Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements

by Bob Mehr

“The whole thing was probably the typical fears of adolescence: ‘Am I gay? Am I retarded? Do I fit in? What do I do, where do I go next?’ I don’t think I was really trying to kill myself. But John was . . . different.”

In life, Zika had been Westerberg’s idol. In death, he would become his guiding spirit, the rock-and-roll ghost who would haunt his psyche. “When Zika killed himself, that was a big part of what changed me,” said Westerberg. “I believe that I took it as a passing of the torch. “From then on, when in doubt, in my mind, musically, or whatever, I would think: What would John have done? My attitude changed too; I became a little more of a ‘fuck you’ type. It’s the classic thing: after he died, I took on a bit of his personality.”

an immediate reaction you can get from music that you can’t get from art,”

“Once school was out, I could wear my glasses till my heart was content. So I’d go to the public library every day.” If he wanted to be a songwriter, he figured he’d have to study. “I forced myself to read literature, even if I didn’t enjoy it, as a mental exercise: ‘I have to work this muscle a bit.’”

“Tom’s mom wanted us to play dance music,” said Westerberg. “We may have done ‘Le Freak’ by Chic. That’s when I went out and smoked a cigarette.”

As Oat struggled along, Westerberg landed a gig with Marsden Maintenance, working an evening janitor gig in a downtown building that included the office of US Senator David Durenberger. “That was the best of the crappy jobs,” he said. “I’d turn on all the radios to the same station, eat the doughnuts left over at the office, and sing along.”

He would sometimes write out the band’s set lists on Durenberger’s stationery: “There’d be songs like ‘We’re Gonna Get Drunk Tonight,’ and at the top it would say, ‘From the desk of US Senator.

Suicide Commandos

Suburbs.

Mollitive Nerves

“I’d had it with playing with guys who were half-assed into it,” said Westerberg. “I did that probably from age fourteen to nineteen. Five years of playing with guys in

garages, basements, cover bands, parties, keggers. I’d already fucked around with guys who really didn’t want to go for it. All these dudes were eventually gonna go off to college or go become accountants. And it took me a long time to find guys who had no other fucking options in life. I needed desperation. ’Cause that’s where I was coming from.”

he would hoof the thirty-plus blocks from downtown to his house in South Minneapolis, taking Bryant Avenue all the way. “I was thinking of trying to build up my lung power,” said Westerberg. “I’d read that Sinatra had swum laps.

I always got good ideas when I walked too.”

The two chatted between puffs. They’d been born just a couple weeks apart. “And whatever chemical imbalance we both shared, we bonded on that level too,” said Westerberg. Bob was also impressed with the fact that Paul had played for money: “Pitiful as it was, I had actually been paid a couple bucks.”

Westerberg looked at the boy with the bowl haircut, blue hoodie, and Sears bass and broke out in a grin. “He just looked like . . . a star,” he said. “That’s what I saw: a twelve-year-old who sounded like a little girl and played like a motherfucker. And I thought, This kid is a fucking star.”

the Damned’s 1979 LP Machine Gun Etiquette

he fucked up, he would fuck up with majesty.”

Dogbreath

Though the band’s drinking would come to define and even consume them in later years, in the beginning it was a perfect lubricant for the long hours of practice and their burgeoning friendship. “That was the glue that held us—ol’ Jack Daniels,” said Mars. Westerberg noted: “They weren’t heavy fall-down drunks when I met them. None of us were. We learned to be that together.”

Westerberg wasn’t sure he could really come up with anything truly original, but a Ritchie Blackmore quote in Guitar Player magazine—“You’re either a genius or a clever thief”—provided a spark. “I thought, Okay, I’m no genius, so I went and ripped off a bunch of Johnny Thunders songs and rewrote them. If Johnny can make two chords for ‘All by Myself,’ I’ll just change the key and call it something else.”

His greatest frustration was women. He’d always been consumed by romantic crushes on unapproachable figures. “Try Me” was about a curvaceous waitress he’d admired from afar; “Customer” was inspired by the clerk who sold him cigarettes. “Near my house, there was SuperAmerica, a gas station,” he said. “There was a cute girl who

worked behind the counter who never had time for anything. There was always a line of five truck drivers, and you’d have to get your thing and go.”

“I figured if I’m gonna sing these tunes, it’s gotta be something they can relate to,” said Westerberg. “If I wasn’t specifically writing about them, I would use something they said, their terminology or a phrase, to sew the whole thing together.”

“It was the most surreal thing,” he said. “Here’s a bunch of sixteen- to twenty-two-year-old idiots that are crawling out of their skin—because you’re spending the first week of your life not stoned all the time. Imagine how great a band had to be to get my attention under those circumstances.”

“Seeing the Beatles, it was such a fundamental, profound thing that happened to me,” said Jesperson. “It felt like destiny, like this was my music. As people, they were funny and irreverent too. I fell so hard, so fast, for them.”

That rush of discovery, the sweet, almost narcotic quality of losing himself in a new band or

record, was a feeling Jesperson would become addicted to. He began to devour the music of the British Invasion: the Beatles and Stones, the Kinks, Yardbirds, and the Who. He loved American bands too, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Cryan’ Shames, and the Left Banke. He also adored local Twin Cities favorites like the Castaways and the Jesters, who were featured on the Big Hits of Mid-America compilations put out by the Minneapolis-based label SOMA.

“The Longhorn was where you could sit and look up Debbie Harry’s skirt, hang out with David Byrne, and have a drink with David Johansen,” said Chan Poling of the Suburbs, who quickly became one of the top draws at the club.

The following afternoon, a now-frustrated Westerberg decided to stop by Oar Folk to see if Jesperson had finally gotten around to their demo. He stepped a few feet into the store when he heard the Replacements’ tape blasting. Worried what Jesperson’s reaction was going to be, he practically ran out.

It was that combination of naïveté and deception—as Nabokov might have said—that made the band so compelling. “The Replacements’ energy was a beautiful thing—as crazy as it was, there was an innocence to it,”

Though they could be sloppy, the drunken disaster sets of lore were still years off. “We were not drunk. If anything, we did take amphetamines, at least I did, I was a sucker for that shit from day one,” said Westerberg. “But it took us a while to get into liquor and make it more of a boozy thing.”

“The Replacements right off the bat . . . it was like, ‘What the hell? Where did this come from?’”

‘More Cigarettes.’

“I was probably annoyed at him,” said Mould. “Like ‘What about our demos? What about our tape?’ But it was one of the best things that could’ve happened at the time. There’s nothing like being spurned by the cutest label in town to make you really suck it up and do it on your own terms. That’s pretty much what happened. We ended up starting our own label, pressed up a single, and started touring until we found sympathetic ears outside of Minneapolis.” Twin/Tone’s rejection of the Hüskers and its support of the Replacements would fundamentally determine the paths of both bands, as well as color a friendship and competition between them that would grow intense over the next few years.

“The way things rolled out, we were always outsiders,” said Westerberg, “even among the other outsiders.”

The antipathy was mutual. Westerberg—who likely had some clinical degree of oppositional defiant disorder—

Luddite,

“I thought they were so dysfunctional that it should be amplified, that it should almost be encouraged,” said Stark. “Peter had the opposite view; he wanted to mold them into a little bit more of a polished band. I felt that if you reined them in, what would you have? You’d have a mediocre band at best, with a good songwriter, who wouldn’t amount to anything. I thought the only chance the band had was to amplify the dysfunction . . . though they would go far beyond my imagination in being dysfunctional.”

“There’s a Norwegian word that a lot of Minnesotans know: Jantelagen,” said Hoeger. “It pretty much

means, ‘don’t brag’ or ‘don’t have big aspirations.’

This prolific output was the result, Westerberg would observe much later, of a prolonged manic phase. “My mania tends to come quicker and leave faster now, but at this time, I was around . . . twenty-one, [and] it came out of five years playing in basement groups that were going nowhere, and realizing that I had to grab this by the horns.”

“I like stuff that isn’t vague, where it says it all in the title,” he said, noting the “action titles” of songs like “Kick Your Door Down” and “We’ll Get Drunk.”

dreams as a younger man. “And he sorta got what I was doing too,” said Westerberg, “and why it was important to me.”

Out in the crowd, Westerberg and Chris Mars stood waiting for Thunders eagerly. “Kramer came out and said, ‘Guess who’s not ready?’” recalled Westerberg. “Then Johnny finally appeared, strung out, wearing leather pants. The moment he walked on . . . I saw it.” The look on Thunders’s face—imperious and desperate all at once—struck Westerberg: “He was

frightening and beautiful and mean at the same time,” he said. “Like a child.” Physically struggling through

“To me, the soul of rock-and-roll is mistakes. Mistakes and making them work for you,” Westerberg would note. “In general, music that’s flawless is usually uninspired.”

The incident in Duluth revealed Westerberg as an impulsive, compelling stage performer. As shy and retiring as he could be in real life, the few feet of elevation on the floorboards changed him, as did the security of having a gang of brothers to fall back on.

pals. At heart, Westerberg was a sensitive intellectual who craved a kind of male intimacy—even if his whole mien argued against it. “Paul was a real thoughtful person who did not want you to know he was a real thoughtful person,” said Santacroce. “Like that was betraying some kind of vulnerability.”

drug induced escapism—