Here in the golden age of reissues, sometimes the most enlightening piece of a decades-old puzzle lies in out-takes—the scraps an artist chose to leave on the floor and the stories behind how an album came to be.
Case in point Pleased to Meet Me, the only album Minneapolis’ The Replacements recorded as a trio. In gearing up for their sophomore major label album the band began recording demos in a hometown studio. After the first day mercurial lead guitarist Bob Stinson apparently showed himself the door. When the band reconvened to record the album in Memphis with producer James Luther Dickinson at the legendary Ardent Studios, they would be augmented by a coterie of locals including horn players, a pre-North Mississippi All Star Luther Dickinson and Jim himself, on piano.
As a trio, Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars tightened their ranks. Musically, Westerberg’s open-tuned guitar and Dickinson’s psychology helped deliver an album that doesn’t wreak of the production and technology of the day. Bob Mehr’s liner notes refer to Dickinson’s attempt to make the record sound like a “big boombox.”
When Bob Stinson left, there was a piece of the puzzle that needed to be replaced. It is no stretch to use an analogy of a table becoming a three-legged stool (which sounds like a Bob Stinson song-title). But in hindsight, maybe the fourth member of the band for this album ends up being an amalgam of Dickinson’s hoodoo, the expertise of engineers John Hampton and Joe Hardy, and even the city of Memphis, itself.
As a writer Westerberg continued to grow, penning the harrowing suicide-note “The Ledge,” an attempt to make cult hero “Alex Chilton” recognized by millions of children and the sensitive observation of “Skyway.”
But dig deeper and the outtakes point to bassist Tommy growing into his skin. His “Awake Tonight” doesn’t sound like the demo it is labeled as but more like a full steam-ahead encore. His exuberance in some way seems to define Pleased to Meet Me’s raison d'etre. The box set include oodles of demos and rough mixes for fans and sonic archaeologists. Mastering was done by Milwaukee’s Justin Perkins.
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Perhaps the best distillation of the band at this point in their career is the video for the song “Alex Chilton.” In the heyday of slick promotional music videos, the band dropped something between an Andy Warhol screen test and a French New Wave film. Filmed in black and white, it goes nowhere. Or does it? Four Midwestern spuds-turned-iconoclasts who just happen to be smart enough to flip the bird at the hand that feeds them.
