Jer
Beagle Scout
Posts: 1,182
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Post by Jer on Feb 18, 2021 18:05:55 GMT -5
Today is the anniversary of Bob Stinson's death. SiriusXM Volume channel is noting the event in their hourly news updates.
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Post by con on Feb 24, 2021 20:44:48 GMT -5
Old interview with Paul from 99 seems to have resurfaced. I remember seeing this years ago..... youtu.be/rq56Z7hYzr0Incredible find. Thx! His last little anecdote... damn. That’s why we love the guy, right? And about his artist vs. wanna-be rock ‘n’ roller take: he was both, more than most. (It’s a small club at any rate.) I think he knows it too.
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Jer
Beagle Scout
Posts: 1,182
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Post by Jer on Feb 25, 2021 22:36:40 GMT -5
Old interview with Paul from 99 seems to have resurfaced. I remember seeing this years ago..... youtu.be/rq56Z7hYzr0I've never seen that. Suicane-era. It's got a dark, jaded feel to it, like he knows what's up, and it ain't great.
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gah
First Class Scout
Posts: 169
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Post by gah on Feb 28, 2021 15:54:30 GMT -5
Matt Berninger, of The National, released a lyric video for a song called "Let It Be." In the description box on YouTube it says:
“This is a new song about an old frenemy. Not Paul McCartney or Westerberg.” - Matt Berninger
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JimP
Dances With Posts
Posts: 91
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Post by JimP on Mar 13, 2021 11:03:47 GMT -5
Fun little song I stumbled on. Mentions lots of Minneapolis musicians. "Bobby Stinsons Guitar" by the Legendary Jim Ruiz Group. youtu.be/8Lu4s8t71XA
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Post by con on Mar 14, 2021 17:16:17 GMT -5
[Grammys spoiler alert]
According to The New York Times, Bob Mehr has won a Grammy for Best Album Notes (for Dead Man’s Pop). Congrats, Bob!
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Post by oldmatsfan on Mar 29, 2021 12:50:44 GMT -5
Thank you Hagbard, I love hearing Bob Mehr talk about the Replacements, so insightful, listening to it now.
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Post by Hagbard on Mar 29, 2021 21:04:30 GMT -5
Thank you Hagbard, I love hearing Bob Mehr talk about the Replacements, so insightful, listening to it now. You’re welcome, oldmatsfan. I’m half way through myself now, it’s a pretty good listen!
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Post by Hagbard on Mar 31, 2021 17:53:14 GMT -5
I stumbled across this awesome live performance of I Hate Music live from 81. The quality is great, the energy amazing. youtu.be/Zl-FTYruPUY
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Post by oldmatsfan on Mar 31, 2021 18:09:55 GMT -5
I stumbled across this awesome live performance of I Hate Music live from 81. The quality is great, the energy amazing. youtu.be/Zl-FTYruPUYRecording sounds really good, thanks Hagbard. Sounds like the version from 7th Street Entry 1-30-81 boot I've got.
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Post by Veets on Apr 9, 2021 17:12:43 GMT -5
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Post by raccoon on May 7, 2021 8:51:25 GMT -5
The Mats got ink in The New Yorker? Sell outs! Okay, it is actually a review of Mehr's book from 2016 with some interesting insights. I just stumbled upon it so it is new for me and maybe for you idk...:
Why Rock Criticism Was Essential to the Replacements By David Cantwell
The song “Alex Chilton,” by the Replacements, belongs to a subgenre of pop records that help us hear other records. Like Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said,” Bob Dylan’s “Song to Woody,” Taylor Swift’s “Tim McGraw,” and Chiddy Bang’s “Ray Charles,” “Alex Chilton,” released in 1987, is music that doubles as music criticism, a record review with melody and rhythm.
Chilton, who died in 2010, was a singer and songwriter for the blue-eyed-soul band the Box Tops and the power-pop cult band Big Star, as well as a beloved, if obscure, solo act. Sing-along catchy, with hand claps and crunchy guitars, “Alex Chilton” sounds like all of Chilton’s sounds smushed together. The clever, enigmatic lyrics get at the reclusive Chilton’s mysterious power, describing him, at one point, as an “invisible man who can sing in a visible voice.” The Replacements’ principal songwriter, Paul Westerberg, might have made a pretty good rock critic if he hadn’t been fronting his own band.
As it happens, the Replacements—who were dubbed the ’Mats, short for placemats, by their fans—have themselves been assayed in song. In 2002, eleven years after the band disbanded, the Nashville singer-songwriter Tommy Womack released “The Replacements,” an eight-and-a-half minute ballad that recounts the band’s legend and limitations with lyrics both heartfelt and hilarious:
They weren't afraid of anything or anybody, like skinny little dogs in a cage They'd get drunker than you've gotten in your entire life, Have another drink on top of that one and walk right out onto the stage.
On other nights, Womack declares, the band could leave an audience “white-knuckled, straitjacket, dumb-ass blind. / They were the greatest rock-and-roll band I ever did hear!” Womack’s key critical insight is that the band’s unevenness fomented its status. “You paid and you took your chance,” he concludes. “ ’Cause when they were good . . . God got up to dance.”
The ’Mats, who first bonded in Minneapolis in the late seventies, were not ambitious or disciplined in the double-album-producing manner of fellow-Minneapolitans Prince or Hüsker Dü. They were irresponsible, self-destructive, and—as a series of demolished and befouled tour vans attested—just plain destructive. They seemed to believe that they didn’t deserve their big dreams. Westerberg emerged as the group’s leader, providing ragged lead vocals and hooky, sharp-as-a-tack songs that grew steadily hookier and sharper as the albums progressed. The bass player, Tommy Stinson, who joined the band when he was twelve, had wild energy and Teen Beat good looks. Tommy’s half-brother Bob was on lead guitar, and Chris Mars was on drums. Bob was kicked out of the band, in 1986, for excessive substance abuse and general unreliability, which seems a little like being forced to leave the N.B.A. because you’re too tall. He was replaced by Slim Dunlap. The band called it quits in 1991.
The often dispiriting details behind the band’s notoriety and demise are laid out masterfully by Bob Mehr in “Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements,” published earlier this year. Mehr tracks a mostly bloodless trail of misused friends, abused managers, sabotaged sets, games of dodge-knife—per Tommy Stinson’s description, “like dodgeball . . . with knives”—furniture launched from windows, vomit hurled onto the ceiling, cheated-on girlfriends, punked producers, and fired agents. Rob Light, who looked to sign the band to the powerhouse agency C.A.A., tells Mehr about the time Westerberg and the other ’Mats arranged to meet him in what turned out to be a pitch-black college locker room, where the band, hidden from view, banged on lockers, sang “March of the Winkies,” from “The Wizard of Oz” (“Oh wee oh!”), and peppered him with questions like “Can we open for Madonna?” Light declined to sign the band. The Replacements did not make for good clients or good spouses, but they do make for a good read.
What elevates the book beyond titillation is the explanatory context Mehr provides for all this terrible behavior. Each member of the band was troubled in his own particular way, but the Stinson brothers, and Bob in particular, had it the worst. Bob was physically and sexually abused by his mother’s boyfriend and eventually diagnosed as bipolar. While the mercurial Westerberg has always been regarded as the public face and chief behind-the-scenes creative force for the band, it’s Bob who emerges in the book as its heart and soul. Mehr portrays him as overmatched by the world, a man-child who kept his day job as a line cook multiple albums into the Replacements’ career, and who was, contra the sound and image of the ’Mats, a lifelong fan of the prog-rock pioneers Yes. After he was fired from the band, he got a job as a janitor, where he encouraged his co-worker Slim Dunlap to take that great new gig he’d been offered. He died in 1995, at the age of thirty-five, and Mehr begins “Trouble Boys” at Bob’s funeral, as the surviving Replacements arrive to pay their respects. “We were just kids,” Westerberg whispers to Bob’s ex-wife. “We didn’t know shit.”
“Trouble Boys” takes us to all the recording sessions, reveals the inspirations behind Westerberg’s key songs, and puts us in the front row at infamous concerts. The Replacements’ early releases—a full-length in 1981 called “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash” and the EP “Stink” a year later—were spiky, sarcastic, and slapdash, and pegged the boys as one more Midwestern hardcore group. But, from the beginning, Westerberg tried for melodies that stuck, and the band was always more punky than punk. “Shiftless When Idle” bounced about like the Buzzcocks, with power chords swiped from the radio-friendly Clash. “If Only You Were Lonely” was a beautiful, vulnerable early B-side, albeit one not quite yet willing to cop to that vulnerability—and working hard to scuff up that beauty. While “shiftless” and “lonely” aren’t words that show up often in hardcore, they do nicely bookend Westerberg’s budding point of view.
“Hootenanny,” from 1983, ran with those ideas. The what-are-you-gonna-do confusions of “Within Your Reach” were fundamental to the Replacements’ ethos, and, set to a drum machine and synth wash, suggested that Westerberg had paid attention as Prince rose to fame across town. But it was a trio of albums in the mid-eighties—“Let It Be,” “Tim,” and “Pleased to Meet Me,” the latter two for the major label Sire—that elevated them to college-rock heroes, masters of the smart-ass and the sincere, the punky and the poppy at once. On songs like “Unsatisfied” and “Answering Machine,” from “Let It Be,” their rocking angst revealed tenderness. On “Hold My Life” and “Little Mascara,” from “Tim,” their tenderness rocked. Westerberg’s portraits of romantic, bleary-eyed losers—“Here Comes a Regular,” off “Tim,” is the most obvious example—were notably clear-eyed and decidedly unromantic. All three albums revealed more and more the more you listened. “The Ledge,” one of the singles off “Pleased to Meet Me,” at first appears to be the story of a kid jumping out a window to his death. But listen again to the melodrama of that edgy opening lick, and to a lyric that somehow has the kid narrating his own suicide in present tense—complete with anticipation of press attention and of the frantic attempts to stop him—and then to the track’s cartoony, echoing plunge, and a different story emerges. “The Ledge” is an all-too-common teen-age daydream: if I killed myself, they’d be sorry. The band’s final two albums have never been well regarded, though they are no more inconsistent, in their polished, ballad-heavy way, than the band’s sloppy, sprinting earliest efforts. “Don’t Tell a Soul,” from 1989, includes “I’ll Be You,” the closest the band ever came to an actual pop hit. “All Shook Down,” the band’s dénouement—save for a temporary reunion last year—was essentially Westerberg’s first solo album; it’s also, a half-dozen official solo efforts later, his best. That’s due in part to the self-descriptive slacker ballad “Sadly Beautiful,” but it’s due most of all to “Nobody,” a dissolute blast of pop, rock, and soul that Mehr, oddly, doesn’t even mention. It’s the sort of song Alex Chilton and the Box Tops could have turned into a Top Forty hit.
Mehr sometimes quotes other music writers, though typically only in their capacity as reviewers—star rankings, letter grades, poll results—rather than as critics. And Mehr doesn’t attempt criticism himself in the book. The meaning of a Paul Westerberg song is here limited to whatever Paul Westerberg says it is. Mehr doesn’t elucidate the band’s musical power as distinct from its alternately poignant and profligate backstory. He doesn’t present an argument for why the Replacements mattered—or why they might still matter. He likely figured that anyone already into the band enough to read a book about it wouldn’t require a case for significance. And he’s probably right. Most pop-music biographers make similar calculations.
But music criticism does seem particularly essential to what the Replacements were up to. Two things that heartland rock-and-roll fans coming of age in the late seventies had that earlier fans did not were punk rock and easy access to rock criticism.
“I was weaned on critics. I read every issue of Creem, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy!,” Westerberg tells Mehr, adding, later, “I started to get a sense of what critics think is cool.” He also got a sense of what a certain type of critic did not think was cool. Critics, Westerberg explains, taught him that Top Forty singles and album-oriented-rock tracks were corny and hackneyed, and that punk rock—Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls especially—was the way to go. Happily, the lessons young Paul Westerberg learned from all those critics freed him to explore new sounds. And, just as happily, he and the other Replacements followed those lessons only intermittently, mixing uncool bubblegum, A.O.R., and singer-songwriter balladry in with the punk—and whatever else was needed. “They were nice guys, they were dicks,” Tommy Womack sings in “The Replacements.” It is hard to imagine that anyone will make a smarter or more thorough case for both halves of that proposition than Mehr has in “Trouble Boys.” As for the ’Mats’ music, the best of it transcends any backstory. A line that Westerberg wrote about Alex Chilton works as well for his own band, teaching us that much of what we listen for in the Replacements’ catalogue begins with the joy of a pure pop crush: “I’m in love! With that song!” (An earlier version of this article misstated Bob Stinson’s job after leaving the band and which album “Answering Machine” appeared on; it also incorrectly identified Stinson’s mother’s boyfriend as his stepfather.)
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Jer
Beagle Scout
Posts: 1,182
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Post by Jer on May 11, 2021 15:27:42 GMT -5
Today on the Eddie Trunk show on SiriusXM Volume, he was doing his occasional "Bands That Should've Been Huge" show and one guy called in with The Replacements. Talked about Trouble Boys, the movie rumors, how they "started punk and hit their stride with PTMM and DTAS." They were on Eddie's radar, mostly because of "Black Diamond," but he said enthusiastically that "I'll Be You" is a GREAT song.
It was a little out of place because the show is mostly hard rock and metal, But he loves Soul Asylum and Pirner, and Cheap Trick, so there's some pockets of crossover. There's a couple things about him that I really struggle with, but any talk show about rock and roll will get my ear.
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