foley, who joined the band in its later years. Their lives are embedded in a well-sketched portrait of ‘80s Minnesota, putting you right at the bars where the band played its first gigs and even rubbed elbows with Prince.
"The band was always in such a perpetual state of evolution and drama internally that the dynamics were difficult for anyone to come in and assess and handle," Mehr said. When we spoke, Mehr was careful to explain that this is only his best attempt to tell a faithful story. Because substance abuse was such a prominent part of the band’s existence, memories had to be double-checked. "It’s not quite like Rashomon, but certainly there were moments that people remembered differently and finding the truth of the incident somewhere between all those perspectives was a trick that I had to figure out."
But the book does a masterful job of balancing all these moving parts, and condensing a narrative that soars high and dips low. Trouble Boys has the feel of living history, because the band might not be done. They hinted at a second breakup in June, which followed months of speculation about new material. As their fans wait to see what comes next, the book will sate anyone’s curiosity about how it all began.
Pitchfork: When did you first learn about the Replacements?
Bob Mehr: I was 11 at the time and was a fan of "Saturday Night Live," probably because of Anthony Michael Hall. When the Replacements came on, I didn’t really have any awareness of them before that, but there was a certain something about that performance that stood out. [Ed. note: The Replacements performed on "SNL" in 1986, and were banned after Westerberg yelled "come on, fucker" at Bob Stinson during "Bastards of Young."] I remember it being immediately far louder and rougher than I had ever seen a band be on television. There was also a kind of insouciance to their performance, particularly the way Paul was sauntering around the stage missing lyrics and coming back on the mic. There was just a sort of looseness and a rawness to their performance that really leapt out of the TV screen. To see a band as unvarnished as this in that spotlight was pretty jarring, even to a little kid who didn’t know anything about the music.
Pitchfork: Tommy and Paul are the two primary interviews, but given their history of substance abuse, was it ever difficult to piece together their history?
BM: Paul’s memory is funny. He has an incredible recall for very specific things, both within his own life going back to childhood and within the band’s life, but then there are other very obvious things that he doesn’t remember. Sometimes he would surprise me asking which album came first. Those sorts of things where you’re like "Really? These things that everybody knows?" But generally, Paul has a fantastic memory, which is surprising to me because the blur of touring and the process of being in a band—there’s a lot of redundancy there, so it can all tend to morph and blur together. I was surprised at how vivid his recall was on some things and unclouded by drink or whatever might have been going on.
With Tommy, he was real good on certain stuff, but then there were some things—particularly with the early part of the band, where his role within the band changed. When he started out, he was such a kid. There were some things he wasn’t around for, too, because he was in school, so there were some gaps with him.
Pitchfork: When you were researching the book, did anything jar your preconceptions?
BM: I was maybe surprised at the scope and breadth of their musical influences, what [band manager] Peter Jespersen brought to them the kinds of things they were into. I think Peter exposed them to a lot of stuff because he obviously worked at a record store, and had a massive record collection. But when you hear Tommy was into Captain Beefheart and did a pretty spot-on Captain Beefheart impersonation, I thought that was amusing. Or that Paul, when he didn’t have money and he was a janitor, used to check out records from the library and learn things from a weird jazz instructional LP or pick up a song from a Glenn Yarbrough record.
The interesting thing about the Replacements is they’re such a distillation of so many different types of influences. They’re products of their environment, to a certain extent. Paul played folk and blues stuff early on, that was his big exposure. Then, he was playing in ad hoc bands for years and was around the kind of basement/backyard party scene in Minneapolis. I found a tape of Westerberg shortly after he had met the Stinson brothers and Chris Mars. This was maybe December of ‘79 or January of ‘80, and it was Paul and his brother and a couple of guys that he used to play with playing Doors songs, "My Sharona" by the Knack, and whatever else was popular. Hearing Paul just jamming out as this amazing boogie blues guitarist was kind of a revelation.
Pitchfork: One of the themes of the book is that tension between wanting to be successful rock stars, but also getting in their own way a lot of the time. If they wanted to be successful, why did it seem like they were deliberately getting in their own way?
BM: As far as their relationship to their careers, the business, and this notion of chasing success, I think it’s a pretty complicated thing. Part of it is you’re not dealing with one person or one artist— you’re dealing with four people and four personalities and four different sets of desires as far as what they wanted out of the band goes. In Paul’s case, I think part of him really wanted to be successful in a very conventional old-school way. He wanted to have a radio hit. That’s not to say he necessarily wrote that way or conducted himself the way those artists did, but that certainly was a desire. The bigger desire for all of them was to escape what would have otherwise been a fairly unpleasant reality of life back home.
The first part of the book is called "Jail, Death or Janitor," and that’s the way Paul and probably Bob and Tommy and maybe even Chris viewed the band. Those were the options had the Replacements not come along, so there was a kind of desperation and drive there to make something of themselves. These were not guys that were necessarily armed with all the tools. As Paul used to say, there wasn’t a high school diploma or driver’s license between them. There was ambition in terms of wanting to be successful, but their limitations also came out in the way they conducted themselves.
I think it was partly out of pride. Maybe they were too proud in some instances to do the whole major label, dog and pony show that you had to do then to be successful. Also, it comes down to communication. That wasn’t in their nature—they were a very uncommunicative band among themselves. Paul and Tommy and Bob never really sat down and said, "okay, here’s what we’re doing," "here’s our one-year plan and our five-year plan," or "here are the lines that we are willing to cross or not cross." That conversation just never happened.
I talked to Peter Buck and he sort of talked about a similar moment—a crossroads in R.E.M.’s career where they had to make that decision. And they did have that conversation about how they were gonna move forward with their career, and what they were willing to do, and if they were just gonna be this kind of band or were they gonna really go for it? I think articulating that certainly helped [R.E.M.] and not articulating that in the case of the Replacements hurt them in some ways. But I don’t think temperamentally, they were really built for those kinds of things. They were people who had some level of issues with alcoholism and self-esteem and all those things, and those things propelled them in a way but it also kind of put a ceiling on how high they could go.
Paul Westerberg with Bob Mehr (photo by Bob Medcraft)
Pitchfork: We also see this anxiety that Paul had watching all these bands appropriate elements of the Replacements, but in more polished ways. Does he feel validated by the fact that the Replacements have had their moment in the sun all these years later?
BM: That’s something that has become easier over time. When Paul was probably the most vulnerable at the end of his major label solo career in the mid-1990s, certainly at the end of his Warner Brothers deal, he was at a low ebb. At the same time, there are all these people who are devout followers of the Replacements becoming incredibly successful in all sorts of different genres. You’ve got bands like the Goo Goo Dolls and Wallflowers and Wilco and Green Day all around that time starting to rise up. So Paul was probably conflicted by that, and stung by that; to almost feel as though he had been shut out of this thing that he had helped create in terms of his own tangible success. That could play with anyone’s head, especially when you’re sitting in your basement or sitting in a shrink’s office trying to explain where your head is at when you flip through a magazine or look at the charts and see all these people who are having incredible success looking and sounding like you, and you can’t enjoy that same success.
I think now it’s much different for him. As time goes on, his reputation grows, the songs continue to affect generation after generation, and the Replacements’ reunion was another big validation. When you go out and headline a show in New York City and there are 13-14,000 people there showering you with love and singing back your songs to you, you can’t help but feel like the legacy of the band and those songs has been validated. I would never say Paul is entirely at ease with anything, and as a restless artist I think he always wants to feel like his best work is ahead of him. But there’s also a measure of satisfaction now that he has what he didn’t have, say, 20 years ago.
Pitchfork: There’s a consistent theme of how Bob’s life was so tumultuous from the beginning of his childhood, and that maybe his trajectory was unavoidable in some ways. He was molested by his mother's boyfriend, he spent time in a psychiatric institution, he struggled with alcohol and heroin abuse, and none of these problems were ever properly treated. The idea that a relationship with a family member would get so bad that you would have to jettison them is pretty alarming. Is there a world where things could have been worked out with Bob where he could have stayed?
BM: It’s something that I’ve thought about and certainly the band’s thought about. The lesser solution to the Bob "problem" at the time in ‘86 was to actually quit the group and dissolve the Replacements rather than fire Bob. But ultimately, Chris and Tommy wanted to carry on and Paul wanted to carry on and so they had to face the reality of dealing with Bob. I don’t think any of them were necessarily at a place in their own lives where they were in a position to really see what needed to be done. And quite frankly, Bob’s problems were far bigger than anything that had to do with the Replacements. His own addictions and abuses were also the byproduct more of his childhood traumas. So it would have taken people a lot more sophisticated, and a culture that was a lot more understanding, to salvage Bob’s position in the Replacements. At that time, under those circumstances, I think it would have been impossible.
Bob clearly wanted something different than the rest of them. Paul and Tommy saw the band as a way out, as a way to being rock stars, to having the sort of freedom in life that those things bring. Bob was way more modest in his aims. He was not entirely comfortable with the trappings of a serious professional music career. Some of that was a bit of a big fish, small pond syndrome. He was much more comfortable in Minneapolis than existing in the major label, New York City kind of environment. I have turned it over in my mind—I don’t think there was really any way that Bob could have continued on in the Replacements. I just think the Replacements would have ceased to exist, and they almost did. Tommy basically was faced with that choice—it came down to him saying, "We continue on without my brother or we don’t continue on." In effect, he salvaged it. And I don’t think anybody can judge him for that.
Pitchfork: In June, Paul suggested that the band was done. Do you think they have a final act?
BM: I certainly hope they do, and I feel like they do. I know how powerful the bond between them. There’s all kinds of weird dynamics and complex issues that arise out of having a bond with somebody like that, because they have a personal relationship and this amazing creative chemistry. I think the reunion healed some of the things and made their relationship better, but it also maybe highlighted some of those same complexities. At this moment, they’re probably happy to take a break from the idea of the Replacements as a working entity. But at the end of the day, I do feel like what they have is so strong and so special that it’s hard to stay away from that forever. Even though it seems like maybe they’re in hibernation mode, I still feel like the Replacements are alive and well in spirit, if nothing else.