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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bob Mehr
Read between
December 8 - December 26, 2021
Teasley. “Another time we were sitting
on the couch writing romantic letters back and forth to one another—as though he were an inmate on the inside and I was his girl on the outside waiting for him to get out. We were using our middle names, Harry and Janie. Those are things that he thought to do.”
“Tommy was everybody’s little darling and a jackass at the same time,” chuckled Earle. “He was this charmed, cocky kid. But I always saw something more in him.”
Barefoot & Pregnant (to which the Replacements contributed a cover of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades”).
Mould felt that some more dogmatic audiences viewed the ’Mats “as a rock-and-roll band . . . trying to be hardcore. Maybe the overlords of the existing hardcore scene saw them as poseurs. But those people didn’t know shit anyways.”
Ever the reactive writer, Westerberg noted that “if I hear something I like, I steal it, and if I hear something I don’t like, I write about that.” While he dug the clarion quality of “I Will Follow,” he balked at what he considered its unrealistic message. The kids he knew weren’t going blindly forth, their faith steadfast, their belief unwavering in the face of adversity.
Nothing Always Happens.
“Kids Don’t Follow”
“The whole thing of being in a band is like putting on a mask, it gives you license to do things you wouldn’t normally do, especially when you’re away from home,” Jesperson would later note. On the road and in close quarters, the Replacements’ personalities became exaggerated: the sometimes petulant Tommy became “The Brat,” penny-pinching Chris became
“The Chince,” Bob, ever in his cups, was dubbed “The Drunk,” while moody, churlish Paul was “The Louse.”
“Something that always informed Paul’s sensibility was his inwardness. He was fundamentally uncomfortable with people looking at him,”
The Damned
When he wasn’t donning outrageous garb and playing the guitar, Bob was an altogether different person. “There was this whole other side to him that had nothing to do with the stage Bob; there was nothing loud or attention-grabbing about his personality,” said Ayers. “There was a kind-hearted, quiet guy underneath the oaf in the dress.”
Replacements partisans were, on the whole, literate, dark-humored, and a bit confused about their place in the world.
“If Only You Were Lonely”
‘I just recorded this song, and I sing it all in falsetto, and I want you to hear it—but I’ve got to get it out of the house right now or I’m going to erase it.’ It was like he’d done something and freaked himself out.”
“You’re Pretty When You’re Rude.”
“Color Me Impressed”
“Heyday”
“Normally you can dismiss someone: ‘Ah, they’re a bar band,’ or, ‘It’s generic
New Orleans pop-punks the Red Rockers,
The song’s element of illicit romance was rooted in Westerberg’s reality. “I think Paul had some dalliances with girls that he probably shouldn’t have at that time,” noted one of the band’s confidantes.
Westerberg’s flirtations with femininity would result in the album’s most delicate composition, the piano ballad “Androgynous.” “A girl said it to us,” said Westerberg. “I didn’t know what the word meant.” After looking it up, he wrote the song on his parents’ piano.
“Unsatisfied” may have been inspired by Westerberg’s developing interest in palmistry. Every palm reader he saw told him that the lines of his hand meant he was doomed to be unhappy forever. The song—keening folk-rock in the style of Rod Stewart’s early solo work—was a testament to the band’s seat-of-the-pants approach. Westerberg barely had any lyrics, save for the “I’m so unsatisfied” hook, and improvised as he sang.
“By then, he felt like, ‘Fuck it, I’m not
going to be worried anymore. If Bob doesn’t like these songs, it’s his problem, not mine,’” said Jesperson.
The mostly instrumental “Seen Your Video” had once been called “Adult”: “You look like an adult / Walk like an adult / Who taught you that?”
“You’d ride around on the 4 bus, and then head back to your little punk-rock ghetto with sixty cents in your pocket and hopefully you could afford Taco Bell on the corner,”
On occasion, Mars was given to fits of strangely theatrical behavior. This usually coincided with the appearance of his outré alter ego, “Pappy the Clown.” The first time Pappy appeared was during a gig at a punk club in Virginia Beach. “We did a sound check, and then Chris came back for the show made up like a clown, with no explanation,” recalled Westerberg. “And he wouldn’t say a word. It was all mime. It kinda startled us. We all thought this is pretty much genius . . . but weird as hell.” “It was . . . God . . . it was funny,” said Tommy Stinson. “It was pretty disturbing at first too,
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Whereas, like, Dean Martin had swagger; the Rolling Stones had swagger . . . the Replacements had swagger.”
Gun Club
Pontiac Brothers,
“A total conversation killer with Paul was to start complimenting him on his songwriting, or talking about how much you love this song or that song . . . just conversation over,” said Dotson. “He didn’t know how to deal with it.”
With Let It Be, people were paying ever closer attention to Paul Westerberg’s words. “It was a mixed blessing when I started to attract fanatics who would read something into a song that maybe wasn’t there, or maybe someone who would read exactly what’s there,” he admitted. Still, Westerberg never took the power of his songs, his ability to connect with listeners, for granted. “People always come up and say, ‘You wrote this just for me,’” he noted. “And I say, ‘Yeah, I did. I don’t know you, but I knew you were out there.’”
“I do remember hating that record,” said Albini. “When a band made the transition from being a punk band to being an R.E.M.-type band, that was the point where you could write them off—’cause they were never going back. There’s no way that a band that aspires to being a credible pop/rock FM radio band is ever going to make a snotty, smelly, messy punk rock record again. It’s never happened in history. It’s basically an indication of the kind of people they always were. And you feel a little bit foolish for having been duped.”
‘This is how we’re going to do it from here on out.’ I don’t know that the Replacements ever had that talk. I’m not even sure how much Paul wanted it. Everyone wants it a little bit. If you get up onstage even once, you must want it to a certain degree. Then it’s just a matter of finding out where your lines are.”
Westerberg was more inclined to sabotage himself than risk rejection.
Seymour Steinbigle
Douglas “Dee Dee” Colvin
For the first time, these kinds of songs were coming more naturally and more fully formed to Westerberg than the rockers. They allowed him to express a vulnerability he didn’t reveal in his life: “I could hide behind a character and then shed myself of it. I used to mine my deepest feelings and use that for the songs and then keep my relationships light. As light as I could, anyway.”
Blakey, singer-guitarist for North Carolina’s Let’s Active.
They’d met when the bands shared a bill at San Francisco’s I-Beam in the fall of 1983. “He followed me around and bummed cigarettes off me,” recalled Blakey. The following night, after a show in Berkeley, the two spent hours walking in the rain. They would exchange calls and letters as Blakey moved to Athens, Georgia, where she joined Michael Stipe’s sister Lynda in the band Oh-OK. “I figured the only way I’d hear her voice was with her band on the radio . . . on a college station,” said Westerberg. “And one night we were passing through a town somewhere, and she was doing an interview on the
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The song was a residue of Westerberg’s Catholic upbringing, with lyrical allusions to the gospel of Matthew, ruminations on the love of family versus the approval of strangers, and a cynical take on the slippery slope of earthly ambition:
Sitting on his stool, reflecting in the dim light of the barroom, the song’s narrator looks back at the friends, love, and chances that have slipped away: “Opportunity knocks once, then the door slams shut.” The song was filled with glimpses of the drinkers Westerberg had known, both distantly and
well. “There’s a little of my father in there,” he said. “There’s a little bit of Bob in there too.” Erdelyi, Fjelstad, and Jesperson sat blinking back tears during the take. “It was breathtaking,” said Jesperson. Even Bob Stinson couldn’t deny Westerberg this one. “I have to give him credit [on] ‘Here Comes a Regular,’” said Bob, who tried but fell short of a fitting part for it. “I was in that mood but couldn’t pull it out of me.”
“Anybody who saw them on a good night drank the Kool-Aid,” said Warner’s sales vice president Charlie Springer. “I think maybe the problem was that some people rarely saw them on a good night. There were regional sales people who never saw them on a good night.”
“Within Your Reach” or the youthful angst of “Unsatisfied,” numbers like “Run for the Country,” “Learn How to Fail,” and “Birthday Gal” were about adult issues: grown-up love, the regrets that come with age, the difficulties of trying to mature in an adolescent rock-and-roll world.
“Valentine,”
As a boy, Bob was highly intelligent, somewhat eccentric, and incredibly skinny. With his mop of curly black hair, big ears, and pipe-cleaner arms, he cut a curious figure among the corn-fed farm kids, who teased him for his brains and lack of brawn. The catcalls were always about his size: Beanpole, Skinny, Slim.
Music was his refuge. He loved rock’s greasy-haired rebels—Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent—but his great hero was the bookish Buddy Holly. “It was so fun to hear a new Buddy Holly
