…for me to finally at least start telling my Replacements stories. Why? Well, an e-mail from my friend Missy kind of reminded me, for one thing, and Westerberg’s been touring (I missed his appearance here only because I was out of town—no way would I have missed him otherwise, despite my relative lack of enthusiasm for his solo work), and my dear friend Peter, the band’s discoverer and long-ago manager/mentor, has been much in my thoughts lately, because he had a birthday a month ago and because it’s been bugging me that I haven’t written him in well over a year. And mostly because I can point to several bands who changed my life in vague, difficult to describe emotional and aesthetic ways, but I can really only point to two or maybe three who changed my life in literal, material ways: Uncle Tupelo, maybe the Jam, and probably most of all, the Replacements.
(But first, a preliminary Reason to Be Cheerful for the day: 2.5 minutes into the second half, it’s Gophers 40, Indiana 33 in the second round of the Big Ten championship. I think my Gophs are officially off the bubble now, but I’m not sure the selection committee agrees with me; a loss to Indiana wouldn’t completely ruin their tournament hopes, but a win would pretty well cement them.)
The stories are going to take me a while, though. So I’ll start with some prehistory: For most of my college years, my best friend was Martha, previously mentioned in this here blog. Martha was from Minneapolis (okay, actually Hopkins, an upper-middle-class-ish close-in suburb), and her then longtime boyfriend was a guy named Sprague, who was something of a minor figure in the Mpls. music scene. He was in one version of the twangabilly band Safety Last, which also featured, at various times, Gary Louris, later of some lameass alt-country band, and the extraordinarily talented and underrated singer/songwriter Lianne Smith. Sprague was also a recording studio guy, and went on to do some studio work as well as guitar playing for various minor luminaries. (He was also a complete jerk, as I recall from my occasional encounters with him, and he treated Martha appallingly, but I guess lots of 21-year-old guys are jerks…not to mention lots of 19-year-old girls, I guess.) So Martha was up on all the Minneapolis bands, and sometime in early 1982, she told me about the Replacements, sang snippets of “I’m in Trouble” to me, and finally played me “Sorry, Ma.” I became a fan right away, though I only saw them once in my remaining years in NYC–a show at CBGB that was good but wasn’t spectacular in either of the ways that the Mats could be spectacular.
(Gophers 51, Indiana 42, 11:20 to go. And the Gophers are already in the bonus. I am guardedly optimistic.)
So that’s the prehistory. I didn’t know about them as early on as a Minneapolitan (or even someone from elsewhere in the Midwest) would have, but I knew about them and knew I liked them pretty early in their history.
Flash forward to 1984. I moved to Austin for my first attempt at grad school. Saw the Replacements one drunken evening at the Continental Club in late ‘84, I guess. They were pretty rowdy and sloppy, but not out-of-control sloppy, so it was the best way to see them…but I was really drunk, so it wasn’t quite as memorable an experience as it might have been. Slight fast-forward again to February 1985. I had just been dumped by a guy I didn’t even really like all that much, with whom I had had a pretty unsatisfying relationship (he had a great body, not so much on the personality…and he was kind of a pothead, though he never smoked around me because I was so disdainful of it). True to form, though, I waited for him to dump me rather than dumping him when I had the chance. And even truer to form, I fell into mild heartbreak/obsessiveness after the breakup, out of habit rather than any actual feelings for the guy. (In a rare burst of insight, I actually recognized that my reaction to the breakup was way out of proportion to anything I’d felt during the relationship, and started seeing a therapist to help me break that pattern–which I did, almost permanently.) But even if the heartbreak was self-inflicted rather than sincere, it felt like heartbreak, and for those first few weeks afterward, I felt like raging hell.
(Gophers 60, Indiana 46, 8:00 left. I never underestimate the ability of any team from Minnesota to snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory, but this is starting to look pretty good.)
And that was my frame of mind when my roommate Bill (not my now-husband Bill, but a friend since college days who I still refer to as “my other Bill”) brought home the 12″ single of “I Will Dare” b/w “20th Century Boy” and “Hey Good Lookin’.” He brought it home, then went out with his girlfriend for the evening, and I threw the record on the stereo. For some combination of reasons known only to the cosmos, it just…hit me. That’s the only way I can think of to put it. It hit me the way the first days after you’ve fallen in love with someone hit you, the way seeing King’s College Chapel at Cambridge hit me the first time I was there, the way a big ol’ Austin sunset can hit you when it isn’t too hot to be outdoors yet. I’d say the song “resonated” with me, but there’s no way that verb is anywhere near adequate. It hit me right in the solar plexus, not to mention the head and heart. And when it was over, I picked up the tone arm and put it on again…and again…and so on. I must have listened to it 25 times in a row that night, pausing only once or twice to check out the b-sides. Fifteen or so listens in, I knew all the lyrics (or thought I did—there’s a line in there that everyone always gets wrong, and I didn’t find out for sure what it was until later in this story) and was singing, shouting, sobbing along. Twenty (!) years later, I can still remember exactly how I felt that night…and “I Will Dare” remains (if I’m forced to choose) my favorite song of all time.
(Gophers 71, Indiana 52, 2:00 to go. I’d say that I don’t think even the Gophers can blow this one, but I’m afraid I’d jinx them. And stranger things have happened. I once saw then-Gopher Sam Jacobson—a guy who really should have had at least a little bit of an NBA career—score 12 points in 90 seconds to give the Gophs a come-from-behind win.)
I was grad-student poor in those days, so I couldn’t go out the next day and buy the entire Replacements catalog, but I did buy Let It Be, the album from which “I Will Dare” comes, as soon as I could find it, and gradually, over the next few weeks, I bought all the rest, too. Fanaticism ensued. I went to the giant Perry-Castaneda Library at UT and scoured their periodicals collection looking for articles about the band, which were surprisingly few and far between back then. I did find a short profile in Musician magazine, with a publicity photo in which Paul looked really cute…which he actually kinda wasn’t in those days, as I was soon to find out. Not that it mattered; I was already in love with him, so what he looked like wasn’t strictly relevant.
(And the final: Gophers 71, Indiana 55. That noise you just heard was a giant sigh of relief emanating not only from me but from a significant portion of the population of Minnesota.)
Yeah, okay, I wasn’t in love with him, I was in love with his songwriting. It’s an important distinction, sure. There are songwriters I love who I suspect aren’t tremendously nice people. But—going out on a bit of a limb here—in a way, it’s different for girls. I wouldn’t say that I never had a favorite band without having a crush on one of the guys in it, because that wouldn’t be true at all. (After all, I spent a good part of the early ’90s listening to almost nothing but American Music Club, and God knows I never had a crush on Mark friggin’ Eitzel, to say the least.) But I also can’t deny that crushing on a band member has often been a component of my fandom for any given band, at least the ones with boys in them. (And sometimes even ones without boys in them, though that’s a totally different type of crush.) It’s pretty much just the cult of personality, really. And though some of the women I know would deny it with their last breath, most of the women I know who are serious music fans (and that used to be a really small number; more on that sometime) also get crushes on boys in the band. It doesn’t diminish the sincerity or informedness of their fandom, I’m not suggesting that in the least. It’s just a component of the fandom. Now that a) I’m old and married and b) often don’t pay as much attention to the individuals in bands as I used to, partly because CDs, with their smaller photos, and the iPod have contributed to my not gleaning as much information about bands as I did in the past unless it’s a band I’m really passionate about (I can tell you the names of all of the Delgados band members, for sure, and Dolorean too). And c) it’s harder to have crushes on guys in bands these days because they’re often literally 20 years younger than me, and I just don’t get crushes on anyone who was born when I was, like, in high school.
But I digress. And it’s time to wrap up for the day anyway. The next installment will begin with the day Tim was released: October 14, 1985.