CHRISSY PIPER
Paul Westerberg: off the 'Mats and sounding as good as ever.
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The Replacements' final show at Chicago's Grant Park in 1991 wasn't exactly a blowout, or even the pull-out-the-stops performance the band's fans might have wanted. Nonetheless, there was the clear sense of an ending.
Frontman Paul Westerberg altered and twisted the band's familiar lyrics, as usual—the funniest parts of the group's shows often emerged from Westerberg's sharp wordplay—but that night the ad libs were centered mostly around the evening's finality. "You'll never have to hear it again!" he bleated over an instrumental break; even in the opening number, he announced the end by replacing the title "I Will Dare" with the words "one last time!" in its opening chorus. An era was plainly drawing to an close, even if Westerberg in particular seemed determined to poke a hole in the Replacements' already ballooning mythos.
Long gone were the days when the 'Mats approached their live gigs like Irish wakes, drinking heroically before they took the stage to drape heartfelt emotions in boozy enthusiasm. Beer-soaked shows which consisted of half original material and half Bachman-Turner Overdrive covers were now committed to history. (An acquaintance once referred to that period's gig as "the best and the worst show I ever saw"—an encomium which, one suspects, the band would perversely savor.) In the space of scarcely a decade the Replacements had grown from hard-core purists into what Plato knew college radio could be, in its purest form—brainy, smartass, sweetly melodic, just irresponsible enough to court constant flameout, and always trusting in its heart before its head.
The Replacements were fiercely loved by the kids who followed, and when Westerberg officially went solo his harshest critics were inevitably his former disciples. Reaction to 1993's 14 Songs set the tone for the next decade's appraisal: A collection of Stonesey rockers leavened with gentle mood pieces, the record was seen as a step away from Westerberg's raucous, goddamn-it-all gutter poetry toward calm domesticity, a move few of the Replacements' notoriously unhinged fans were willing to make with him.
While next-gen songwriters yanked whole pages from his biography and notebook—there's simply no Ryan Adams or Green Day without Westerberg—the man himself seemed, like the Bob Dylan of the early '70s, always in competition with his younger, more inchoate self. Like Dylan, Westerberg had been pegged as one of the smartest and most important songwriters of his generation. And, like Dylan, he'd been widely relegated to history's dustbin when he no longer seemed connected to his own past, or even to rock's present.
So when all the world's tried to remake your Highway 61, what's left to do?
Answer: Stereo/Mono, and the coppery scent of Paul Westerberg's blood all over its tracks.
IT SHOULDN'T HAVE come as a surprise that Paul Westerberg would have a hard time escaping the long shadow of his former band. After all, he chose to begin his solo career under the banner of Replacements; the group's 1990 swan song, All Shook Down, was a Westerberg album in all but name. Coming from the newly sober Westerberg, the muted, world-weary disc was the sound of a man waking up after a decade-long bender. While All Shook Down was viewed as something of a disappointment at the time—it was not the raucous, Viking funeral that many had hoped for the Replacements finale—recent critical appraisals have been kinder, hailing the album as a touchstone for the alt-country movement and the inspiration to artists like Whiskeytown and early Wilco.
Though it arrived only a few years later, 14 Songs was released into an entirely different world—specifically one of post-grunge, post-Nirvana proportions. To many, the Replacements were a seminal influence on the new crop of alternative acts taking over the airwaves in the early '90s; if Neil Young was their godfather, then Westerberg was certainly their drunk uncle (a fact confirmed when Cameron Crowe asked the latter to write songs for his grunge love letter, Singles).
Indeed, many tried to draw obvious comparisons between Westerberg and Kurt Cobain—each hailed as the great white saviors of rock in their day. The glaring difference, of course, was that Cobain courted success ruthlessly, while Westerberg chose to sabotage his at nearly every turn. The only real connection between the two was that Cobain was following a path that Westerberg had begun paving a decade earlier. Emerging from the morass of early '80s hardcore, Westerberg was first among American post-punk songsmiths to truly embrace melody and earnest sentiment in his songs ("Within Your Reach," "Answering Machine," "Here Comes a Regular")—something that made it acceptable for the alt and indie artists who followed to openly wear their hearts on their tattered flannel sleeves.
Though 14 Songs was a fairly consistent collection, it began a trend of confusing listeners—especially latecomers to the 'Mats, fledgling alt-rock fans just discovering the power trash of Sorry Ma and Hootenanny—still looking to Westerberg as some sort of hard-rocking, hard-living Dionysus.
The folk-jangle of 1996's Eventually saw Westerberg further violate expectation. Judging from songs like "Good Day" and "MamaDaddyDid," his touchstones no longer seemed to be the Stones and Heartbreakers, but rather Jackson Browne, Ricky Lee Jones, and a host of other West Coast softies—artists whom Westerberg had long (if quietly) admitted admiring. In interviews around this time, he also went to great lengths to subvert his youthful punk image, playing up his love for John Coltrane and suggesting that as he grew older he lost his appreciation for the Sex Pistols.
