When Bob Mehr asked what the Replacements 1989 UW-Milwaukee show was like, I had to admit it was blurry—like most of their shows. Blurry both as an experience and a memory. Mehr, author of Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements was tabbed, along with Jason Jones, to produce the new Replacements box set, Dead Man’s Pop.
Built around 1989’s Don’t Tell A Soul LP, the box includes Don’t Tell A Soul Redux, the previously unreleased Matt Wallace mix; We Know the Night: Rare & Unreleased, a disc of songs recorded at Bearsville Studios in 1988 and a parts of a session recorded with Tom Waits in Los Angeles; and the complete two disc 1989 Inconcerated show at UW-Milwaukee’s Union Ballroom, cleaned up and mastered by Milwaukeean Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering. The box set also contains a 12-by-12 hardcover book with dozens of rarely seen photos and a detailed history of the era written by Mehr.
Sire Records eventually recruited Chris Lord-Alge to mix the Don’t Tell A Soul album in order to give it a shot a radio airplay. Unfortunately, the album smells like 1989—wreaking of radio and dated sound technology. It did not catapult the band into the big leagues as the label hoped. But Paul Westerberg's songs and the band’s playing spoke through the mix.
By this, the band’s seventh record, the ‘Mats dynamic had shifted. Guitarist Slim Dunlap replaced Bob Stinson. Stinson’s kamikaze brilliance had turned into unreliable behavior. The addition of Dunlap substituted a steadying influence, which in hindsight Mehr believes allowed Westerberg, Bob’s younger brother bassist Tommy Stinson (Coming of age in a touring rock and roll band? C’mon—was his youthful arrogance ever more than brash insecurity?) and drummer Chris Mars to take more chances themselves.
In 2014 Dunlap’s wife Chrissie, discovered in a cupboard long-forgotten tapes of the pre-Lord-Alge final product.
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The 30 Year Do-Over
After several fits and starts Matt Wallace was brought in to work with the band in the studio. When he got wind that the label was going to have Lord-Alge do the final mix—a task he thought would be his—Wallace presciently spent his last day at Paisley Park Studios doing a quick mix.
How often in life or art does a person get a second chance to revisit something as lasting as a major label album? Last spring Wallace was able to finish what he started. Redux confidently restores original drum tracks, vocal takes and tempos as well as presenting the original track order.
Wallace’s mix sounds more muscular, closer to the band’s live sound than the original release. It sounds like the logical, if somewhat mature, follow up to the feral Pleased to Meet Me album. For the best evidence that Wallace truly gets the ‘Mats, just listen to the fully illuminated banjo on “Talent Show.” Fans whose entrée to the band was Don’t Tell A Soul may disagree, but Redux is really the album that should have been released.
Bearsville Detour
The road to Paisley Park began with recording sessions in upstate New York at Bearsville Studios. While the band and Tony Berg never seemed to, as they say, “hit it off,” a handful of songs offer insights into the band’s work-in-progress. Tommy Stinson’s bongo playing can be heard on some songs. Liner notes document incidents that scared a band called Metallica, who was also recording at the studios.
As fascinating as a collaboration between the band and Tom Waits looks on paper, the later L.A. session fly-on-the-wall snapshots offer a ramshackle bit of history. “Date to Church” was previously a B-side (song credit to Reverend Backwash) and the real keeper is Billy Swan's “I Can Help.”
Milwaukee Connections
“Turn the fucker off!” Westerberg hollers at Slim and his feedbacking amplifier during “The Ledge,” and now 30 years later, Justin Perkins was able to take care of the stray noise. Perkins sonic bolstering and needle-nose tweezer clean-up of errant sounds and feedback took time. He estimates he spent about a day removing dozens of instances of feedback from the vocals mic alone. What you hear is better than what we heard that night.
Shank Hall owner Peter Jest had been booking bands since the early '80s as Alternative Concert Group when he brought the Replacements to the UW-Milwaukee Ballroom. Jest also booked Iggy Pop to the same room the previous September. It was not a rock and roll venue.
The ‘Mats previous stop at the cavernous Eagle Club is alluded to in Westerberg’s comment “I can already tell we’re better than last time,” a show that saw drummer Mars donning his infamous Pappy the Clown costume.
The UWM show had been recorded by an unscrupulous local fan on a cassette recorder and that tape had already made the rounds when Sire released Inconcerated, a promo item that included five songs from the Milwaukee gig.
To this day, there are listeners who ask of the Replacements: “What was the big deal?” Finally, we have a live document to offer as Exhibit A.
Perkins was too young to see the ‘Mats the first time around. But life has a funny way of working things out. Perkins’ Mystery Mastering Studio is a first-call facility and his resume includes touring as bassist with Tommy Stinson’s band Bash and Pop.
Perkins’ work on Inconcerated is the prize in the Crackerjacks. Opening with a brash tribute to iconoclast “Alex Chilton” and featuring a harrowing version of “The Ledge”, the ‘Mats storm through 29 songs. This is not the crash and burn band that fans of train-wrecks came to see, but it is a rock and roll group careening around corners, sometimes on two wheels. On certain nights these guys could rival the Rolling Stones, the Faces or The New York Dolls. The UWM set offers ample evidence of how great they were live.
It wasn’t all swagger. “Answering Machine,” “Left of the Dial,” and “Can’t Hardly Wait” show Westerberg’s ability to write and perform tunes that display depth and vulnerability without being cloy. By this point he had channeled enough Hank Williams Sr. and Johnny Thunders to be a songwriting force to be reckoned with. He may have become pals with Chilton, but Westerberg was savvy enough to realize, Chilton’s was a mold broken years ago. Westerberg knew all about punk rock, but Chilton had become a genre unto himself, not that he cared any more.
Legendary for their choices of covers the ‘Mats picks this night run the gamut from Walt Disney to the Heartbreakers and Kiss, as well as the incendiary “Another Girl, Another Planet” (which would be leaked on the original promo disc).
If you were lucky enough to see them live and be part of the trajectory of these natural-born contrarian misfits, consider yourself fortunate. I can only hope the next generation has their own Replacements. But I ain’t betting on it.
