Wait On The Sons Of No One

The Replacements 1985 album Tim has been given the four disc box treatment, out recently and sold out almost everywhere. Tim came out in 1985, a year after Let It Be, their mid- 80s classic. Let It Be was full of classic Replacements songs, Paul Westerberg stretching out a little and the band on top of their ramshackle game. It took them to a major label, Sire, and then Tim. The title of Let It Be was a sly nod to The Beatles, but a middle finger too and a dare. The title of Tim came about after the band kept getting asked what the album was going to be called and they kept saying, 'Tim', and laughing. Eventually, that's what it was called. 

Tim has many very good songs but the mix was not ideal, the drums tinny, the bass indistinct, everything a little smaller than it should be. On songs like Bastards Of Young, Left Of The Dial and Kiss Me On The Bus it didn't matter, you just turned the volume up and sang along, the guitars cranked up high and Westerberg's outsider/ loser anthems hitting home like the first cigarette of the day (back in the days when I did such a thing). The new version of Tim contains this 1985 mix (remastered) but also has the entire album remixed by Ed Stasium, best known for his work with Talking Heads and The Ramones. It's fair to say that, after a few listens, the new mix of the album is going to become the definitive one. It's so much better, the songs sounding like they should have all along and as fresh as if they were recorded yesterday, while you were in the room with them. The muddiness and thinness is gone. The drums punch and sound real, the bass is up with the guitars, some of the guitar solos appear from the murk, the instruments sound closer together and louder, not in a radio station loudness wars way but in the way a band should sound. 

Bastards Of Young is one of Westerberg's best, a lyric for the alienated and dispossessed. The new mix makes it sparkle and jump, the Replacements' punk edge restored to the performance. 

Left Of The Dial, a song about where to find the best music stations on the radio/ a girl that's left him/ the loss of teenage years, is more dynamic than before, crunchy and alive with Westerberg singing like it's the last song he's ever going to sing. 

Little Mascara, is the most changed, the song not just remixed but rejigged, intro extended, verses and choruses shortened and tightened. In short the song it should have been in 1985.  

The other eight songs on Tim all benefit in a similar way. I know you can argue that the definitive version is the one that came out first (and the purist in me agrees up to a point) but in this case I think we have a situation where the Ed Stasium mix becomes the one to go to every time. The box comes with more discs including a third disc of outtakes, alternate mixes, demos recorded with Alex Chilton and alternate takes which I haven't had time to explore yet- however it's well known that the unused version of Can't Hardly Wait included here knocks the spots off the one that came out on Pleased To Meet Me. There's a live disc too, a record of the band at Cabaret Metro in Chicago, a twenty six song set from November 1986 with covers aplenty. The Replacements were a notoriously unreliable live band, drunk and self sabotaging and not long after this album the band began to disintegrate and by the late 80s was a Paul Westerberg solo outfit under the Replacements name. This new version of Tim offers a sliding doors moment, where The Replacements stay together, where the sound and the songs are what they should sound like. 

Saturday Live

Last Saturday's Saturday Live post was Husker Du in blistering form in 1985 in London. Today brings Minnesotan contemporaries The Replacements (also included in Thursday's Andrew Weatherall post and mix). The Replacements- Paul Westerberg, Tommy and Bob Stinson and Chris Mars- were by all accounts a raucous and chaotic live experience, often self sabotaging, screwing their own songs up, lurching into fragments of covers and often too drunk to stand up never mind play. At a showcase set up specifically for them to impress record label bigwigs they got pissed and pissed everybody off. When they appeared on Saturday Night Live they were so drunk/ stoned (backstage with Harry Dean Stanton) Bob Stinson fell over making his way to the studio and broke his guitar. The programme banned them from appearing again. 

On the other hand Peter Jesperson saw them in 1980 at a local venue and signed them on the spot. He became their manager and cheer leader, keeping them going when the only person in the audience at the gig was Jesperson himself. In February 1986 they played at Maxwell's, Hoboken, New Jersey. Their label Sire (and RIP Seymour Stein, Sire's label boss and guiding light, who died just this week) recorded the show for a possible live album. It finally saw the light of day officially in 2017, a double CD set of twenty nine songs. It is a fine document of the band on a good night, a band with enough great songs to fill much bigger venues and a counter to Bob Stinson's assertion that 'there are no good Replacements live recordings'. In one eight song run in the first half of the gig they play these songs, guitars trebly and fuzzed up, the four players locked in, Paul singing his self- deprecating lyrics, raw and good voice...

I Will Dare (Live at Maxwell's 1986)

Favourite Thing (Live at Maxwell's 1986)

Unsatisfied (Live at Maxwell's 1986)

Can't Hardly Wait (Live at Maxwell's 1986)

Bastards Of Young (Live at Maxwell's 1986)

Kiss Me On The Bus (Live at Maxwell's 1986)

They also play Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out and Takin' A Ride as part of that run of songs and then follow Kiss Me On The Bus with Black Diamond. Occasional dropped notes and tuning issues but they sound great, alive and far from the sloppy mess they're often portrayed as. 

Five years earlier they played this set, filmed at 7th Street Entry, Minneapolis. Husker Du headlined- imagine seeing both bands on the same night in 1981. This is faster, punkier stuff, mainly focussing on songs from Sorry Ma, I Forgot To Take Out The Trash. Fast and furious, twelve songs in twenty five minutes.

AW60

Today would have been Andrew Weatherall's 60th birthday. His absence is felt very strongly among his family and friends and in the corners of the culture he inhabited. His presence is there too I think, in the open minded spirit of adventure, of finding new music and doing things your own way. Fired up by youthful rebellion, the DIY spirit of punk and acid house and an interest, often obsession, in what was happening on the margins, he was a singular character. In the end, by the time he died in February 2020, he was approaching national treasure status. At the start he was an inexperienced DJ asked to bring his box of 'weird records' down to Shoom. Then he was a novice remixer asked to make something new from an indie rock 'n' roll record (in fact his remixes of Happy Mondays and That Petrol Emotion both pre- date Loaded, as do his remixes Word Of Mouth, Deep Joy and West India Company- the chronology is not entirely clear but all those were released before Loaded). In between 1989 and 2020 he took us on a ride from the Balearic network to techno, from Sabres to Swordsmen, from deep house to rockabilly and 60s garage to the multi- coloured cosmic chug of the 2010s, all of it underpinned by dub. He moved on, working quickly and always looking forwards. The way he became a master in not just one form of electronic music but several is largely unparalleled- not many of his peers could play several hours of dub one night, techno the next and house the third and do it well, brilliantly in fact. 

With Andrew you weren't just buying records either, you were getting into something deeper- he left clues scattered throughout his back catalogue, in song titles and remix names, references to books and artists that you might not pick up on until many years later. You also were not just buying a record. In 2007 he released Wrong Meeting, an album of rockabilly, garage rock and experimental rock 'n' roll with the man himself singing. The album came out on vinyl (at a time when virtually no one was buying vinyl never mind releasing new albums on it), in a box with an illustrated lyric booklet, a t- shirt and a hand signed print (a print of a Weatherall linocut of guitarist Chet Atkins from the cover of his Workshop album). 

There are a series of events taking place during April to celebrate his 60th birthday. Tonight at Fabric in London a host of names will play records/ CDs in several rooms, starting at 11pm and going through until dawn- David Holmes, Daniel Avery, Sean Johnston, Dave Congreave, Adrian Sherwood, Miss Kittin, Fantastic Twin, Radioactive Man, Ivan Smagghe, Manfredas, Optimo and Fi Maguire will all play to rooms full of friends and fans, trying to capture something of the spirit of the man in music. 

Later on this month, in a turn of events which still baffles me at times, I will be part of the birthday celebrations at The Golden Lion in Todmorden. On the Saturday afternoon and evening myself and four other fans/ DJs (Martin, Mark, Dan and Baz) will play support to Timothy J. Fairplay and Justin Robertson as The Flightpath Estate DJs. This blog and my repeated writing about Andrew Weatherall and his music led to this- I like to think in some way reflecting the spirit of Andrew, do what you want to do, create something you love, do it yourself. 

I've put together a mix of songs inspired by Andrew for today. There's so much variety in his life and work you could put together ten mixes and only scratch the surface. His radio shows at 6 Mix and NTS, his Music's Not For Everyone banner that took in goth, garage, rockabilly, 80s indie, cosmic blues and country, rock 'n' roll and punk, where endlessly inspiring and I've tried to reflect some of that in the hour of songs below with one of his songs in the middle. 

AW60 Mix

• The Triffids: Wide Open Road
• Chuck Prophet: Play That Song Again
• Forest Fire: In Shadows
• Grant Hart: You're The Reflection Of The Moon On The Water
• The Dream Syndicate: John Coltrane Stereo Blues
• Dennis Wilson: Carry Me Home
• The Replacements: Sadly Beautiful
• Two Lone Swordsmen: Get Out Of My Kingdom (Demo)
• Rowland S. Howard: She Cried
• White Williams: Route To Palm
• Rose City Band: In The Rain
• The Jesus And Mary Chain: Darklands
• Cowboys International: The 'No' Tune

Wide Open Road was on The Triffids' 1986 album Born Sandy Devotional, an album widely seen as the band's masterpiece. The song is on Andrew's The Black Notebooks YouTube playlists, Volume One of which you can find here. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. You'll find plenty in there to keep you going. 

Chuck Prophet was the guitarist in US roots rockers Green On Red. His solo career included a 2012 album called Temple Beautiful and this song is built around a cracking guitar riff and a load of good one liners- 'You go fight the power/ I'm fighting off a cold'. Andrew played it on one of his Music's Not For Everyone radio shows for NTS that year, a series that were a monthly treat and are missed beyond words, his voice, his wry sense of humour and his song selection. 

Forest Fire were an experimental rock band from New York whose second album Staring At The X came out in 2011. The song here, In Shadows, is superb and much played in my house. The way the rhythms, FXed guitars and vocals merge into one rush of sound hits me every time. Andrew played it on his third Music's Not For Everyone in 2011. 

Grant Hart, ex- Husker Du drummer and solo artist, features in Andrew's Black Notebooks and radio mixes. You're The Reflection Of The Moon On The Water is a blistering wall of guitars and drums with words inspired by the sayings of the Buddha and came out in 2009. Andrew played it while at 6 Mix in March 2010, a show he did with Fuck Buttons as guests. 

The Dream Syndicate's John Coltrane Stereo Blues is an eight minute epic, from their 1984 album Medicine Show. Andrew played it memorably while doing a MNFE set at Terraforma, a music festival held in Italy, in 2017. The fifty minute film of him DJing in sunglasses and 1940s work clothes to a crowd of young, beautifully lit Italians is here. The song appears alongside Fujiya and Miyagi and Moon Duo, sequencing only Andrew would attempt. 'I got some John Coltrane on the stereo baby/ Make you feel alright/ I got some white wine in the freezer mama/ I know what you like/ We gonna learn about love on a three ply rug'

Dennis Wilson's Carry Me Home was recorded in 1973 but didn't make it onto Holland, The Beach Boys album of that year. It is a broken, beautiful funeral blues for a soldier dying in Vietnam. Andrew produced Primal Scream's cover on their 1992 Dixie- Narco EP, ably assisted by Hugo Nicolson. 

Sadly Beautiful is a Paul Westerberg song from The Replacements' 1990 album All Shook Down, a song he wrote with Marianne Faithful in mind. She was supposed to sing it but that never happened so Paul recorded it for All Shook Down instead. By 1990 The Replacements were to all intents and purposes a Paul Westerberg solo project although Tommy Stimson plays bass on much of the record. Sadly Beautiful shows up in Andrew's Black Notebooks and on various tapes he made for friends in the early 90s along with songs from the previous Replacements album, 1989's Don't Tell A Soul. That album is not the group's best, marred by a glossy radio friendly production but some of the songs are classic Westerberg, Achin' To Be, Rock 'n' Roll Ghost and We'll Inherit The Earth among them. Talent Show is a song I've had a weird soft spot for for thirty- five years. 

Get Out Of My Kingdom was perhaps the pinnacle of the final incarnation of Two Lone Swordsmen, the live band, garage/ rock 'n' roll, Andrew on vocals version of the band. I saw them play at Sankey's Soap in 2008 supporting the Wrong Meeting album, the full live band tearing it up in a corner of the club. Sankey's was once the only thing you'd head into Ancoats for, a maze of streets and dilapidated buildings north of city centre Manchester. Andrew commented once that artists are the vanguard of gentrification. Now Ancoats is the place to live/ work/ socialise.

She Cried was on Rowland S. Howard's Teenage Snuff Film, a 1999 album. The former Birthday Party/ Bad Seed was joined by Mick Harvey. They covered Billy Idol's White Wedding on the album. She Cried is itself a cover of a 1961 melodrama single by Teddy Daryll and has been covered by others including Johnny Thunders, Del Shannon and David Hasselhoff (insert your own joke here). The Horrors also borrowed from it on Who Can Say in 2009. She Cried is in Andrew's Black Notebooks playlists. 

Route To Palm is by White Williams, a song that somehow combines both rockabilly and krautrock and is therefore perfectly Weatherall. White Williams is from New York and released the album Smoke in 2008 (on Domino). Andrew played it on his 2009 6 Mix, a legendary show in the Bagging Area which took in Wayne Walker, La Dusseldorf, Andrew's remix of Primal Scream's Uptown, The Glitter Band, his remix of David Holmes' I Heard Wonders and much more besides. Route To Palm turned up on FACT Mix 85 too. 

Rose City Band is one of three groups headed by cosmic guitarist/ singer Ripley Johnson- Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo are the other two. Ripley's music is all over Andrew's radio shows. In The Rain was played on Music's Not For Everyone in 2019. 

Darklands was the title track on The Jesus And Mary Chain's 1987 album and has been selected by Andrew on various occasions- when on tour in Australia and asked to compile his formative influences in 2018 and in an internet article called Five Songs For The End Of The World (or similar) which I can't find right now. 

The 'No' Tune was on a 1979 album by Cowboys International called The Original Sin, a band that included Keith Levene, Terry Chimes and Marco Pirroni in its number. The 'No' Tune was the theme to Andrew's Music's Not For Everyone shows, the chiming guitar line announcing the start of two hours of adventure, two hours of Andrew's Gnostic Sonics. As the guitar notes faded, The 'No' Tune's space lullaby would be replaced by Andrew's voice. 'Huddle round your devices, don your ceremonial robes and headgear...', he would advise, and we'd be off into new territory, music from the past and present sewn together in ways only he could do. 

As such, rather than have the two minutes and forty seconds of The 'No' Tune as an ending, in the spirit of Andrew it should be a beginning, the gateway to music new. Go and find something new today, something from the margins, the edges, the sidelines- and when you do, raise a glass to the man. Happy 60th birthday Andrew.  

Isolation Mix Twelve

I'm not sure that the title of these mixes holds true any more but onward we go. This week's hour of music is coming from the punk and post- punk world and the long tail that snakes from the plugging of a guitar into an amplifier and someone with something to say stepping up to the microphone. Some Spaghetti Western as an intro, some friendship, some politics, some anger, some exhilaration, some questions, some disillusionment, some psychedelic exploration and some optimism to end with.

In History Lesson Part 2 D. Boon explains his friendship with Mike Watt, the importance of punk in changing their lives, the singers and players in the bands that inspired him and, in the first line, the essence of punk as he experienced it.

'Our band could be your life
Real names'd be proof
Me and Mike Watt played for years
Punk rock changed our lives

We learned punk rock in Hollywood
Drove up from Pedro
We were fucking corn dogs
We'd go drink and pogo

Mr. Narrator
This is Bob Dylan to me
My story could be his songs
I'm his soldier child

Our band is scientist rock
But I was E. Bloom and Richard Hell
Joe Strummer and John Doe
Me and Mike Watt, playing guitar'

Ennio Morricone: For A Few Dollars More

Minutemen: History Lesson Part 2

Joe Strummer/Electric Dog House: Generations

X: In This House That I Call Home

The Replacements: Can’t Hardly Wait (Tim Outtake Version)

Husker Du: Keep Hanging On

The Redskins: Kick Over The Statues

The Woodentops: Why (Live)

The Vacant Lots: Bells

The Third Sound: For A While

Spacemen 3: Revolution

Poltergeist: Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder)

Echo And The Bunnymen: Ocean Rain (Alt Version)

Pete Wylie: Sinful

Carbon/Silicon: Big Surprise

Alex Chilton

Songs named after famous people number 3. In 1987 The Replacements released Pleased To Meet Me, an album with some great songs marred by some bad production. Lead Replacement Paul Westerberg got some kind of wish fulfilment here, recording a song in tribute to one of his heroes , Alex Chilton, who returned the favour by playing guitar on the song Can't Hardly Wait.

Alex Chilton

'Children by the million
Sing for Alex Chilton
I'm in love
with that song'

Westerberg's song is a song about being in love with a band and we can all identify with that. Alex Chilton wrote September Gurls so he pretty much gets a free pass from me.

While we're here the version of Can't Hardly Wait, recorded for the 1985 album Tim, but not used is to these ears superior to the one on Pleased To Meet Me. I've posted it before but it's worth a repost. Bob Stinson's guitar is electrifying, far more so than the later, sweeter, version with horns. This version makes some clear allusions to suicide in the lyrics, removed from the '87 one which was turned into being a song about touring.

Can't Hardly Wait (Tim Version)

We Are The Sons Of No One

In 1989 The Replacements released the album, Don't Tell A Soul, a record that was recorded in LA, buffed up in the mixing process and had the aim of making Sire a little money from a band a seemed to sabotage their career at every opportunity. Founding guitarist Bob Stinson (above right) had been replaced by Slim Dunlap. Chris Lord- Alge mixed it, adding some late 80s West Coast guitar band sheen and a big drum sound to give it in Lord- Alge's words 'a three dimensional, radio ready sound'. The songs contain some typical Paul Westerberg moments- Talent Show, We'll Inherit The Earth, Rock 'n' Roll Ghost, Achin' To Be- but it sounds (and always has) a bit flat and lifeless, songs for a teen TV show. Westerberg was trying a little too hard to write hits and then shrank away from the record when the released mix was aimed at giving him exactly that. I know there are people who love it and it must have been popular in the US where single I'll Be You made number fifty- one on the Billboard chart but it's my least favourite Replacements album. It sounds defeated, and not in a celebration of the underdog way. Having said that, I must have listened to it a fair amount because re-listening to it this week, I knew all the songs and what was coming next.

The album has now been re-released in a new form across four discs including a live show, outtakes and unreleased songs (with some from a late night drinking session with Tom Waits) and Don't Tell A Soul in a completely different mix by producer Matt Wallace, closer to what Westerberg intended at the time. It's definitely rawer and more immediate, bits of studio chatter intact, the band sound closer to the mic and less smothered by the late 80s. This one stands out, a song for drumming your fingers on the steering wheel to, heading off down the road with the stereo turned up loud, singing along to Westerberg's outsider words 'we'll inherit the earth/we don't want it/ it's been ours since birth/what you doing on it?'

We'll Inherit The Earth (Matt Wallace Mix)

But then go further back into the band's back catalogue and you'll find albums that need no re-polishing, no redux versions and no excuses made for them. 1984's Let It Be is wall to wall, mid 80s brilliance, their final album for indie label Twin/Tone. A year later they made their first for Sire (and last with Bob Stinson on guitar) a record called Tim, and within its grooves among other moments you'll find Kiss Me On The Bus, a genuinely great teen romance song, and this, a song that has underdog punk swagger and speaker rattling guitars to spare. 

Bastards Of Young

Jesus Rides Beside Me

Live albums don't tend to take up much of my time- often they're the sort of record that get played once or twice and then filed and I don't own very many. If it's a recording of a gig you attended I can see the point and I can happily spend time listening to, say, bootlegs of New Order in the 80s but too often they don't do too much for me. I'm sure you can all make suggestions to counter that view (and I'm happy to be corrected). But there's a release coming up of a gig The Replacements played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey in April 1986 and the songs that have been posted on Soundcloud have got me interested. The studio versions of some of The Replacements songs didn't always do the songs justice- I've posted the unreleased rougher Tim version of Can't Hardly Wait before and it is miles better than the released one on Pleased To Meet Me. The outing Can't hardly Wait got at Maxwell's sounds close to definitive.

Pitchfork have a riotous sounding run through Bastards Of Young here. The Replacements For Sale: Live At Maxwell's 1986 is a double cd, out at the end of the month, making October looking like it's going to be as expensive as September has been. The tracklist is a pretty perfect selection of songs with I Will Dare, Unsatisfied, Answering Machine, Takin' A Ride, Color Me Impressed, Left Of The Dial, Kiss Me On The Bus, Black Diamond, Waitress In The Sky and Fuck School among the 28 songs.

In 1986 the band played Saturday Night Live. They were drunk and swore on live TV and got banned from ever playing on the show again. In a funny little coincidence they are introduced playing Bastards Of Young by the great Harry Dean Stanton who died yesterday aged 91. It has to be said, they sound better drunk than many bands sound sober.

By the time they played Kiss Me On The Bus Paul, Chris and Tommy had swapped clothes...

I don't think Saturday Night Live went out at a funny angle- the Youtube uploader's done it to avoid copyright issues.

Harry Dean Stanton, RIP.

47

I'm bookending this working week with The Replacements. After posting the outtakes on Monday I was listening to a couple of their albums and I Will Dare came on with that little guitar riff at the start and then Paul Westerberg sings...

'How young are you?
How old am I?'

And today, as it happens, I turn 47.

The number 47 doesn't seem to have very much going for it. As Wiki points out it is the fifteenth prime number, the thirteenth supersingular prime and the sixth Lucas prime (nope, me either). It is strictly non-palindromic and in binary is represented as 00101111. A U.S. Maths professor used it to prove something funny to his students about numbers and this led to a long running visual gag in Star Trek. It is the atomic number of silver (my hair may be going that way). Mars has a forty seven year cycle around the sun. The Brooklyn hip hop collective Pro Era used 47 repeatedly because they felt that it represented perfect balance in the world and tension between the heart and brain. They also had a 47 logo that looked a tad swastika-like. It is the international dialling code for Norway. The Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn are forty seven degrees apart. There are forty seven Ronin in the Japanese story of the same name. More up this blog's alley, FAC 47 was the Factory anvil badge.

Frankly, there are more interesting numbers than 47. I'm spending the evening of my 47th birthday watching Jane Weaver play her psychedelic/electropop/folk music at Band On The Wall. I'll let you know how it was.

I Will Dare is a cracking little song off 1984's Let It Be album. The guitar solo was played by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck who was astonished by the amount of alcohol The Replacements could put away. And as he pointed out, R.E.M. were hardly the soberest band in the mid 80s.

I Will Dare

Perfectly Lethal

I'm not sure The Replacements made a perfect album but they came pretty close with 1984's Let It Be (and in typical fashion the soul bearing and emotion of Answering Machine, Androgynous and Unsatisfied were undercut by thrashy instrumentals like Gary's Got A Boner and Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out and a Kiss cover). The strength of the album is also shown by the songs that didn't make it. Perfectly Lethal is driven by Bob Stinson's ragged guitar playing and the sense that they might be about to fall apart but are enjoying the ride.

Perfectly Lethal

They didn't always get it right on their albums with production and song choice. The version of Can't Hardly Wait they recorded for Tim but didn't include is vastly better than the one that came out with horns on it on Pleased To Meet Me. What rational band would record this song and then decide to leave it off an album. It's all part of what makes them one of my favourite bands.

Can't Hardly Wait (Tim Version)

Within Your Reach

I was flicking through my records on Saturday looking for something else when I found what I wasn't looking for but pulled it out and played it anyway- Hootenanny, the second album by The Replacements. Hootenanny is a halfway house, a stepping stone from the breakneck punk of their early years to the slightly more considered sound of Let It Be and Tim. Hootenanny is still ragged, a bit of a mess in places with some songs that sound tossed off for a laugh but it also has the first of what would become Paul Westerberg's signature aching, yearning guitar songs. Within Your Reach is just Westerberg too with a drum machine, flanged guitar and a trademark romantic lyric.

Within Your Reach

Prince Paul And King Paul

I saw this recently, an excerpt from Bob Mehr's excellent sounding new book on The Replacements, and it made me smile...

'Prince was rumoured to have lurked in the shadows at some of the Replacements shows at First Avenue, but it was in the bathroom of a club in St. Paul where Westerberg finally ran into him. 

"Oh, hey," said Westerberg, seeing the dolled-up singer standing next to him at the urinal. "What's up, man?"

Prince turned and responded in cryptic fashion: "Life."

Paul Westerberg called time on The Replacements re-union recently having fell out of love with it again. He called the re-union 'whoring himself'. I've said it before- The Replacements were such a great little band. Paul's gone straight back to work, recording and releasing an album with Juliana Hatfield as The I Don't Cares. This upbeat song has clanging Westerberg guitars, a bitter-sweet lyric and drawly vocals from the pair of them. Good stuff.

King Of America

Can't Hardly Wait

The reformed Replacements (frontman and songwriter Paul Westerberg and bassist Tommy Stinson) play two nights at the Roundhouse in London, tonight and tomorrow. Which is great if you're within spitting distance of Camden on a work night, but less so for the rest of us. Still, I hope it's great and everyone has a ball. The Replacements were such a great little band whose songs touch chords and tug heartstrings. A lot of their best songs- and therefore some of the best songs of the US in the 80s- were let down by bad or dated production. This is as true of Can't Hardly Wait as any, marred on the official Pleased To Meet Me version by horns and a too poppy production. This version, recorded during sessions for the previous album Tim but not included, is much better.

Can't Hardly Wait (Tim Version)

Left Of The Dial

There can't be many bigger fans of yesterday's postee Alex Chilton than Paul Westerberg. In fact, he even wrote a song called Alex Chilton. Westerberg's 80s indie-punk  band The Replacements deserve a place in every record collection. Starting out as snotty teenage Mid West punks they (matured is probably the wrong word) eventually made several excellent albums, the pinnacle being Let It Be, a stone cold classic. They managed to sabotage their career on multiple occasions, through drunkeness, bad timing and bad luck. Left Of The Dial is one of their ragged anthems, a tribute to where on your radio tuner you need to go to find more interesting sounds.

Left Of The Dial

Folk Star

Ex-Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg has had a hit-and-miss solo career with hidden gems surrounded by duff moments, and albums which got rid of large proportions of his fan base followed by albums that hit form but no-one bought. In 2004 he released Folker, then his fifth album in two years. It had it's quota of less than average songs and a few really bright moments. The final song was this one, where Paul rhymes 'folk star' with 'red plastic guitar' and wryly shoots at his public image. Cack-handed guitar playing and rough production complete a minor gem. This song is then followed by several minutes of silence and then, ooh, a secret track, the name of which I don't know. To be honest the hidden track thing always annoyed me, so I don't blame you if you press Next or Fast Forward after the end of Folk Star. I don't know what's going on with that jacket either.

Folk Star

How Do You Say I Miss You To An Answering Machine?

From The Replacements 1984 album Let It Be (a truly great 80s US rock album), Answering Machine, in which Paul Westerberg mixes up the medium and the message. It's just raw, distorted guitar, Paul's 40 a day voice and some answering machine noise. Paul can't get through, she's not picking up or she's out (and if she's out, who's she with?), he can't leave messages on a piece of tape inside a machine, he hates the answering machine.

07 Answering Machine.wma

The Replacements 'I Will Dare'

The Replacements started as a punk inspired band in early 80s Minneapolis, but swiftly moved beyond the hardcore stylings into something less hectic. Lead songwriter Paul Westerberg hit his stride with 1983's Hootenany and then perfected it with 1984's Let It Be. The band repeatedly blew major opportunities, usually due to alcohol consumption and fear of success/selling out. The Let It Be album is their high water mark, containing some great songs (I Will Dare, Unsatisfied, Answering Machine, Androgynous, Sixteen Blue) but being a Replacements album they still sabotaged their best shot (songs on the album included Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out and Gary's Got A Boner). This song is a U.S. alt-rock classic, contains a Peter Buck (from REM) guitar solo, and rattles along brilliantly, the right side of shambolic, with a great vocal. Westerberg said it was about how the band would 'dare to do anything... dare to fail', which kind of sums them up.

13 I Will Dare.wma