Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements

by Bob Mehr

Chrissie took one look at the lean, frizzy-haired guitarist onstage and fell in love: “Bob and I sat up on a hay bale talking all night, and we’ve been together ever since.”

Returning to Hoyt’s, the band again pressed him to join, but Dunlap was still resistant. They went back and forth for many hours and many rounds. Finally, a cracked compromise was reached: They would all drink until somebody dropped. If one of the ’Mats went down first, they’d leave Dunlap alone; if he fell before them, he would join the band. The next morning Dunlap rubbed his bleary eyes and reached to steady his pounding head. He looked around and saw that he was at home, in bed, but couldn’t remember when or how he’d gotten there. All he was sure of was that he

was the Replacements’ new guitarist.

“Seymour arrived in Memphis off a plane from Paris,” said Jim Dickinson. “He was wearing a tuxedo jacket with little Playboy bunnies all embossed over it. . . . I don’t think he’d been asleep in a week. The first words out of his mouth were ‘Where’s the coke?’”

The lack of a hit would become an albatross around Westerberg’s neck. “You don’t get to choose,” said Baird. “There are people who’ll tell me: ‘Oh, you wrote “Hands” . . . that is such a cute song.’ And they’ll come up to Paul, and talk about ten different songs: ‘That one broke my heart; this other one tore me up; that song hit me where I lived.’ Not many people get that kind of response.”

“I’m not giving you a hundred percent,” replied Westerberg. It had become his refrain, practically a mantra, during Pleased to Meet Me. When Westerberg said it to Jim Dickinson, it was a question of trust; as he acted it out with the record company, it was a matter of insecurity. But as he spit out the words again to Rieger, it went far deeper. “I can’t mean it every night,” admitted Westerberg, meeting Rieger’s eyes. “I just can’t fuckin’ mean it every night.”

Westerberg viewed performing, as he did everything, in stark black-and-white terms. He could live with drunken insouciance or bored incompetence, so long as it was real. What he couldn’t do was fake it. And he wasn’t willing to put himself on the line emotionally. “For him there was no middle ground,” said Rieger. “That’s part of the reason people gravitated to him as an artist. It was all or nothing.”

Westerberg explained to a reporter. “You’re not at home, you don’t feel at home, and you don’t act human. You abuse yourself, not intentionally. But you . . . can never relax in the place you

are, so you tend to distract yourself by drinking.”

He was coming up with far more character-driven pieces, partly after further immersion in Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams. Ultimately, much of the new material played as portraits of the women in Westerberg’s life: his sister, his wife, his numerous road dalliances. “I never knew what, or who, his songs were about,” said Bizer. “I’d ask him and get a different story every time. So I stopped asking.” Of course, some of Westerberg’s female protagonists were merely disguised versions of himself. “It is easier for me to say what’s on my mind by using a character. And it’s generally a woman,” he said. At the same time, many of the new tunes—raw reflections like “They’re Blind” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Ghost”—were more nakedly autobiographical than ever.

polka-dot suspenders and teased hair and cooed, “My, aren’t you the bright young things.”

“Someone Take the Wheel.”

The response delivered a deep psychological blow to Westerberg. “We paid our dues, went to a moderately big level, then went to a huge level on that Petty opening slot,” he observed. “But it was like playing a tiny club where no one cared—except there was 20,000 of them every night. I mean, the rejection of a small club is one thing. But the rejection of a small city was tough.” Things got worse once the tour

One night Westerberg caught Mike Campbell and couple of other Heartbreakers watching from the wings. “So I decided, let’s just show them what we can really do,” he said. “And we sorta blew them away . . . and confused them. The next day their roadie said to me, ‘I don’t get it, man. You guys are,

like, brilliant if you want to be. Why don’t you want to be?’ I didn’t have an answer for him.”

Laughs, however, were generally few and far between. Backstage, before a date at a state fair in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Tommy Stinson was bitching to Petty about the indignity of having to do a gig where the hogs and cows were being judged. “We’d never be playing a fuckin’ fair if we weren’t on this tour,” groused Stinson. “Really?” said Petty. “Well, I’m making a quarter of a million dollars tonight. That’s why I’m playing here.” Stinson was stunned into silence. His take-home that night would be a few hundred.

As Bill Flanagan would note, this material had “all the optimism of a suicide note.”

It provided little relief. Instead, the songs forced Westerberg to own up to the fact that he was fed up with nearly everything in his life. It had started with “Rock ’n’ Roll Ghost.” “That song was the beginning of me starting to think, What am I doing? I still don’t know. Am I happy?” More and more the answer was no. He was unsatisfied with himself, the band, and his marriage: “It frightened me to think that this was my lot in life.”

“Sadly Beautiful”

“Here Comes a Regular”

bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan wanted to record “Bastards of Young.”

“It wasn’t a creative or emotional argument; it was a business argument.”

“Happy Town” played on his fear of rehab culture and borrowed liberally from the Dorothy Parker poem “Bohemia”;

“If writers had a little more guts, maybe they wouldn’t be writers. They wouldn’t need to put their feelings in a song.”

But “The Last” was a note to self, a Sinatra-style piano ballad summing up Westerberg’s confused relationship with the bottle. “It’s a drunken man writing about love, who doesn’t know love from drinking,” he said.

She’d recently lost her mother to cancer; her father was fighting the same disease. Her relationship with Westerberg started as friendship (“Nobody was wearing their heart on their sleeve immediately,” she said), a union of mutual need: “Like two people in the middle of an ocean holding on to the same life preserver.”

“She and I were friends, lovers—but very connected,” said Westerberg. “You have that person you don’t think about for six months and you get on the phone to call them and you pick up the phone and they’re calling you.”

Johnette Napolitano,

“I could make the horror of losing myself in that shit brilliant enough in my mind to say no.”

“Bent Out of Shape”

Michael Wilson, a Cincinnati native who specialized in moody black-and-white street scenes.

“I was feeling like there might be a fresh beginning with her,” said Westerberg. “And with her, and with her, and with her.”

John Updike, especially 1975’s A Month of Sundays. Westerberg saw himself in the book’s protagonist and narrator Tom Marshfield, the exiled minister stuck in an unhappy marriage, ringing up multiple affairs, and dealing with a diminishing faith in his convictions.

“In my mind, right now, there is no band,” Westerberg told SPIN. “It got to the point where just flipping through the paper and seeing the word replacement, even if it’s replacement windows, I would get a tight knot in my stomach. . . . I’ve always felt that they were dependent on me, and it’s just recently that I’ve realized that I’m dependent on them.”

Finally clear-eyed, Westerberg could accept what had always unnerved him: the intensity of people’s connection to his songs. “I used to not be able to deal with some of the fans,” he said. “The ones who come up with tears in their eyes, saying, ‘You changed my life.’ At one time, I didn’t want the responsibility. I couldn’t even take care of my own life.”

“It came thundering down on me that, sober, I could face my feeling, which was ‘This is not any fucking fun,’” said Westerberg. “It wasn’t so much that I needed the alcohol to face the audience; I needed the alcohol to mask the disillusionment.”

of closure was obvious from the opening jangle of “I Will Dare.” “Meet me anyplace, anywhere, anytime—I don’t care, meet me tonight, if you would dare . . . one last time,” sang Westerberg.

The Silver Eagle pulled away from the Stinsons’ house. On the tour bus’s destination board, bands proudly displayed their names as a marker of their renown. On this bus, the sign in the window read simply: NO ONE YOU KNOW.

His solo career might’ve been small stakes compared to what he’d experienced during the ’Mats’ height, but Dunlap relished it all. “Every time I get done playing, and I go to settle with the club owner, I ask, ‘How much do I owe you?’” he said. “I feel like I have no business being paid, no matter how meager it is. It’s too much fun to call that work.”

Free from booze, the band, and any personal attachments (his divorce from Lori Bizer would also become final), Westerberg sought solitude instead. He rented a little bungalow in South Minneapolis and lived a simple, ascetic existence. “I was alone for the first time ever, and I enjoyed it,” he recalled. “I had a piano, a rug, a rocking chair, and a couple good books. I learned how to play saxophone. I started gardening. Soon after that, I began writing and the stuff just poured out.”

recorded and written in the basement. This [was] the first batch of songs that were

written actually looking out the window.”

Westerberg would settle into a new significant relationship. “Oddly enough,” he said, “I ended up with a girl I had known for a long time.”

Lindeen thought it might just be a passing “rock star” fling, but it soon became something more, despite her reservations. “I’m falling in love with you,” she told Westerberg, “but, you know, you have a terrible reputation. . . . I can’t set myself up like this.” Westerberg pointed to his sobriety. “I am living proof that people can change,” he said. “I’ve changed.” “I surrendered,” wrote Lindeen. “This might be . . . where I make a deal with the devil, but who cares—there are thousands of girls out there who would love to have such a dilemma.” Their relationship—marked by myriad joys and dilemmas—would last for the next two decades.

“Lenny told them, ‘I got a song here that’s hit-ish’—that was his term, ‘hit-ish,’” chuckled Westerberg. “I think that’s Yiddish for shit.”

“I definitely had some sort of breakdown there, like a severe anxiety attack or something.”

Although he’d stopped drinking, Westerberg had not dealt with his alcoholism or depression issues. Back on the road, he was white-knuckling his way through his promotional obligations, through concerts, through his life. “He’s not drinking. He’s trying to behave in a new relationship. And at the end of the day he was all alone,” said Hobbib. “There was no Tommy anymore. He didn’t have Tommy to bounce his discontent off of. Now it’s all on him, and it started to eat him up.”

“It dawned on me that my dream came true. Maybe it didn’t play out like I thought it would, but I’d lived my dream. At that point I realized I didn’t have another one. And that was somehow terrifying.”

you can’t veer too much from the path that people expect you to be on. I’ve seen it happen with Iggy Pop and even with the Stones. You continue to grow as an artist and as a human being, but people wanna freeze you in a moment from your past.”