I recently read Bob Mehr's excellent 2016 book Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements and it's set me off on a big tear of listening to the band more than ever before, so I figured I'd put together a playlist while I was jamming this stuff a lot.

The Replacements deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. I Hate Music
2. Somethin' To Dü
3. I Bought A Headache
4. God Damn Job
5. Within Your Reach
6. Run It
7. Treatment Bound
8. Favorite Thing
9. Black Diamond
10. Androgynous
11. Unsatisfied
12. Seen Your Video
13. Left Of The Dial
14. Here Comes A Regular
15. Waitress In The Sky
16. Hold My Life
17. Swingin Party
18. Valentine
19. Red Red Wine
20. Never Mind
21. I.O.U.
22. Talent Show
23. Anywhere's Better Than Here
24. Darlin' One
25. Sadly Beautiful
26. Nobody

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash (1981)
Track 4 from the Stink EP (1982)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from Hootenanny (1983)
Tracks 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 from Let It Be (1984)
Tracks 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 from Tim (1985)
Tracks 18, 19, 20 and 21 from Pleased To Meet Me (1987)
Tracks 22, 23 and 24 from Don't Tell A Soul (1989)
Tracks 25 and 26 from All Shook Down (1990)

I didn't hear a lot of Replacements growing up -- they had already started to kind of recede into alternative rock's established canon by the time I was really up on things in the grunge era, I just thought of Paul Westerberg as this guy who seemed a little out of place on the Singles soundtrack. So I didn't hear much of the band until the late '90s when someone made me a 'Mats mixtape. In my nascent days of being nerdy about music online, I'd participate in mixtape swaps with people on mailing lists and newsgroups -- I'd make someone a tape of my favorite Elvis Costello or Sonic Youth songs, and they'd make me a tape of their favorite Devo or Replacements songs. I don't remember which person out of that group made me that 'Mats tape, but it was a perfect introduction to the band at the perfect time, hearing those songs at 17 and feeling like they were written for the exact place I was at in life.

For a long time that tape was my only frame of reference for those songs, because it was a few years before I picked up a CD of Let It Be and a few more years before I started to listen to the other albums. 14 of the 26 tracks on this playlist were on that tape. Side 1 of the tape ended with "Kiss Me On The Bus," and the tape cut off right before Westerberg says "stop" at 1:49. So in my mind for years that was just how the song ended and there was no guitar solo or final chorus.

I also stuck with chronological order, much like that mixtape did, because really the only way to make sense of The Replacements' career arc is to hear it in real time, the breakneck punk songs being periodically interrupted by experiments like the drum machine on "Within Your Reach" and the piano-driven "Androgynous" as the band's overall output gradually slowed down to midtempo anthems and vulnerable ballads. Lots of bands start fast and punky and get more mellow over the years, but few did it as dramatically as the 'Mats, or improved their songwriting as quickly as Paul Westerberg did. I do love the attitude on those early songs, though, and Tommy was just a kickass bass player from the jump.

One of the things that entertained me about reading Trouble Boys was learning that things I'd kind of assumed were scripted, like the bit at the top of "I Hate Music" ("tape's rolling," "so what?") was a real, unrehearsed exchange. "I hate music, it's got too many notes" is a great punk rallying cry, but like a lot of punk bands, The Replacements grew up on classic rock and kind of feigned distaste for it when it was fashionable to do so, and ultimately embraced those influences pretty unabashedly. But it still surprised me how big a Yes fan Bob Stinson was, how his drunken spontaneous guitar solos were probably as good as they were because he'd spent hours hunched over a record player studying everything Steve Howe played.

Listening to Replacements live recordings, I'm impressed by how controlled their chaos was, how one guy could start playing a song and the band would fall in right behind them after a beat or two, even if it was some random cover they were playing to antagonize an audience who wanted to hear their hits. That takes a level of musicianship that a lot of good bands don't possess. I remember the one time I was onstage with one of my bands and somebody started playing a cover we'd jokingly played in practice a couple times months earlier, and I wish I'd rolled with it instead of kind of freezing up in indecision until they stopped.

Westerberg more or less says that most of the lyrics on "Unsatisfied" and "Hold My Life" were ad libbed and improvised in the vocal booth, which makes sense listening to them, but it's still remarkable how well those songs work. I was surprised, however, that "Valentine" was an unfinished song that was quickly completed and thrown onto Pleased To Meet Me at the last minute because the label thought the album was too short, that's a total highlight of the record. I was also interested to learn that "Waitress In The Sky," often taken as kind of an ugly broadside at flight attendants, was actually based on the experiences of Westerberg's sister, who was one.

Since The Replacements were critical darlings who never quite became consistent hitmakers, a lot of their most beloved songs have always been album cuts, and there's a pretty well established canon of fan favorites like "Unsatisfied" or "Here Comes A Regular." But in 2020, the two most streamed Replacements songs on Spotify are "Androgynous" and "Swingin' Party," which is not something that I think would've been easily predicted back in the day even if the songs were always well regarded -- neither song appeared on either of the band's best-of compilations released in 1997 and 2006. "Swingin' Party"'s popularity is I guess primarily derived from Lorde's 2013 cover, and it's kind of cool that one of their songs was covered by a pop star born 5 years after the band broke up.

"Androgynous" is a song that's been covered a lot (most notably a 2015 cover by Joan Jett, Laura Jane Grace, and Miley Cyrus) that I think that has really resonated more and more over the years. Hearing it back in the '90s, I found it really moving and kind of impressive how Paul Westerberg, this tough guy straight midwestern rocker dude, presented such an empathetic and open-minded view of sexuality and gender in such a sweet and playful and touching song way back in 1984, and I feel that way even moreso now.

Another song that's now among their most streamed songs is the Don't Tell A Soul outtake "Portland" that was featured on last year's collection of alternate mixes and demos from that album, Dead Man's Pop. But I still much prefer the song that cannibalized the "Portland" chorus and became Soul's opening track, "Talent Show." Apparently at one point it was slated to be a single, and was performed in the band's only live TV appearance other than the infamous "Saturday Night Live" episode, at a short-lived annual gala called the International Rock Awards. Lately I've really gotten into "Darlin' One," which I was happy to see Tommy Stinson single out as a favorite. All Shook Down has its moments, too, "Nobody" is still one of the most indelible songs I heard on that cassette a couple decades ago.

Let It Be is obviously their defining album, though. It was hard not to put practically the whole album after "I Will Dare" on here. I had to include the cover of Kiss's "Black Diamond," because I always like being able to put the same song on different artists' deep cuts playlists. I've been getting more into "Favorite Thing" lately too, my family was driving through rural Virginia the week I was reading Trouble Boys and randomly we happened upon this station's Sunday morning block of '80s alternative and they were playing "Favorite Thing." And "Seen Your Video" feels like part of the band's mythology, making a song that mocked the whole idea of music videos and then signing a major label video and kind of compromising by making these cool minimalist anti-videos. And of course, their major label debut featured a timeless ode to college radio, "Left Of The Dial."

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 10:49 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.