A Beautiful Mess

I'm probably one of the better-known non-professional Replacements experts in the world, at least online, and it's a well-known fact that I "worship at the house of Westerberg". So I'm kind of ashamed to admit this, really, but they'd already been around three or four years when I finally discovered them.

But thank goodness I did. Much like The Ramones (and then The Clash, and the Sex Pistols, and so on and so on) did almost a decade earlier, the Let It Be album totally changed my life. Many of the things I'm still involved in today and other things over the years, they never would have happened - people I know and work alongside with on things today, I never would have met - if not for someone turning me onto this album.

One of my friends from home had been away at school at UT-Knoxville for a while, and had come back a whole different person. She didn't look the same, she didn't act the same. I had originally been supposed to go to Knoxville too, but changed my mind at the last minute and opted to start college at a smaller school in the Nashville area.

When I was living and working in Jackson, Tennessee, between semesters, she came down that summer to visit and brought with her a whole host of new music I'd never heard - and some I'd never heard of - before. The Descendents, The Misfits, Husker Du - a bunch more I don't recall. Husker Du stuck with me a little. Black Flag - that wound up sticking with me. A lot of the rest, I could give or take.

And the other was The Replacements' Let It Be album.

We did nothing that entire weekend but get uproariously drunk and listen to all that music. It was my first time shooting tequila - a hobby that wouldn't last, because a couple of years later I got more violently ill than I ever have in my life doing the same thing and never drank it again. Still won't, not in the last 21 years. All I have to do is smell it and my stomach twists in knots.

But that weekend, it was all good. And The Replacements. THE REPLACEMENTS!!

I was convinced Paul Westerberg was a musical genius. In many ways, although from a more masculine point of view certainly, it felt like Paul Westerberg had somehow written the story of my life. Years later, I would read in an interview that a fan at one of his shows had told him the same thing, and his response was, "I didn't write it for you, but I knew you were out there."

I met one of my most adored boyfriends through The Replacements newsgroup on Usenet, when the Internet was still fairly young. I was griping and moaning about how all the best 'Mats fans that were guys were either gay or married (the friend I was responding to was the latter).

The next day there was this response in the newsgroup - "So, where have you been all my life?" And thus began one of my shortest-lived, but favorite, love affairs of all time.

I have fifty million stories, many of which have little to do with Paul Westerberg or The Replacements other than the fact that they were the reason those stories came about, for whatever reason. Some of my closest friends for the last 15 years, locally and otherwise, I met because they were 'Mats fans too.

I never met Paul, but I did meet Tommy Stinson, who was just the nicest guy. Tommy and I are the same age. He was 13 (13!!!) when he started playing bass in the band. I met and spent an evening talking with Peter Jesperson, longtime Replacements manager, too. The first thing I said to him was that I just had to shake his hand, and "Thank you."

There's an anecdote that's been going around for years about us Replacements fans, the fact that there's always been one group that likes everything from Tim on back and hates everything that came after, and another group that prefers the Pleased to Meet Me album and after and doesn't like the early Twin/Tone albums. I was admittedly one of the former and it took years for the later albums to grow on me, but they eventually did. I think we've all gotten that way as we've grown older.

The Let It Be album, though - that's the one. And most will agree; even the late era preferrers will tip a hat to Let It Be as the real turning point, at least.

There's not a song on the album that's not absolutely brilliant, but ask me what my favorite is, and it will probably change tomorrow. Sometimes it's "Unsatisfied". Sometimes it's "Favorite Thing", or "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out".

Today it's "Answering Machine", with its guitar and Paul and nothing else until the end, and "How do I say I miss you to an answering machine?". So brutally honest and open and painful it literally hurts.

I'm probably one of the few that owns an original cassette copy of The Sh*t Hits the Fans, the live show tape that was literally pulled out of pirate taper's recorder and then mass produced and released by the band. Like The Replacements themselves often were, especially in the early days, it's sloppy. They're drunk. It's a mess.

And it's just so absolutely brilliant it hurts, yet at the same time, it's a beautiful and wonderful and joyous absolute mess.

Many have tried to get a piece of what The Replacements had themselves (*cough* RyanAdams *cough). Many more have failed miserably. I don't think it'll ever be duplicated, not quite the same way. And you either get it, or you don't.

I'm so very glad I got it.