When I started reading Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, I was sort of dreading its length: 432 pages, not counting the Notes and Index, and they aren't small pages with big type and margins. I'm pretty sure it comes in at more than 200,000 words, which could have been a lot of fawning adoration, or a prohibitively high pile of gossipy speculation, or a seemingly endless sprawl of self-congratulatory hipness. But now that I'm around half through it, I wish it could be even longer, because I'm going to be sad when I'm done. The impression one has is of a knowledgeable fan who's done his homework, really a lot of homework, and is intent on telling the story without any pretentious trimmings.
For me, one of the book's big and unanticipated attractions is how the city of Minneapolis, in which Paul Westerberg, Chris Mars, and Bob and Tommy Stinson were in the 1970s growing up within a few blocks of each other in a south-side neighborhood, functions as another memorable character in the story. Certain fans will want to know the addresses. Westerberg's house was at 4126 Garfield Avenue. The Stinsons were first at 3628 Bryant Avenue, then later at 2215 Bryant. The former address is the one in which Westerberg, walking home on a fall day in 1979 from his janitor job in downtown Minneapolis, first heard the Stinsons playing and crept around the bushes trying to peer into the basement; the latter address is the one shown in the famous Let It Be album cover, where the band members are sitting on the roof outside the bedroom window of the Stinsons' sister, Lonnie--if you look closely, you can see Lonnie's softball trophies in the background. The main north-south street in the neighborhood is Lyndale Avenue; the Stinsons were two blocks to the west, the Westerbergs a block to the east and five blocks further south. It's not surprising Westerberg heard the Stinsons practicing on his way home from downtown. He would have been walking southerly somewhere in the Lyndale corridor, and they played loud.
We don't learn Chris Mars's exact address but it was near 37th Street and Garfield Avenue. So Westerberg was about two-thirds of a mile from the Stinsons, and Mars was less than that from both the Stinsons and Westerberg. I used to marvel at how Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, and Jack Morris--three baseball Hall-of-Famers--were all growing up at the same time in St. Paul, Minnesota. But how about these four guys growing up not just in the same city but within a few blocks of each other? If you want to let in the whole city, Prince was a year older than Westerberg, and went to the old Central High School about a mile to the east of where the Replacements grew up.
It's remarkable how contained by the neighborhood these young lives seem to have been. One of the ten million interesting bits dropped into the narrative concerns how, after the band was established and had gained a certain notoriety around town, Westerberg and his first kind of serious girlfriend had to improvise dates around the fact that the budding rock star had no place of his own, no car of his own, no driver's license, and no money. They would go on long night walks with each other, often in Lakewood Cemetery, where Minneapolis's rich and prominent are buried in grounds adjoining the east side of Lake Harriet. (The cemetery would have been comparatively secluded, and with benches.)When Westerberg eventually made the acquaintance of Bob Stinson, he immediately recognized him as the weird-looking guy he often saw riding the 4 bus, which to this day runs on Bryant Avenue between downtown and West 50th Street. At about the time the Replacements began rehearsing together in the basement of Mrs Stinson's house at 36th and Bryant, I began living on my own for the first time, in south Minneapolis, maybe a mile and a half to the southeast of the Stinsons, at 14th Avenue and East 40th Street. Many of the Replacements' early gigs were played at places--Duffy's, the Longhorn Bar, and of course soon the 7th Street Entry--that I was just discovering. The whole scene described by Mehr seems so familiar, and for me is so strongly connected with youthful discovery, that, reading along, the sensation can be bittersweet. Mehr is not from around here and a slightly haughty pleasure arises from noticing the occasional mistake. For example, he places a certain sober club that the Replacements were scheduled to play--only to have the show cancelled when they were busted fortifying themselves with alcohol that afternoon--at 26th Street and Chicago Avenue, "in southeast Minneapolis." You can understand the mistake, because 26th and Chicago is to the southeast of the downtown business district, but natives know that "southeast Minneapolis" means "by the U" or, more specifically, south of East Hennepin Avenue and east of the Mississippi River.
I don't think I saw the Replacements play in those early days. I didn't become a fan until later, so it would have been just by accident, and I don't think I would have forgotten an accidental exposure. I'm not crediting my musical acumen. They were an eye-full, the principal exhibit being bassist Tommy Stinson, the "weird-looking" Bob's half-brother, who was 13 when they landed their first gigs. At You Tube, you can see a multi-part video of an early Replacements show at 7th Street Entry. Tommy was probably 14 then, but he didn't really look it. The sight of this tow-headed little boy on the stage at the Entry with the other Replacements, just playing the shit out of his bass guitar, loud and fast and super-aggressive, jumping around in exhilaration--you wouldn't forget seeing that live. Mehr describes a "typical" day during this period. The three older fellows would hang around Peter Jesperson's--Jesperson, there's a story!--record store at 26th and Lyndale, listening to music and reading magazines, waiting for Tommy to be done with his day at 8th grade so that they could rehearse in the Stinsons' basement. Tommy dropped out of school when the band began to tour.
Well, read it, if you're at all interested. The book contains multitudes. On keeping with the theme of their lives in the neighborhood, it may seem surprising that Westerberg didn't connect with the other guys until 1979, the year he was 19. (His birthday is December 31: "Income tax deduction/One hell of a function.")There they all were, living so closely together, and with the same passionate interest, all with loads of talent. Maybe it's because Westerberg did not attend the public schools. Mehr at least suggests that Westerberg's Catholic upbringing might have had more of an influence on him than many would believe. Flannery O'Connor, whom Westerberg apparently read devotedly for a time, once wrote that in Hemingway's fiction there is a "yearning for Catholic fullness of life." There's something like that in a lot of Replacements songs, I think.
Jesus rides beside me.
He never buys any smokes.
Hurry up, hurry up, ain't you had enough of this stuff?
Ashtray floors, dirty clothes, and filthy jokes.
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