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.