Let it Bleed - Minus 1

Tomorrow's the big release day for The Replacements' Let it Bleed - the remixed/resalvaged box (boxed?) set for Tim - and everybody's buzzing about the (curiously so, in my eyes) masterpiece:

The new box set is preoccupied with fixing perceived mistakes: a new mix, a new remaster, a counterfactual history of an awkwardly perfect album. There’s lots of fun stuff on the updated version well worth hearing—scrappy tracks from a demo session with the band’s spiritual mentor Alex Chilton, a typically wobbling and bracing 1986 live set from Chicago—but the perverse net effect is of taking a defensive stance to an LP that never truly needed defending. The new Ed Stasium remix is fine, but it was never really Erdelyi’s heavy hand that prevented “Tim” from attaining its commercial aims. The original mix sounds no more gated or dated than “Born in the U.S.A.,” which never had any difficulty connecting to a mass audience. In the 2003 documentary “Come Feel Me Tremble,” Westerberg is asked his opinion of “Tim” and offers a typically gnomic and incisive verdict: “Coulda been.” Whether he is invoking Marlon Brando’s “coulda been a contender” monologue from Elia Kazan’s social-realist masterpiece “On the Waterfront” intentionally or just by osmosis doesn’t really matter.