"Throw The 'Mats A Dime": The Replacements News & Discussion Thread

I was at the MKE show the day or two before. They seemed to be going through the motions. I should've yelled "Where Bob?" just to get them a bit agitated.

 

If it makes you feel better to believe that they mean record label sanded off their rough edges, more power to you, but, as always, their career choices were a two-way street. No one forced them to sign with Sire. If Westerberg truly wanted to put out demos from his basement, maybe he shouldn’t have signed with Sire. But after Sire paid for them to record Don’t Tell A Soul twice in professional studios with two different producers, I’m not surprised Sire wasn’t interested in putting out an album of home demos.

 

It's pretty well documented exactly how the Replacements felt about the whole industry thing. You should read the book. Westerberg, in a nutshell, wanted to be a Dylanesque figure in a rock band. He saw the entire anti-establishment ideology as tailor-made for him. The Replacements should have been the vehicle that propelled him for a decade or so as a major force in rock music. Excess and neurosis got in the way. Don't Tell A Soul was a bend-don't-break olive branch to the label: Great songs, let the label decide how to package it.

 

Yeah, this was the 3rd time I had seen them. The Kalamazoo show earlier in the same tour was outstanding.

My memory is that Detroit shows in the early 90s by almost any band were kinda full of aggressive assholes. Maybe it was the punk going mainstream thing or just youthful energy, but everybody seemed to think they could crowd-surf and have mosh pits with hundreds of participants and Detroit attitude was at it's peak.

 

I read the book. I bought the records as they came out. I saw the concerts, both the drunken train-wrecks, the transcendent nights, and the shows somewhere in the middle.

I have zero interest in the myth of the band’s drinking, and zero interest in Westerberg’s rationalizations and myth-making about the career choices he made. I’m interested in the band because Westerberg was a genius songwriter, period. If all of the “us against world” and beautiful loser mythology floats your boat, great. I listen to the records in 2019 for Westerberg’s songs, not for the myths around the band.

 

Not necessarily; Let It Be was reviewed favorably in Rolling Stone, and the 'mats were on the cover of the Village Voice in late '84 (yes, technically "independent press," but the Voice had circulation of 140,000 at the time).

 

A more accurate sentence would be “Once Westerberg had kicked Bob out ...” not the passive construction you employ that, as with all your other rose-colored takes on the band’s history, absolves Westerberg of any agency or responsibility for the decisions he made. Bob wasn’t fired, he was just ... no longer there. Paul didn’t really want to grow up or make a more commercial record ... the mean record company forced him to.

 

I listen to the records for the songs AND for the performances of the band. They were a uniques band with a unique, idiosyncratic sound that elevated Westerberg's songs to another level. And there is much less of the band (their sound, their artistic vision) on the last two records, which is part of why I like them less.

You are correct that Westerberg and the band made conscious choices to try to become more commercial but they were ambivalent about those choices at the time, and Westerberg regrets making them now with the benefit of hindsight. I think he's being accurate when he says he felt pressured by management and the label to go in more commercial directions. It's true that he could have said no to them, and at times did. And it's true he signed on with them in the first place. I don't think he's engaging in blame shifting when he expresses regret for choices made then.

 

Re: the whole “biographical fallacy” thing being thrown at me...

Um, the Replacements were probably the biggest inventors of their own myth, of any rock band that made any kind of impact in history. On Sorry Ma, Paul is namechecking his own bandmates in the lyrics and liner notes, and putting a real boozy, saracastic angle on the whole thing. And that continued for every record they did. As “anti image” as they were, they played up the “we can’t bothered probably bc we’re too drunk” thing on record, during live shows, in interviews, and (importantly) even post-Bob.

These guys were always drawing people into their world via their music and ethos, regardless of any ambivalent attempts to appear to the contrary. They have a freakin’ dumb nickname they use themselves (The Mats, which I always thought was kinda cringey.)

Different strokes and all that. But there’s no point in being so academically objective and detached about the Replacements when they were pretty much the most waywardly subjective band of all time.

 

I think they must have been pretty let down and confused when Pleased To Meet Me wasn't the big breakthrough. Because it really should have been.

It's great and accessible and there are several songs on there that should have been hits. But they weren't. So it must have felt like...what now?

 

Here's what Slim says about the DTAS songs (in the 1994 Goldmine interview):
The Replacements’ two-year layoff produced no shortage of new songs to rehearse, as Dunlap recalls. But the label’s hunger for a hit threw an extra spanner into the works, which Dunlap summarizes as, “It was either, ‘Having a f@@king hit, or goodbye, Jack’. It was down to that.” He recalls that Warner Brothers even sent Paul Westerberg home during Don’t Tell A Soul’s creation “just to come up to a couple more singles. They wanted that one packed with singles.” Ironically, the plan backfired in classic fashion, says Dunlap: “Paul was determined to come up with something that was a hit, and he wrote a bunch of songs that everyone was saying, ‘We have one or two of ‘em that’s a hit for sure,’ but no one could agree on which one or two they were!

It's really interesting to contrast that with Chris Lord-Alge's view:
“I didn’t know anything about The Replacements or garage rock. Each of those songs was quirkier than the other,” Lord-Alge says. “But when we got to this ‘I’ll Be You’ track, to me, it was the only song on the album that resembled a rock song for radio.”

Westerberg thought he was writing commercial songs, while Lord-Alge felt there was only one song even remotely commercial on there.

 

I've seen this Lord-Alge quote before and it's really kind of mind-blowing to me. I suppose it's not his job to be into everything he mixes, and he probably didn't express that at the time anyway, but here's the guy that's supposed to get them on the radio basically saying, "I didn't get this band at all.'

 

To me it also underscores just how far from the prevailing commercial sensibilities the Replacements were at the time. Even when he was deliberately trying to write commercial hit singles, Westerberg was FAR off the mark, according to someone who knew more about what was commercial than pretty much anyone else at the time. So we get something that in my opinion was neither fish nor fowl... too watered-down to be great Replacements music, yet too "quirky" to be viable on commercial radio.

 

But Paul even referred to it at the time as their "dark pop" album, right? Seems like he knew exactly what he had.

It took a few years, but when he was asked to write a sunny, pop hit-type song he did so easily enough. It was called "Dyslexic Heart."

 

Yeah, even at their most watered down they were still too quirky. And the record is sort of lacking in the hook department for a record that's supposed to be aiming at radio.

What's funny is the songs on Pleased to Meet Me are definitely hookier. More rough and rocking sounding but still catchier. That's what made me think of how Paul must have felt after that record. Like, I gave you all these gems and you still can't sell them? I can imagine him second guessing himself and his idea of what a good song even is.

 

But that is the legend. The whole ball of wax is the fractured genius and his band of delinquents. THAT'S The Replacements. Right down to the perfectly chosen name.

I was there too. I watched them start out as a warmup band not listed on the poster. I watched Bob Stinson sitting in the audience at Ann Arbor's Michigan Theatre while Paul invited guitar players up from the audience to play Brownsville Station covers. I watched them on 2 tours after that supporting Pleased To Meet Me and Don't Tell A Soul, where they played with a nearly off the rails abandon that made me shiver in delight.

Every single show was a blueprint of who they were at that time. They rocked. They sucked. And all places in between. This band at their best was larger than the sum of Westerberg's songwriting and the band's performances and that's why they are legendary. Bottom line, they happily owned it all. Never once did they not lock right into who they were at the moment. Good and bad.

 

Well put. Truly, they were incapable of faking it.

 

The Village Voice at the time was the leading purveyor of independent music news. That was were you wanted to be as an independent artist. Rolling Stone did a short review. Maybe a couple paragraphs. Hardly mainstream world premiere press. They did like the album and why wouldn't they? I know this, I searched high and low for a copy and finally found exactly one (1) at a local independent super store, Sam's Jams in Ferndale, MI.

 

Cool -- Sam's Jams, represent. Did you go to the in-store for Pleased To Meet Me?

 

I did not. I can't remember why. Probably had to work or some such foul reason.

 

I’m in for anything Replacements, and welcome this. I saw the DTAS tour and played this album tons when it came out. I actually like it better than ASD, which I know is an unpopular opinion, but I like it when the Mats rocked and mixed it up and I found ASD depressing and dour. I still like it, but it just feels off to me. As a child of the 80s, big bad 80s production never bothered me. It sounded “normal” to me when it came out.

 

Damn, I stayed away from the Mosh Pit at shows during that era. I remember the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Latin Quarter in Detroit. This was the Monster's of Sock Tour, for Mother's Milk. Girls were walking out of there with their faces all punched up bloody. I had a spot on the upper rail. To hell with getting my ass kicked for fun.

 

Based on what I've read, there definitely was a great deal of overthinking involved in the making of DTAS. And overthinking usually does result from second-guessing one's own instincts/gut feelings.

 

Meanwhile the Lemonheads are scoring major play with their cover of Mrs Robinson. The music industry then was 20% substance and 80% the Empire Records soundtrack

 

Point taken, but it's also true that the Lemonheads' success didn't come until three years later, after Nirvana had kicked open the door. In 1989 no commercial stations were playing their fine cover of Luka.