Book Review

When I was a kid, I pretty much worshipped The Replacements, and Paul Westerberg in particular. I’d listen to the records over and over – I wanted to be them, I thought they were me, and they were my religion during those important years. Back then, there’s no way in hell I would’ve ever even dreamed that one day there would actually be a book about them – back then, you had to scour stupid rock magazines and hope for even a blurb of your heroes. Unlike now where there’s nobody that hasn’t at least heard of them, back then they sold like 3 records a week and were nowhere near the radio.

Pretty much every book about rock and roll bands suck, and "The Replacements: All Over but the Shouting" is no exception. You would think that anyone going out of their way to buy this book would already be at least a pretty big Replacements fan, so they’d already know that yes, they were an amazing band that always shot themselves in the foot and usually took a dive by shambling through an hour of drunken covers instead of playing a proper show. We know this. And any Replacements fan knows that there’s no “sort of fans”: kids like me lived our lives poised to throw ourselves in front of an oncoming bus in the name of “real” rock and roll according to Saint Paul. So we know the gushing already. So now we have a book, and 95% of it is 1) fans gushing and going about how much they meant to them and 2) story after story of “we went to the show, they were wasted, it was awesome!!!” We get it. Seems to me like the author could’ve boiled all that down to a small chapter; for once in a fucking rock n roll band book can we hear something about the songs themselves? How they were written and, as importantly, how they were recorded, please? I’d guess off the top of my head that each album has MAYBE a page worth of info/anecdotes, then it’s straight back to “Paul was a contrarian!! They were drunk!!” Lotta Hullaballoo about Tim being their major label debut, and then a single quote about the gotdam thing. Westerberg spends a sentence bitching about Tommy Ramone’s mix of the album. Really? Well, can you do a LITTLE bit of work and find out more about that? I would think that would be a big deal: band leader hates the mix of their big go-for-it album. Why did he? What’d he try to do about it? Etc etc. Nope. Back to Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, who should be shot for trying to out-gush himself with every quote. We get it, Craig. You loved the band. Here’s a fucking medal.

Anyways. Disappointing. But what did I expect? Same thing with that stupid book that came out about the Stones’ making Exile on Main Street. I started reading that the other day. Unreadable. Started skimming through it, looking for actual stuff about the making of the album. Nope. “Keith disappeared for three days and got high!! Mick was mad! Keith came back, then left! It was warm!” Over and over.

A coupla years ago I wrote an email to Peter Jesperson, the first manager of the Replacements and their discoverer (if that’s a word.) I forget what I wrote to him about. Prolly blathering/gushing, something gay prolly. He wrote back, obviously amused I had named my band after a Replacements song. So he writes me a nice email and then at the end includes a story about the song “Hayday” – that after the album Hootenanny had been completed, Paul came up with the song and made them reconstruct the mobile studio, going through all that trouble again, fighting with everybody to record it and finally recording the song. Then he officially declared the album finished. Not an amazing story, but an insider’s point of view and insight on the actual making of one of the records everyone professes to love. And if some complete stranger can get something like this, why wasn’t it, and hundreds of stories like it, in this book?

The only good purpose this book has served is for me to dust off the albums again and really listen. Which I rarely bother with anymore, since every note of every song has been embedded in brain for about twenty years, already attached to every bit of my skin. So that’s one good thing I reckon.