WHO WOULD HAVE thought, back around 1986, that thirty years on a ramshackle, off-the-radar band like the Replacements would have a 435-page history, with a further 16 pages of notes?
Yet it makes a kind of sense, too. Bon Jovi (to name only one monster ‘80s band) sold records and played for audiences in numbers whole levels of magnitude beyond anything the Replacements ever achieved. For sheer unquantifiable devotion among their fans, though, the ‘Mats were unmatchable. (Mehr, by the way, explains the band’s odd nickname.) To the band’s faithful, frontman Paul Westerberg’s songs were scripture, their verge-of-chaos live shows a sacrament, their penchant for self-sabotage the only true holiness.
The book breaks neatly into two halves, the Replacements with Bob and without Bob—Bob Stinson, that is, founder of the band and human train wreck, kicked out of the band as an unredeemable liability just when it looked like they might conceivably break huge. They were arguably a better band without him and his car crash guitar solos—except, of course, that they now sounded more like every other band and were Never the Same.
The dropping of Bob and its complicated effects—not least on his half-brother, Tommy, the band’s bassist, who stayed on without him—is among the many topics on which Mehr proves illuminating. Mehr is a great journalist; he did the legwork to find the right sources, won their trust, got the story. He writes as a fan, but not a besotted one. He can capture the incandescent, unpredictable brilliance of the band without sparing the details of how they could be their own worst enemy. (Their two network TV appearances led to lifetime bans from both networks.) His writing is always sturdy, often eloquent.
Are there still high school dropouts with day jobs as janitors flailing away in midwestern basements, blasting through cheap amps, coming up with such howls of angsty joy as “Kids Don’t Follow” and “I Will Dare”? I don’t know. I hope so.
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