Paul Westerberg/The Replacements, by Brendan O’Malley

Whenever I hear people talk about how the ’80’s sucked, I have to argue. How, you ask, could you argue for a decade that spawned all those horrible songs that we all know by heart even though we hate them?

The answer to that question dates back to a rainy night I spent driving around my hometown. I had just gotten my driver’s license and it was late at night. I remember the streets being rain soaked, sparkling. It was cold. And I was a teenager. An American teenager.

I was raised listening to the Beatles, folk music, and show tunes. A few years earlier, I’d been wrenched into puberty by Purple Rain but this night I discovered the underbelly of that blockbuster. I was listening to the local college radio station, something I had only recently been doing because I hated hair bands and synth pop. I heard a song.

For those of you who haven’t heard ‘Unsatisfied’ by the Replacements, your shame ought to crush you. I won’t dwell on that particular song only because it launched my lifetime musical obsession, but suffice it to say that the Replacements sound like what it feels like to be 16 and driving a car late at night on rain soaked streets in America.

To give you an idea of how ballsy, hilarious, tragic, sexy, wasted, and brilliant this band was, they named their third album ‘Let It Be’. Paul Westerberg, the poet rock’eate of the band said that if it was good enough for the Beatles, it was good enough for them. This album is so good that it is better than the Beatles ‘Let It Be’. Yes, I said better than the Beatles.

In fact, if you took the Beatles, smashed their tour bus into the Rolling Stones’ hotel (crazy sidenote…listening to my itunes randomly and the Beatles ‘Let It Be’ came on just this second so maybe their ‘Let It Be’ is better than the Replacements)

Where was I? Beatles bus, Stones hotel, then sent them to American high school, gave them shitty fast food jobs, stuck them in the most disaffected era of American history in the midwest where you pretty much had to kill someone to get noticed, fed them a steady diet of cigarettes, cheap booze, punk rock, and the explosion of the mass media culture…well, you get the drift. The result is

ASTONISHING MUSIC.

Some highlights:

Color Me Impressed: Begins with the lyric “Everybody at your party/They don’t look depressed/Everybody dressin’ funny/Color me impressed” while the music careens like a joyride.

Androgynous: A jazzy piano shuffle that imagines a time in the future when men and women are virtually indistinguishable. Remember, this was a punk band. This was akin to Bob Dylan going electric at Newport. Piano? Androgyny?

Bastards of Young: A searing scream at the adults who’d abandoned them…”God, what a mess/On the ladder of success/When you take one step/And miss the whole first rung/Dreams unfullfilled/Graduate unskilled/Beats pickin’ cotton and waitin’ to be forgotten” (the band, when forced by their record company to produce a video for the song, filmed a kid putting the needle on the record, listening to the entire song, then kicking the speaker in)

Gary’s Got a Boner: This was on the same album as Androgynous. Contains the gem “Gary’s got a soft-on!”

Treatment Bound describes an early tour through the neighboring cities of Minnesota and ends with someone banging on beer bottles.

Waitress In the Sky: An hilarious, nasty attack on the poor souls who serve us as we fly…”Sanitation expert and a maintenance engineer/Garbage man a janitor and you my dear/Re-unified attendant myohmy, you ain’t nothin’ but a waitress in the sky”

OK, I could literally go on forever. The lead singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg is on a par with Dylan, Lennon/McCartney, Chuck Berry, Costello, Joni Mitchell, ah, fuck that noise. He crushes them.

If you listen to every release, you hear a nation going from Christopher Cross to Kurt Cobain.

The man behind the curtain was Paul.

— by Brendan O’Malley