Here is the interview Peter did with Paul. This was a nice spread for him in the Washington Post. I remember I clipped the article out of the paper and kept it somewhere.
A REPLACEMENT FINDS HIS OWN PLACE
By Peter Gilstrap
June 13, 1993
MINNEAPOLIS -- "I used to be a lot of things," says Paul Westerberg with a telling half smile that speaks a hundred shrugs. A few of those things were: leader of a Minneapolis band called the Replacements, writer of maybe the best rock-and-roll songs of the last 12 years, a singer with a tar-and-nicotine voice capable of screaming from the gut and cracking from the heart.
In the '80s, he was as reluctant to claim the title -- bestowed by adoring critics and fans -- of wounded pop laureate as he was eager to write of his confused emotions about growing up in that decade. "Unsatisfied," "Sixteen Blue," "Treatment Bound," "Hold My Life," "I Don't Know," "White and Lazy," "Achin' to Be": titles that confess for themselves.
"14 Songs," his solo debut, will soon hit the shelves and prove that he came out of the 12-year Replacements roller coaster with his musical talents not only intact but working better than ever. There are no broad stylistic jumps on this album of go-to-hell rockers, fluid ballads and good old pop, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Maybe just tune it up a bit.
Westerberg piloted the Replacements -- "four young men against the world" -- through countless drunken shows that teetered between anarchistic brilliance and utter stupidity. Shows that created legends but left a real-life reputation of mandatory sloppiness that still lingers like a bad tattoo.
He was married and divorced, battled the bottle, smoked a lot, bit his nails.
Two years ago, after eight acclaimed albums whose influence can be heard in such current groups as Nirvana and Soul Asylum, the Replacements died, a victim of themselves as much as anything else. In keeping with rock band breakup tradition, the Mats went down amid firings, ego wars and general bitterness. And they had never achieved the elusive rock-and-roll godhead many thought the band was heir to.
"I think during the course of the band it was easy for us to find scapegoats and point fingers at the record company or other bands or the fans, and that's all crap," Westerberg says today. "You could list a hundred reasons, but the bottom line is we didn't go for it hard enough.
"Someone who's made it will say, 'Oh, these are the words of a loser, these are the words of a last-place guy who's had to find a way to put credence in where he is.' I don't look at it that way. I'm grateful for everything that happened to us, it's built me to this point where I'm fairly strong. I think a major success back then would have weakened us, made us more fearful. I'm glad it didn't happen. If it happens now, I'm into it."
Today Paul Westerberg, 33, still bites his nails and smokes a lot -- some things never change -- but the booze and the supposed bad attitude are things of the past.
There is still room on Westerberg's sleeve for his heart; his new tunes, as always, lay bare the songwriter's feelings in terms that range from heart-jerking innocence to cocksure swagger, all sung with the trademark voice that a decade of one-night stands couldn't kill. (Of his voice, he says, "It's the same as my face. I don't love it but I'm used to it.") He's lost none of his wry-to-black sense of humor, but the most addictive thing about Westerberg's writing is its raw honesty. It's hard to find a varnished lyric in the batch. Even the cigarettes he smokes are True.
He inhales and stabs out many of those over lunch at a downtown, somewhat trendy restaurant here called Chez Bananas. The food is Caribbean, there are inflatable sharks hanging from the ceiling, and a Mr. Potato Head sits next to the ashtray. Despite tales of a low tolerance for interviews, he is relaxed and gracious.
A kinder, gentler Westerberg? Well, at least a man who's come to grips with the second word in the term "music business." "I'll come and do interviews when I don't want to, and I'll do a bunch of takes for a video when I don't want to, when five years ago I would have just said, 'Get out of my face -- I'm done,' " he says, and, indeed, stays right where he is.
There are certain hoops an artist must at least stumble through to push an album, and Westerberg didn't make "14 Songs" just for his parents to buy. "I've sort of adopted the philosophy of envisioning the target, pulling back the bow and letting the arrow fly without watching where it lands," he explains. "If it goes big, great. If it flops, I'll be upset because I really tried and I think it's damn good -- this one's from the gut, and I'm banking on the fact that someone's going to sense that. But I want to give it a fair chance; I felt like if I blew off all these interviews and didn't do a video and it failed, who is there to blame but me?"
The 14 songs that became "14 Songs" germinated after the Replacements' last recorded gasp, "All Shook Down" (1991), an album Westerberg describes as "the best I could do at the time. ... It wasn't very uplifting, though who says music has to be uplifting?" The almost-but-not-quite first Westerberg solo album, it "chronicles the breakup of the group, and the falling-apart of my life." But, he adds, "that defeatist fear that came to a head at the time of 'All Shook Down' was gone by the time the band broke up." Things began looking brighter.
In between the two albums, he was asked by director Cameron Crowe to write the soundtrack to the film "Singles." Heading into it with the notion that "I might fall on my face," Westerberg accepted. It was different from his previous work, though: "The idea of scoring a film is, if you notice the music it's no good. My whole career has been about getting attention and making sure people notice, so I had to tone it way down, take out the minor chords."
After "Singles," his mission was clear. "Okay, now I'm going to make a record," he says he told himself. "I started looking over these songs I'd written, reworking them or throwing them away and starting new ones." What emerged was a disparate combination of tunes, bound together by production that is anything but slick -- "kind of a novelty in this day and age."
A perfect example is "Black Eyed Susan," a lovely acoustic guitar and drum machine ode to an intravenous drug user -- almost McCartneyesque, except that McCartney doesn't write about such things. It was "done in the kitchen on a four-track {recorder}. You get a certain innocence and immediacy," he says, "but it's obviously very ragtag-sounding." "Things" is a classic Westerberg juggling act -- simultaneously wistful, spare and cutting, woven together with shots of country licks. ("Things I'm bound to tell you like/ That dress looks great on ya/ I could use some breathing room/ I'm still in love with you ... Things I'd never tell you/ Down the line someday/ You'll be a song I sing/ A thing/ I give away.")
And People magazine was the inspiration for "Mannequin Shop," a commentary on plastic surgery complete with a Seven Dwarfs-style whistling chorus. The magazine was at hand, featuring "whoever {was} on the cover, and they had a little nip and tuck, and I thought, 'Aha! I'll have one little mass culture drivel song on the record, it can't hurt me.' If I wrote 14 of 'em I'd be afraid."
Though he can pound out rockers that other musicians would crawl across broken beer bottles to write, perhaps Westerberg's strongest gift is for ballads. Not the soppy drivel dripped out by most Top 40 artists, but beautiful, powerful things that are as anthemic as they are lyrically fragile. There are two on his new release, "First Glimmer" and "Runaway Wind."
The latter recalls, in spirit, Gram Parsons at his best. It's a story of getting older, but not of giving up. "You trade your telescope for a keyhole/ You make way for the gray that's in your brown/ Dreams made way for plans/ So you watch life from the stands/ Come on I'll help you burn 'em to the ground."
"I like to go in with one or two real keepers," offers Westerberg. "A couple ballads, then it gives me the chance to bash out some rockers whenever the mood strikes."
There are a variety of hurdles that go along with a maiden solo release: fear, responsibility and renewed commitment among them. Plus, Westerberg adds, "I had to learn how to spell glimmer and mannequin for this record."
He mows the lawn. Uses a power mower. It relaxes him, he reveals, perhaps even rising to a higher, Zenlike state. "Absolutely," says Westerberg, without a trace of cynicism. When he rented his current suburban house he was "gonna hire some kid to do it, but as soon as I started doing it I felt like, God, I'm 9 years old. Or am I 33, or am I 69? You can go out and do or be whatever; it doesn't matter. It all comes back to the damn lawn."
But that's not all. "Actually, I planted some stuff too, dug the weeds out. You couldn't have got me to do that as a kid, but when you have this other life, it's kind of fun. I actually enjoyed being in the dirt. I was thinking, this is cool. I need this."
And apparently not much else; he is a man of simple pleasures, according to his longtime friend and former band-mate, guitarist Slim Dunlap. "Everywhere I go, people want to know about him because of this mysterious image he's fostered," " says Dunlap, a thin, tall man wedged into a booth at the C.C. Club, a local watering hole for rockers. (Many a drink was drained down Replacement gullets here, before alcohol became a no-no for certain members.)
"If you tell people the truth about Paul Westerberg it's kind of a letdown," Dunlap continues. "He's sitting in his house a few blocks from here alone. He's not an unhappy person, he's just your classic lone wolf."
Dunlap speaks the truth, says Westerberg. "I just work at home. I don't take part in the nightlife and the scene." Much of this dedication may have to do with two years of sobriety. "Life has always been great, it's just that when I was drinking I didn't see it," he adds. "It's helped me work harder and worry less, to sum it up."
Westerberg was born and raised here, and although he could opt for life on either glittering coast, he displays a simple affection for his city, which allows him a life of Midwestern normality. "I was thinking for a moment of telling the record company that I refuse to do interviews in my home town, because if you look at the world as where you work, then your home town is your bedroom," he says.
His wiry shadow rarely darkens a club doorway these days, but then again, the guy who dresses up as Mickey Mouse probably doesn't spend his days off at Disneyland. "When the Mats first started I used to go out a ton, but after years of touring it gets to you. I come home and I want the opposite: quiet, peace. I'm not like those guys who need to get onstage after a month to affirm their being," he says. The man doesn't even like to talk about guitars. "It's a hunk of wood with wires -- what could be more boring? It's like, I got a big red loud one, all right?"
Or maybe he's just getting older. "When we were 24 it was like, how dare a guy 30 come to one of our gigs? Get a life!" snorts the man who has taken great care to fashion a new one for himself. "Now I've been away from the scene for three or four years and I'll go out and see the same guys who used to come and see me. Some people think, 'Well, I haven't changed a bit so that's good.' To me, that's the biggest crime you could ever commit. If you haven't changed, you should be ashamed of yourself."
Man cannot live by gardening and songwriting alone. Westerberg has a library card and knows how to use it. Which leads back to songwriting. "I am a fan of short stories and the economy of one sentence that says so much," he explains. Flannery O'Connor is a favorite. "That is the craft, the gift of a great writer to put all of the lyrical vision into one simple-worded sentence. I think in the past my lyrics have been confusing, but I'm trying to make them more simple, to accomplish more in one sentence."
Unusual talk for a rock-and-roll songwriter, but in many ways Westerberg has creative ties as close to pop craftsmen of the past -- Sammy Cahn, Cole Porter -- as he does to contemporary artists. (Listen to the cocktail jazz-pop of "Androgynous," "Nightclub Jitters" or "The Last.") But unlike the old guard, he doesn't read music:
"Reading music is like listening to flowers. I don't understand the concept." So there.
"I think the craft and the goal -- if there is one -- is to make yourself understood," he continues. "I don't want to challenge the listener, but then again if I make you think a little ... Whoever said 50 percent of what I write is crap so you can understand the other 50 percent, there's truth to that. I'll lay some things out in silly black and white, and other things you can chew on."
Westerberg has learned another major fact about his music, though as with all good lessons, it took time. "I am writing for me, and it took me 12 years to figure that out," he says pointedly. "I really don't dwell on who is my audience. ... If I can't please myself I can't please anybody."
By all indications, he's ready for the success the Replacements somehow missed. Whether he can achieve it on his own terms is anybody's guess, but taking to the road soon -- "probably a whole tour of dumps" -- with a newly formed backup band is step one.
Westerberg claims he won't miss the camaraderie of the old boys. "I've got my new guys -- that's part of the fun. Once I get up there it's going to be a band, and I figure if you're going to play rock-and-roll that's what you need."
Growing old -- as opposed to just growing up -- in rock-and-roll is a daunting concept, but one that Westerberg feels comfortable with. "I'm a fan of rock-and-roll and I'll love it till I'm an old man. I don't love the extraneous crap that comes with it, or the fact that it means you have to be dressed up in a bar, 22 years old and on drugs," he says. "But that rhythm, I'll always like that."
Our cab is headed across town, back to the suburbs after lunch, and Westerberg is gazing out the window at the passing sights. A big church goes by -- it's Catholic, he says, and so is he. "Sometimes I go with my dad." An arena appears; "I saw Led Zeppelin there once."
Pauses of comfortable silence permeate the ride, broken only by the radio. At one point he joins in, unconsciously, it seems, on the chorus of a James Taylor song. Could be a ride with almost anybody. The taxi drops a passenger; Westerberg continues on home. It pulls away, but there he is -- the soulful loner, the ex-spotlight drunk, the tough punk, the average guy -- turned around in the back window, waving goodbye.
www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1993/06/13/a-replacement-finds-his-own-place/23e1146d-e4ac-4c78-895e-f638064dee3e/