Ed Masley

The Republic | azcentral.com

The Replacements wore their status as the only band that matters like a dirty lampshade, effortlessly filtering the spirit of Rod Stewart and the Faces through the more reckless abandon of punk. They were known for their drunken performances that could fly off the rails into beautiful chaos or provide the most cathartic moments of transcendence you could hope to witness at a rock show – sometimes both in the course of the same unhinged performance.

And they had songs to back it up, from such early punk classics as “Takin’ a Ride” and “I Hate Music” through more introspective ballads as Paul Westerberg matured into the self-effacing poet laureate of alternative-rock while giving voice to the outsider in us all.

It was the stuff of legends. And the fact that they had yet to truly “make it” by the time they played their final show in 1991 just made it that much more romantic for the members of their growing cult — like Big Star, whose praises they memorably sang on “Alex Chilton.”

That’s all part of what inspired former Phoenix New Times music editor Bob Mehr to write about the whole chaotic ride they took together. But the thing that most intrigued him was a single question: Why?

A decade later, having talked at length to Westerberg and bassist Tommy Stinson as well as 200-some people who witnessed the legend unfolding, from the individual member’s troubled childhoods through Bob Stinson’s tragic death and the reunion tour that gave their tale the happy ending it deserved, he poured those answers to that single question into “Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.”

The title is not from a Westerberg lyric. It's the name of a Dave Edmunds songs they covered at one of their early rehearsals.

As Mehr recalls the scene in “Trouble Boys:”

“When the last note rang out and the song was over, there was silence. Looking at one another, they realized as Paul would recall, ‘that we had fallen in together.’”

We caught up with Mehr to talk about the book and the Replacements in advance of a conversation with Mehr, which I’ll be moderating this weekend at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix.

Question: So you got your start at Phoenix New Times?

Answer: I did. I was raised in California until high school. Then we moved to Tucson. I went to school there and started working professionally in Phoenix in the late ’90s. I had a couple gigs for, like, three months in radio or whatever, but my first gig in journalism was music editor at New Times. I got the job when I was 23 and started a couple months later, when I was 24. I was there not quite three years. I left at the end of ’01.

And from there I worked at weeklies in Seattle and Chicago before coming to the daily paper here in Memphis, where I’ve been for the past 10 years as the music critic. And much of that time obviously was spent working on the Replacements book. I started making my inquiries about getting the band involved in the book in 2007, maybe about a year after I arrived in Memphis.

Q: What was it about the Replacements that inspired you to write a book?

A: Fundamentally, I was a fan growing up, loved their music and began writing about them, or at least their various solo projects, when I became a critic. So I was always attracted to the music, but I think more than that I was attracted to the story and maybe what I felt was hidden in the story. They’ve been written about, romanticized, anthologized. And yet I felt like there was something missing in understanding their tale.

You hear all the stories about their drinking, their antics, the things they did to create their reputation and the fact that they fell short of this commercial success everybody expected and wanted for them. But I never got the answer to the question “Why?” Why did they do these things? Why did their career unfold the way it did? So that became the mandate for the book, to really find out the why of their story.

Q: Did you have ideas as to what it was that had been hidden in the story? Or did you have to kind of go in cold?

A: I did want to investigate and research the story in a serious way as a sort of historical exercise. I thought they were important enough, influential enough and interesting enough to warrant that kind of approach. And I suppose I knew instinctively that there was something lurking in their origin that was kind of the key to unlocking and understanding how things unfolded. So a lot of my focus was on what their lives were like leading up to the formation of the Replacements.

I felt like the more I dug into that, the more I would be able to unlock the mysteries of the band. And certainly, that proved to be the case in terms of exploring the childhood of the Stinsons and particularly Bob Stinson, understanding where it was that these people came from, what was driving them, because that drive was ultimately the thing that was the most unique about the Replacements.

So much of the perspective on the Replacements has been from the outside looking in, in large part because they’re guarded people. Even though they’ve talked about the band, Paul in particular has always been sort of comical or dismissive or protective in some ways.

So the opportunity to have the band involved — primarily Paul and Tommy but really most of the key principals in the story — gave me that access and that insiders’ perspective I was looking for to really understand where their heads were at and what was sort of propelling them and compelling them to do the things they were doing.

Q: You said Paul tends to be comical, dismissive, protective. Why do you think that is?

A: Probably because there’s this idea, which I think is wrong, that the Replacements failed somehow. While it’s true that they didn’t become a Top 40 multi-million-selling band, I certainly don’t think they failed in the bigger picture. I think time has proven that they completely succeeded in a way. And I think probably the fact that they fell short is, in part, what’s kept them kind of pure in people’s eyes.

But it was hard for Paul to deal with that because so much of that fell on his shoulders. So he had a tendency, I think, to deflect or to rationalize or to not want to really examine the things that went right and the things that went wrong in their career. And it was a protective impulse on his part for many years.

But as I was able to sit down with him many times over the course of many years and really get into the story and have him sort of open up and be honest, I think that’s where the book really began to take shape and bloom in a way, because these guys are being frank about their fears and insecurities and their passions and hopes, and how all that figured into this kind of whirl of expectations and emotions that was their career through the 1980s.

Q: Having spoken to Paul at length, do you get the impression that he thinks they failed?

A: I think the thing that ultimately in the last few years probably lifted that weight off his shoulders was the success of their reunion from 2013-2015, which was rapturously received. They’re playing to 10-15,000 people in Minneapolis and New York City and the audiences are lapping it up and singing their songs back to them as these generational anthems they’ve become.

So I think maybe now at the end of the reunion and hopefully with this book, the band and Paul can kind of see the power and the value of this thing they created so many years ago and that whatever negative things may have once been associated with the band have probably fallen away.

Q: You mentioned how guarded they are. Or were. Did it take you a while to get Paul in particular to open up?

A: Yes and no. I think they had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do, that I wanted to write a serious book in a serious way that would kind of force them to examine their time in the band and everything that happened. But certainly there was a trust that had to be built over time, maybe not with the band so much as their families and other people I interviewed who were close to them.

And quite frankly I have to give them – particularly Paul and Tommy – a lot of credit because they stuck with this project much longer than I had anticipated it going. At any point through the six or seven years of working on it with them actively, they could have said, “Enough” and walked away and shut me out. But they stuck through it to the end. And I think that maybe is a testament to whatever trust I was able to establish.

Q: You mentioned having been a fan. Do you recall your initial impression of the band, what piqued your interest?

A: Sure, my first exposure was watching their infamous 1986 “Saturday Night Live” performance as a kid, not knowing who the Replacements were or anything about their music, just seeing this band so raw and loud and rude and rough exploding across the TV screen and grabbing me by the throat and really just knocking me out. Fairly soon after that, I got into the records and developed a growing passion.

I saw them open for Tom Petty in Phoenix. And then their final tour, they played the Celebrity. But my initial thing was seeing them on TV, just kind of randomly watching “Saturday Night Live” and being taken aback by this performance that was unlike pretty much anything that I had seen up to that point.

Q: What’s weird about that “SNL” performance is you see people refer to it as being, like, disastrous.

A: No. it’s actually great.

Q: Right?

A: There’s a chapter in the book about the “SNL” experience. They got read the riot act between songs by Lorne Michaels because Paul had sort of cursed off mic on the first song. So when they played the second song, they actually screwed up the count-off and had to start over. But it was disastrous only in terms of the after-effect, that it soured their relationship with “Saturday Night Live” and NBC and the record company. They didn’t appear on TV for a couple of years probably because of that.

But I’d say it’s one of the best performances ever on “Saturday Night Live,” up there with Neil Young doing “Rockin’ in the Free World,” with Keith Richards, with Elvis Costello, the great performances we talk about. You have to consider the times. It was the ‘80s. There was so much polish. And to see a band that loud and loose was, I think, shocking. But on pure performance terms, I would think it’s an epic performance. And watching the video today, I think that backs it up.

Q: With bands like the Replacements, I get the impression that as much as fans would like to see them succeed, the fact that they never quite pull it off is also part of the appeal?

A: There’s a certain type of American rock fan that is fascinated with the idea of the beautiful loser, the band that fell short. When you kind of don’t make it but you’re so beloved, it sort of bestows upon a band a kind of purity, a kind of romance, a certain quality that people cling to. They’re unsullied. They didn’t have a one-hit wonder kind of status. They were just this great band that didn’t make it. And so I think we kind of admire that. Or certain kinds of rock fans will latch onto that.

And I think that, in some ways, has certainly benefited the Replacements’ reputation. Whereas certain bands from that era are no longer hip or revered, the Replacements have always been so. But I don’t think any of that would matter if the music didn’t hold up.

The quality of Westerberg’s songs, the variety and excellence of their records… if you look from “Sorry Ma” to “All Shook Down,” it runs the gamut of musical styles, and that kind of musical evolution, all that figures into it, probably more prominently than the fact that they have this kind of beautiful loser status.

Q: As a fan, did you think, at the time, that they were on the verge of breaking through? I remember when ‘I’ll Be You’ was almost kind of a hit, thinking “This is it! This is happening now!” And then, of course, it didn’t.

A: They certainly made efforts with that record to have a hit. And who could blame them? At that point, the band had been together 10 years and was still sort of scraping by. And the response, at least initially, to that record was favorable. “I’ll Be You” had movement like it would get into the Top 40 and go gold. None of that happened, obviously. The single stalled at No. 51. And the record only sold about 300,000.

But for so many years and for so many records, the Replacements were regarded within a certain kind of cultural segment as being THE band, you know? The great rock and roll band. And they got the acclaim but not the sales. As a high schooler, I remember thinking, “Sure, why wouldn’t they be massive?” But my judgement would have been a little biased.

Q: When I spoke to Tommy in 2014, I brought up the timing of the breakup, it being the same year Nirvana exploded and kind of opened the doors for a lot of alternative music to find a larger audience. And he said, “To be honest with you, I never really got the connection.” His whole thing was, “That wouldn’t have helped.”

A: I think the only way it would have helped is that with Nirvana’s success and the growth of alternative radio as a viable commercial format, the Replacements would have had more success in that environment. That’s not to say that they were like any grunge bands or that they would have been successful riding the wave of grunge. Because by the end of the band, they weren’t really making music like that anyway. Not that they ever were.

But I do think that the radio environment, the environment at MTV, the music-biz environment in general, would have been more hospitable to a quote-unquote alternative band. And certainly you saw, in that era, a lot of bands having radio success that they certainly wouldn’t have had in the ‘80s, from Weezer to Pavement to whoever you want to say who had kind of a radio hit and maybe a gold album.

Q: Do you feel there was an element of self-sabotage at work?

A: Sure. And that’s a running thread and theme of the book. Self-sabotage was more, I think, a by-product of their fears. The fear of success, the fear of failure, the fear of being judged. These guys came from fairly humble beginnings, in some cases troubled beginnings. As Paul says in the book, there wasn’t a driver’s license or high-school diploma between them. They were coming from a place where their options were limited.

The first part of the book is called “Jail, Death or Janitor.” That was Westerberg’s answer for “What were your options in life if not for the Replacements?” And that desperation fueled them early on. It gave them power as a band and informed their music, but it also kind of put a ceiling on what they could do and what they were willing to do once they got into the big-time show-business world. So it was kind of a double-edged sword. It propelled them but also limited them.

Q: What would be the biggest misconception people have of the Replacements?

A: There’s so many misconceptions. And it’s not that I set out to clear up every misconception. But I wanted to write a history that would maybe debunk some of the false notions. There’s this idea that all the bad shows were drunken shows and that there were way more bad drunken shows than there really were. The alcohol intake didn’t always have a proportional impact on whether the show was good or bad.

Sometimes the sober, hungover shows were the worst and the drunken shows were the best, where they played the sharpest. But the funny thing about the Replacements story is because they tend to be a band whose reputation is based on so much word of mouth, things tend to get embellished, enlarged or distorted. My job was to tell the truth behind some of these famous stories or to provide context so that people understood the real history, as opposed to the kind of folk-tale history.

Q: What do you think the ultimate legacy of the Replacements is?

A: I think it’s pretty massive. While I don’t think their influence was seen or felt really deeply in the grunge era, if you look starting in the mid-‘90s, you see a lot of bands take the influence of the Replacements and become very successful and very important. Look at Green Day, who clearly took a lot from the Replacements’ early work, that sort of melodic pop-punk sensibility, and had enormous commercial success.

You look at Goo Goo Dolls, who sort of mined the adult-contemporary, ballad-y side of Westerberg’s work and made an entire multi-million-selling career of that. Groups like Wilco, Jeff Tweedy will tell you he learned so much about songwriting and his approach by listening to the Replacements and Paul Westerberg. Whiskeytown and Ryan Adams draw a lot on that.

I don’t think any one band sounds exactly like the Replacements but there are dozens and dozens of bands that have taken parts of the Replacements’ personality and used it to inform what they do and in many cases been very successful with it. Their catalog of songs ranks up there with anyone but certainly right at the top of the post-punk era.

And I think the ultimate triumph in them doing their successful reunion is that all these generations of people who never got to see them, these kids in their 20s and 30s, got to experience them performing great.

Review: Replacements' first club show in 20-odd years

They were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. And they didn’t get in, but I think that’s a testament to the institutional recognition of their importance. And they’re a band whose reputation will continue to grow and whose music will continue to last.

Bob Mehr: A Conversation and Q&A on “Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements”

When: 5 p.m. Saturday, July 16.

Where: Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W. Camelback Road, Phoenix.

Admission: Free.

Details: 602-274-0067, changinghands.com.