Their problems left the band members, as Mehr explains through an immense accumulation of detail, singularly unable to deal with, well … anything. His half-brother Tommy was inducted into the band before even hitting his teens, because of his persistent trouble with the authorities, and Bob’s desire to spare the kid what had happened to him. Guitarist Bob Stinson was haunted by a childhood of abuse at the hands of his stepfather he had been driven to drink and drugs, and was institutionalised while still in his teens. There is certainly an element of that in Trouble Boys, but more striking is the miracle that the band was able to come together in the first place, let alone keep a recording career going for a decade.Īll four of the original Replacements came from backgrounds that were troubled by parental drinking or depression. Rock biographies have a standard narrative: the band members come together, bursting with companionship and desire they dazzle the world with their brilliance then drugs and alcohol come into play, the records get worse, the musicians fall out, and the band falls apart. Their inability to meet the music industry’s needs, despite the industry offering them every chance, meant they struggled and withered while REM, their contemporaries and kindred spirits, became one of the world’s biggest bands, much to the chagrin of Westerberg and his bandmates. They were the band who walked and talked like the Rolling Stones, while existing on the kind of audience and sales befitting a scrappy group of misfits who emerged from the Minneapolis punk scene. It was to be the fate of the Replacements that their greatness – which, these days, is pretty much undisputed you’ll find their third full album Let It Be (1984) on scores of “greatest ever” lists – was recognised only by a small number of people. “We didn’t have the things that made those bands huge we had the thing that made them infamous and decadent and, perhaps, great.”
‘We happened to … like all of the funky quirks of the classic rock bands – the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Ramones,” notes Paul Westerberg in the epilogue to American music writer Bob Mehr’s exhaustive biography of the Replacements, the band Westerberg led.
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