Post by allshookup on May 30, 2006 10:50:44 GMT -5
The REPLACEMENTS AMG Discography
Tim
Let It Be made the Replacements into college radio and critical favorites, leading the group to a major-label contract with Sire. The band's major-label debut, Tim, does represent a bit of a compromise of the group's garage punk sound. Producer Tommy Erdelyi (formerly of the Ramones) helped clean up the band's sound, primarily by harnessing the rhythm section to a click track -- no longer does the band thrash all over the place, they keep a steady rocking beat. Similarly, Bob Stinson is kept in check, and his wildfire guitar bubbles above the surface only on two cuts, "Dose of Thunder" and "Lay It Down Clown," which are both filler. Some of the rockers, even the anthemic "Bastards of Young," are gutted by the cleaner sound, but the overall effect of the record isn't hurt, because Paul Westerberg turns in his finest overall set of songs, ranging from the charming love song "Kiss Me on the Bus" and the college radio anthem "Left of the Dial" to the detailed chronicles of loneliness like "Here Comes a Regular," "Hold My Life," and "Swingin' Party." Westerberg's melodies and observations are sharper than ever, giving Tim an eloquent but edgy power that can't be diluted by the tame production.
- Hold My Life
Kicking off the album Tim, which saw the gifted Paul Westerberg taking over almost all of the songwriting and honing his craft, the Replacements offer another fine generational anthem. Self-deprecating, awkward, immature social retards were usually the voices of Westerberg's songs during his tenure with the Replacements, as well as his solo career, and his protagonists spoke directly to hundreds of thousands of similarly disaffected young adults in the mid- to late '80s. A Stonsey, two-guitar rocker, "Hold My Life" also brings to mind Westerberg's other musical heroes, Alex Chilton's Big Star. The song is a memorable, singalong pop melody, played with a bit of the edge that is held over from their early days as a punk rock garage band. In the spirit of the Ramones' -- who Tommy Erdelyi produces -- "I Wanna Be Sedated," the narrator positions himself as a helpless, hopeless case who surrenders control of himself to others: "Hold my life until I'm ready to use it/Hold my life because I just might lose it/Because I just might lose it." Though obviously humorous, Westerberg sings with an air of desperation, playing on the words "die" and "dye," as if he is warning a new romantic interest that he may need her more than she needs him. Though the band was clearly cleaning up their act a little and Westerberg was letting down his guard and letting his melodies shine out a bit from the din, "Hold My Life" was still far more raw than anything heard on mainstream radio in 1985. But we can hear Westerberg "maturing" -- a word that was the death-knell for post-punk bands of the era when signing to a major label -- as the Replacements did for this album -- was more than suspect for many fans. Most of the Replacements' audience identified with songs like "Hold My Life" precisely because they too felt like outsiders, not afraid to admit, even celebrating their awkwardness and insecurities. The fact that this little clique was in danger of joining the mainstream would have seemed threatening to such folk; it meant either they were not part of something special after all, or that their heroes were abandoning them for a shot at commercial success, or both. As silly as this may seem, this stuff mattered to a great deal of people. And Westerberg, who astutely chronicled the lives and times his friends and fans, would certainly have realized this.
- Kiss Me On The Bus
A romantic love song, "Kiss Me on the Bus" offers an urgent plea from the smitten narrator for his crush to loosen up and join him in a spontaneous and public show of affection: "Your tongue, your transfer/Your hand, your answer/On the bus/Watch our reflection/On the bus/I can't stand no rejection...ooh if you knew how I felt now/You wouldn't act so adult now/Hurry, hurry, here comes my stop." With handclaps, sleigh bells, and a Chuck Berry-like guitar solo, the song -- from the college-radio classic Tim (1985) -- is an effervescent piece of pop from a band at the top of their game; the performances seem effortless and ebullient. The demo version of the song, as heard on bootlegs, was a fairly pedestrian, careening pop-punk arrangement. The original arrangement is worth seeking out for hardcore Replacements fans interested in the germination of the song. The more nuanced album version, however, is a far more rewarding offering. A rockabilly pop song in the style of Nick Lowe, the band is clearly confident in Paul Westerberg's songwriting and, with the prior LP, Let It Be (1984), had already begun to outgrow their uni-dimensional garage band sound. This assured perspective allows the band to balance their raw and unstudied tendencies with closer attention to crafting arrangements and increasingly higher production values. The Tim version of "Kiss Me on the Bus" is a swinging, acoustic/electric hybrid, with alternately muted and ringing guitar and bass parts and a more musical Chris Mars drum part than the demo. The layered textures allow for Westerberg's emotionally expressive vocals to shine through. The song is an example of the band at their peak; for many fans, the band lost a bit too much of their rowdy spirit on their next album, Pleased to Meet Me. While that 1987 album featured some of Westerberg's best songs, it suffered from antiseptic production and performances.
- Swingin’ Party
For a period of a few years, the Replacements were capable of seamlessly tossing together elements of punk rock, heavy metal, rockabilly, folk, country, and Brill Building/ Tin Pan Alley-style pop -- all on the same album, sometimes even tying a slew of such influences together in one song. They were sort of an NRBQ for a new generation, a bar band taking in and digesting as many forms of American pop music as they could. Rarely did the band feel self-conscious; in fact, they were usually a bit too uninhibited and loose for mainstream tastes. From the band's excellent Tim (1985) LP, "Swingin’ Party" continues in the Replacements' habit of mixing up the traditional with the contemporary. It is a breezy ballad with a climbing-scale melody reminiscent of "Something Stupid," of all things, the duet made famous by Frank and Nancy Sinatra. "Swingin’ Party" is based around a kind of country-ish, early rock & roll groove that Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, or Ricky Nelson might have worked. With a warts-and-all approach to the performance and production, the Replacements save the song from sounding like pastiche or overly retro. If anything, the band sounds more like such English pub-rockers and early new-wavers as Elvis Costello or Nick Lowe, by tackling a 1950s/'60s-style ballad with an attitude that is at once earnest and irreverent. Tommy Erdelyi's production includes such obvious nods to early rock & roll as a slap-back tape-echo on Bob Stinson's staccato electric-guitar chords and Duane Eddy-like twangy guitar solo, but he also keeps in a few dissonant moments and does little to dull the Replacements' notorious raw edge. The Replacements would tackle such traditional pop styles in almost the same way the Pogues took on traditional Celtic music. Paul Westerberg's lyrics offers a 180-degree, self-deprecating twist on the traditional love ballad, the sort that would offer burning pledges of love and worthiness. Westerberg's narrator is the same type of insecure and scared boy-man, the hopeless failure who readily accepts his limitations, that he features in many of his songs: "If being wrong's a crime, I'm serving forever/If being strong's your kind, then I need help here with this feather/If being afraid is a crime, we hang side-by-side/At the swinging party down the line." He sings such ironic and tragi-comic lines as "Bring your own lampshades/Somewhere there's a party/Here it's never-ending/Can't remember when it started" with a quiver in his voice, like nervous laughter. With the impending firing of the troubled Bob Stinson, the Replacements -- and Westerberg in particular -- were moving on from their personas as lovable drunks, an image that was becoming increasingly less charming. As with another ballad on Tim, "Here Comes a Regular," Westerberg turns an incisive eye on himself and his enabling gang, does not like what he sees, and decides to sober up (well, maybe not right away, but soon) and try to grow up. While airing his growing pains, in the process he turns in some of the best songwriting of his generation.
- Bastards of Young
With "Bastards of Young," the Replacements' Paul Westerberg finally delivered the rock & roll anthem he'd always threatened -- a rallying cry for a generation of misfits and ne'er-do-wells raised on false hopes and dim aspirations, it's less about thwarting fate than accepting it, a celebration of resignation and defeat in the absence of anything else worth clinging to. "Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled/It beats pickin' cotton and waitin' to be forgotten," Westerberg asserts, his ragged, world-weary voice pitted against a muscular guitar riff distilled from endless hours of classic rock radio; the matter-of-fact profundity of couplets like "The ones that love us best are the ones we'll lay to rest/And visit their graves on holidays at best/The ones who love us least are the ones we'll die to please" is startling -- in his offhand, sheepishly poetic way, he captures life's most bitter ironies to perfection. Yet it's frustratingly appropriate that much of "Bastards of Young" is unintelligible, the poignancy and sensitivity of Westerberg's lyrics obscured by his deliberately half-assed diction -- even the final, acerbic cries of "Take it, it's yours" blur together as the song crashes and burns. Also noteworthy is the "Bastards of Young" video clip -- comprised of a single black-and-white take of a stereo blasting out the song, its utter contempt for the music video medium and the culture which spawned it is so hilariously palpable that in its own unique way, it's one of the landmarks of the form.
- Left of the Dial
"Left of the Dial" is, in fact, a love song. Not only to college radio (the low-wattage, non-commercial stations found at the lower end of the FM spectrum), but to a specific person. Paul Westerberg revealed in interviews that the song was directed towards Angie Carlson, guitarist in Let's Active, whom Westerberg met and became smitten with on tour. The two groups' touring schedules didn't coincide, however, and the next time Westerberg heard Carlson was when she was being interviewed on a college radio station. None of this is explicit in the lyrics, but there's a typically gruff sense of heart-on-the-recently-puked-on-sleeve romanticism on display here that makes it easy to fill in the blanks. The overall mood is wistful but unsentimental, with a fine Bob Stinson solo, making this one of the group's best mid-period ballads. Unsurprisingly, it became an all-time college radio classic, one of those songs that is forever tied to its time and place.
- Little Mascara
The best song that the Rolling Stones forgot to write for Some Girls, the Replacements begin "Little Mascara" with a similar twin-electric-guitar-riff attack as the Keith Richards and Ron Wood interweaving on the Stones' 1978 garage-roots return. Bob Stinson and Paul Westerberg play naturally off of each other in this driving, mid-tempo rocker. A tribute to a woman friend trapped in a bad marriage, Paul Westerberg again exhibits the extraordinary sense of pathos in his writing. He had always shown an eye for detail, and his material -- even the earliest thrashy stuff -- always had a depth of heart. But on 1985's Tim, Westerberg turned it up a notch, with the sort of keenly drawn characters -- desperate and lonely working-class folks and hometown losers -- who draw praise for other chroniclers of the forgotten, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits. Indeed, in a better world, it would have been Westerberg, not John Cougar Mellancamp, to inherit some of the same heartland mainstream audience that Springsteen speaks to and for: "For the moon you keep shootin'/Throw your rope up in the air/For the kids you stay together/You nap 'em and you slap 'em in a high chair/All you ever wanted was someone to take care of you/All you're ever losing is/A little mascara/Little mascara." Westerberg's incisive lines like, "All you ever wanted/Was someone Ma'd be scared of," seem almost effortless, and the song does not draw undue attention to itself; one could be forgiven if after a few listens they just heard the chorus and assumed it was a song about a breakup between the narrator and a girlfriend. While catchy, "Little Mascara" was not the single and was pretty much buried as the second to last song on the extremely strong record. Any residual appreciation could be easily wiped out by one of Westerberg's masterpieces, "Here Comes a Regular," which came right after and closed the album. But "Little Mascara" is among those songs of which Westerberg is rightfully most proud.
- Here Comes A Regular
A poignant testament from one who decides to stay in his own suburban hometown with just a few sad-sack others, drinking in their local watering hole while so many of their generation have moved on. The plaintive ballad "Here Comes a Regular" serves as the perfect closer to the classic Replacements album Tim (1985), a record that includes another song that focuses on generational themes, the anthemic "Bastards of Young." Over the autumnal sounds of a strummed acoustic guitar playing just three folky, suspended chords high up the neck (think "Knocking on Heaven's Door") and haunting Mellotron-like string sounds, Paul Westerberg sings one of his best songs in a bruised, cracking voice swimming in reverb, setting the mood with the opening lines, "Well a person can work up a mean, mean thirst/After a hard day of nothing much at all/Summer's passed, it's too late to cut the grass/Ain't much to rake anyway in the fall." The lyrics are rich with evocative images and sharp, personal, crushing detail. Westerberg takes the voice of one who feels like he's wasted too much of his life, a guy who has <|>almost had enough of small comforts like a shared drink and the shared misery of fellow failures: "And sometimes I just ain't in the mood/To take my place in back with the loudmouths/You're like a picture on a fridge that's never stocked with food/I used to live at home, now I stay in the house." Westerberg joins Tom Waits as a barstool poet, moving far past his humble punk rock garage band roots with incisive lines and clever turns-of-phrase like that last line. Westerberg was one of a few songwriters coming from punk rock roots to successfully inject a high level of emotion and pathos into his songs, finding a majestic, though precarious balance between raw performances and production and accomplished songcraft. Make no mistake, "Here Comes a Regular" is more than a melancholy or whimsical song about barflies, it is a deeply sad, lonely lament, with heartbreaking lines like, "A drinking buddy's that's bound to another town/And once the police made you go away/And even if you're in the arms of someone's baby now/I take a great big whiskey to you anyway/And everybody wants to be someone's here/Someone will show up, never fear/Am I the only one who feels ashamed?" For those who know the history of the Replacements, the song is given a particularly devastating perspective if they envision one of this song's characters as Bob Stinson, the troubled, substance-abusing guitarist who got kicked out of the infamously dysfunctional band he shared with his brother, Tommy, drummer Chris Mars, and Westerberg. Stinson finally died from his addictions in 1995. The morbid joke that went around back then was that Stinson must have really had a problem in order to get tossed from this notorious bunch. In "Here Comes a Regular," it is almost as if Westerberg sees himself as growing up, sad to "turn (his) back on a 'pay you back last call,'" and thus a friend, but perhaps finally making the decision to move on. In a final, profoundly desolate image, the song's narrator leaves the warmth of the bar and turns up his collar to the oncoming winter weather. One cannot help but wonder if he really will move on or be back tomorrow night.
Tim
Let It Be made the Replacements into college radio and critical favorites, leading the group to a major-label contract with Sire. The band's major-label debut, Tim, does represent a bit of a compromise of the group's garage punk sound. Producer Tommy Erdelyi (formerly of the Ramones) helped clean up the band's sound, primarily by harnessing the rhythm section to a click track -- no longer does the band thrash all over the place, they keep a steady rocking beat. Similarly, Bob Stinson is kept in check, and his wildfire guitar bubbles above the surface only on two cuts, "Dose of Thunder" and "Lay It Down Clown," which are both filler. Some of the rockers, even the anthemic "Bastards of Young," are gutted by the cleaner sound, but the overall effect of the record isn't hurt, because Paul Westerberg turns in his finest overall set of songs, ranging from the charming love song "Kiss Me on the Bus" and the college radio anthem "Left of the Dial" to the detailed chronicles of loneliness like "Here Comes a Regular," "Hold My Life," and "Swingin' Party." Westerberg's melodies and observations are sharper than ever, giving Tim an eloquent but edgy power that can't be diluted by the tame production.
- Hold My Life
Kicking off the album Tim, which saw the gifted Paul Westerberg taking over almost all of the songwriting and honing his craft, the Replacements offer another fine generational anthem. Self-deprecating, awkward, immature social retards were usually the voices of Westerberg's songs during his tenure with the Replacements, as well as his solo career, and his protagonists spoke directly to hundreds of thousands of similarly disaffected young adults in the mid- to late '80s. A Stonsey, two-guitar rocker, "Hold My Life" also brings to mind Westerberg's other musical heroes, Alex Chilton's Big Star. The song is a memorable, singalong pop melody, played with a bit of the edge that is held over from their early days as a punk rock garage band. In the spirit of the Ramones' -- who Tommy Erdelyi produces -- "I Wanna Be Sedated," the narrator positions himself as a helpless, hopeless case who surrenders control of himself to others: "Hold my life until I'm ready to use it/Hold my life because I just might lose it/Because I just might lose it." Though obviously humorous, Westerberg sings with an air of desperation, playing on the words "die" and "dye," as if he is warning a new romantic interest that he may need her more than she needs him. Though the band was clearly cleaning up their act a little and Westerberg was letting down his guard and letting his melodies shine out a bit from the din, "Hold My Life" was still far more raw than anything heard on mainstream radio in 1985. But we can hear Westerberg "maturing" -- a word that was the death-knell for post-punk bands of the era when signing to a major label -- as the Replacements did for this album -- was more than suspect for many fans. Most of the Replacements' audience identified with songs like "Hold My Life" precisely because they too felt like outsiders, not afraid to admit, even celebrating their awkwardness and insecurities. The fact that this little clique was in danger of joining the mainstream would have seemed threatening to such folk; it meant either they were not part of something special after all, or that their heroes were abandoning them for a shot at commercial success, or both. As silly as this may seem, this stuff mattered to a great deal of people. And Westerberg, who astutely chronicled the lives and times his friends and fans, would certainly have realized this.
- Kiss Me On The Bus
A romantic love song, "Kiss Me on the Bus" offers an urgent plea from the smitten narrator for his crush to loosen up and join him in a spontaneous and public show of affection: "Your tongue, your transfer/Your hand, your answer/On the bus/Watch our reflection/On the bus/I can't stand no rejection...ooh if you knew how I felt now/You wouldn't act so adult now/Hurry, hurry, here comes my stop." With handclaps, sleigh bells, and a Chuck Berry-like guitar solo, the song -- from the college-radio classic Tim (1985) -- is an effervescent piece of pop from a band at the top of their game; the performances seem effortless and ebullient. The demo version of the song, as heard on bootlegs, was a fairly pedestrian, careening pop-punk arrangement. The original arrangement is worth seeking out for hardcore Replacements fans interested in the germination of the song. The more nuanced album version, however, is a far more rewarding offering. A rockabilly pop song in the style of Nick Lowe, the band is clearly confident in Paul Westerberg's songwriting and, with the prior LP, Let It Be (1984), had already begun to outgrow their uni-dimensional garage band sound. This assured perspective allows the band to balance their raw and unstudied tendencies with closer attention to crafting arrangements and increasingly higher production values. The Tim version of "Kiss Me on the Bus" is a swinging, acoustic/electric hybrid, with alternately muted and ringing guitar and bass parts and a more musical Chris Mars drum part than the demo. The layered textures allow for Westerberg's emotionally expressive vocals to shine through. The song is an example of the band at their peak; for many fans, the band lost a bit too much of their rowdy spirit on their next album, Pleased to Meet Me. While that 1987 album featured some of Westerberg's best songs, it suffered from antiseptic production and performances.
- Swingin’ Party
For a period of a few years, the Replacements were capable of seamlessly tossing together elements of punk rock, heavy metal, rockabilly, folk, country, and Brill Building/ Tin Pan Alley-style pop -- all on the same album, sometimes even tying a slew of such influences together in one song. They were sort of an NRBQ for a new generation, a bar band taking in and digesting as many forms of American pop music as they could. Rarely did the band feel self-conscious; in fact, they were usually a bit too uninhibited and loose for mainstream tastes. From the band's excellent Tim (1985) LP, "Swingin’ Party" continues in the Replacements' habit of mixing up the traditional with the contemporary. It is a breezy ballad with a climbing-scale melody reminiscent of "Something Stupid," of all things, the duet made famous by Frank and Nancy Sinatra. "Swingin’ Party" is based around a kind of country-ish, early rock & roll groove that Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, or Ricky Nelson might have worked. With a warts-and-all approach to the performance and production, the Replacements save the song from sounding like pastiche or overly retro. If anything, the band sounds more like such English pub-rockers and early new-wavers as Elvis Costello or Nick Lowe, by tackling a 1950s/'60s-style ballad with an attitude that is at once earnest and irreverent. Tommy Erdelyi's production includes such obvious nods to early rock & roll as a slap-back tape-echo on Bob Stinson's staccato electric-guitar chords and Duane Eddy-like twangy guitar solo, but he also keeps in a few dissonant moments and does little to dull the Replacements' notorious raw edge. The Replacements would tackle such traditional pop styles in almost the same way the Pogues took on traditional Celtic music. Paul Westerberg's lyrics offers a 180-degree, self-deprecating twist on the traditional love ballad, the sort that would offer burning pledges of love and worthiness. Westerberg's narrator is the same type of insecure and scared boy-man, the hopeless failure who readily accepts his limitations, that he features in many of his songs: "If being wrong's a crime, I'm serving forever/If being strong's your kind, then I need help here with this feather/If being afraid is a crime, we hang side-by-side/At the swinging party down the line." He sings such ironic and tragi-comic lines as "Bring your own lampshades/Somewhere there's a party/Here it's never-ending/Can't remember when it started" with a quiver in his voice, like nervous laughter. With the impending firing of the troubled Bob Stinson, the Replacements -- and Westerberg in particular -- were moving on from their personas as lovable drunks, an image that was becoming increasingly less charming. As with another ballad on Tim, "Here Comes a Regular," Westerberg turns an incisive eye on himself and his enabling gang, does not like what he sees, and decides to sober up (well, maybe not right away, but soon) and try to grow up. While airing his growing pains, in the process he turns in some of the best songwriting of his generation.
- Bastards of Young
With "Bastards of Young," the Replacements' Paul Westerberg finally delivered the rock & roll anthem he'd always threatened -- a rallying cry for a generation of misfits and ne'er-do-wells raised on false hopes and dim aspirations, it's less about thwarting fate than accepting it, a celebration of resignation and defeat in the absence of anything else worth clinging to. "Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled/It beats pickin' cotton and waitin' to be forgotten," Westerberg asserts, his ragged, world-weary voice pitted against a muscular guitar riff distilled from endless hours of classic rock radio; the matter-of-fact profundity of couplets like "The ones that love us best are the ones we'll lay to rest/And visit their graves on holidays at best/The ones who love us least are the ones we'll die to please" is startling -- in his offhand, sheepishly poetic way, he captures life's most bitter ironies to perfection. Yet it's frustratingly appropriate that much of "Bastards of Young" is unintelligible, the poignancy and sensitivity of Westerberg's lyrics obscured by his deliberately half-assed diction -- even the final, acerbic cries of "Take it, it's yours" blur together as the song crashes and burns. Also noteworthy is the "Bastards of Young" video clip -- comprised of a single black-and-white take of a stereo blasting out the song, its utter contempt for the music video medium and the culture which spawned it is so hilariously palpable that in its own unique way, it's one of the landmarks of the form.
- Left of the Dial
"Left of the Dial" is, in fact, a love song. Not only to college radio (the low-wattage, non-commercial stations found at the lower end of the FM spectrum), but to a specific person. Paul Westerberg revealed in interviews that the song was directed towards Angie Carlson, guitarist in Let's Active, whom Westerberg met and became smitten with on tour. The two groups' touring schedules didn't coincide, however, and the next time Westerberg heard Carlson was when she was being interviewed on a college radio station. None of this is explicit in the lyrics, but there's a typically gruff sense of heart-on-the-recently-puked-on-sleeve romanticism on display here that makes it easy to fill in the blanks. The overall mood is wistful but unsentimental, with a fine Bob Stinson solo, making this one of the group's best mid-period ballads. Unsurprisingly, it became an all-time college radio classic, one of those songs that is forever tied to its time and place.
- Little Mascara
The best song that the Rolling Stones forgot to write for Some Girls, the Replacements begin "Little Mascara" with a similar twin-electric-guitar-riff attack as the Keith Richards and Ron Wood interweaving on the Stones' 1978 garage-roots return. Bob Stinson and Paul Westerberg play naturally off of each other in this driving, mid-tempo rocker. A tribute to a woman friend trapped in a bad marriage, Paul Westerberg again exhibits the extraordinary sense of pathos in his writing. He had always shown an eye for detail, and his material -- even the earliest thrashy stuff -- always had a depth of heart. But on 1985's Tim, Westerberg turned it up a notch, with the sort of keenly drawn characters -- desperate and lonely working-class folks and hometown losers -- who draw praise for other chroniclers of the forgotten, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits. Indeed, in a better world, it would have been Westerberg, not John Cougar Mellancamp, to inherit some of the same heartland mainstream audience that Springsteen speaks to and for: "For the moon you keep shootin'/Throw your rope up in the air/For the kids you stay together/You nap 'em and you slap 'em in a high chair/All you ever wanted was someone to take care of you/All you're ever losing is/A little mascara/Little mascara." Westerberg's incisive lines like, "All you ever wanted/Was someone Ma'd be scared of," seem almost effortless, and the song does not draw undue attention to itself; one could be forgiven if after a few listens they just heard the chorus and assumed it was a song about a breakup between the narrator and a girlfriend. While catchy, "Little Mascara" was not the single and was pretty much buried as the second to last song on the extremely strong record. Any residual appreciation could be easily wiped out by one of Westerberg's masterpieces, "Here Comes a Regular," which came right after and closed the album. But "Little Mascara" is among those songs of which Westerberg is rightfully most proud.
- Here Comes A Regular
A poignant testament from one who decides to stay in his own suburban hometown with just a few sad-sack others, drinking in their local watering hole while so many of their generation have moved on. The plaintive ballad "Here Comes a Regular" serves as the perfect closer to the classic Replacements album Tim (1985), a record that includes another song that focuses on generational themes, the anthemic "Bastards of Young." Over the autumnal sounds of a strummed acoustic guitar playing just three folky, suspended chords high up the neck (think "Knocking on Heaven's Door") and haunting Mellotron-like string sounds, Paul Westerberg sings one of his best songs in a bruised, cracking voice swimming in reverb, setting the mood with the opening lines, "Well a person can work up a mean, mean thirst/After a hard day of nothing much at all/Summer's passed, it's too late to cut the grass/Ain't much to rake anyway in the fall." The lyrics are rich with evocative images and sharp, personal, crushing detail. Westerberg takes the voice of one who feels like he's wasted too much of his life, a guy who has <|>almost had enough of small comforts like a shared drink and the shared misery of fellow failures: "And sometimes I just ain't in the mood/To take my place in back with the loudmouths/You're like a picture on a fridge that's never stocked with food/I used to live at home, now I stay in the house." Westerberg joins Tom Waits as a barstool poet, moving far past his humble punk rock garage band roots with incisive lines and clever turns-of-phrase like that last line. Westerberg was one of a few songwriters coming from punk rock roots to successfully inject a high level of emotion and pathos into his songs, finding a majestic, though precarious balance between raw performances and production and accomplished songcraft. Make no mistake, "Here Comes a Regular" is more than a melancholy or whimsical song about barflies, it is a deeply sad, lonely lament, with heartbreaking lines like, "A drinking buddy's that's bound to another town/And once the police made you go away/And even if you're in the arms of someone's baby now/I take a great big whiskey to you anyway/And everybody wants to be someone's here/Someone will show up, never fear/Am I the only one who feels ashamed?" For those who know the history of the Replacements, the song is given a particularly devastating perspective if they envision one of this song's characters as Bob Stinson, the troubled, substance-abusing guitarist who got kicked out of the infamously dysfunctional band he shared with his brother, Tommy, drummer Chris Mars, and Westerberg. Stinson finally died from his addictions in 1995. The morbid joke that went around back then was that Stinson must have really had a problem in order to get tossed from this notorious bunch. In "Here Comes a Regular," it is almost as if Westerberg sees himself as growing up, sad to "turn (his) back on a 'pay you back last call,'" and thus a friend, but perhaps finally making the decision to move on. In a final, profoundly desolate image, the song's narrator leaves the warmth of the bar and turns up his collar to the oncoming winter weather. One cannot help but wonder if he really will move on or be back tomorrow night.
