Paul always seem to bring out some interesting commentary from people (ie he's sober,
he sucks. Or he doesn't rock, he sucks).
Seriously though, I think this (long) article takes an interesting look at the Paul's
past as well as what drives him in the present. Basically, Paul hasn't been a
consistent .300 hitter throughout his career but he's always made the highlights.
Chaco
----
>From the Dallas Observer
Bastard of middle age Paul Westerberg digs into a deep, dark place and
makes a brilliant, horrible record By Robert Wilonsky
"On those first two solo records, I needed to prove that I
could do what the Replacements did," Paul Westerberg says. "And maybe what I
did was prove that I couldn't." Photo by Len Irish
Bob Stinson died alone on February 18, 1995. He was discovered on the couch
of his Minneapolis home, a syringe laying next to his slumped-over corpse.
Nine years after being adiosed as the Replacements' guitarist, good ol' Bob
- dress-wearing Bob, fun guy Bob, crazy fuckin' Bob - kicked his drug habit
the real hard way, leaving his friends and former bandmates to ponder a life
well-lived but wasted nonetheless. His funeral a few days after the
35-year-old's overdose would reunite the Replacements one final time: Paul
Westerberg, Chris Mars, Bob's younger brother Tommy, and Bob all dressed up
with no place to go. So much for getting the band back together. In the
words of another famous Minnesota boy, the former Robert Zimmerman, "Death
can be the result of a most underrated pain." But as Westerberg sat there
looking at his old friend lying in a coffin, he couldn't focus on the task
at hand - grieving Bob, burying him in the hard ground. He was too busy
trying not to listen to the music blaring from the speakers Bob's mother had
set up - those old Replacements songs, especially the loud, fast, and sloppy
early ones from Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash and The Replacements
Stink, coming back to haunt the man who wrote them and barely sang them. As
Bob lay in his coffin - "stiff as a board," Westerberg recalls now, his
voice a deadpan drone bereft of sadness - it was all Paul could do to keep
from leaping from his seat and bolting from the funeral parlor. All
Westerberg could think about was: I sound like shit. He felt foolish,
selfish, like a real asshole. But still, Paul couldn't stop thinking it: I
sound like shit. "There is Bob, laying there, and then 'Fuck School' comes
blaring over the speakers," Westerberg recalls. "God love him, God rest his
soul. But I could only think, like, 'How could I have fucking sang like
this?' To me, I was in hell. There's a guy I loved who's dead, and to punish
me, they had to play my music, and that was really tough. If there's going
to be a movie ever about the Replacements, that has to be included. That was
one in a million, really. They played the entire catalog. I walked in as
they were playing 'Johnny's Gonna Die.' There was some irony for sure." And
then Westerberg lets out a sad little chuckle. "Please don't play my stuff
when I die," he says, almost begging. "I want nothing but John Coltrane."
Westerberg, now 38, would like nothing more than to leave the Replacements
behind him, a speck in the rear-view mirror. That band has been broken up
for almost the entirety of the 1990s; its final album, 1990's All Shook
Down, wasn't even a real Replacements record at all, more like a Westerberg
solo record with some special guests, among them bassist Tommy Stinson and
drummer Chris Mars, reduced to cameos where once they had been featured
attractions. He participated in the assembling of Warner Bros. Records' 1997
two-disc best-and-rest-of All For Nothing, Nothing For All, but only because
he was resigned to the fact that it would be done with or without his
assistance. Better to choose your own fate than leave it in the hands of the
label you abandoned when they couldn't sell your records. Westerberg is on
his third solo album now, Suicaine Gratifaction, due in stores February 23.
It is a disc full of home demos recorded on piano, fleshed out later in a
studio with old pro Don Was making things slick and shiny. The new album -
its lyrics ambiguous and poetic, sung in hushed tones by a man who used to
scream as though each performance were his next to last - is so far removed
from the Replacements or even Westerberg's first two solo albums, it might
as well have been made by someone else. And maybe it was.
Westerberg has no time or desire to look backward, to
consider his past
mistakes or his ancient triumphs. That's for other people to ponder - those
of us who came of age with Hootenanny, Let it Be, Tim, and Pleased to Meet
Me; those of us for whom songs such as "Unsatisfied" and "Within Your Reach"
and "I Will Dare" and "Bastards of Young" were title tracks to the college
years. No other 1980s band - save, perhaps, R.E.M., who stuck around too
long to become legendary - has been so romanticized by the survivors of the
Amerindie revolution. No other band back then wore its heart on its
puke-stained sleeve, or sang unrelenting heartbreakers after getting
fall-down drunk in the van, or got its kicks from playing slatternly Jackson
5 and T. Rex and Thin Lizzy covers before passing out on stage. The
Replacements exist 19 years after their formation as a symbol now, an emblem
- The Last Great American Rock and Roll Band. At least, that's what the
Replacements' tombstone reads. And while Westerberg is more than willing to
engage in a discussion of his past, it's clear he would prefer to talk about
the here and now - the new label after a decade on Warner Bros., the nervous
breakdown and "dark places" that accompanied the making of Suicaine
Gratifaction, his desire to stay away from the stage as long as possible.
He is a far, far different man than he was during his days in the
Replacements. He's a father of a son less than a year old. He has been sober
for almost a decade. And now, when he rocks, Westerberg does so only as a
side project and in the shadows. In 1997, on a tiny label out of Boston, he
released a five-song EP called Grandpaboy, with Westerberg assuming all the
parts. The disc, credited to "Winthorpe Marion Percival V," sounds more like
an echo or a vestige than the real thing, like B-sides recorded around the
time of Pleased to Meet Me in 1987 - lots of horns, lots of silly jokes,
songs titled "Homelessexual" and "Psychopharmacology." Yet the latter also
hints at the mood-enhancers Westerberg took during the recording of Suicaine
Gratifaction: "I need somethin' to calm me down / I need somethin' to keep
me focused / Narcoleptic and paranoid...ADD, PCP, F-U-C-K-E-D, that's me."
"I like that Grandpaboy junk," Westerberg says. "I like it, I miss it, I
love it. But to think that it matters or means anything is ridiculous. I
don't know if the stuff on Suicaine Gratifaction does either, but I'm just
sort of betting on the smart money, hoping that in the long run, someday I'm
going to touch somebody or influence somebody deeper with the music of the
new records as opposed to 'Homelessexual.' I think I finally came to the
point where I've made my bed: I'm a solo artist. Rock and roll can no longer
be my forte if I'm going to be doing this alone. I'd love to do it for a
weekend, but, you know..." His voice trails off. As far as he is concerned,
the new record is his most honest, vulnerable work. No more hiding behind
the band; no more ducking out of sentimental moments by throwing in the bad
wisecrack; no more giving the fans what they want. It's the sort of record
made by a guy who has only now figured out what he wants to do - which, in
this case, means writing songs about growing up and growing out of rock and
roll and trading in the guitar for piano. The album begins with a song,
"It's a Wonderful Lie," about a man trying to figure out whether he's "past
my prime" while wondering "was that just a pose?" And it ends with a song
about a father who abandons his family, crushing his daughter "like the
petals of a flower between the pages of a novel." In between are signposts
that lead the way to a songwriter conflicted about where he's been and where
he's going: Westerberg portrays himself as "an idiot and a genius," "the
best thing that never happened," "a bad idea whose time has come"; and he's
a man who believes "I've started to go out of my head." "It has to do with
depression, and it has to do with like, to use a scenario, like a dark place
in your mind where you go," Westerberg says of Suicaine Gratifaction, a
record that has confounded even his oldest, closest friends. "I went deeper
in there than I've ever gone before, and the only danger is that you don't
know exactly how you're going to come back out, and I just kept going in
deeper and deeper and deeper. I had a good two months, almost like a hermit
at home. It was very stressful for whoever was around me. It led to
medication and treatment and whatever. But through it all I knew that that's
kind of where the gold lay. "It was like, I could stop now and pull myself
back and go up and read a book and watch TV, or I can keep hunting for this
thing that's gnawing away inside of me. I kind of chose to go deep. I hate
to think that every single time, one would have to go that dark to get it,
but if that is the case, then I guess you deal with it or make the decision
to do what I really can at the risk of my own mental health. That's kind of
why I feel like I'm starting over again. "I'm not prepared to go to that
dark place again and again. I don't know what my next move is. I'm not
prepared to reproduce these songs or go perform these. The other day,
someone asked me, 'If this was your last record, would you be satisfied with
it?' And I guess I would. It never crossed my mind that this was my final
record, my swan song. But if I was hit by a truck tomorrow, it would sort of
appear that way, because I went as deep as I've ever gone before. Who knows
where I was supposed to go?" To answer that question, you have to go back
to where he's been - Minneapolis in May of 1980. It was then that a
19-year-old Paul Westerberg gave a four-song demo to Peter Jesperson, who
was then working at a local record store and running a Minneapolis record
label, Twin/Tone. Jesperson has told the story so often it's become myth, a
tale too good to be even a fraction of the truth, but he repeats it once
more: Peter didn't even get halfway through the first song on the cassette,
"Raised in the City," before he stopped the tape, phoned three friends, and
begged them to come down and listen to the damned thing. He told them he was
either crazy, or this brand-new band called the Replacements was the best
thing he'd heard since the Rolling Stones. Perhaps no one can tell the
Replacements story better than Jesperson, who immediately booked the band at
the Longhorn Club in Minneapolis, where Jesperson worked as a DJ, and signed
the band to Twin/Tone. It was Jesperson who took the band into the studio to
record Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, released on Twin/Tone in
1981. It was Jesperson who pissed off half the Twin Cities' other punk bands
by jumping the Replacements to the head of the line, in front of so many
other groups who had been biding their time for the shot he'd promised them.
In 1980, the Replacements were nothing more than a band fronted by a
teenaged ex-janitor with broken-glass vocals, a lead guitarist whose main
influences were Johnny Winter and Steve Howe, a drummer who adored
Aerosmith, and a 12-year-old bass player who signed on with his brother.
Their song titles included "Shut Up!" and "More Cigarettes" and "I Hate
Music" (because "it's got too many notes!"); their sound was crap by way of
shit, garage hardcore played by dudes who were convinced their junk-rock was
arena-ready. They were first-rate screw-ups, bastards of young who bragged
about writing songs "20 minutes after we recorded" Sorry Ma. And Jesperson,
who was so often told they were a waste of time, insisted the Replacements
were worth the small amount of agony. "It was such an incredible rush," he
says of those early days recording and managing the Replacements. "We were
lucky to have found each other. I don't know who was luckier. I had been in
the Minneapolis scene for a long time when they came along, and people made
fun of me for the Replacements. I remember people saying, 'A 12-year-old
bass player? Real cool, Peter.' The Replacements didn't come into the scene
being friendly to the other groups. They made their own space and weren't
real sociable. People resented how quickly they made their claim."
The keys to the kingdom: Westerberg trades his electric
guitar for the piano. Photo by Len Irish But there
would never be any disputing how compellingly they did so: On
1982's The Replacements Stink, recorded just months after the debut,
Westerberg was writing short, sharp anthems for every "White and Lazy" "Dope
Smokin Moron" in the audience who had said "Fuck School" and still needed a
"God Damn Job." The music was hardcore with a furtive melody, a joke with a
point, a punch line with a serious purpose. It was as though the 'Mats were
performing an entire album's worth of responses and follow-ups to "(I Can't
Get No) Satisfaction" and "My Generation." Westerberg's songs were nothing
more than snippets of conversations overheard and borrowed, everyday
dialogue set to a train-wreck beat for dancing and drinking. But they seemed
enormous at the time, even bigger today. In retrospect, it's quite possible
that later records - 1983's Hootenanny, '84's Let it Be, and the next year's
Tim - have been overrated by the fanatics. They are not the perfect gems
they're often portrayed as, not the sloppy masterpieces of a band known for
drinking itself into oblivion before going into the studio or onto a stage.
They contain too many half-assed moments to be considered truly great, too
many songs easily skipped over once they were transferred to CD. And Let it
Be, considered by the disciples to be the most perfect Replacements album,
is a complete mess, full of cheap throwaway jokes ("Tommy Gets His Tonsils
Out," "Gary's Got a Boner") and a horrible cover of a horrible KISS song
("Black Diamond") and at least one unlistenable song about cross-dressing
("Androgynous"). But there were a handful of songs on Hootenanny and Let it
Be that seemed to mask all the flaws, that made them essential albums for
the lost and lovelorn who found solace in electric guitars and drunken
howls. "Within Your Reach" off Hootenanny revealed for the first time the
softer, lonelier side of Westerberg: "I can live without your touch," he
sang, the drum-machine-and-slide-guitar music sparse and empty behind him,
"but I could die within your reach." That it was sandwiched between "Mr.
Whirly" (which mutated the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" into a punk-rock
rant) and the surf-rocky instrumental "Buck Hill" only made it seem that
much more an anomaly - The Geek hanging out with all The Jocks. Certainly
the transcendent moments remain on Let it Be: "I Will Dare," "Answering
Machine," and "Unsatisfied," three songs that could - and did - cover a
multitude of sins. The first track on the record was this weird little pop
song, so catchy and inviting, so desperate and real: "Meet me any place or
any time or anywhere / If you will dare meet me tonight / If you will dare,
I will dare." And the last was so utterly pathetic, the sound of a coward
trying to proclaim his love for a woman and finding only her answering
machine to talk to - and "how do you say I love you to an answering
machine?" Westerberg wondered over nothing more than the sound of a
furiously strummed electric guitar, his voice ripped in half. But it was
"Unsatisfied" that remains Westerberg's gilt-edged moment, and it's nothing
more than a ripped-off KISS riff ("Hard-Luck Woman," actually) and a man
yelling over and over again: "I'm so...unsatisfieeeeeeeeeed." You could feel
the song in your bones. Westerberg was always a wimp deep down, a softie, a
broken-down romantic; the later records on Warner Bros., including 1987's
Pleased to Meet Me and 1989's Don't Tell a Soul, were full of such lullaby
moments: "The Ledge," "Skyway," "Achin' to Be." But the way Westerberg
explains it now, he was almost too ashamed of those songs, afraid the guys
in the band wouldn't understand that he didn't always want to write stoopid
drunk-rock songs the rest of his life. "I'm proud of something like
'Unsatisfied,' but I probably would have written lyrics to the thing if I
had written it now, and I probably would have ruined it rather than just
screaming out," Westerberg says. "It's like, that was my way of making it
appeal to the guys. Now, I probably would have written more. You'd have to
go back to, like, 'Answering Machine' and stuff like that. You can hear me
trying to include the group in almost everything. It's like...I don't know.
Does it fucking matter?" Jesperson says that every now and then during the
early days of the Replacements, Westerberg would write a ballad, record it
at home, rush the tape 20 blocks down to Jesperson's apartment and slip it
in the mailbox, then disappear before Peter ever got to the door. Jesperson
explains that Westerberg was too afraid that he would either erase the tape
or that one of the other Replacements would find the song and laugh at it.
One such song, the Paul-alone "If Only You Were Lonely," made it to the
B-side of a single in 1982. Another such track actually made it to a band
rehearsal, a song titled "You're Getting Married," which features among its
lyrics such lines as "You're like a guitar in the hands of some fool who
can't play." But when Paul offered it to the band for inclusion on
Hootenanny, Jesperson says, Bob Stinson stopped him cold. Bob is said to
have told Westerberg, "That's not a Replacements song. Keep it for your solo
record, Paul." "I have a live recording of them doing 'You're Getting
Married' made on February 11, 1984, in Trenton, New Jersey," says Jesperson,
who has spent the past several months compiling dozens and dozens of
unreleased Replacements songs for a Twin/Tone boxed set he hopes to release
within a year's time. "They attempted to do it in a completely drunken
stupor, and it's one of the most precious things they did in their entire
history. Paul makes up words, and I remember him singing this to a really
hardcore crowd, this mohawk audience, and I thought at the time, 'They're
gonna kill him.' But by the end of the song they're transfixed. And at the
end of the song, Paul tells them, 'At least you fuckers ain't enemies.
That's nice to know.'" "Now, people will say, 'What would the
Replacements have added to this?'"
Eventually, Westerberg would begin slowly dismantling the band, crawling
toward the inevitable solo career. When he finally debuted all alone on
1993's 14 Songs, he sounded very much like a man still trying to reconcile
who he wanted to be with who he thought he should be. Half the songs were
tepid ballads; the other half, tepid rockers. It was ironic that when he
toured for 14 Songs with a four-piece band - the Replacements' replacements
- the songs came alive, sounding whole instead of like fragments of old
reverberations. Eventually, released in 1996, was even more dull; Lord only
knows how many times the words "James Taylor" appeared in reviews for the
album, which can now be purchased for $4.91 in local used-CD bins, alongside
his contributions to the soundtracks for Singles, Friends, and Melrose
Place. Replacements fans couldn't help but shrug at the sad irony that while
Chris Mars - booted from the band because he wanted the band to perform a
few of his own songs - was recording in quick succession some brilliant, Ray
Davies-fronting-the Replacements mini-gems, Westerberg was struggling
without his old bandmates to prop him up. "On those first two solo records,
I needed to prove that I could do what the Replacements did - and maybe what
I did was prove that I couldn't," he says. "But either one, it's history.
This is what I do. Now, people will say, 'What would the Replacements have
added to this?' Well, we wouldn't have gotten around to doing 90 percent of
it. When you have the guys of the group - even if it's just a small group,
three or four people - it frees you a little more to make statements like,
'We are this,' or, 'We're gonna do this.' When you're all alone, you realize
you've got to lay yourself on the line, because that's all you've got. No
one is really covering you from behind anymore." Even less so now: Suicaine
Gratifaction, his first album for Capitol Records, is the sound of a man so
far out on a limb, even a fireman couldn't rescue him. It's a confusing,
beautiful, unlistenable contradiction - the former Replacement recording
with cellos and guitars turned down to one and guest vocalist Shawn Colvin
brought in to sweeten up the sour moments. It's the sort of record that
reveals the world about a man so many indie-rock fans have grown up with -
and a record those very same fans will surely despise, wondering what the
hell happened to their rock-and-roll hero. The Replacements left in their
wake both the best and worst that rock and roll has to offer: Nirvana and
the Goo Goo Dolls, idols and enemies. They never became popular, never went
platinum, never achieved the stardom they secretly pined for. And now, the
Replacements will never get back together. Tommy Stinson recorded an EP and
a never-to-be-released album with his own band, Perfect; now, he is paying
the rent with Guns N' Roses, and the mind reels at the implications. Chris
Mars has disappeared into the basement with his tape recorders and his paint
brushes; when he will return is anyone's guess. Slim Dunlap, who replaced
Bob as well as anyone could, is still making wonderful records no one is
buying. And Bob, well, he's still dead. As for Paul, he will not tour for
this album. He doesn't see how it's possible to sit behind a piano and
perform these new songs for an audience that will keep shouting out requests
for "I Will Dare" or "Bastards of Young" or "I.O.U." or "Unsatisfied." He is
content now to sit in his tinfoil-covered basement, black lipstick smeared
on his face, and record in front of a new video camera with which he's
become infatuated. Jesperson says he's heard rumors of Westerberg's showing
up at South by Southwest in Austin next month, but don't count on it; Paul
seems very much resolved to holing up with his piano and his son, shut out
from the rest of the world with his Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane
records to keep him company. He does like to say he is an unabashed
misanthrope. And perhaps it's just as well that he has chosen to shelve his
rock-and-roll side. The Grandpaboy record has its moments - indeed,
Westerberg insists the song "Lush and Green" is among the best things he's
ever recorded, and maybe he's right - but it sounds too much like a thousand
steps backward, right into a land mine. Suicaine Gratifaction is by no means
a flawless record, but at least you can hear, feel, the ambition and thought
and pain that went into its making. If nothing else, for all its faults, the
new record feels like the most genuine record he has made since breaking up
the band. And that's hardly an apology, simply a fact: Suicaine Gratifaction
may be a mess, even a bore at times, but never does it feel like a fake.
"I'm now at a place where I ask myself, 'Why do I do this?'" he says. "You
kind of have to slap yourself upside the head and go, 'You do this because
you can do it better than most.' That's maybe not as rewarding, but if
you're going to continue in life and have a place or a job or a purpose, you
have to use that. I do it because I'm good at it and it's a challenge to
myself to top myself. I want to make a better record next time. But I'm not
holding this up against someone else's record and saying, 'Well, it doesn't
sound as good as them.' I've learned the trick of only listening to my last
thing. "It all comes down to manic depression. When I'm in an up cycle,
I'll go with it. Sometimes that down cycle lasts a long time, and it's
horrible if you're caught either way. You're in an up cycle making a record,
and then you just slowly slip down. I do have sort of a polar personality.
I'm not an even-keel guy. Right now I'm starting to be in an up vibe again.
If only I could just bring intelligence with it." <<...>> Send us your
feedback. <../../feedback/index.html>
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