Released 1985
Hold My Life
I'll Buy
Kiss Me On The Bus
Dose Of Thunder
Waitress In The Sky
Swingin Party
Bastards Of Young
Lay It Down Clown
Left Of The Dial
Little Mascara
Here Comes A Regular
Is it possible to point to the moment life starts? I can: the first seven seconds of "Bastards Of Young." First that guitar, then that Howl. Rewind. Play. The guitar and then the Howl again. I felt like I was being born. (Casey Greig, actor, quoted in The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting)
Clang - Clang! Two chords ringing out, sustained ala Townshend, like two doors exploding open as an audience pours out of the theater exit. Ecstatic fans leaving a great rock and roll show? Or a terrorized crowd fleeing a fire? Could be either. With The Replacements, and this is one of their grandest qualities, it was usually both.
Years of watching Paul Westerberg have led me to perceive him as possibly the greatest neurotic ever to emerge from popular music - the Adrian Monk of rock and roll. His lyrics are devoid of macho posturing or even swagger. He has no confidence in anything other than his ability to fail. "Down on all fives," he shouts, "lemme crawl." So he crawls, muttering (shouting?) to himself. "Hold my life," he asks (demands?) as the music charges forward drunkenly around him, "because I just might lose it." The music keeps building as he staggers to his feet, lurches forward, still muttering, bits and pieces, holding on with both hands, stretching the syllables out, as Bob Stinson steers the song to its conclusion with a downward-spiraling raga-like guitar figure. Stinson never sounded more out of control here (and on the rest of the album as well), his guitar like a bucking bronco, barely under his control, tearing out of his grasp and dragging him along behind it.
"Hold My Life" isn't the best track but it's the most unique, the least traditional, and a great way to kick off an album. Side one's a mess after that. Two misfires anchored by two little gems - "Kiss Me On The Bus," a loping bit of Replacements-billy elevated by Westerberg's songwriting. PW is practically the only songwriter of his time and place who really understood the history of rock and roll: that it embraced more than just rebellion and noise but also smoochy romance and slow dancing. He's also one of the only songwriters of his time and place who wasn't afraid to write about sex. Thus the horny adolescent burns for his standoffish paramour. "Ooooh if ya knew how I felt now," he moans, "you wouldn't act so adult now." It's right up there with the Everly Brothers. Meanwhile, "Waitress in the Sky" rewrites Johnny Rivers' "Mountain of Love" into a snotty putdown of a snooty stewardess ("garbageman, janitor and you, my dear"). And one major classic, their first ballad that wasn't tongue in-cheek (okay, "Within Your Reach" - I'll buy that and its just as good if not better a song - but let me have my hyperbole anyway, willya?). Sounding slightly like one of the odd little soft songs from R.E.M.'s Murmur, but with a solid groove to it. It's a paean to fear and lack of self-worth ("If being strong's your kind, I need help here with this feather"), to embracing the role of the hopeless loser once and for all. It's very defiance lies in its lack of defiance. Sonny Bono's response was to "why do they all laugh at me?" Westerberg's seems to be "go ahead and laugh. I'll laugh with you."
This was the Mats sell-out album, according to many. On a major label (Reprise), "slickly" produced (and badly, ex-Ramone Tommy Erdelyi mixed the songs too flat and too thin, to their detriment. Had the album had more of Let It Be's rumble, it would have been better), "promoted" with videos (extended jokes by the band that did little for them commercially, but cemented their rep as nose-thumbers extraordinaire). It was where Westerberg began to accept the inevitable, and try to deliver an album that was mostly the kind of solid songs those of us who'd been paying attention knew he was capable of, rather than cramming it full of jokes and pisstakes and fucked-up covers with the occasional glint of genius peeking through. Thus the charges of sell-out; the jokes and pisstakes and fucked-up covers were supposed to be an artistic statement, after all. True enough. But one the Mats had already made. It was time to prove it. Or not. And, Westerberg being Westerberg, he tried both. Thus the album is burdened with some loud, punky throwaways. Dumping "Dose Of Thunder" or "I'll Buy" or "Lay It Down Clown" for the Alex Chilton-produced demo of "Nowhere Is My Home" (released the following year on the UK EP Boink!) or either of the original takes of "Can't Hardly Wait" (both on CD reissues of Tim) would have been a far wiser decision. But wise decisions were, after all, the antithesis of the Mats.
Side two is where things come together. Except for nearly blowing it with "Lay It Down Clown", a noisy bit of Faces-meets-punk that falls apart on its own tuneless-ness (and is nearly saved by some extra-sloppy, Woody-like slide guitar), its perfect. Kicking it off with "Bastards Of Young." Stinson's anthemic guitar figure mating with Westerberg's strangled scream. Some compared it with "My Generation," but I think "Won't Get Fooled Again" may be the better match. Where Townshend lamented a generation that had failed to live up to its ideals, here the Mats lament a generation with no ideals to live up to. The crash-and-feedback outro to the song makes the Who analogy complete.
Then, after the accident of "Lay It Down Clown," comes the barrage. A bit of studio noise, the hum of an amp, and, echoing in the background, you can hear Westerberg say, "okay." And the band rushes in with a wave of crashing, thrilling power chords, (again, Who-like in their grandeur), and Westy begins to weave his tale. Or pieces of a tale. Images and impressions: sweet Georgia breezes, a voice fading into the night on the radio. That "okay," it says everything. "This is it," it tells us, "this is the last act, the finale ... one more and we're gonna go." The song says the rest. As it fades into "Little Mascara," a mocking, smirking yet somehow compassionate, in its own smartass way, of a lonely, too-young housewife and mom left behind by "all you ever wanted - someone ma'd be scared of." All she's lost is a little mascara, he tells her as consolation.
"Here Comes A Regular," possibly the greatest barfly song ever penned. Probably the saddest song in the Mats canon. I've always thought of it as the flip-side of "Where Everybody Knows Your Name", the song from Cheers. Rather than a warm embrace, it offers the chilly imagery of fall fading to winter ("summer's passed, it's too late to cut the grass"), and a lonely night of drinking, in a room full of familiar faces who are actually strangers, gives way ("First the lights, then the collar goes up, and the wind begins to blow...
First the glass, then the leaves that pass, then comes the snow...") all left as our narrator, too aware to not be disgusted with himself, too inert to actually do anything about, resigns himself to his fate. "Ain't much to rake anyway in the fall," he says to himself as he walks into the night, alone, as always, and a string synthesizer deep in the mix plays a wistful-sounding refrain. It is a song about endings. Not new beginnings. Just endings.
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