"Pleased to Meet Me" Reissue

Apparently Pleased to Meet Me came out 24 years ago today.  I bought it a few weeks after that; I can still picture riding in Brothatime!!'s Shitvette to Doc's and finding the cassette among the un-alphabetized stacks (thanks, Doc.)

Mostly, I remember how I got the $crillah to buy it.  The summer after 9th grade I got a job cutting the grass at the DMV, which was a TINY square of grass that took maybe 15 minutes to cut.  I got $10 to cut it every Saturday, and of course after about one Saturday the scorching heat completely killed the grass, so there was no reason to cut it.  But I'd still show up every week, go through the motions and then walk in to collect my ten fat ones (that's cash money, ladies; from Day 1 I demanded "folding money only, please.") The lady would always be a little confused, "gee, did it really need it this week?" to which I'd look like she was ridiculous "oh yeah, yeah it really did" and then take my ten bucks to invest in some little-known company at the time called "Google." - XMASTIME

The big reissue of The Replacements' classic Pleased to Meet Me is out, and people are quite happy about it:

By 1986, the group’s quixotic determination to both ironically comment upon and simultaneously up the ante on every rock-star-excess cliché had created its first victims. Founding member and lead guitarist Bob Stinson—a musical wildcard with debilitating psychological and addiction issues—was summarily fired from a group that included his younger brother Tommy on bass. This followed the dismissal of longtime manager Peter Jesperson, who carefully nurtured a young Westerberg’s evolving gifts. Such were the emotional contours for the Replacements’ second major-label record, and the one that Warner Brothers badly hoped would break them into the mainstream the way that the band’s friends R.E.M. had done in the previous year. The great, Faces-set-on-fire opener “I.O.U.” simmers with sublimated guilt and explicit anger: “Want it in writing/I owe you nothing.”

Pleased To Meet Me sold roughly 300,000 copies, well short of expectations. Warner Brothers didn’t have the platinum hit they had hoped for. But they did have an instant classic. And maybe, in their Russian Roulette way, the Replacements were always playing the long game. As any number of their more commercially successful peers slide ever more into the gaping maw of cultural obsolescence, now it’s all Replacements all the time. Against all odds, they’ve got both feet in the door.

This is the first reissue I'm considering buying in forever, since you get all these tracks:

* New remaster of the original album by Justin Perkins, who was also behind the boards for our Dead Man’s Pop regimaging
* 1986 demo session with Bob Stinson – his last recorded Replacements performance
* Additional 1986 demos with the band as a three-piece outfit (sans Bob)
* Previously unreleased rough mix of the album with alternate track listing
* Studio outtakes from the album recording sessions (Memphis, 1987)
* Rare single mixes

PLUS a tote bag! Buy it all HERE.

Or listen to the whole mess of glory on Spotify.