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Per the video below, Bob Mehr, author of the great Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements, had some interesting insights on what created the band and the world they came out of:

I appreciated that when you introduced people, you would say, “So-and-so is from South Minneapolis, they’re second-generation Polish-American, they’re the eighth of 10 kids, they’re Catholic, and their dad was a fall-down drunk.” It seems like about 70 percent of the people in the book have that same background. It shows you another context for how punk rock got born — how people came up in Minneapolis and what they were rebelling against. People were coming out of these lineages where their dad was in the war and would come home and never spoke about anything, bestowing all of this freighted manhood on their sons. What else were they going to do but start a screamy punk band?
Mehr: That is it. The book is about American families, damaged American families, what happens to those children, and how they relate to the world through rock and roll.

Toward the end, it was all completely in spite of themselves.
Mehr: That’s the funny thing I came away with. This isn’t true for every band, and maybe wasn’t true for The Replacements, but you understand just how complex a band relationship is. You’re talking about the four people — not just their relationship with each other and the music they’re making, but every bit of their lives leading up to that point, which goes into what the music is, how everything plays out. For me, that’s the complexity, the places they can go — from [Omaha Beach], where Paul’s father was walking after D-Day, and how that affected his father and how that affected Paul. Obviously, people are the sum of their lives, but sometimes we think a band is just four guys who got together in a garage, and sometimes it’s a lot more than that.