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Post by FreeRider on Feb 5, 2011 8:48:24 GMT -5
FreeRider, these are all great articles. Thanks for taking the time to share them. I've gained a lot of insight from reading them. Keep on posting! You're welcome Although, I am starting to run out of the ones I saved, I'm down to the last few, I think. But I figured this thread would a be a great reference point for future discussions. We can always come here and look something up he's said. I'm still trying to find one that he did during the "Eventually" tour where he discussed his bad back and how if he felt anxiety attacks coming on, he'd go back to the hotel room, listen to the Who's "Live at Leeds", kick a chair over, and feel much better. If anyone remembers that and has it, please post it. I'd love to read it.
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Post by FreeRider on Feb 7, 2011 15:32:51 GMT -5
I don't have any source for this other than the writer:
PAUL WESTERBERG -- As interviewed by Bill Bentley Q: When did you start writing songs for this album? A: They're split into two groups. Half of them were written about two years ago, right after the Replacements finished their last tour and I moved into a new place. I didn't have anything but a piano, a chair and a rug. "Runaway Wind," was the first one I wrote, along with "Silver Naked Ladies" and "First Glimmer." Some were written in the studio as we were recording. "World Class Fad" was bashed out in literally ten minutes and recorded in one take. It was the same with "Something is Me" and "Down Love." Q: Have you ever written like that before?
A: Never had and always wanted to. I think it was the fact that I was the only one there a lot of the time. Matt [Wallace] and I would work on something, and when a song wasn't working he'd do an edit or a rough mix and I'd sit alone with my guitar and come up with stuff. There was no pressure of other musicians sitting around waiting to work. And when I came up with something we'd call in the drummer or get a bass player, or I'd play bass because there wasn't a guy around. It took a long time to get those little magic moments. Q: Did it feel different doing songs that you knew were going to be on your album as opposed to the Replacements?
A: It was kind of the same. There wasn't any real feeling of doing something different on my own. I pretty much sat down as always and wrote the songs on either acoustic guitar or piano and fleshed them out on electric guitar. Where my head was at was that I was feeling less like I had to make a statement or be this supposed great song-writer. I felt very free to just write whatever I felt like that day.
Q: How does songwriting come to you? Is it inspiration or just work? A: Both. Nine times out of ten, though, the sit-down-and-write ones don't ever make it. There was a song called "Two Raindrops" that was beautiful and everything, but when it came down to recording it, it just didn't feel right. Generally the songs that come fast are the best. They're usually a little silly. The one that did take a while was "Runaway Wind." I was writing that like you would write a poem or something. Q: What's the feeling you have when you've got a good one? A: It's a great feeling. And it's almost sad, too, because it flashes through your mind that the greatest moments of your life will almost always be spent alone. Playing live with the guys is great, but it's not like writing by yourself when there's no one around. For that hour or two you feel like you've got a purpose and a place in life. You think you're hot shit and pat yourself on the back, and then that fades.
Q: Do you get the feeling of a place or person when you write? A: I have little things that I go back to that mean nothing to anyone but me that relax me. I'll picture myself back when I was four or five years old at my neighbor's house, looking at baseball cards on an autumn day with the wind blowing. A lot of my songs seem to be cropping up with a fall-type vibe. I've never had any summer songs. You get a lot of cold weather, probably because of where I live. I've been playing "Here Comes A Regular" recently. It's time for me to gear up to go out and perform, so I've been pulling out the old records. That song and some others were hard for me to play for years after I wrote them, for some reason. I don't even remember the specific inspiration behind it -- if it was too close or too personal, but now that I've got a little distance I can play it and sing it as a good song, almost as if someone else wrote it. Q: Do you ever write a song that scares you? A: Oh yeah. All the time. I guess "Things" would be one song on this record that falls into that category. I wrote it almost two years ago and then put it away and then pulled it out during the sessions. Everyone is saying that it's obviously about my ex-wife, but it isn't, which gives it even a more mysterious, macabre twist. I don't really know what it's about. Lines of it may pertain to her, but others may have crept in while the television was on in the background. I'm not trying to evade the issue. I don't think I've ever written a song simply about one person. People get offended. They hear a line that's definitely them and then they hear two more and say, "How dare you call me that."
Q: Is it hard to detach yourself and just listen to music for pleasure? A: No. Over the last four years the music I chose to listen to is music I can't write. It's jazz or classical or a lot of blues. I love rock and roll but I'm not too terribly interested in music I can do. I can play my own rock and roll. I don't really need to listen to it. I listen to music to release me from what I can do. I remember reading interviews with Charlie Parker in the fifties and they'd ask him what he was listening to and he'd say Barto'k and Debussy. It's the same kind of thing. You get inspiration from other forms of music. Q: Do you feel a sense of loss about what you're leaving behind? A: No. I haven't turned my back on rock and roll. I just don't necessarily scrutinize everything. I'll put on "Brown Sugar" like someone would open a beer when they want a lift. Q: What about the actual recording of your album? How did you come across Brian as a drummer? A: His name came up from Matt and Tommy [Stinson, former Replacement]. They said he could play and that he was a cool guy and they were right on both counts. I took to him immediately, person-alitywise. Before he played a beat I figured, if this guy was a little bit above crap, he's in. There were other drummers, Mike Urbano and Josh Kelly. These were people Matt knew. I suggested Rick Price, the guy who played bass for the Georgia Satellites. He and Josh came up to New York and that's where we started. I ended up playing a week with those guys, but we weren't getting the right spirit and we had to shake things up and make a change in the rhythm section. John Hart played on the "Dyslexic Heart" thing and he was recommended by Scott Litt. He was going to tour with me, but he crapped out so his nice guy status gets knocked down a notch. I'm currently looking for a bass player. I've got a few guitar players who sound cool, but bass is still a stickler. Q: You're credited with sax on this album. Is this a new thing? A: No, this is something that I picked up while I was listening to jazz. After hearing so many metal guitar solos, I just wanted to learn something else. I bought the sax at a garage sale across the street for a hundred dollars. It's a C-Melody. I blew on that for six months before I bought a cheap tenor. It was great. It really felt like starting over. I could barely play and there was no one to tell me what I could or couldn't do, like back when we did the first Replacements album. Q: Van Morrison is another vocalist who plays the occasional sax. A: The only time I ever saw Van Morrison was when we were doing the record. In fact, the day Ian McLagen [former keyboard player with The Faces] played piano, he had a show in San Francisco and I went and Van came on stage. I met him backstage afterwards and for the first time in my life I was truly mortified. I was toe to toe across from him and he's asking me who I am and he starts pounding the table and telling me he's got to hear the cassette. I'd heard all the horror stories, but actually he's kind of a nice guy. Not scary at all. Q: How did you hook up with McLagen? A: He's a fan of the Replacements. He came to see us in L.A. and told us he wanted to come down. It never crossed my mind -- I was extremely flattered. That was the single most exciting moment of making the record. He came in, sat down, and in one take blew through it [[probably referring to "Silver Naked Ladies" here]]. We listened to it in the control room at a hundred and thirty decibels, and we were jumping in the air, shouting and screaming. Q: How was the song "Black Eyed Susan" recorded? A: We did it in my kitchen. The reason we didn't redo it was because I couldn't remember how. It was one of those things where I just twisted the strings a little bit different tuning and was immediately inspired to come up with a new fingering and usually a melody follows. For the life of me, afterwards I couldn't remember how I played it. "Here We Are" is the same thing. We spent the entire day in the studio in New York, spending how many thousands of dollars and not getting anything done and I ended up going into the bathroom with an acoustic guitar and started fiddling around and Matt came in with a little cassette deck and we recorded the song in the toilet. We knew we had something and I knew Matt was my man. He'd done whatever it took to capture something different. Q: Joan Jett was also involved singing background. A: I like Joan. We're friends and whenever I go to New York I usually say hello. She wasn't busy so she came down and hung out and sang on a couple of songs. It was fun.
Q: You recorded the album in three cities. Was there a difference in the feel of each city or was it just the logistics? A: The record really came to life in San Francisco. Most of the one-take live stuff was done there. We did a little overdubbing in Minneapolis and L.A. We also worked in New York, but I think the problem was that I tried to rehearse Josh and Rick on ten songs in three days and then, when we got them in the studio, God bless them, they couldn't quite get a handle on all ten. It was way too much. I also had cold feet. It wasn't like going in and making a record with guys I've known for twenty years. It was difficult to get the ball rolling until we came in one morning and did one song live. We just rolled the tape. Q: In the Replacements, it was always you guys against the world. Are you confident enough now to go out and do it yourself? A: Yeah. The band-against-the-world thing was how it was when we started. But that spirit probably left halfway through our career. We became, dare I say, average. We gussied it up a little and tried to be more professional, less creepy, and it didn't work to our advantage. I wouldn't be so pompous to say we were ahead of our time, but maybe these days the attitude we cultivated is applauded more and encouraged. We spent a lot of time getting our wrists slapped and making enemies. Q: Are you much a reader? A: I do read. I go in phases where I've got about six books that I'm flipping through. I like biographies a lot and I'm reading this thing about Henry Miller by Erica Jong, which is kind of interesting. I just got done rereading all of the J.D. Salinger stories. I went on a big jag while making the record -- that's actually where we copped the title from: Nine Stories. I had more than nine songs, though.
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sivad
Star Scout
Posts: 323
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Post by sivad on Feb 7, 2011 16:29:39 GMT -5
FreeRider, I recognize this as the interview in the 14 Songs promotional book.
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Post by FreeRider on Feb 8, 2011 10:03:32 GMT -5
FreeRider, I recognize this as the interview in the 14 Songs promotional book. ahhh, no wonder it looked familiar. thanks for providing the source for this!
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glgbill
Dances With Posts
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Post by glgbill on Feb 8, 2011 19:53:45 GMT -5
Another 'thank you' for posting all of these...they've been a great read!
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Post by FreeRider on Feb 9, 2011 11:39:04 GMT -5
Another 'thank you' for posting all of these...they've been a great read! you're welcome! if anybody else has some good and illuminating stuff, please post 'em.
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Post by FreeRider on Mar 21, 2011 15:53:10 GMT -5
Not really about the Mats, but an excerpt where they are mentioned by Tom Petty on tour with them. The entire article is here: thepettyarchives.squareserve.com/magazine/magazines-1989/1989-10-05-rollingstone/On The Road With Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: If It’s Monday, This Must Be Miami By Tom Petty and Steve Hochman Rolling Stone #562 — October 5, 1989 The first time Tom Petty went on tour, he and his teen band drove from Gainesville, Florida, to Sarasota in a van and spent the night in two rooms at a Holiday Inn. Now when Petty and the Heartbreakers — guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Howie Epstein — take to the road, they do so for months on end, rolling in three luxury buses (one for Petty, his wife, Jane, and their two daughters, one for the band and one for the crew), with four semis for equipment. The accommodations are first-class. Every detail is watched by minions schooled in the ways of modern touring. Rolling Stone sent photographer Aaron Rapoport to chronicle the opening days of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ first tour in two years and asked Petty and reporter Steve Hochman to keep diaries of the proceedings. As Petty’s opening entry shows, at the start of the nine-week tour, which was to hit forty-four American cities, he was having a little trouble getting in the right frame of mind. June 29th: Crescent Beach, Florida (Tom Petty): I came here two days ago with Jane and my two girls — Adria, who’s fourteen, and Kim, who’s seven. We’re in our rented place on this fairly deserted stretch of intoxicating white-sand beach in north Florida. I left L.A. after cutting rehearsal a week short. “We know these songs,” said Howie. “Go rest,” said everyone who’s had to deal with me lately. So I’m here resting, I guess. I just walk miles up and down the beach. Stan lives near here sometimes and might even be here now. The rest of the Heartbreakers will drift down to Miami over the next few days for our first sound check on July 4th and our first show in two years on the fifth. The band has a modest wager that Howie will arrive two hours before we go on, as he is finishing production on Carlene Carter’s LP — the last HB to be free of outside endeavors. I had a week here last summer, the only week off since we finished our tour with Bob Dylan in ’87. Since then I met some new friends, recorded Full Moon Fever with Jeff Lynne, wrote and sang some tracks on Roy Orbison’s LP, sang on Joni Mitchell’s record, made the Traveling Wilburys LP, played and sang on a couple Randy Newman cuts and, along with Jeff Lynne, wrote and recorded (at Mike Campbell’s) a song for Del Shannon. Oh, we also played on this wild track for Jim Horn. Maybe I should just say, “I’ve been in the studio for a couple of years.” So have the Heartbreakers been busy? Yes. Benmont with Elvis Costello, Roy O., U2 and who knows how many others. Stan with Don Henley and Lord knows what else. Mike with me on Full Moon Fever, on his own writing and playing with Don Henley and Stevie Nicks and also playing with Warren Zevon, Paul Carrack, and oh, yeah, he did those sessions for Del Shannon with Jeff and me and some more of Del’s as producer. And he produced four tracks on Roy’s Mystery Girl, then somehow found the time to play on those Randy Newman and Jim Horn tracks, too. Our tour begins in seven days. It’s late. I guess I should rest. July 2nd: (T.P.): Our bus-driver Robin (on her third T.P. tour, even though she’s only twenty-three) arrived with our new bus for the drive to Miami in the morning. Smelling diesel always does it — I’m starting to find it hard to get my mind off being onstage again. July 3rd: Miami Beach (T.P.): We’re in a high-rise hotel on the beach, complete with two pools and a fake rock waterfall. It’s amazing how less charming his beach is. I miss the soft white sand. The band arrived around 11:00 p.m.: Tony Dimitriades (our manager) called to say Full Moon Fever entered the English charts at Number Eight. We had a brief international celebration, and I went to bed. July 4th: Hotel Alexander, Miami Beach (T.P.): Wake up to a million phone calls. I worked on some form of song list, which is still not straight. And I’ll bet it’s not when we go on. Got bored and went early to Miami Arena for rehearsal and T.V. interviews. Had crew meal. Finally got some clean clothes. Sound was okay. But we’re not fond of rehearsal for some reason. I don’t want us to know too much about what we’re doing tomorrow. First gigs are an experience. My favorite moment today was watching Kim and Adria chase colored spotlights around the floor of the arena. July 4th: 12:30 p.m. (Steve Hochman): In the hotel coffee shop, a waitress with a Hispanic accent asks Petty, “You do concert tonight?” T.P. says “Nah, we’re just here to play cards.” A wise-guy waiter comes over and says “Hey! Don’t back down, okay?” T.P. grimaces. T.P. asks if they want tickets to the concert. The waiter says, “Yeah, just quit draggin’ my heart around.” Everybody grimaces. July 4th: 2:00 p.m. (S.H.): The same waiter comes to the table where Tench and Lynch are studying the menu. Tench: “Can I get a club sandwich?” Waiter: “Sure, just don’t back down, okay?” Tench and Lynch grimace. July 4th: 9:00 p.m. (S.H.): After calling for an early sound check so that he can enjoy the holiday with his family, T.P. heads off for the beach with Jane and their kids so that they can watch the fireworks and set off a few of their own. “The last time I was anonymous was up in Crescent Beach,” Petty says. “I just pulled my hair back and wore a cap and sunglasses and my old T-shirt and this fluorescent-green pair of shorts I had, and I was just like a local. Until the last day there, when people started to recognize me.” July 5th: 12:30 a.m. (S.H.): Squired by assistant tour manager Mickey Heyes, Campbell, Tench, tour accountant Tony Flannery and manager Tony Dimitriades take up an invitation from a local rock club to be its guests. The young crowd (“Rob Lowe does his shopping here,” says a friend of Dimitriade’s) and loud sounds are not to everyone’s liking, so the party departs, with Tench, Campbell and Heyes catching a ride from a young associate of the club’s in a white Jaguar. The young man hints at shady connections (“Anything you want, I can get,” he says, though no one takes up his offer) as he drives through downtown Miami at an average speed of about 65 m.p.h. “So you’re in a band?” he asks. “A rock band,” Heyes says. “You new on the scene?” Campbell can’t resist. “No, we’re been around about two years,” he says with a straight face. “Well, I wish you a lot of success, and I hope it all doesn’t go up your nose.” July 5th: 7:00 p.m. (S.H.): Before the show, Petty and the band piddle around the arena, obviously antsy. Campbell emerges from his first meeting with the Replacements, who are opening for the Heartbreakers, and encounters T.P. and Tench in the hall.
“You gotta meet these guys,” Campbell says. “They’re great. They were telling me how much they like your new song ‘Running Down the Drain.’”
T.P. and Tench immediately to meet them.
“You nervous?” Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson asks T.P.
“I’m scared as shit.”
“You want a beer or something?” Stinson asks for the first of several times.
“Nah, you’re opening Pandora’s box there,” Petty replies.
“You still do ‘Breakdown’?” Stinson asks.
Petty rolls his eyes. “Yeah, we still do that. I think I’ll know we’re really doing okay when I don’t have to do that song anymore.”
Singer-guitarist-songwriter Paul Westerburg says, “That was the first song I ever sang with these guys. But I couldn’t really get the high parts. My voice won’t do that.”
“Why don’t you do the song and then we won’t have to?” says Petty.... July 8th: 9:15 p.m. (S.H.): “Ladies and gentlemen, will you welcome…” The Replacements don’t go over too well with the crowd. (Only a version of Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen,” sung by the band’s road manager, gets the audience cheering). But the HBs have no such problems. Campbell plays with a little extra fire, while Lynch and Epstein lock into particularly propulsive grooves all night long. And the packed-house crowd does its part: On “Breakdown,” the fans sing almost the entire song for Petty, who doesn’t jump in until the last chorus.
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Post by bobstinsonsghost on Mar 21, 2011 23:51:33 GMT -5
I remember reading that bill flanagan musician article when it came out. did'nt know that much about the mats at the time but i remember thinking 'that guy pretty much threw his drummer under the bus in public' nasty stuff. i'm pretty sure that interview was the last straw for chris who left soon after and recorded a few solid albums by himself that were as good as anything paul did up until mono(imo).
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Post by FreeRider on Jun 14, 2011 10:44:11 GMT -5
yeah, i always wondered why Paul didn't just keep be polite about Chris in public.
Anyway, interview with Ira Robbins:
Independence Day, 1991. Lincoln Park, Chicago. One by one, the Replacements — what’s left of ‘em, anyway — hand their instruments off to their roadies, leaving them the honor of nailing the Mats’ career coffin shut with a last call rendition of “Hootenanny.”
The band that wrested punk rock back from the British, revved it up in a Minneapolis garage and drove drunk into the hearts and minds of thousands, the band that swilled down the ’70s wretched rotgut and spat up fiery, inspiring anthems of loneliness and confusion for a generation of young bastards too bored and bummed to allow themselves the luxury of an identity, the band whose chaotic live shows weebled with the tension and unpredictability that had become foreign to rock’n'roll, the band that unlocked music’s eternal mystery and proved that electric noise can make a difference … was over. Finito. One dead parrot. Like an Antabuse candidate — defined, sustained and nearly, but never quite, destroyed by alcoholism and antagonistic indolence — the Mats’ system simply would not tolerate maturity, ego and sobriety.
“I could say we ran out of picks, we ran out of strings, ran out of time, ran out of patience. They’re all true,” says former Replacements star Paul Westerberg, in New York for a week to audition sidemen for a tour this summer. It was the singer/ songwriter / guitarist’s sharp sense of irony that lit the Replacements’ raucous travels down a sensitive, intelligent, messy path of sardonic venom, reckless abandon and staggering tenderness, so it was his switch to flip. “We all smelled smoke, and I was the first one to say that the thing is on fire, boys, let’s exit the building quietly.”
But dissension and frustration were already burning down the band when Westerberg commandeered 1991's All Shook Down, a dispirited, wan album that became a solo project in all but billing. “I sound very tired and weak on it, and I was. I was not healthy, not caring much. I sort of erased all the real angst, the pissed off and the humor and took only the elements that were a little deranged, a little sad and a little pathetic and put them together. I was pretty fucking desperate there, and it shows.” His surprise. “I’m glad we captured it.”
Westerberg’s impetus for relegating his bandmates — bassist Tommy Stinson, guitarist Slim Dunlap (who replaced brother Bob Stinson when Bob’s appetite for self destruction exceeded the band’s newly struck functional sanity rules) and drummer Chris Mars — to session man status, alongside a dozen other players on the album, was a growing tug of war over his artistic preeminence in the band. “I didn’t want to have to check with people to see if what I was doing was OK. If I like something, I’m at the point now that’s good enough,” says Westerberg. “From day one I led and wrote and sang,” he notes. Ten years on, his bandmates “had their own material, and they wanted to do my job. I didn’t want to do theirs.
“If I had been more together physically and emotionally I should have said, OK boys, I’m doing this [album] alone. I was hoping they would instinctively know, and say, ‘OK, Paul, do it.’ Then they could go and be their own singers and their own songwriters. Instead, they clung to the group and it was difficult for all of us.
“By the time the record came out I was sober for the tour, and it was difficult to play these songs that I didn’t feel anymore. It was like a traveling wake. Everyone knew it was the last, except for Steve [Foley, Chris Mars' successor in the Mats, who now plays in Tommy Stinson's Bash & Pop].”
Westerberg briskly announces his current weather report on the ex Mats interpersonal front. “I’ll tell you in a nutshell: Tommy and I are pals. I don’t talk to Chris, don’t miss him. Slim and I never were that close; we stayed friends. That’s about it.”
“The ones who love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest …
The ones who love us least are the ones we’ll die to please”
— ‘Bastards of Young’
If punk died with the Replacements in Chicago that summer day, it was too dumb and lazy to lie down. A few months after the Mats quit, Nirvana’s Nevermind — a record clearly in debt to the rowdy brats responsible for tuneful slacker thrash (and beyond) songs like ‘White And Lazy’, ‘Gimme Noise’, ‘Color Me Impressed’ and ‘Nowhere Is My Home’ — launched a garage rod salesquake that is still causing aftershocks.
But the success of Nirvana wasn’t the only irony visited on this rock’n'’ roll ghost. While the remnants of the Replacements evaporated into the terminal ozone, silent but for Chris Mars’ first album last year, their Minneapolis scenemates soldiered on, some to long due victories. Bob Mould, the local patriarch who had lived through the dismal end of Husker Du and two adventurous (read: uncommercial) solo LPs, took a step back in style and formed Sugar, which promptly wreaked some major commercial damage. Then Soul Asylum whacked Grave Dancers Union — an album different from the band’s previous work only in its relatively forthright production and new corporate home — right out of the park. Add to that the minor indignity of Titanic Love Affair’s sonic simulation and the Mats influenced Goo Goo Dolls, who got ol’ pal Westerberg to write the words and melody for the recent ‘We Are the Normal’.
New for ’92, Westerberg guested briefly onstage with Joan Jett in Minneapolis (“I was terrified”) and recorded two new songs for the Singles soundtrack (the catchy, clumsy ‘Dyslexic Heart’ and ‘Waiting for Somebody’, the latter a candidate for the forthcoming live programme) which proved little more than his continued existence. Otherwise, this voluble, self analyzing wiseacre with a fine line in egotistical self deprecation kept a very low election year profile.
With punk’s belated breakthrough following so close to the settling dust of his bygone job and marriage, the cleaned up Westerberg — a troubled malcontent even in the best of circumstances — might have gone quietly mad, stewing in bitter, resentful juices. And who could have blamed him? Intentionally or unknowingly ignoring the clear and present dangers of their adolescent approach to playing in a traveling band, the ‘Mats wrote the book on a far from acceptable style and sound. They got the great reviews but not the cash, but then turned sensitive and respectable — Alan Alda taking the place of Mickey Rourke — just when a huge new audience was getting itself ready for a shattering fist in the face. Timing, as someone endlessly said, is everything.
“We were five years ahead of our time, 10 years behind,” Westerberg reckons. “When you see guys come out and sell three million right out of the garage, you wonder, what are we doing wrong?” But his hindsight is realistic. “If we’d have sold three million Let It Be’s when it came out we would have been dead in a month. We couldn’t have handled it.”
The class clown can now admit that his profession of indifference — to the press and success — was not entirely honest. “I always cared [about criticism]; I used to pretend I didn’t. I think I care less now, but a bad review is a bad review. It still gets to me.” On the other hand, he has a fascinating take on why rockcrits dug the Replacements so much. “I think we happened to like all of the funky quirks of the classic rock bands — the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Ramones [to a certain extent] — that critics found endearing. We didn’t have the things that made those bands huge, we had the thing that made them infamous and decadent and, perhaps, great.”
Reflecting on the overwhelming irony of it all, he says, “I’ve had to find heroes. Like Bo Diddley. Bo Diddley didn’t go; the Stones took it and they went. We were pioneers, and the pioneers — Iggy, Johnny Thunders, the Dolls — don’t get it. Somebody’s got to start it and somebody’s got to pick it up — maybe water it down, crank it up, do something to make it work. I’m not expecting to be revered as some sort of god of grunge shit, but I’m comfortable now.”
Comfortable enough that, last fall he finally set about making a solo record with co producer Matt Wallace, the Mats’ studio collaborator on 1989's coming of age album Don’t Tell a Soul.
“I went through every phase thinking, what is this record gonna be? For a moment I thought, ‘Well, it’s expected; I guess I can get into the acoustic record.’ As soon as I made that decision, all I could write was rockers. ‘Two Raindrops’ and ‘Make the Best of Me’ didn’t go on the record because that would have been another cocktail jazz thing. I like that, but I’m not gonna confuse you with that. I’m gonna give you stompin’ rockers and ballads that you know I can write. Matt told me to give ‘em a record of great stuff and leave off the ones that maybe someone’s gonna love but not 100 percent. So we left off the two cocktail jazz and the spiritual quasi mantra. I gave you the meat, I left out the frills.
“I’ve made a conscious effort to not be the brilliant tale spinner that I’m known as. I guess that’s me trying to keep ‘em guessing. There’s an art to writing simply, there’s a craft to playing simply. Less is more.” Musically, the new songs avoid the distinctively uncommon chord changes of many Mats tunes. “If you write music to impress people you usually miss your audience. Another guitar player will [comment on] a great suspended 9th, but to everyone else that’s the funny part of the song that you can’t sing along. I don’t need that chord.”
Westerberg and Wallace tried but quickly abandoned one rhythm section in New York and then settled down in San Francisco with drummer Brian MacLeod (ex Wire Train) and bassist John Pierce. By February they had finished 14 Songs, an upbeat, emotionally stable look around and back that mixes loud rockers and quiet non rockers and sounds roughly (on some cuts, specifically) like the saner sides of Don’t Tell a Soul.
“When we talked about making the new record, what he didn’t like about Don’t Tell a Soul. He said the right thing: We tried too hard. We spent a lot of money and time making the drums on time and getting my vocal on key. Fuck that. I don’t sound like that. Let’s keep it raw and wild. I stopped trying to sound like something I’m not.”
But he no longer sounds like what he was, either. Punk’s reckless fury is no longer in his blood. It’s become a learned memory, a musical skill that he can rev up but never again truly embody. Now 33, the hard drinking idiot who could frantically scream a song like ‘Take Me Down to the Hospital’ and howl his anguish in the wrenching ‘Unsatisfied’, is proud to express his desire for ‘A Few Minutes of Silence’. On the same theme, the rousingly punk styled ‘Down Love’ avers, “I got to turn you way, way down/ If I could only find your volume knob.”
Is that adulthood calling? “I’m not afraid to say that. Any kids that can’t handle that, fuck ‘em.”
“Do you remember me, long ago?
I used to wear my heart on my sleeve
I guess it still shows”
— ‘First Glimmer’
The inclusion on 14 Songs of several fine slices (‘Things’, ‘First Glimmer’, ‘Runaway Wind’, ’Even Here, We Are’) of what Westerberg reluctantly terms “ballads” amid jocular rock’n'roll selections like ‘Mannequin Shop’ (a plastic surgery dig inspired by a People magazine cover) and ‘Silver Naked Ladies’ will assuredly lead die hards to believe that time, sobriety or something more pernicious has softened Westerberg’s will to rock. And while the desultory energy in the record’s electric songs doesn’t really prove otherwise, that perception misses the point by an inch. Manic expression was never the Mats’ sole artistic weapon. From almost the beginning, the band’s unbridled wildness was cut up with the searing poignancy of understatement, pensive cries borne on a knife edge no less serrated or damaging than the willful ear splitters. ‘Within Your Reach’ and ‘Here Comes a Regular’ were hardly wimp outs, they were devastating sob ins. Few other artists have ever been so adept at eliciting the same emotional response with a nudge or a kick.
Beyond any superficial measure of volume or distortion, the handsomely crafted and unquestionably appealing’ 14 Songs never sounds like a matter of life or death. While ‘First Glimmer’ and ‘Things’ — finely wrought love songs that are moving and eloquent — reach Westerberg’s prime emotional resonance, what’s gone out of his songwriting is a trace of desperation. Suffering for art is well beyond an audience’s rights, but for someone who once fished satiric doctor terror from the mundane trivia of ‘Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out’, this album’s WYSIWYG charmer about backyard flowers plants him in an altogether different garden. (‘Black Eyed Susan’, recorded two years ago in Westerberg’s kitchen, was de hissed and put on the album in its crummy sounding original form because he couldn’t recall the one off guitar tuning.)
Indeed, it’s hard to remember the smart, funny guy sitting on a Central Park bench this glorious spring Saturday noon as a maladjusted enfant terrible. Musing about how fans identify with songs, he says, “If they want to like the shit I’ll pretend like I wrote it just for them.” Hearing himself voice another gushy bit of enthusiasm, he laughs. “I sound like an old showbiz cat here.” Maybe that’s what he always was.
“When it came to writing the songs, I was never as fucked up and dumb as people assumed. There was always a method to the madness. Even on something as ridiculous as ‘God Damn Job’, I weighed the options. I knew it was very stupid, but I thought, ‘We can get mileage out of this.’” Does that mean my impression of the young Westerberg as an unselfconscious intuitive, blowing absurd chunks of his life into songs that made cleverness honest was just an illusion? He doesn’t think so.
“The songs were about what we were. It was never a pose. It may have come suspiciously close when we got attention for being fuck ups. We accentuated it, and maybe even stretched the limits of what we actually were. Essentially, when we started we were mixed up kids and we wrote about it.
“It’s funny that the people who related to it the most weren’t fucked up kids. Our fans have always been, dare I say, a little more intelligent than the band was labeled as. I always thought that ironic.”
So were the Replacements more calculating than the chaos they presented? Westerberg concedes he had a bit more in mind than simply paying tribute to a musical idol in writing ‘Alex Chilton’, a memorable hymn on Pleased to Meet Me. “I thought it would appear hip. I can say that. He knows that. But a lot of it was genuine.”
The two musicians have grown to be friends. While starting on 14 Songs last October, Westerberg watched the World Series with Chilton, and invited him to drop by the studio. “He sat down and winged out a lead on ‘Knockin’ on Mine.’ It was good, but he gave it a real country flavor. We wanted something a little angrier, so I redid it. I think he’s got one guitar chord on there that we couldn’t fully erase,” Paul chuckles. “That one flat chord in the last chorus is Alex.”
Looking toward the release of 14 Songs and the start off small head lining tour that will follow, Westerberg sounds like a zen showbiz cat. “This time I just feel so relaxed. I’m not expecting a lot. I’ve never been more willing to accept whatever comes. I used to be disappointed with records and record sales. All of my worst problems have come from myself. If I don’t set myself up to be disappointed, I’m not gonna be.”
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4x8
Star Scout
Listen to music you like, not music someone says you should like.
Posts: 338
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Post by 4x8 on Jun 14, 2011 13:42:34 GMT -5
Thanks for posting Freerider. Can anyone tell me what "WYSIWYG" means from this line -
Suffering for art is well beyond an audience’s rights, but for someone who once fished satiric doctor terror from the mundane trivia of ‘Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out’, this album’s WYSIWYG charmer about backyard flowers plants him in an altogether different garden. (‘Black Eyed Susan’, recorded two years ago in Westerberg’s kitchen, was de hissed and put on the album in its crummy sounding original form because he couldn’t recall the one off guitar tuning.)
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Post by friendlybombs on Jun 14, 2011 14:07:55 GMT -5
Can anyone tell me what "WYSIWYG" means from this line What you see it what you get, I believe. Thanks for posting all these articles, FreeRider!
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Post by FreeRider on Jun 15, 2011 11:39:49 GMT -5
Ok, this is definitely the last interview I have....glad that some folks got some more insight into Paul's thoughts and his songwriting. if anybody has anymore interesting interviews, please post them. Interview by Russell Hall, May 1996 Few artists have had as great an impact on modern music as Paul Westerberg. It's not at all farfetched to speculate that without Westerberg's deeply personal, angst-driven songs, the entire alternative rock explosion might never have occurred. As leader of the legendary Replacements, and as a solo musician, Westerberg's facility for soul-searching balladry and searing rock 'n' roll has earned him the respect of songwriters everywhere. Artists as diverse as the Gin Blossoms, Nirvana, and Tom Petty have borrowed from him and cited his influence. Westerberg began writing songs in 1979, inspired initially by punk pioneers such as the Sex Pistols and Johnny Thunders. Specializing in three-minute bursts of revved-up power pop, on the surface the Replacements' early songs were unexceptional, although Westerberg did slip in the occasional ballad, hinting at a mature aesthetic which would reach fruition within a few years. Between 1984 and 1987, the Replacements released a trilogy of inspired, reckless masterpieces which, along with REM's recordings during the same period, constitute touchstones for practically every modern rock 'n' roll band. Let It Be, Tim, and Pleased To Meet Me each mixed a Chaplinesque spirit with songs that zigzagged between blustery bravado and harrowing insecurity. Several classics from this period--including the ballads "Skyway," "Swingin' Party," and "Here Comes A Regular"--rank among the best pop-rock songs of the '80s. The Replacements' final two albums, Don't Tell A Soul and All Shook Down, heralded significant changes in songwriting for Westerberg. By the turn of the decade, he had begun focusing on the romantic disillusionment which had often lain at the heart of his best songs. Westerberg also began making serious changes in his lifestyle. Plagued since adolescence by an addiction to alcohol, he set about the task of conquering the problem, and by the time of the Replacements' final tour, he had stopped drinking entirely. Since 1991, Westerberg has been living in his hometown of Minneapolis, where he spends most of his time playing piano, writing songs, and collaborating with friends. In 1992, he wrote the score for Singles, a Generation X film which also featured two songs showcasing Westerberg's pop sensibilities. A year later, he released 14 Songs, an album which prompted Rolling Stone's critics to name Westerberg the year's best songwriter, the second time he had received that distinction. The spring of 1996 saw the release of Westerberg's second solo album, Eventually. The album features a set of songs tied loosely together by time-based themes, and evidences a poetic spirit susceptible to both empathy and enchantment. A great writer once said that art should "tell us things that we know but don't know that we know." Like all good artists, Westerberg seems to grasp this concept intuitively. Eventually paints a subtle portrait of a man becoming comfortable in his own skin, and in that sense it's an optimistic work. The album also proves that, at the age of thirty-six, Paul Westerberg is at the top of his craft. Eventually sounds more relaxed, and more optimistic, than things you've done in the past. Does that reflect your state of mind these days? I think so. It's not like everything is smooth as silk now, but I guess the more I do this, the more I realize that whatever happens is going to happen, and I just do my best and put it out there. Do you feel any responsibility, musically speaking, to anyone other than yourself, whether it be fans or record company executives? I think my standards are high enough that, if I meet my own, then that takes care of the "man," and most of the fans, at least. I don't cater to anyone other than myself, I'm afraid. Most of the people I've spoken with who've heard Eventually--mostly journalists--have said that the album is growing on them. It didn't necessarily hit them immediately, but they're liking it more and more as they listen to it. Is that typical of the response you're getting? I've heard that. I've also heard other people say they loved it the moment they heard it. I would say it depends on what you listen for, and that's probably a fair estimation, coming from people with a literary background. The lyrics may pass you by initially, but as you listen more and more, you maybe hear a secondary meaning in all the songs. Whereas someone who concerns himself with melody . . . I mean, it's probably impossible for that type of person not to like "These Are The Days." It's got such an infectious melody. So if you listen on that level, then it's easy to like the songs right off the bat. The songs also seem to meet in the middle ground of the territory that was covered on 14 Songs, rather than veering back and forth between rockers and ballads. That's true. I purposely left off the songs on the outer fringes, on both ends. Like the homemade, quiet stuff, for instance. I had to leave on "Hide N Seekin'," because I just thought the feel of that song was great. But 14 Songs was more of a concept album than people realize. It was fourteen songs; it wasn't fourteen performances. And it wasn't necessarily [meant to be] a full, rounded record. Whereas the new album is much more of an album in which the songs fit together. I had good songs that I left off, and I've rarely done that before. I usually try to put the best songs on, and if they don't all fit next to each other, then so what? But this time, I really tried to make them flow together. Did you put a lot of thought into the song sequence? A bit. I knew long ago that "These Are The Days" would be the first song. And once I'd written "Good Day," I realized that was the closer. Then, after a while, I thought that perhaps that would leave the album on too much of a down note, for some people, although it's an optimistic tune. So I added the last song. But yeah, I was fairly picky about the order, this time. Speaking of "These Are The Days," I understand that one reason the Atlanta sessions didn't work out was because of a disagreement you had with [producer] Brendan O'Brien about the song. Yeah. Brendan really wanted to do it as a ballad. We tried it several times, and he was happy with the results we were getting, and I just heard a much different song in my head. I heard it much more as a celebration, and he heard the opposite. He heard it as kind of a melancholy thing. So yeah, that was one reason we didn't see eye to eye. But we got some good stuff: "Love Untold," "Angels Walk." Back to "Hide N Seekin'." Did that song go through many changes before it arrived at what it is on the album? No. I demoed it at home a little more elaborately. But it was recorded while everyone was having lunch. I was playing by myself, the engineer had just come back, and he hit the "record" button. We added some bass and keyboard later, but it was one of those very organic, natural little performances. I'm really glad there was someone there to turn on the machine. "Once Around The Weekend" sounds a little like a rewrite of "Merry Go Round," to me. Hmm . . . I don't hear that. It's probably the same tempo. It's not in the same key, but there's probably a similar melodic line. Tempo fools a lot of people. Someone told me yesterday he thought "First Glimmer" and "Love Untold" were one and the same. I was like, "Yeah, well, they're probably the same tempo." The bass pattern is the same, but . . . Are you putting your face on the cover, this time? It is, yeah. I tried desparately not to. It's just a simple photograph of me, and there'll be one on the back as well, I think. Originally, we had this cover that I really wanted done, and we spent a lot of time on it. We hired an artist who was about eighty years old, who used to do art-deco advertising, and I had him make this elaborate logo. He was supposed to draw an animated figure depicting me, and it ended up looking . . . a little kooky. (laughs) It ended up looking like a Buster Brown ad for shoes. So we killed it at the last moment, and just slapped a photograph on there. No lyric sheet, I presume. No. Never will be? Or never say never? No, I never want one. I did sign a co-publishing deal this year, so I think they'll probably make a little songbook, which is something I guess I used to get when I was a kid. But I don't see that there's much use for . You can hear the words, can't you?
Sure. But you realize, I suppose, that people have tried to decipher your old lyrics and put them on the internet. Have you seen that?
No, I haven't. But I've had people come up to me for years and say things like, "What is this line? It sounds like you're saying this to me." And that's what makes it fun, for me, because I get new interpretations of these lines that are dead obvious to me. I guess my diction isn't as clear as I thought.
Do you sometimes get improvements? Do you ever think, "Wow, I wish it had been that?"
Oh, yeah. They figure I couldn't have said anything as dumb as I actually said. They'll come up with an elaborate rhyme that gives the line new meaning.
I hear you've stopped smoking.
I had to do that. I'd always said I'd quit when I had to, and it had sort of gotten to the point where it was advised that I not smoke.
What will that do to your voice?
Well, you can hear it on the record. It won't really change it. I quit one year ago, so every vocal was cut since I gave up cigarettes. But I've damaged my larynx to the point where my voice is going to sound like this, forever.
Twice, Rolling Stone's critics have chosen you the year's best songwriter. Do you get anything for that?
No. No award, no money. You get the jealousy of other songwriters, I suppose. I don't know that the readership ever chooses their favorite songwriter, but it's always interesting that the reader's choices and those of the critics are never one and the same.
Whose comments do you tend to heed more, those of fans or those of critics?
Well, it's hard to make a sweeping generalization in regard to the fans, because I've talked to some journalists who were indeed fans, and also to some fans who were really dumb. And I just think . . . someone who is a little more intelligent, I tend to listen to. There are certainly dumb people who write, who I don't give the time of day to. I can tell when somebody gets it. I don't know if that answers your question.
Are you finding that a lot of fans from the early days have grown with you, or has there been a sort of turnover, where you've got new fans now and many of the old ones are gone?
Umm . . . I don't have a ready answer for that.
I suppose there's no way to know, for sure.
Exactly. I would imagine that most people my age, or who started out watching me, are not going to come out again to see me, if they're in their mid to late '30s. I know I don't go out like I used to. So I think that's why I see younger audiences, when I perform. But who knows who's buying the records? I would imagine that I still have a good many fans who always liked the Mats.
As time passed with the Replacements, you wrote less and less about the band. Now, it seems your lyrical perspective has broadened even further, and you're writing more about things outside yourself. Do you think that's an accurate thing to say?
I think so.
Has that happened naturally?
Yes. None of this is ever a concerted effort to write about this or that. It's more a matter of whatever is important at the moment. When I was surrounded by the three other guys, they were my world, and I wrote about them. I don't have them anymore, so I write about my surroundings. I've been accused of writing material that's too personal. But to me, people who say that don't get it, because . . . you know, you can listen to my music in a group, if you like, but I think I make the kind of music you should listen to by yourself. And when you're by yourself, and I'm speaking in the first person, if you can relate to it I think that makes it all the more enjoyable. I find that when I listen to musicians, I like to hear them singing about their experiences in the first person. I don't like slogans, or "movement"-style songs, or rants or chants. That's not for me.
Do you ever put something aside, or discard it, or just not let it see the light of day because it's too personal?
As time goes on, I try more and more to do the opposite. I think whenever I feel like a song is too personal, or I'm afraid--and I'm afraid of a lot of my songs--I've found that those are generally the ones that people say they love, or that changed their lives, or that they took with them. So I feel like I have an obligation to continue to do those. Like "Good Day," or "MamaDaddyDid." Those are two that I wrote--and it felt good that they were written--but I didn't really want to put them on the album, because I was afraid. But that's what sort of separates the men from the boys. You gotta do what you don't wanna do, sometimes.
Are you becoming more confident in your piano playing? You're instantly recognizable.
Really? I don't know if that's good. (laughs) I'm an utter and total hack at the piano. But I play all the time; I sit at the piano every day. People ask what I've been doing, or why I've taken three years off, and I say that's total nonsense. I've been at the piano every day since the last day I was on tour. I play the guitar when I'm writing songs, or in the studio, but the piano has become sort of my outlet. I think that as time goes by I'll be writing more and more songs on it. The songs aren't always played on it; "Ain't Got Me," for instance, was written on the piano. But the songs that have a richer melody--I've found that it's easier to write those kinds of songs on piano.
Do you have anyone who you can bounce ideas off of?
No. I really don't, until it's too late. It's like, "What do you think of this? You don't like it? Well, tough, we're gonna do it anyway." (laughs) No, I don't have anyone like that, and that has it's obvious drawbacks. But on the positive side, it makes me edit myself as heavily, or maybe more heavily, than most people would. I don't just write a song and think, "Oh well, somebody's gonna tell me if it sucks." It's more of a situation where I have to look at it and find out if there's something in it that could be better. Now, as far as performance goes, Brendan and I might decide something together. And Lou Giordiano--I'd ask his opinion about things like which vocal take was best. But when writing the tunes, I really don't ask anybody's opinion any more.
Which come easier for you, ballads or rockers? Actually, I think I know the answer to that.
Do you? Which do you think?
Well, I would assume that the rockers come easier.
No. If the question is, "Which comes easier, great rock 'n' roll or a great ballad?", I think . . . (pauses) I think I can write a ballad pretty easily, but great rock 'n' roll, to me, is almost impossible to write, alone. With a band, it's a different story. And that's the whole gist of my career right now. I used to be able to write great rock 'n' roll easily, because I had a great rock 'n' roll band. Now I don't have one, so I would have to answer your question by saying that, yes, the ballads are easier because there's no one to bounce things off of. There's no one to throw a drumstick at me.
Do you ever write lyrics without melodies, and then try to fit them in later?
Yes. I wrote some stuff the night before last, for instance, when I couldn't sleep. I got up and wrote something, then turned out the light and laid down. Then I did that several more times. And I might carry that crumpled piece of paper around in my little cheap carry-on bag for a year and a half. Then I'll take one of those lines and use it somewhere in a song.
Does a melody ever suggest or inspire a lyric?
When I sit down to write, and sort of hum along, I always sing a dummy lyric. It's usually a generic "baby," or "come on come on come on," or "yeah yeah yeah," that kind of stuff. Then sometimes I'll try to fit, phonetically, the noises I'm making to the melody. That's a little more difficult, because sometimes there's a melody that your voice can only make if you go [sings "aaaayyyy"] as opposed to [sings "oohhhhhh"]. So you might want to write a real word for that part, one that sounds like that. Then you can fill in actual lyrics and story. But there's one or two key elements . . . it's called a hook, as you probably know. I do write hooks, first.
Is songwriting becoming more a matter of craft than inspiration, to any extent?
Crap? Can we put a "p" at the end of that? (laughs) It straddles the line between crap and craft. You can craft yourself a nice, fine, shiny piece of crap real easily. But sometimes it's just a jagged, bitter emotion--something that you sit down and just pound out--that is the essence of a great tune. It takes a while, then, to refine it a little for human consumption. But sometimes it's dangerous to work on something too long, I've found.
A member of the Gin Blossoms recently said that if [the Replacements' 1987 album] Pleased To Meet Me came out in today's market, it would be monstrous.
That's very interesting. The Gin Blossoms' producer [John Hampton] is the same guy who engineered Pleased To Meet Me. (laughing) He was probably the one who said it. But that's a nice thing to say. Who knows? I think it's safe to say that we were ahead our time. I don't think you'd get any argument about that, unless someone wanted to claim that we were ten years behind our time, which is probably also true. But yeah, I think if all that shit came out now, we would sell a lot more.
"Unsatisfied" and "Answering Machine"--was there any acting going on in those songs?
On "Unsatisified," there was. I hate to break anyone's heart, but yeah, there was acting there. Probably the real acting came from the fact that the drugs were wearing off, while I was singing the vocal. I think it was something as base, and as common, as that. I don't hold "Unsatisfied" in as high regard as a lot of people do. "Answering Machine," on the other hand, I do. I think "Answering Machine" is one of my best songs. "Unsatisfied" . . . I don't know. It was like an open wound, something almost akin to Yoko.
When you say that "Answering Machine" is one of your best songs, are you speaking from a lyrical perspective, or the entire song?
From the lyrics, to the spoons in the pots and pans, to the . . . I mean, at the time, it wasn't really daring, but . . . even I, I must admit, have an answering machine now. In fact, I have two of them. I always swore I would never own one. But I went through so much shit, so much inconvenience, I finally thought, "This is ridiculous. I've become a slave to this song I've written." I had to break down simply because it's easier than getting up at, like, four in the morning to talk with someone you don't know. But what can I say? I think ["Answering Machine"] was from the heart, and it hit the nail on the head. There was real passion, and there was a real person on the other end, and that made it all come to life. We can all relate to it, I think.
Didn't you write "Sadly Beautiful" with Marianne Faithfull in mind?
Umm . . . sort of. I wrote it thinking that she was going to sing it. Someone told me that Marianne Faithfull was looking for a song, and he asked if I would write her one. This came from some A+R person; Marianne had probably never heard of me. But I thought, "Oh, Marianne Faithfull wants me to write her a tune," so I wrote her this song. It was about someone I knew. And once again, had it been up to me to write a song about . . . let's call her "Jane," . . . I wouldn't have put it on my record. It was for someone else to sing, and when she didn't sing it, I realized it was too powerful to throw away.
Whose idea was it for John Cale to play on the song?
That was so . . . that was like falling off a log. We were in the studio, and I asked if we could get someone to play violin. And Scott Litt, the producer, said "Yeah, I think I know someone. I'll give John Cale a call." I thought he was joking. An hour and a half later Cale walks in. I nearly pissed in my pants. (laughs) We didn't have one of those little things he sticks under his chin, to play the viola, so we had to give him a rag we'd used to wipe up the beer from the previous night.
I've been told that "Rock N Roll Ghost" was written for a friend who committed suicide.
Yes. (pause)
Can you add anything to that, how that became the impetus for the song?
He was seventeen, and I was sixteen or seventeen, and . . . he was my hero. I think of him often, still. He was a musician. He played the blues. He lived a life like . . . The rest of us were listening to Boston, and Led Zeppelin, and all this rubbish, and he wore straight-legged pants and a plaid shirt and a rope for a belt. And he played the harmonica. He was just a throwback to another era, the coolest guy I had ever met. And then one night he killed himself. We never knew why.
"Angels Walk"--that song sort of sounds like it's subject to me. Sort of ethereal and dreamy.
Yeah, it is. I'm trying to think now . . . something inspired it, although I can't remember what it was. I think that's one where the music came first, the guitar licks. I had all the music done at home, and I was gazing out the window, putting the lyrics to it as the song went by over and over again. It has a ghostliness to it, I guess.
"Here Comes A Regular" has some similarity to Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door."
Yeah.
You used to cover "Heaven's Door" live, didn't you?
We took a wild stab at it. I love that song. Chordally, it's similar. I've heard that, but I've also heard it sounds like Bruce Springsteen. I've heard all kinds of stuff, and you're all probably right. I make no bones about having listened to Springsteen, Neil Young, Bob Dylan. It's evident in what I do.
Did you ever play "Never Mind" live?
Oh, sure. That was always a challenge. It's beyond my vocal range. It's in "B," and "B-flat" is probably the top of my range. But we struggled through it.
Did you lift the phrase "never mind" from [Alex Chilton's] "September Gurls?"
No. We stole it from Nirvana.
(laughing) Right.
No. Christ, we all say things like that, like "get out of here" or something. (smiling) Believe it or not, it's part of my vocabulary.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this stuff.
Perhaps.
Do you keep up with what's going on currently on the music scene?
I'm afraid I don't. And I'm afraid I'm in trouble in about an hour, when I have to go to MTV and talk about it. Tell me somebody to talk about. (laughs) It's like, I really don't know shit.
Are there any particular novelists or fiction writers who have inspired you?
Yes, but . . . I'm not quite as stuffy as that. I'm also inspired by people who dress well. I'm happy that my [sensibilities] come from being a teenage guy who liked rock 'n' roll. I liked flashy-looking guitar players, and I liked glam. So find me the best writer who wore spangly clothes and threw his guitar in the air. It's people like Pete Townshend who inspired me, who I wouldn't necessarily have gone for had I not been a fan of rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll, in general, sort of formed what I like in a writer. I like people who are mysterious with their lives. I don't like a grandstander, or someone who's obvious, or who's very social.
Speaking of that, do you think MTV has robbed rock 'n' roll of some of its mystique? I remember, as a kid, how exciting it would be to find out that Lou Reed, or Bowie, or someone, was going to be on television maybe once that year.
Yeah. Someone who grew up in the '70s, and who came of age with MTV, doesn't know anything other than that. And it was probably the same way before radio. You'd only hear the band when they came through town. But yes, I remember that. You'd make a week of it. "Oh, man, I can't wait to see so-and-so." It was that Rock Concert show, or whatever it was.
Have you heard the Replacements tribute album that several Athens bands put together [for the Humane Society]?
No, I haven't. I was unhappy with the whole idea. My thoughts were, if you're going to do something for charity, then please give it to human beings. Not that I'm against animals--I love 'em. But it's like, if we're gonna make some money, then let's help a person.
Do you think growing up Catholic affected your songwriting at all?
I suppose it did, because it affected my life. It affects my way of thinking and everything. I mean, I'm still a religious person. I believe in God, although I never sit down to write "God" songs. I have my belief, and my faith, and I keep it private. But I try to live right and treat people fairly, so I suppose that comes through in the music.
What was your family-life like, growing up. Was it happy?
It was generally happy. I think back often to the times when I was five to ten. Those are years I look back to with sheer bliss. And I think that . . . my early teen years were very difficult. It got hard at about thirteen. Thirteen to thirty-two was pretty tough. (laughs)
You caught some grief for "The Ledge," didn't you?
Yeah. We made a video for it, and MTV didn't want to play it because they thought it promoted suicide.
But that's not even listening to the song. You say people have come up to you and said a particular song helped them in some way. Has anyone told you that about "The Ledge?"
Possibly. I don't really recall anyone ever saying what that one has given or done for them.
Can we touch on the subject of drinking, just briefly?
Sure.
Everyone seems to have a theory about why writers drink. Do you have one?
Well, I drank before I wrote, so I could almost be disqualified as a writer slash drinker. My reasons went deeper than that. It was to cure an anxiety that I'd felt ever since I was small. And drinking would do that, but when it wore off it would make the problem worse. I don't know. Perhaps writers think too much, and liquor makes it hard to think. There's a simple statement, probably true.
At some point, with the Replacements, did you ever feel like that part of the band . . . that you were becoming an enabler for some people who were seeking a way to legitimize taking that approach? By that, I mean people who perhaps were very intelligent and had serious aspirations, but who wanted to set themselves up to be heroic failures.
Yes. That was a foul smell that I caught toward the end, and even earlier on. People would come up to me with a lost, hopeless look in their eyes, looking to me for a pat on the back for throwing their lives away. It didn't cross my mind that I needed to stop drinking for them, to show them the right way. I needed to save myself from dying. But now that I'm kind of back on my feet, I'd like to hope that someone might look at me and say, "If he can do it, I can do it." I mean, I was as bad as anyone. It's not impossible to stop, and you don't have to do it the way someone else says you have to. You don't have to go to a hospital; you don't have to go to meetings. If that works for you, then do it. But I didn't do that; I just stopped.
Is there anything that's changed drastically about your songwriting since you gave up [alcohol]?
I know right away when it's crap. It doesn't take me until the next day to find out.
So you wrote when you were under the influence?
Well, I was always on my way to being under the influence, or else I was coming off it. There was never, like, two days of being totally straight. I was always kind of halfway in the bag. Especially in the studio, you'd think that you had something magnificent, and then you'd listen to it in the light of day and realize it wasn't quite so good. I'm a little more able to catch it quick, now.
Where do you write?
Everywhere. But usually it gets pounded out right there in the living room. Hotel rooms are the seed of where a lot of things come from, when I'm traveling. And many times, songs get finished in the studio. I like to record away from home, so I can go back to a hotel each night, and not go to my home. I do a lot of my writing and finishing there in the hotel room, wherever the studio is.
Your lyrics are nearly always subject to multiple interpretations. They're kind of like a Robert Altman movie, where you might have several things going on at once and they all fit together.
Yeah, people usually don't see the layers. A lot of people take the song for its initial value, and maybe it takes someone who thinks a little more deeply to see that the song has more than one meaning. A lot of people see only the obvious, and that's okay. In a way, I'm proud that I can write songs like that, because it gives an option to people who want to go beyond the first meaning. But a lot of people don't.
Was there ever a point in your life where you knew this was what you were going to do? Or did that happen gradually?
I think it was gradual. I can't think of one exact moment. Maybe [it was] the day I quit my job and never went back, but I didn't have any reason to think when I was nineteen, "Okay, I've got it made now." I knew it would be a long haul. I mean, I made up my mind back then that I was never again going to sweep under anyone's feet. I wouldn't have led a life of crime, but [without music] I might've become some sort of low-life gigolo or something. (laughs) Anything to get by without having to go back to manual labor.
Do you feel like you're prepared, if this album were to really go through the roof?
I think so. I've never been more prepared. That would be the honest statement.
Are you hopeful that that will happen?
Yes, I am. With each record . . . I think each one is good, and I think each one should do something fantastic. And when they don't, I always have to go back and regroup, and try not to think about it too much. Or think, "Where did I go wrong?" But I believe it's the right mix this time. There seems to be real commitment from the record company. I've always done my part, more or less. I've toured, and interviewed, and delivered "good" to "great" albums. And I think this one leans toward great. So yeah, I'm optimistic.
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Post by Veets on Jun 15, 2011 18:51:20 GMT -5
"I don't like a grandstander, or someone who's obvious, or who's very social."
That line and all the talk about artists who drink, and self-destructive behavior reminded me of Charles Bukowski and the movie about him (Barfly):
"Henry: Why did it have to be Eddie? He symbolizes everything that disgusts me. Obviousness. Unoriginal macho energy. Ladies man..."
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Squaw
Star Scout
You're the only one that you are screwin' when you put down what you don't understand~ Kristofferson
Posts: 544
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Post by Squaw on Jun 15, 2011 19:48:42 GMT -5
Thanks FreeRider!
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Post by FreeRider on Jun 20, 2011 14:30:43 GMT -5
I lucked out, one more ---a friend found this for me:
Title:Q and A With Paul Westerberg San Francisco Chronicle bySusan Whitall , May 5, 1996
As former lead singer and songwriter of the Replacements, Paul Westerberg labors under particularly burdensome expectations. His second solo album, "Eventually," released last month on Reprise, follows 1993's critically lauded "14 Songs." But fans of the Minneapolis-based Replacements still hope the band will reunite, even though founding member Bob Stinson died last year.
At the turn of the '80s, the Replacements invented a thrashy, pop-punk style that owed equal debt to the Rolling Stones, glam rock, punk and the Beatles. The one constant was that the Replacements played with heart. And Westerberg's talent for classic pop songwriting, coupled with his deeply vulnerable voice, ensured that the band was recognized as one of the most influential groups of the '80s.
Sadly, the band's no-holds-barred style extended to its members' lives. While Westerberg embraced sobriety at least five years ago, guitarist Stinson continued down a self-destructive path that ended in his death in February 1995. On "Eventually," Westerberg included a song about Stinson, "Good Day," which includes the line: "A good day is any day that you're alive." .
Q: It's been three years since "14 Songs." Did you intend to leave that long a gap between albums?
A: Well, there's no sense in striking when the iron is cold. I wrote a lot of tunes. I'd planned for it to be out last summer and that just didn't work out. I was in the process of buying a house and moving. That slowed it down by three months. Then, lo and behold, suddenly it was a year later than I thought. Nothing held it up. (Record company executives) said they weren't in a hurry. And that last tour kind of took a lot out of me. I took a lot of time to rest. .
Q: Is it true that you're going to tour, but that you really don't want to?
A: No, I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I didn't want to make a record in two years, and I didn't. I don't mind touring. I just mind excessively long periods of touring, coming back to the same city so many times. Twice in every town, that's it for me. The third time, what can you possibly do that you didn't do the first two times? I'll probably go out by the end of June. .
Q: What's the last album you bought?
A: The Osmond Brothers. Truly, it's the last thing I bought. It brings me back to my youth. What else? I got one armload the last time I was at the record store. Ben Webster, the Bobby Sherman record with "Hey, Little Woman" on it, some bluegrassy stuff. .
Q: Aren't you a Burt Bacharach fan?
A: I always have liked those songs . . . that style of writing. There's a Burt Bacharach thing now where he's considered cool. I don't know how cool he is, but those are great melodies he wrote. . Q: So many bands today -- the Goo Goo Dolls and Wilco, to name two -- sound derivative of the Replacements. Do you think you receive proper credit?
A: Yeah, I've read where those two bands have cited myself and the Replacements as an influence. I can ask no more from them. I can't expect them to make their fans go out and buy our records. It disturbs me a little that someone may hear one of those bands and think I'm imitating them. But I don't think that's going to happen. .
Q: When Bob Stinson died, you said it was "a sad end to a sad life." Was it inevitable?
A: Yeah, I think so. He lived very hard all his life. No one who knew him was surprised. .
Q: But sometimes when people live hard for so long, it still surprises some people when they die, doesn't it?
A: Well, some people live just long enough for a bunch of fools to think, "Hmm, perhaps this is a lifestyle option for me, too." I mean, one of these days Keith Richards will die, although he's not supposed to. He'll be 99, of course. But what if he dropped dead next year? There'll be those fools who'll say, "Yeah, but the way he lived, he had a full life in that time." Sure, but who wouldn't prefer 20 more years? .
Q: How long have you been sober?
A: I don't exactly know, which is a good sign. Six, seven years? Five years? I don't know. .
Q: Is punk dead?
A: I suppose it pretty much died when the Sex Pistols did. Rock 'n' roll -- what flavor is it this week? Has Blur overtaken Oasis yet? .
Q: Can you be too old for rock 'n' roll?
A: No. I think we can be too old for pop music and pop culture. I couldn't name you one song by Blur. But for actual rock 'n' roll, rhythm-and-blues-based, swing-influenced music -- no. And I still love that music. .
Q: "Love Untold" on the new album is so sad, including the lines "Does anyone recall the saddest love of all, the one that lets you fall, with nothing to hold . . . It's the love untold." Why are sad songs so compelling?
A: They seem to touch people more. Speaking as a fan of sad songs, they tend to stick with me longer. I don't know why that is. Maybe there's catharsis there. The feeling that, when somebody puts it in words, it makes us all feel a little better. .
Q: Some critics think you sound very depressed on this album. Do you?
A: I get that, too, but I have to wash my hands of it. No matter what I do, they'll say that. I think it's the tone of my voice, truly, the way I sing. There's a little melancholy in my voice. All I can say is, I wasn't feeling that way. On "Good Day," yes, ultra sad; and on "Hide and Seek" maybe. But the other ones I wrote feeling very up, and I wanted it to come across. Ah, but I guess I'm never going to be seen as the happy songster. .
Q: Am I nuts, or is that the Unabomber you're singing about in "Trumpet Clip"?
A: Yes to both questions.
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Post by FreeRider on Jun 22, 2011 9:34:59 GMT -5
Another one sent to me by a friend:
After 'MATS `Eventually means more than a record title to Westerberg It's been five years since the revered Replacements disbanded. Now the band's leader and bassist are trying to redefine themselves with new projects. Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) Jon Bream, April 21, 1996
COPYRIGHT 1996 Star Tribune Co.
"I'm a folk singer who writes pop songs and plays a rock 'n' roll guitar," said Paul Westerberg, trying to describe his second solo CD, "Eventually," due in stores April 30.
He doesn't know where he fits in anymore. Does his new music belong on MTV or VH1 or both? He feels like he's in musical limbo.
"It's the impossible years of being 36. Which is, I'm way too old to be a young upstart; I'm too young to be revered like an old veteran like Tom Petty or something," said Westerberg, peering through dark glasses last week over lunch in the back room of the Monte Carlo bar in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. "So if I can hang tough for a few years and make it to 40, it'll actually be easier for me."
Rolling Stone magazine asserted in its review of "Eventually" that Westerberg, leader of the freewheeling, deeply loved Replacements, belongs in the same category as Elvis Costello - widely respected for his work and his influence but never a big seller. "Better Elvis Costello than - who are we going to rag on now? I would never take a comparison to Elvis Costello lightly; he's a great, great songwriter. He does what he wants and if he sells records, great," Westerberg said. "I do the same thing and I don't work in the avant-garde. What I do is write simple pop songs. I would like them to sell; I say it every time. If they don't, I continue to do what I love; so maybe there's the comparison."
Sales of Westerberg's "14 Songs," his 1993 debut solo, were only 160,000. One of the most acclaimed songwriters of the 1980s, he was disappointed. Just mention the success this year of the Goo Goo Dolls - 1 million albums sold and counting for a band that sounds astoundingly like the Replacements - and Westerberg cringes.
"What good does it do to be bitter? Johnny [Rzeznik, Goo Goo Dolls' lead singer] is a really nice guy. He still calls me routinely to, like, apologize; he talks about me every day. . . . I think if everyone knew who came first, I would be happy." Judging by the early signs, Westerberg is confident that "Eventually" will get a better shot than "14 Songs." "Love Untold," his new single, has already been played on more radio stations than "World Class Fad," the principal single from "14 Songs," which stayed on the charts only a month. He said Warner Bros. Records is giving him a promotional push he didn't feel he received last time.
Westerberg seemed more relaxed talking about his new album than he was when "14 Songs" was released. He wasn't chain-smoking and sipping coffee after coffee. Instead, he was rolling up and chomping on sticks of gum and sipping a ginger ale. With his black polo shirt, natty sportcoat and black briefcase, Westerberg could have passed for any other businessman on casual day - except for his sunglasses, dyed dark hair and loud green pants.
Stinson reflections
The Minneapolis singer-songwriter started making "Eventually" in Atlanta with producer and instrumentalist Brendan O'Brien, who had worked with Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots. After completing three songs, however, Westerberg decided the project wasn't working because he and O'Brien butted heads too often. Westerberg wrote more material and produced the rest of the album himself in Los Angeles and at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen.
The song that immediately jumps out of "Eventually" is "Good Day," a melancholy reflection that suggests guitarist Bob Stinson, the tormented soul who founded the Replacements and died of heart failure in February 1995. Westerberg said he started writing the song when Stinson was alive but his death made Westerberg "truly unhappy" and prompted him to finish and record it.
Westerberg was reluctant to talk about Stinson, whom he considered like a brother. "It's made me realize life is short. There's no reason to wait one day to do what you want to do today," he said. "I think the songs I was writing were the opposite of his death; when he died, it underlined what I was trying to say and how I felt about myself, and it hurt even more. Then I pulled myself up and away from the life that pulled him down. It hurts."
Westerberg began to get teary-eyed and physically tense. He wanted to change the subject.
Wacky cabaret
Has he considered collaborating with his girlfriend, Laurie Lindeen of Zuzus Petals?
"I'd like to produce a record for her. I play the piano sometimes and she sings, and we do sort of wacky cabaret songs and stuff like that," said Westerberg, who recorded a duet of a Cole Porter song with Joan Jett two years ago.
Westerberg's reputation may have been made in garage rock, but his tastes run to all kinds of music from bluegrass to jazz. He doesn't get out much, especially to see music. There's the occasional weekend trip to a restaurant and a movie, but mostly he sits at home and makes music.
"You dress and you breathe and you drink coffee, and my next stop is at an instrument," he said. "I don't do exercises or play scales or work, but I'm always making noise on an instrument and forever scratching down a word. I never take a break. That's the irony of being away for 2 1/2 years: Sitting out in the backyard and not doing anything is incredibly difficult if you have to come up with that one line. Going and playing a set two hours long sometimes isn't as hard."
Westerberg works at his own pace and he's comfortable with the pace of his career, even if it has been three years between albums. He doesn't pay attention to the competition. "I'm not battling with Offspring," he said. "I'm battling with myself. I want to be better than the last one I did."
He occasionally ships a song or two to executives at Warner Bros., which is how he landed songs on the soundtrack CDs to TV's "Friends" and "Melrose Place."
Sister DJ
Westerberg has one advantage that few if any recording artists have: a sibling in radio who could give him advice about how his work might be perceived. His sister Mary Lucia, with whom he used to sit and discuss music when she was 6 and he was 10, is a prominent DJ on the cutting-edge Twin Cities rock station REV 105. Although he did play her his album last October in the recording studio, he didn't ask for advice; he doesn't want to mix family and career.
The one piece of advice Westerberg could use right now is where to find a guitar player. He's putting together a band for a possible tour in June. He brought bassist Darrin Hill back from his last solo tour, and two weeks ago hired drummer Michael Bland, formerly on Prince's payroll. The first day of rehearsal went well, Westerberg reported.
What motivates him?
"I'm happy. I'm not content to the point of where I'm lazy and complacent," he said. "I want to do better. I'm hard-working. I want success. I like simple things. I like baseball. "What motivates me? Love, lack of love."
With that, he picked up his guitar case, slung it over his shoulder and headed across the street to his rehearsal space for Day 2 with his new band.
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Post by FreeRider on Jul 15, 2011 9:52:14 GMT -5
Paul Westerberg: out on good behavior Guitar Player Magazine, October 1993
One almost gets the feeling that Paul Westerberg is uncomfortable being tagged a "songwriter," with all is attendant expectations and scrutiny. "I'm still what I've been since I was 13 - a rocker," says the former Replacements singer, guitarist, and leader from his home in Minneapolis.
True enough, but in addition to their half-in-the-bag abandon and incendiary, if sloppy, live performances, what made the 'Mats magic was Westerberg's inspired songwriting - a combination of garage-band bravado, salty sleight-of-phrase, and pure heart that produced legendary post-punk classics like "Color Me Impressed," "I Will Dare," "Bastards of Young," "I Don't Know," and "I'll Be You."
The Replacements played their last gig on July, 4, 1991, and in the two years since, Westerberg recorded two songs, "Dyslexic Heart" and "Waiting For Somebody," for the movie Singles, and he's just released his first post-'Mats album, 14 Songs [Sire]. A limited edition of the CD, designed as a small bound book with a section for "Notes," practically begs the issue of songs as literature, but Westerberg is sheepish. "They wanted me to write lyrics in there, but that would have been obvious," he says, his smoky, resonant voice as distinct in speech as it is in song. "|Okay, here's the book, and here's the lyrics, and the lyrics qualify as literature.' Well, no they don't. I write songs. That's the point of not putting the lyrics in there. You take the words away, they don't stand alone - the melodies don't really stand alone either, but together they're something."
Westerberg crafts his little somethings on Guild 12-string and Gibson J-200 acoustics and a reissue Les Paul Junior, generally by ad-libbing riffs and lyrics along with a beat box. "When it's a rocker," explains Westerberg, "I'll just turn on my little drum beat out of my $10 Casio keyboard and run that through an amplifier so I have something to tap to. That's essential. I could never write a rock and roll song just sitting there with an acoustic guitar. I'll just start hitting chords and shouting along. As soon as I get something that feels fun, I'll hunt for a title."
Westerberg grabs titles from everywhere. "Silver Naked Ladies" are the highway starlets embossed on big-rig mudflaps, and "A Few Minutes Of Silence" was conjured in the hope that kids would call their local radio stations to request, well ... "When the title comes, it all falls into place," says Westerberg, "because the title sets the mood. For instance, |Mannequin Shop' was a silly title which came from a People magazine article about plastic surgery. Once I decided I was going to write a disposable little pop song about something current and ridiculous, it just flowed. If I hadn't come up with that idea, it would have been a laboring effort. But once you make up your mind that this is going to be a cute one, no two ways about it, you can go for it."
Westerberg ways the going-for-it part can follow a few different tacks: "If it's a rock and roll song, I'd say get your gut feeling out, whatever it is. Even if you think, |Oh, I can't say that,' go ahead and fucking say it. Spit it out, and if you're going to be a fool, be a fool." When writing about specific people, Westerberg suggests checking back later to make sure your emotions didn't get the best of you. "Sometimes you're mad at someone, and a month later you're not mad, and there it is forever: |I hate your guts.' Instead, you can rethink that and make it so people in general can relate to it."
With a guitar style inherited from the Clash, Keith Richards, and Alex Chilton, Westerberg keeps his musical arrangements fairly simple, a tendency that he says helps keep him focused on his craft while writing. "You may think you have to be really aggressive or flashy on the guitar," he says, "but more often than not, that gets in the way of what the song is saying. You have to make up you mind: |Am I going to be a player, or is this going to be a song?' Don't worry - there'll be a spot in the song for someone to show off, whether it's you or another guy." Westerberg, who "like any guitar wanker, likes to get out there and play too many notes once in a while," remains a fan of Neil Young, Albert King, Toy Caldwell, and Ron Wood. "If they had to hit a couple wrong notes to get to the one that felt really good," he notes, "then that was cool."
The same could be said of Westerberg's music. His albums are long on raw energy and short on polish, reveling in the ragtag, aw-screw-it ending that Westerberg says he took from bluesmen like Albert King and Lightnin' Hopkins. "Those endings are the best," he raves, "because Lightnin' just gets bored, hits the I chord, and expects everybody to stop. I always wanted the Replacements to be bluesy in essence, where we could stop a song in the middle if it wasn't going down, but everyone else chalked it up to the band being loaded. It wasn't like rock and roll showbiz - here's the big ending, here's the lights. If you've ever seen Albert King live, he'd stop in mid-solo because he didn't fuckin' feel like it. I just dug that ornery behavior."
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Post by anarkissed on Jul 15, 2011 11:21:07 GMT -5
Paul winces as his guitar style is described as "inherited from the Clash"...
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Post by raccoon on Jul 18, 2011 14:41:15 GMT -5
Wow - I have never heard Paul/Mats mentioned in the same sentence as Toy Caldwell/Marshall Tucker Band. Paul has some mighty fine taste to single out Toy's playing !!
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sivad
Star Scout
Posts: 323
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Post by sivad on Jul 23, 2011 15:17:51 GMT -5
Here's the Playboy interview from June 2005
Fame is fickle. And no one in recent rock history knows that better than Paul Westerberg. As the singer of the Replacements he was the heart, soul and calloused fingertips of a band obsessed over by some, unknown by others, and richly deserving of the platinum albums, stadium concerts and glossy teenage-bedroom posters they never received.
Formed in '79, the quartet arguably became the best rock band of the 1980s: less pretentious than U2, more blue-collar than even Springsteen. Somehow, when these four drunk teenagers from Minneapolis were in the same garage, theirs was a beautiful musical catastrophe. But even after their breakthrough album (1984's Let It Be) and at their height (1987's Pleased to Meet Me) celebrity only taunted them from the wings. The 'Mats were whiskey-soaked rock and roll folk heroes, never Rock and Roll Hall of Famers.
Then again, maybe they were never meant to be superstars.
The Replacements' cult status was always part of the band's charm, even though it left its members with less than robust retirement accounts (and, recently, drove bassist Tommy Stinson to join the latest incarnation of Guns N' Roses). Westerberg wore his soul on his ratty flannel sleeve, mixing punk riffs with Beatles-worthy melodies and heartfelt lyrics (How do you say "I'm lonely" to an answering machine?) that spawned dozens of famous imitators.
When Westerberg was dubbed the embodiment of rock and roll on the cover of Spin in 1993, it was a little too little and a lot too late. The band played its last show in 1991; four years later original guitarist Bob Stinson would be dead. When he launched his solo career in the 1990s, Westerberg had grown out of his drunk-rock adolescence and become a sober songwriter -- although the move smacked of heresy to his crasser fans, who suggested his music couldn't work without a proper vodka marinade.
Westerberg proved them wrong. He recorded "Dyslexic Heart" for the Singles soundtrack and worked with a succession of name producers on three solo albums (14 Songs, Eventually, Suicaine Gratification). Then Westerberg locked himself in his basement and brought forth Grandpaboy (a goofy, scary, Stonesian alter ego) first on a 1997 EP and later on 2002's Stereo/Mono. Along the way he also worked on the most important collaboration of his life: a son, Johnny, with Laurie Lindeen of the Minneapolis band Zuzu's Petals.
This month Grandpaboy is back with Dead Man Shake, and Westerberg is back, too, with the DVD and soundtrack to his 2002 tour documentary Come Feel Me Tremble. Calling from his home in Minneapolis, Westerberg shared his thoughts on fame, fatherhood, sobriety, the possibility of a Replacements reunion and why rock's current glut of self-styled 'Mats wannabes drove him into therapy.
Playboy: Is Grandpaboy a violent man, or is he just misunderstood?
Paul Westerberg: He's certainly not violent when it comes to other human beings, but his playing tendency is a little on the rugged side.
Playboy: Do you have a particular alter ego that you identify with more these days?
Westerberg: It would be frightening if I lost Paul and turned into Grandpaboy. There's danger of that happening because it certainly comes natural. Paul sometimes gets edited, but Grandpaboy never does. Whatever I'm doing as Grandpaboy I don't think twice. I just do it. He's the one who uses a shaver for a guitar solo -- you know, a what-the-hell kind of thing.
Playboy: In Come Feel Me Tremble you flashed a sheet of paper that said, "Keep brave" and "concentrate." Then you put it in your pocket and went onstage. Do you always keep confidence-building reminders on you?
Westerberg: No, that was just the one time. You know, a four-year-old boy once told me to keep brave and concentrate.
Playboy: Your son?
Westerberg: He's smarter than it makes me comfortable. [Laughs] So for him to say that without any coaxing was pretty much what I needed to hear.
Playboy: Did fatherhood change you as a musician -- or as a person?
Westerberg: It opened up another side to me, but it didn't squelch anything that was there previously.
Playboy: Does Johnny know anything about your music?
Westerberg: He's starting to get suspicious. The other day he asked me, "What color is Grandpaboy?" I told him pale. But, you know, he's like me in a way. There's a definite horror streak where he loves Halloween and scary stories and stuff. There's the tongue-in-cheek scariness about Grandpaboy that's laughable to anyone who'd take it seriously. We won't mention the names of any performers who try to be scary on purpose.
Playboy: Are you afraid of the day your son will discover you're not a minivan-driving, nine-to-five-er like all the other dads?
Westerberg: He's already hip. I mean, I don't have a driver's license. It's already like he's 14 and he expects me to be like other dads. But in a different way, he does understand the concept that some dads get up and shave and go to work, and I get up, come downstairs and play the guitar. He thinks it's very odd for other fathers to leave the home.
He just started school two days ago. This is the first time in five years that I've had a whole afternoon without him here. It made me sad. I've gotta admit, the first day I was holding back the tears. He comes home and he's not quite mine as much as he was.
Playboy: It makes you realize how your own father probably felt about you.
Westerberg: Yeah. My son is slowly growing up to where he'll try to tie his shoes, and when I try to help he says, "Daddy, don't help me." Compare that to me going over to my dad's now and helping him take his shoes off. I go over and give my dad a haircut and help him shave.
Just as my little boy doesn't need my help, my dad needs me to practically feed him now. It's life, I guess.
Playboy: Has your family affected your music?PW: I still think about my mom and dad, and my little boy, when I'm playing. Not on the Grandpaboy record, but on the soundtrack, there's a song about my dad called "Pine Box," and there's another one on my other solo record [Westerberg's next studio album, Folker, due out in 2004] that may never see the light of day. I just sort of pray quietly that it'll come out before he dies, so he could hear me saying these nice things about him.
Playboy: What's the song?
Westerberg: It's just called "My Dad." And it just talks about what he is and what he does, which is not much, but he still has the pride of not wanting nurses to come over. He has emphysema, and he sits in his chair and watches TV all day. He doesn't want somebody to come over and make him do arm circles and leg lifts, and shit like that. I don't blame him, but if it keeps him alive for another year I'm all for it.
Playboy: In your documentary you said that when you're in the studio, first takes are always best because you forget what to do by the time the tape gets rewound.
Westerberg: It's true. It's all Freudian in a way, because if you're in the right mood and it's the right time of day, if you have an inspiration, whatever you choose to say is inevitably exactly what you mean. And then as soon as you listen to it back, you don't have the courage to say it again. Then you try to refine it and be tricky and play with words, which is something I've definitely been a victim of. I wish I'd have left a lot of my songs alone. I liked "I Will Dare" best the first time we played it. Same goes for everything, pretty much.
Playboy: It happened by accident, but do you think laying relatively low in the 1990s upped your cool quotient?
Westerberg: Yeah, you could put it that way. You've gotta go away before they miss you. And I had just enough money to be able to step back and not be in the public eye. Which was easy. I mean, if I had a zillion dollars I don't think I'd be doing anything. [Laughs] But I'd probably still be making songs. I write so much that it gets me in trouble. I've got just piles of songs.
Playboy: Have you ever dreamed of headlining a stadium?
Westerberg: We played the crummy side of the stick. I mean, we opened for bands in stadiums. It's just punishment to stand in front of 20,000 fans of Tom Petty or Elvis Costello and 150 of your fans. But, a lot of my tunes at the time didn't lend themselves to arena-type sing-alongs. I don't miss opening for anybody. Then again, I go both ways. Last time I played live was when my little boy was in nursery school. I went over there for the kids and played electric guitar, and I sang three songs. That was as hard as playing Madison Square Garden. I was so nervous. And the kids kinda dug it, except for my son, who told me later he was really embarrassed. [Laughs]
Playboy: Do you still feel a warm glow from being the inspiration for Westerberg High in Heathers?
Westerberg: Nah, that doesn't even cross my mind really. I don't care about that stuff. There was a film that they wanted me to participate in, which had a secondary plot of someone who came to Minneapolis to find me. And in the end of the film, I'm there, and the person doesn't see me and rides away. But I refused because the idea is so close to home. It's true. Many people have actually come here, moved here, lived here just to seek me out. It's a little weird at times.
Playboy: Do obsessive Replacements fans scare you?
Westerberg: There have been a few nutty things, where you question someone's sanity, where I had to enlist the police. My mail has been stolen, and I find things in the yard. Just today I went up to the bookstore and a guy in the parking lot stopped me to shake my hand. [When I left] I had to go the other way to pretend that's the way I lived, for fear he was gonna follow me. Because I wasn't wearing my hat! Tom Petty told me once, "Wear a hat." And it's true. I wear a hat and I'm fine. I take the hat off and nine times out of 10 someone will stop me.
Playboy: Women have always loved you. One rock critic actually wrote about saving a crusty cigar butt of yours, while another stole a tissue off your chair.
Westerberg: Good God in heaven.
Playboy: Can you explain the appeal?
Westerberg: No. I can't explain the appeal other than I'm an odd mixture of bad boy masculinity and I have a real soft spot for women. I had three sisters, so I grew up knowing what girls liked and what they didn't, just by them coming home after their dates. I guess I've learned to respect women, maybe more than some guys. I don't know other than that. I haven't a clue.
Playboy: It's been said that the term "drunk-rock" was specifically designed for the 'Mats. When you released Eventually you were sober, and a few people clamored for you to take up the bottle again. Did that piss you off?
Westerberg: It pissed me off because the ones that they assumed I wrote drunk I wrote stone cold sober. Performing was always a matter of needing some courage. But with writing, I never needed inspiration from a bottle. Even though after I wrote the song I would go to rehearsal and then we'd all go to the bar and drink. But I didn't and I don't need anything to stimulate my creativity.
Playboy: Were there any classics you wrote sober?
Westerberg: Well, "Here Comes a Regular." It's the perfect one. I wrote that in the afternoon with nothing to do, and it has more to do with the lawn and the season than it has to do with somebody drinking.
Playboy: You've struggled with bouts of depression and anxiety for decades -- you once called them the curse of creativity. Has it affected your music over the years?
Westerberg: It's the double-edged sword. Depression affects writing, and anxiety affects the performance.
Playboy: Are you on any antidepressants?
Westerberg: Oh, yeah. We used to just take drugs. Now, it's like, I take prescription things to deal. It's the one thing the docs can't really fix for you. If you're depressive and anxious at the same time, you've got to take your pick. Do I want to be calm today or do I want to be on edge today? It's hard monitoring it.
Playboy: Do your meds ever affect your memory?
Westerberg: The antidepressants do tend to affect your immediate memory. Like, Did I take them? And then five minutes later you take them again. It's like, shit, I just took 12 pills.
Playboy: Do you ever find it funny when your fans are calling out the next lyric to a song they recall more vividly than you do?
Westerberg: It isn't funny -- it's helpful on many occasions. Sometimes I will sing the original lyric that came to my brain when I was just strumming the guitar. But I try to guard against that as much as I can because I know people like to sing along, and the only one singing the wrong verse is me.
Playboy: Do you begrudge Tommy Stinson for going off and making a living with Axl Rose?
Westerberg: No. The press has kind of been bored and has been trying to make a little feud between us. They've succeeded on a certain level. Tommy, for instance, was in town last week and played two nights. And he didn't call me, you know? But then again, I didn't extend myself and go down and see him.
Playboy: Will the 'Mats ever reunite?
Westerberg: That kind of stuff doesn't make it sound like a reunion is imminent.
Playboy: You've influenced so many musicians. Is it weird to hear Ryan Adams or Pete Yorn seemingly imitating your songs?
Westerberg: I don't know. I've never heard either one of those guys. But as a group.it's to the point where I hear myself so much on that style radio, and now it's even on television commercials, and it's what drove me into psychotherapy. I came in there telling the guy that everyone on the radio sounds like me. He rolled his eyes thinking, God, I got a nutcase here. But it was true. I felt like everyone sounded like me.
Playboy: Is there anything good on the radio right now?
Westerberg: See, that's always the question, and your assumption is, [any] new music. I find all kinds of good stuff on the radio, but it's not a new station. I listen to the jazz station and the public radio blues station. I listen to the oldies, '70s, stuff like that. I've got plenty of stuff to entertain myself. I don't go anywhere near the latest stuff. I couldn't tell you at all.
Playboy: In hindsight, what's your opinion of the Replacements?
Westerberg: It unfolded naturally and it collapsed naturally. We did what we were supposed to do, which is spawn a million other bands like us and, out of it, a handful of good ones. I think that our mixture of elements was just different enough where we'll have a lasting impact, like Elvis did for rockabilly and blues, and country music. We married punk rock with major seventh chords, the kind of chords that might remind people of the Beatles. And then, there was always this tendency to love the blues. It's a heady mix. I like the Partridge Family, I like Wagner and I like Jimmy Reed. That's a funky brew, but it shows in places.
Playboy: Will you ever retire?
Westerberg: For the evening? [Laughs] No, I won't. I mean, I will retire from some things. I don't think I'll ever jump off the top of an amplifier again. But I don't believe I'll ever stop making music.
Playboy: You can always buy a new cherry red guitar to inspire you.
Westerberg: We'll see. I've been buying guitars, and that's a dangerous sign. Whenever I buy a couple, it's the thing that gets me rolling to want to go out and play 'em.
Playboy: What do you want to buy next?
Westerberg: [Pauses] Peace and security.
Playboy: If only they could put that in a guitar.
Westerberg: Yeah, well.it's funny. You said that as a joke, but come to think of it, the only time I feel peaceful and secure is when I'm holding a guitar. Which is a little bit sad, but it's true. It goes back to being 13 or 14 and coming home from school, locking myself in my room and cradling my guitar for lack of understanding, or having a friend. The guitar was, and is, my companion-slash-friend. And then I go and kill it every night.
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