The_Replacements … Let It Be 4 Sixteen Blue It’s a strange, beautiful song, and testament to how far he had travelled in a very short time.
Indeed, Westerberg seemed just as confused here as anywhere – and showed his repeated gift for capturing a complicated thought in a single line (“He might be a father, but he sure ain’t a dad”). Androgynous was one of its greatest moments, a piano ballad about gender ambiguity that espoused the message of the album’s title without ever seeming to preach. It sounded like all of late teenage life condensed into less than 40 minutes, by someone who seemed as confused as you, but was able to articulate that confusion. Let It Be’s greatness lies in it being the perfect summation of the life of a young man who’s not yet graduated to being grown up: most “great” albums reduce life to one set of emotions, but Let It Be encompassed everything: reckless stupidity, sexual uncertainty, wild abandon, boredom, excitement. There’s a song about Tommy getting his tonsils out ( Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out) a cod-metal track that gleans amusement from someone having an erection ( Gary’s Got a Boner) a Kiss cover ( Black Diamond), and a throwaway complaint about MTV bands ( Seen Your Video), but those songs are somehow necessary. The strange thing about Let It Be is that a good chunk of the album, is by most rational standards, throwaway. After rejecting Kind of a Sewer and The Replacements Get a Soft On as options, they chose to pluck one from rock history in an act of bravado: the album was called Let It Be. It had the perfect cover – the band, looking hungover, perched on the roof of the Stinson home – and the perfect title. The fourth Replacements album was their masterpiece, the one that still gets 10/10 reviews when reissued, that crops up in best album ever lists. The band play Saturday Night Live in 1986 … Tommy Stinson, Chris Mars, Paul Westerberg, Bob Stinson. Within Your Reach was an early effort at what would be revealed as possibly his greatest strength, the lovelorn ballad, while Color Me Impressed portrayed him in his favourite role: the outsider who’s simultaneously superior and insecure: “Everybody at your party/ They don’t look depressed/ Everybody dressin’ funny/ Color me impressed.” In retrospect, though, Color Me Impressed was just a dry run for what came next.
That means it’s sometimes a shocking mess, but for all the terrible jokes – if the title track were half as amusing as the band thought it was, it would be twice as amusing as it actually is – it allowed Westerberg’s songwriting to stretch into new places. Stink, their second album – or EP, really – was pretty much their last gasp as a punk band, and its follow-up, Hootenanny, was the first time the band displayed every facet of their personality. There weren’t any others, though, who could combine all the things the Replacements did: silliness, melody, empathy, romance, anger, ennui. They realised that though they could play fast and they could play loud, there were always others who could play faster and louder. Punk was a vehicle for the Replacements, and one that could have taken them into a dead end. “I’m shiftless when I’m idle, and I got time to waste.” It was also an early display of Westerberg’s gift for the perfect song title, poetic in its simplicity and choice of words.
“And I ain’t got no idols, I ain’t got much taste,” Westerberg sings. Shiftless When Idle was one of the first Replacements anthems, a spot-on description of the band’s own beautiful fecklessness. In autumn 1980 they recorded their first album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash: it was sort of punk, sort of classic rock, wholly ragged, but both Westerberg’s ability to write an indelible hook and the band’s gift for finding the perfect way to back it were already evident – his description of the band as “power trash” was pretty much perfect. The band became the Replacements and Westerberg started bringing his songs to the party. He was eventually invited to join, and refused to play Roundabout. One night, frontman-to-be Paul Westerberg was walking home from his job as a caretaker in the district office of US senator David Durenberger when he heard the band practising in the Stinson family home. Collectively, they were called Dogbreath, and their big number was a cover of Yes’s Roundabout. His big brother ordered him to take up bass to keep him out of trouble, bribing him with cans of Coke and chocolate to keep him playing. Guitarist Bob Stinson and drummer Chris Mars were in their late teens, Tommy Stinson wasn’t even in his teens and perpetually getting in trouble with the law. The beginning of the Replacements in 1978 was as inauspicious as any band’s has been.
0 kommentar(er)
