Remembering the 'Mats

On the morning after the "k" key stuck on my college roommate's typewriter, she started screaming about how her daddy would be livid. So I snuffed out her Long Island squawk with the Replacements' Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out the Trash (Twin Tone). The breaking-point desperation of me and the music was enough to frighten away Miss Squawkkkkkkkkk.

Too bad the "k" incident happened sometime after I interviewed Paul Westerberg for my student newspaper. He would have understood; he knew about the mechanics of noncomposure, blind delirium, emotions piled in a pre-avalanche heap. I say "pre" because despite the messy and mythical ruckus of early Replacements -- say, through Let It Be in '84 -- the band did have a method and the chaos was not sheer. Westerberg hollered about cigarettes and boners and kicking down doors, but he also wrote some of the most moving songs ever.

Some fans prefer later Replacements -- Don't Tell a Soul and All Shook Down, especially -- because the band supposedly grew up after nutcase guitarist Bob Stinson got booted. To me, nothing felt the same after Tim, the band's major-label debut. The music began to sound tired and nondescript. Just because someone calls a number "sadly beautiful" doesn't mean it is.

When I interviewed Westerberg in the dressing room of the Channel, back in 1986, the band's blend of craziness and sentiment still sounded unselfconscious and undiluted. Afterward, I sat at a table in the empty club, listening to the band soundcheck with "Little Mascara" over and over. The sound surrounded me and made my guts palpitate. That's how the Replacements played live, when they weren't so shitfaced and uncharming you wanted to brain them.

I don't remember the exact set from that night, but I do recall Minutemen guitarist D. Boon introducing them, and Bob Stinson coming out for the encore wearing a guitar and nothing else. I caught the band a few more times; they were worthless drunks half the time and geniuses the rest. One morning in 1987, after seeing them at the Metro, I noted in a journal the songs they'd done the night before -- better-known Let It Be tunes like "I Will Dare," "Favorite Thing," and "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" and the Hootenanny gem "Within Your Reach."

What I can't quite remember is how the band pulled off "Within Your Reach," which on the album is just Westerberg, a synthesizer, and a drum machine. Back when it was released, I'd lie in bed in the middle of the night, jobless and stranded, a recent college graduate, listening to "Within Your Reach" on my Walkman. Right at the end Westerberg gently exclaims, "Reach! . . . for the sky." Those words still sound unplanned, as if in the end he couldn't repress a belief in the power of longing to lead to something more hopeful. Even in the stillness of that moment he couldn't hold back. For nearly a decade, neither could the Replacements.

-- Amy Finch