More Trouble, Boys

The biography I am reading for the Minneapolis band, The Replacements, is both lengthy and well done. I’m just crossing the half-way point and the tale has reached that point in their story where the band started to show their cracks with their lead guitarist, Bob Stinson.

There was always a bit of tension there between Bob and the singer-songwriter Paul Westerberg. Paul was a little older than Bob and Chris Mars (the drummer) and all of them were older by quite a bit than Tommy Stinson (bass player). Paul used his age and experience to take over what had originally been Bob’s band, Dogbreath. [Side note: Tommy was very young and playing bars on a regular basis by 13 years of age.]

I’m not going to go into details of their dynamics in this post, but by the time that The Replacements were discovered by Sire/Warner Records prior to recording their breakout album “Tim”, Bob was feeling like an outsider in his own band. His kid brother and Paul had their eyes set on making it in music (Chris seemed to be happy just playing drums, no matter the fame level) and Bob (by all appearances) seemed quite content playing garage rock in the local bar scene, maybe doing a little regional touring. As the music moved away from the Minnesota “punk sound” and into more melodic fare, Bob may have felt left behind and the band started to fracture (arguably, the fractures started to show in the album prior to “Tim”, named after the first song they heard on the radio while discussing album names, “Let It Be”).

While that was my place in the book, I actually dialed back a little bit, guided by YouTube’s algorithm, which reminded me that the band had a very early video recording of a performance at the 7th Street Entry, a venue adjacent to it’s better known bigger brother, First Avenue (made world famous by the movie “Purple Rain”). It was recorded just before I started delving into music outside of my parent’s record collection and the radio in 1981 and was a high-quality digital transfer of the show (I started listening to the Replacements around 1983).

If you’ve noticed, I always put “punk” in quotes when I refer to The Replacements and Hüsker Dü (another local “punk” band). That’s how both bands are classified by a number of people, but I have always been skeptical of the label for either. We certainly had punk music in town, and plenty of post-punk at the time, but neither band fit neatly into that genre in my opinion. Both were more musically talented then most bands of that genre, which often emphasized speed, politics and/or simplicity over composition. Aside from the speed elements of earlier efforts by both bands, their songs were actually quite complex and neither band could give two shits about politics. Eventually, both quit trying to be fast as well.

While this live footage certainly showcases their speed (it was their thing at the time), most punk bands at the time would follow Verse/Chorus/Repeat/End progressions. A few might add a bridge. But, if you listen, the ‘Mats were fast like punk, but their compositions had more than simple verse/chorus/bridge constructions. In reality, most of it was just fast rock. Sure, Paul was still writing things like “Goddam Job”, which was mostly repeating variations of “I need a goddam job”, but their early music was still often more structurally complex than your standard hardcore punk available at the time.

Considering they were having issues that evening with their guitars going out of tune (I’ve had those shows myself, so I know what it’s like), they sound really tight in this first of two sets. Aside from soundboard balance elements (they were notorious for being hard to engineer live sound for), there is little to differentiate the sound from their debut “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash” and the follow-up EP, “Stink”.

The second set from the evening is just as tight, although they start to give up on trying to keep the instruments in tune. They appear mostly sober (for them), but you could never tell if the drunk was a put on or a real thing — but relative sobriety likely helped the overall sound.

Older, maybe wiser, I look back and I’m impressed all over again. You can see the beginnings of their later music that had more popular appeal (on the college circuit anyway). If this was “punk” we had it damn good here in the Twin Cities.