The Replacements’ finest moment came on TV—Saturday Night Live in 1986. They were appearing to promote their fourth album, Tim, which was their first for a major label (their previous albums—Hootenanny; Stink; Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash; and Let It Be—were released on an indie label, Twin/Tone, out of their hometown, Minneapolis). Besides front man-heartthrob-genius Paul Westerberg, the band at that time included drummer Chris Mars, a waiflike thumper; Bob Stinson, an absurd, drunken lout; and Tommy Stinson, Bob’s younger brother, a Replacement from age 13 who appeared that night, if not so much anymore, to worship the stage Paul Westerberg walked on.
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Bob Stinson, it turned out, wasn’t long for the group; soon after that appearance he was kicked out for excessive drunkenness, an impressive achievement given the Replacements’ history. Stinson’s, um, replacement is one Slim Dunlap, a band pal from the Minneapolis club scene. Now, two years later, the group’s critical rep, always exceedingly high, has gone through the roof. Hailed by Musician magazine as “the last, best band of the eighties,” the Replacements have seen their latest album, Don’t Tell a Soul, gain an unprecedented amount of airplay and almost become a hit. Their exceedingly loud, transporting show at the Aragon a couple weeks ago had to be in front of one of the biggest crowds the group had ever seen; certainly it was the first time I’d seen them play in front of more than a few hundred people. Unlike other college-radio darlings who’ve begun to hit the big time—R.E.M., for example, and U2—the Replacements aren’t solicitous about adjusting their show to bigger crowds. Eight-year veterans of the thrashy, noisy punk circuits, they want stardom now but haven’t quite lost their affection for what they’re giving up. Call ’em young adults.
In his latest book, Music for Pleasure, Simon Frith begins his introduction with this provocative sentence: “I am now quite sure that the rock era is over.” The music business, he continues, “is no longer organized around rock—around the selling of records of a particular sort of musical event to young people. . . . The rock era . . . turned out to be a byway in the development of twentieth century popular music, rather than, as we thought at the time, any kind of mass-cultural revolution.” Frith is a sociologist first and foremost, and his point, disproved though it is every six months by the latest Guns N’ Roses or Replacements, has to be taken in that light: he’s saying that the music industry has been restructured to meet the growing fragmentation of the rock audience and the (ever-quickening, it sometimes seems) aging of the baby boomers.
It took a long time to accustom oneself to the volume and the density of the sound mix. The band was clearly enjoying itself from the first moments (Westerberg ostentatiously patted himself on the back after “I Don’t Know”); word had been that a couple of earlier midwest shows had been terrible, and there was a weird rumor that Westerberg had hit someone, or someone had hit him, or he had got into a fight of some sort, two nights previous. Still, the sound was quite undifferentiated (it reminded me at times of the Headbangers Ball show, with Anthrax, at the Aragon a couple of months ago), and you couldn’t hear a word of what the band were saying between songs. Less than astute song choices—”I Don’t Know,” for one, and also “Favorite Thing,” both anonymous rockers—didn’t help.
Me, I wonder what kind of stardom Paul Westerberg wants. The show was too noisy to be considered a sell-out, too safe not to be. It uncharacteristically featured only three covers—the two already mentioned and “Cruella De Ville” from 101 Dalmatians, the Replacements’ contribution to the Stay Awake compilation—none of them new. The band seems to be groping its way toward a sort of stardom that may not exist anymore. More than R.E.M. or even U2, both of which turned out to be extremely conventional rock bands, the Replacements are throwbacks. Westerberg’s a mythmaker, not a pop star: if the rock era, whatever that was, is indeed over, the Replacements, instead of being the last, best band of the 80s, may turn out to be the last rock ‘n’ roll band, period. Westerberg must have an inkling of this: on the new record, he sings, “Take me by the hand and raise a toast / To a rock ‘n’ roll ghost.” I’ll buy.
