The band that helped keep gutsy rock alive through the hair-metal age could not survive their own excesses
By J.D.
THEY were the other great 1980s music story from Minneapolis, the ultimate “band that mattered” in the American college-rock era. But The Replacements were also a band not so much uncomfortable with success as violently allergic to it. A new biography, suffused with sadness, dysfunction and unrealised potential, charts the doomed trajectory of one of America’s greatest crews of blindingly talented misfits, poised to fail.
The Replacements were a contradiction from inception, playing beer-soaked odes to going nowhere with an unrivaled passion. The band’s scrappy songs brimmed with punk attitude, but tossed out the subcultural signifiers for an everyman perspective. Shaped in working-class Catholic neighbourhoods of south Minneapolis, The Replacements also offered a dead-end counterpoint to MTV’s airbrushed hair-metal foppery. “Let It Be” from 1984, arguably the band's peak, expressed Midwestern desperation and youthful longing in underachiever anthems, managing both poignant ballads and blazing rockers.
In “Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements”, Bob Mehr reveals that the natural highs were few and early, and the lows were much lower and darker than fans might have imagined, in an exhaustively researched, definitive biography. The band originated when Paul Westerberg, a frontman in search of a band, found Dogbreath bare-knuckling through seventies rock in a Minneapolis basement. He seized control and transformed the outfit into a vehicle for his songs, masking his prodigious artistic ambition with blasé attitude, alcohol and self-sabotage.
The biography (which Mr Westerberg and Tommy Stinson, the band's bassist, participated in) explores the dark forces and demons that drove the band improbably along. Mr Mehr considers Bob Stinson, Tommy's older brother and the original guitarist, the soul of the group, and follows his troubled life long after he was booted from the act in 1986 after clashing with Mr Westerberg. Mr Mehr uncovers Stinson’s abuse and rejection as a child—which likely led to addictions, mental health problems, and violent behavior. He died in 1995.
Tommy, just 12 when Mr Westerberg discovered Dogbreath, emerged as the band’s natural rock star—looking to the frontman as a role model, then as a rival. The duo drank, drugged and stirred mayhem wherever the tour bus led, sticking together like Mick and Keith. Chris Mars, the quiet, mysterious drummer, played along until he found satisfaction as a painter.
The underdog status of “The Mats” (yet another self-deprecating name) was no pose. The band’s career was largely an awkward navigation of a music business it wanted no part of and had little success in understanding. The unpredictable foursome moved from Twin/Tone, an independent label, to Sire Records, an artist-friendly major label. But the band never became a professional machine. Mr Mehr illustrates how the four alienated anyone it was possible to alienate, from their longtime manager, Peter Jesperson, to record-label heads, and even a kid who’d made the band a custom bass guitar. In contrast, their chums from Athens, Georgia, R.E.M. got business-savvy, wooed DJs and added just the right producer at the right time. Platinum records followed. The Replacements were more likely to insult a potential ally or, as they were rumoured to do with one producer, cover him in peanut butter and hang him on a hook.
The band embraced chaos with their habit of playing godawful sets on purpose (hours of shambling versions of “Hello Dolly” and “Hey, Good Lookin” while switching instruments midway through) if a crowd didn’t respond to their liking. Mr Mehr’s book connects the overindulgence not only with the group's romantic notion of the rock band as a rolling party (borrowed from heroes the Faces), but with stage nerves, fear of failure and expectation of rejection. Throwing shows also reflected the Mats inability to separate performance from the rest of life. Westerberg once explained a dreadful gig for Warner Bros. executives by saying “I just can’t mean it every night.”
The band's journey from nowhere to status as a sensation was a rush. But stylistic zigs and zags made it difficult for them to break through to full stardom. A scruffy punk band at the outset, their sound matured from album to album. Their unvarnished studio records were underground hits, but their slicker rock records were too unruly for FM radio of the late 1980s. Mr Westerberg had steered the recordings toward sophisticated singer-songwriter territory, with vulnerable tunes and a taste for Flannery O’Connor. Just as mainstream culture was making room for the raucous rackets of Jane’s Addiction and the like, the band finally cracked up. Nirvana would reap the rewards, while Mr Westerberg would hit bottom and try sobriety, but never make the gold records that Mats' critics had seen in their future. For die-hard fans, 2013 presented a small miracle when Westerberg and Tommy Stinson reunited for a triumphant series of festival gigs, playing some of the best shows they ever had before calling it quits again.
“Trouble Boys”, for all its tales of dysfunction, brings details fans of this star-crossed act long for—who or what inspired which songs, and what went on behind studio doors. Ultimately this story of the band as a fraught brotherhood is as tragic as they come. It ensures The Replacements won’t be forgotten—though for those interested in how raw, vulnerable rock survived the 1980s, they never were.
