Bob Mehr
Author of Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements
Works by Bob Mehr
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This compelling, well written book about my favorite band shows how, honestly, they were all a bunch of assholes. (I still love their music though!) Slim Dunlap says something about in store band appearances that applies to this book, too: "The more the fans met the Replacements, the more the band was rude, the less they liked them." Numerous interviewees describe the musicians as having a feral gang mentality that sometimes felt charming, unstudied, and authentic but was more often cruel show more and stupid. For example, was burning dollar bills and destroying tour bus/hotel room furniture a sly criticism of capitalism--or were they just a bunch of jerks? They grew up with so little opportunity and education, coupled with so much neglect or outright abuse, and that damaged them yet certainly made them fascinating.
The best parts of this book are the stories behind the music; they really bring the songs to life and demonstrate the musical brilliance of this band. Recommended for all readers and especially for fans--despite the guarantee that you will like them less (as people, not artists) after reading their story. show less
The best parts of this book are the stories behind the music; they really bring the songs to life and demonstrate the musical brilliance of this band. Recommended for all readers and especially for fans--despite the guarantee that you will like them less (as people, not artists) after reading their story. show less
Reading this book is incredibly moving and incredibly sad. The self-destructive behavior of the Replacements, who pretty much deliberately messed up every big opportunity they had, is appalling and hard to believe, but they just kept at it. Whether it is trashing hotel rooms, buses, musical instruments, or themselves, there seems to have been no limit. Even burning $100 bills when all through their most creative period they never had enough money. But somehow out of all of that came some of show more the greatest, most honest, most poetic rock 'n' roll songs every written or performed. Paul Westerberg, high school dropout, was a poet of the first magnitude--better in fact than his fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan at writing lyrics that went straight to the gut. Listening to Replacements songs now is still a moving, powerful experience. Bastards of Young, The Ledge, Androgynous, Never Mind, Skyway, and so many others are absolute classics. This book, obviously a labor of love, but also a brutally honest account of the band and its members from the very beginning (i.e., when they were born!) is riveting from start to finish and could hardly be improved upon (maybe a complete discography), but it is still mostly a mystery how the chemistry worked and how Westerberg could write such great songs, although his constant reading of great writers is perhaps a bit of a clue, but then I read great writers, too....
Obviously the fans, like me, who despite not sharing the regional or class background of the 'Mats, were completely entranced by the emotion--exhilarating or melancholy--of their music, will read this book. We will suffer along as we watch one mistake after another. We'll marvel at how such great songs came to be, and we'll be wistful at what might have been. But, in the end, maybe this is how it had to be. If the Replacements were anything other than the depressed, alcoholic, drug addicted, combative, (fill in your own verbs) people they were, the music they created would have been something else entirely. At least three of the original four lived through it. The main part of the book begins and ends with the funeral of the group's founder and original guitarist, Bob Stinson, who certainly provided the hard-living spirit that the band adapted. After you finish the book, go back and read the opening again and see if you can keep from tearing up, i.e., having tears in your eyes.
For all their greatness, of course, they only achieved fleeting success with the larger public. Some of this was their own doing, of course. But their uncompromising stance with record companies, promoters, fans, and everyone else is also reflected in their music. It is what it is. Perhaps much too honest to be a hit. But great enough to remain in my mind's playlist until the day I die. show less
Obviously the fans, like me, who despite not sharing the regional or class background of the 'Mats, were completely entranced by the emotion--exhilarating or melancholy--of their music, will read this book. We will suffer along as we watch one mistake after another. We'll marvel at how such great songs came to be, and we'll be wistful at what might have been. But, in the end, maybe this is how it had to be. If the Replacements were anything other than the depressed, alcoholic, drug addicted, combative, (fill in your own verbs) people they were, the music they created would have been something else entirely. At least three of the original four lived through it. The main part of the book begins and ends with the funeral of the group's founder and original guitarist, Bob Stinson, who certainly provided the hard-living spirit that the band adapted. After you finish the book, go back and read the opening again and see if you can keep from tearing up, i.e., having tears in your eyes.
For all their greatness, of course, they only achieved fleeting success with the larger public. Some of this was their own doing, of course. But their uncompromising stance with record companies, promoters, fans, and everyone else is also reflected in their music. It is what it is. Perhaps much too honest to be a hit. But great enough to remain in my mind's playlist until the day I die. show less
The Replacements are a band that have left a legacy of great music, yet always seemed to have the potential to do much more. After reading this book though, it seems amazing that they even accomplished what they did. Beyond their music, The Replacements are known for their heavy alcohol and substance abuse and their disastrous antics on-stage. Turns out that they actually played better when drunk, and their worst performances were a rebellion against perceived hostility in the crowd or plain show more old self-sabotage.
Mehr's book traces the band back to their childhoods which were troubled indeed, especially for the Stinson brothers who suffered from abuse and neglect. Each member of the band is well-devoloped within the narrative of the band's rise and fall:
Bob Stinson - The founder of the band who always resented Paul Westerberg essentially taking over, and disliked the move to more melodic pop songs. Stinson's substance abuse problems were the most serious of all The Replacements, and he was forced out of the band in 1986.
Tommy Stinson - Bob had his little brother take up bass, and Tommy ended up developing into the most talented instrumentalist in the band. Tommy's life is remarkable as he drops out of school and he essentially spends his teenage years playing and touring with The Replacements. Eventually he grows close to Westerberg and allies with him against his own brother.
Paul Westerberg - In the story related in the book, Westerberg hears the Stinsons' band rehearsing in their basement and pretty takes over and makes them his band. Westerberg comes across as arrogant and dismissive, and I really felt like punching him in the face by the end of this book. And yet, Westerberg also grows to become a talented songwriter creating introspective songs that speak for the disaffected youth of the 1980s.
Chris Mars - Every band has a "quiet one" and The Replacements' drummer is not just a musician but an artist who finds fulfillment outside of the band. Still the way Paul & Tommy basically ditch him in the later years is just wrong.
Slim Dunlap - A journeyman/session guitarist who takes over after Bob Stinson's ousting, he's older than the rest of the band and settled in his married life, creating quite a contrast. And yet he becomes something of an enforcer for the band against outsiders.
All in all, this is a well-written book that gives the reasons that for all their flaws, we still kind of find ourselves rooting for The Replacements to succeed.
Favorite Passages:
Mehr's book traces the band back to their childhoods which were troubled indeed, especially for the Stinson brothers who suffered from abuse and neglect. Each member of the band is well-devoloped within the narrative of the band's rise and fall:
Bob Stinson - The founder of the band who always resented Paul Westerberg essentially taking over, and disliked the move to more melodic pop songs. Stinson's substance abuse problems were the most serious of all The Replacements, and he was forced out of the band in 1986.
Tommy Stinson - Bob had his little brother take up bass, and Tommy ended up developing into the most talented instrumentalist in the band. Tommy's life is remarkable as he drops out of school and he essentially spends his teenage years playing and touring with The Replacements. Eventually he grows close to Westerberg and allies with him against his own brother.
Paul Westerberg - In the story related in the book, Westerberg hears the Stinsons' band rehearsing in their basement and pretty takes over and makes them his band. Westerberg comes across as arrogant and dismissive, and I really felt like punching him in the face by the end of this book. And yet, Westerberg also grows to become a talented songwriter creating introspective songs that speak for the disaffected youth of the 1980s.
Chris Mars - Every band has a "quiet one" and The Replacements' drummer is not just a musician but an artist who finds fulfillment outside of the band. Still the way Paul & Tommy basically ditch him in the later years is just wrong.
Slim Dunlap - A journeyman/session guitarist who takes over after Bob Stinson's ousting, he's older than the rest of the band and settled in his married life, creating quite a contrast. And yet he becomes something of an enforcer for the band against outsiders.
All in all, this is a well-written book that gives the reasons that for all their flaws, we still kind of find ourselves rooting for The Replacements to succeed.
Favorite Passages:
Though the band’s drinking would come to define and even consume them in later years, in the beginning it was a perfect lubricant for the long hours of practice and their burgeoning friendship. “That was the glue that held us—ol’ Jack Daniels,” said Mars. Westerberg noted: “They weren’t heavy fall-down drunks when I met them. None of us were. We learned to be that together.”show less
Where other groups evinced a certain artfulness or tried to present an idealized vision of themselves, the Replacements were all rough edges and struggle. That was part of the attraction: watching them, you couldn’t help but root for the band.
When Hoeger asked about their career aspirations, Westerberg articulated a prescient vision of the Replacements’ future: “We’d like to become famous without being professional,” he said. “Maybe like a giant cult.”
“To me, the soul of rock-and-roll is mistakes. Mistakes and making them work for you,” Westerberg would note. “In general, music that’s flawless is usually uninspired.”
Over the course of their career onstage, the Replacements would happily play the role of jesters and buffoons, but their concerts were also a high-wire act as well as a geek show. On one level, it was theater, pure performance—but it was real too. The band was constitutionally unable to put on a conventional act. If they were bored, they sounded bored; if they were drunk, the sets careened; if they were angry, their playing seethed; if they felt ornery, the show might devolve into one long piss-take, a joke on the crowd. That kind of calculated authenticity—in all its paradoxical glory—would be the Replacements’ methodology moving forward.
True Replacements fans—not the ones coming to live vicariously through them or to find sanction for their own behavior—were a different breed. “When we started, we were mixed-up kids, and we wrote about it,” said Westerberg. “It’s funny that the people who related to it the most weren’t fucked-up kids, though. Our fans have always been, dare I say, a little more intelligent than the band was labeled as. I always thought that ironic.” Replacements partisans were, on the whole, literate, dark-humored, and a bit confused about their place in the world. They weren’t the go-getters or yuppie types, but they weren’t hopeless wastrels either. They were, Tommy Stinson would note, “more like us than they fuckin’ knew. They didn’t really fit anywhere. They probably didn’t aspire to a whole lot, but also didn’t aspire to doing nothing either. That’s the kind of fan we probably appealed to most: the people that were in that gray area.
Prince was rumored to have lurked in the shadows at some of the Replacements’ shows at First Avenue, but it was in the bathroom of a club in St. Paul where Westerberg finally ran into him. “Oh, hey,” said Westerberg, seeing the dolled-up singer standing next to him at the urinal. “What’s up, man?” Prince turned and responded in cryptic fashion: “Life.”
Dubbing the Replacements “America’s inebriate counterpart to the Smiths,” Reynolds was one of the few European journalists to grasp the peculiar alchemy that fueled the ’Mats: “At the heart of the Replacements lies fatigue, insecurity, a sense of wasted or denied possibilities, but this is a pain that comes out bursting and exuberant, a world weariness that’s positively, paradoxically boisterous.”
If you haven't heard any Replacement songs, you'll wonder from the start why anyone would voluntarily burden themselves with the company of Paul Westerberg, who made a kind of religion out of willfully stupid behavior, despite high native intelligence and a capacity for empathy that showed itself most tellingly in the universal longing expressed in those songs. Sooner or later, Westerberg treated all of his friends like shit, and he treated the rest of the world, however friendly and willing show more to help him, with the contempt normally reserved for a hated vice principal. He wrote songs like a grief-struck angel, and for every occasion on which he performed them with love and attention, there were more when he blew them off in deliberately poor performances. He was a drunk, but he was conscious and responsible for all of it. He met the Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson when Stimson was twelve, and became his most formative influence.
We all have our demons, but Paul fed his and made them pets. Still, the songs spilled out and were amazing: by turns exuberant, angry, funny, tender, cathartic, and sad. Rock fans will forgive almost any behavior in those who can take the music to its full potential, and the Replacements were dragged toward fame despite literally countless gaffes and offenses that would have stopped the career of a lesser band cold. Eventually, reaching that point where self-sabotage could no longer be transcended, they fizzled, burned, and fell to earth. "Trouble Boys" is the story of the rocket's flight.
Bob Mehr, a career music journalist, spent ten years talking to everyone who could tell him anything about the life of the band, including Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson. The sad life of the Replacements' lead guitarist, Tommy's older brother Bob Stinson, bookends the story; an early chapter about Bob's childhood is so heartbreaking I set the book aside for a while. When the story of the band starts, "Trouble Boys" becomes compulsively readable, a book you might recommend to someone who doesn't know what rock'n'roll is about. show less
We all have our demons, but Paul fed his and made them pets. Still, the songs spilled out and were amazing: by turns exuberant, angry, funny, tender, cathartic, and sad. Rock fans will forgive almost any behavior in those who can take the music to its full potential, and the Replacements were dragged toward fame despite literally countless gaffes and offenses that would have stopped the career of a lesser band cold. Eventually, reaching that point where self-sabotage could no longer be transcended, they fizzled, burned, and fell to earth. "Trouble Boys" is the story of the rocket's flight.
Bob Mehr, a career music journalist, spent ten years talking to everyone who could tell him anything about the life of the band, including Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson. The sad life of the Replacements' lead guitarist, Tommy's older brother Bob Stinson, bookends the story; an early chapter about Bob's childhood is so heartbreaking I set the book aside for a while. When the story of the band starts, "Trouble Boys" becomes compulsively readable, a book you might recommend to someone who doesn't know what rock'n'roll is about. show less
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