Hold My Life

Or, why the new Replacements reissue has me seeing ghosts

I’ve been steering this Substack in a Halloween-heavy direction for the last couple of weeks, but I’m going to switch course a bit for this entry — though I guess it counts in a way, since the new deluxe reissue of The Replacements’ Tim album has me seeing some ghosts…

There are a number of artists whose work I was particularly obsessed with as a teen but put aside in my twenties, only to come back to those same records later with a renewed (and in some cases even greater) sense of appreciation — Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Bruce Springsteen, The Jam, Blondie, and New York Dolls/Johnny Thunders among them. But I’ve never felt at all compelled to go on a similar rediscovery jag with The Replacements, despite the fact that, from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1986, they were my favorite band in the world not named The Kinks.

I never really gave much thought to the “why not?” until recently, when it was announced — much to the giddy excitement of numerous friends and colleagues — that engineer Ed Stasium was giving the band’s Tim LP a serious remix overhaul, to be included as part of the new four-disc Let It Bleed edition of the 1985 album. The album’s original producer, the late Tommy Erdelyi (the man formerly and best known as Tommy Ramone), had not only blunted some of the famously rowdy band’s sharper edges with his head-scratching sonic choices, but had also bathed them in a weird “state of the art” digital reverb that held the listener at arm’s length. Stasium’s remix, therefore, was seen by many as a long-overdue correction.

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In the decades since its release, the album’s slicker, occasionally murky sound has been repeatedly noted as a significant plot beat in the Replacements’ saga — a grim and frustrating tale that’s detailed at length in Bob Mehr’s definitive Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements. Perhaps if the band had just been allowed to completely sound like themselves, many have suggested, then maybe Tim would have been the record that catapulted them to success… or at least higher than #183 on the Billboard 200, which is where the album actually peaked upon its release.

The thing is, I don’t recall anyone having a serious issue with the album’s production back in September 1985, when the album first hit the stores. Not that it sounded great — it was considerably less raw and immediate than 1984’s Let It Be (the Replacements album I came in on) or any of their previous outings — but at the time I figured that such softening just went with their initiation into major-label territory. After spending a half-decade on the Minneapolis indie label Twin/Tone, The Replacements had inked a deal with Sire Records, and my college radio-loving pals and I saw this jump to a major label not as “selling out,” but rather as evidence that “we” were winning the fight against mediocrity in modern music; all manner of guitar-powered underground bands would soon be snapped up by the majors, I was certain, because the industry was finally understanding that ‘80s listeners wanted more from their music than just cold, clinical, drum machine-driven pop.

I was completely right about this in some respects, and comically wrong in others. But in retrospect, I’m pretty sure that Tim sold about as many copies as it was ever going to sell at the time, regardless of how it sounded. American consumers in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s second term were, by and large, simply not ready for songs about social anxiety, alienated losers, alcoholic despair or the travails of indie rock bands, no matter how powerfully they were delivered. (Sure, Bruce Springsteen was riding high at the time with Born in the USA, but a significant portion of his newly-expanded audience seemed to willfully overlook the grim realities of many of its songs in their rush to wave a flag along to the title track’s chorus.) The pool of existing Replacements fans — even with the addition of people who were open to the idea of maybe becoming Replacements fans — just wasn’t big enough to push the band over the top.

In any case, most important thing to me at the time was not how Tim sounded, but that it contained 11 new songs by Paul Westerberg — several of which (including “Hold My Life,” “Swingin’ Party,” “Bastards of Young,” “Little Mascara” and “Here Comes a Regular”) were among his best yet. Even “Kiss Me on the Bus,” Tim’s most quote-unquote commercial tune, was really just a slightly sweetened, adolescent-throwback addition to Westerberg’s already impressive cache of anxiety-ridden love songs; and while I knew a few fans who thought that the song came uncomfortably close to “sell out” territory, it’s not like Tim contained anything as crass and shiny and meaningless as Starship’s “We Built This City,” which had also just been released and was (unlike “Kiss Me on the Bus”) currently rocketing up the charts. I wrote a rave review of Tim for my college newspaper, and not a single person stopped me in the campus center or dining hall or dorm lounge to argue about it.

I don’t think I gave any record more spins that fall than Tim, and — with the notable exception of “Waitress in the Sky,” which struck me then as now as unbecomingly sexist, as well as a weirdly condescending take on blue collar/service workers in general — its songs brought me a lot of comfort in what was a weird and difficult time. I’d started college a year later than planned, so for me the fall of ‘85 was all about trying to figure out where I fit in as a 19 year-old college freshman, and whether or not I even wanted to fit in at all. And in Tim, I found the perfect soundtrack for such internal grapplings.

The first four Replacements records — 1981’s Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash through 1984’s Let It Be — had gotten me through the previous year, which (having completely whiffed on my first round of college applications) I’d spent working as a go-fer at the Beatrice Foods headquarters in downtown Chicago while starting the whole application process over again. Though my unplanned “gap year” experience was ultimately a very positive one (among other things, it taught me that corporate America was where I very much did not want to be), I felt incredibly lonely and dislocated throughout it all. The friends I’d graduated high school with were all off being college students, the friends from a year below me were all enjoying being high school seniors, and I didn’t feel like I fit in with any of them. And then, once I finally did get accepted to college in the spring of ‘85, every single thing I did — from trying to date girls to trying to find people to play music with — seemed tinged with the reality that I would be leaving for school in the fall.

So when it came time to finally begin my freshman year, I was ready to rock — but I was also incredibly out of practice when it came to doing things like studying for exams and writing papers, so my grades initially fell far short of my enthusiasm for my studies. Likewise, now that I was at the seemingly ancient age of 19, I had precious little interest in freshman shenanigans — my new buddy Don and I memorably skipped our class’s big “Serenading Night” event to catch American Ninja at the local movie palace — or in partying down at The Mug, the coke-filled hub of campus social life. Tim’s opening track “Hold My Life,” with its chorus plea of “Hold my life/Until I’m ready to use it” struck an especially deep chord with me. My own life had essentially been on hold for the last 15 months; but now that I was getting the green light, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing or how to proceed.

At the same time, Tim songs like “Swingin’ Party,” “Little Mascara” and “Here Comes a Regular” painted pictures of people who’d never enjoyed the kind of breaks I’d gotten, who’d had to quit school or hadn’t gone in the first place, and whose lives were now entirely consumed by alcohol and angst. Not that I didn’t indulge in my fair share of either — the first time I woke up in a girl’s bed at college, it was with the “Bastards of Young” lines “Ones that love us best/Are the ones we lay to rest/Visit their graves on holidays at best/Ones that love us least/Are the ones we’ll die to please/If it’s any consolation/I don’t begin to understand” ringing in my hungover head. But that fall, the album served as an ever-present reminder to not fuck things up any further for myself.

And truthfully, the weird way Tim sounded jibed with my sense of freshman year alienation as much as its songs did; Erdelyi’s cold and clammy production made the band sound like they were flailing in the fog, unsure of where they were or why they wanted to be there in the first place. Musically, they seemed to know exactly what they were doing, even when they were stretching out on tracks like “Swingin’ Party” and “Here Comes a Regular”; but they also sounded like they were having serious second thoughts about playing on this particular hockey rink. It gave me a strange sense of comfort to know that we were both struggling in our own way.

Just how ambivalent The Replacements were about being in the big leagues (and how likely they would have found some way to shoot themselves in the foot, regardless of Tim’s sound or success) became painfully apparent in the band’s drunken performance on the January 18, 1986 episode of Saturday Night Live, a shambolic appearance that got them banned for life from SNL and torpedoed much of whatever goodwill they’d managed to establish at Sire. Of course, in typical Replacements fashion, they’d just played one of the best gigs of their career — and certainly their best one that I ever witnessed — exactly one week earlier at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro.

All 28 songs from that incredible Metro show are included in the expanded Tim set, and listening to them again nearly 38 years later has been a powerful and profound experience for me. Not just because the band is completely on fire, and the setlist draws from their five greatest records and their deep well of cover songs, but because the recording vividly teleports me back to that night, and to who I was at the time. As I explained back when I first launched this Substack, “Music is my time machine. A song or album has the power to instantly transport me to the time and place in which it was originally recorded, or to the time and place that it initially blew my mind, or to an indelible moment in my life that it memorably soundtracked.” And hoo boy do these Live at the Cabaret Metro tracks deliver on those terms.

As the band roars in with the raucous chords of set opener “Gary’s Got a Boner,” I can see them from my position on the Metro floor, about halfway back on the stage left side with a direct sight line to lead guitarist Bob Stinson. I can also see myself, standing there in the red silk vintage tux jacket my mom had given me for Christmas, wearing my hair in its naturally curly state for the first time in years — I’ve finally ditched the straighteners — and a handcuff earring in my newly-pierced left earlobe. I’ve been back home in Chicago for a month, and after comparing notes with all my returning high school friends about our college experiences, I’ve realized that I’m actually doing pretty well. My grades are coming around, I’ve joined a band, I’m writing regularly about music for the college paper, I’ve enjoyed a little bit of romance and female attention, and I’m finally feeling kind of comfortable in my own skin.

The Replacements seem pretty comfortable where they’re at tonight, as well. I’ve already seen them on some of those notorious nights where each song seems to collapse in on itself less than halfway through, or where they simply pack up and leave because they’re bored and grumpy and would rather be off drinking somewhere, but tonight they’re here to kill. Every song the band plays (and did I mention that they play 28 of them?!?) charges straight through to its established conclusion with zero loss of intensity, even if Paul does occasionally forget the words to his own songs and several of the covers. There’s a seven-song run of originals early on — “Bastards of Young,” the as-yet-unreleased “Can’t Hardly Wait” (which I recognize from the Shit Hits the Fans bootleg cassette), “Answering Machine,” “Little Mascara,” “Color Me Impressed,” “Kiss Me On the Bus,” “Favorite Thing” — that make it plain that we’re in the presence of one of the great bands of this era, as well as one of its greatest songwriters.

After that, it’s an assortment of originals both goofy and sublime (“Mr. Whirly,” “Johnny’s Gonna Die”) and covers played with an atypically impressive attention to detail. Bassist Tommy Stinson pesters Paul to play the metallic Tim track “Dose of Thunder,” which they then follow with their old drunk driving anthem “Takin’ a Ride” and a ripping rendition of Vanity Fare’s “Hitchin’ a Ride”. They play The Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” and the Dave Edmunds/Rockpile rocker “Trouble Boys”; Paul forgets the lyrics to both, but Bob nails the guitar leads with far more deftness than you’d expect from the most infamously troubled member of these trouble boys. Up on the drum riser, Chris Mars slams through every song like Charlie Watts in a particularly bad mood, which I mean as a sincere compliment.

The concert only lasts about 80 minutes, but at the time it just seems to go gloriously on and on. The Replacements pull out back-catalog chestnuts like “Kids Don’t Follow” and “I’m in Trouble,” and they cover Sham 69’s “Borstal Breakout” — a song I’ve never heard before, but which will remain embedded in my mind as I spend the next four years trying to figure out what it is. Bob steps to the mic to sing “The Crusher,” a wrestling song by ‘60s garage band The Novas, which I dimly remember hearing years earlier on The Dr. Demento Show. I absorb song after song wedged amid a cluster of my high school friends, all of us huge Replacement fans, all of us beaming with delight at the scruffy musical banquet they’re laying out for us. In a few days, we will all head back to our respective schools and fates; and when the band closes the evening with a particularly raw and heartfelt “Go,” the standout slow one from the Stink EP, it feels like both a benediction and a warning to us. “Go,” Paul wails, “while you can!” Roger that…

Of course, the first place we’ll actually go after the show will be Zephyr’s, the pseudo-Art Deco grill and ice cream parlor on Wilson Avenue that’s been our post-concert hangout for years, and will continue to serve as such until we become old enough to get into bars. As we wait outside the Metro for whoever is supposed swing by with their car and pick us up, I see a glassy-eyed Bob Stinson shambling past us. “Fucking great show, Bob,” I tell him. “You got any blow?” he responds. I do not. It’s the last time I’ll ever see him in person.

The Ed Stasium remix of Tim unearths the same fire and aggression in the album’s tracks that the band demonstrated that night at the Metro, revealing explosive rock n’ roll performances that Erdelyi’s mix only hinted at. And yet… I find it oddly uncompelling, in the same way that I found myself more or less unmoved by Giles Martin’s remixes of Sgt. Pepper’s or “The White Album”. Yes, it sounds great. Yes, I can hear new things in the music. Yes it gives me a slightly different perspective on the album. But as a listening experience, it’s kind of a one-and-done thing for me.

I’m happy that the Tim (Let It Bleed Edition) exists, and I’m happy to have heard it, but it feels more like an academic exercise to me — “See? This is what it might have sounded like!” — than an actual artifact, the difference between a gleaming reconstruction of a historic building and the however-problematic ruins of the real deal. It’s cool, but I’d ultimately rather listen to the original mix of just about any album you can name, because the time-travel magic I seek comes from hearing the same things that listeners actually heard at the time of the record’s release.

Maybe I also have an aversion to the Stasium remix because its big rock perfection makes me think of The Goo Goo Dolls and The Gin Blossoms, to name two of the many bands who aped The Replacements’ musical moves and Westerberg’s wounded-heart-on-his-sleeve missives, but achieved greater chart success by making the music more straightforward, less dangerous, and deeply bland. Or maybe it reminds me of how bland The Replacements themselves actually became, once Bob Stinson got kicked out of the band and Westerberg started taking himself way too seriously as songsmith. But what it really comes down to is a visceral thing — when I toggle back and forth between the Stasium remix and the straight remaster of Tim that’s included in the set, the Stasium tracks sound good… but the original mix still feels like home.

Or maybe not home, but rather my freshman dorm room, the one with my Blondie, New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders posters tacked to the walls, the milk crates full of albums on the floor, the pair of twin beds spaced as far apart as possible, and the window ledge where my freshman roommate and I prop cases of beer to chill on winter nights. But this isn’t a place I ever really want to revisit, even for nostalgia’s sake, because the scars left over from the alienation and internal struggles of that time still feel too tangibly tender. Which may also be why I didn’t continue to hang with or hang on to The Replacements after Tim — 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me was their last record I liked at all, but I didn’t even dig it enough to actually purchase a copy — and why I’ve never been tempted to seriously re-explore their other albums that I once obsessively loved.

Maybe, like my freshman year roommate, the Replacements and I just haven’t had much in common for decades. The self-destructive, middle-finger-waving antics detailed in Mehr’s book would have thrilled my angry and frustrated late-teenage self, but now I just find them inordinately depressing to read about. Listening to the Let It Bleed edition this past week, the one line that really stands out for me is from “Here Comes a Regular”: “And sometimes I just ain't in the mood/To take my place in back with the loudmouths.” In the back of the bar with the loudmouths hasn’t been my place for a long, long time.

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