Walsh - The Replacements: all over but the shouting: an oral history

All
overbut
the shouting

an oral history

Jim Walsh

Praise for Jim Walshs The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting:

a lovable and absorbing work, a swan song for an irrepressible, irreplaceable era in American popular music.

Elizabeth Hand, The Village Voice

its hard to imagine anyone approaching this unholy mess of a subject and doing a better job.

Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman

Walsh expertly navigates the divide between the truth and otherwise. Its a compulsively readable, passionately compiled oral history of the infamous Minneapolis foursome who spent the 80s writing a new rock n roll fairy tale while simultaneously ripping out its pages.

Ross Raihala, St. Paul Pioneer Press

uniquely, proudly the story of the Minneapolis band from the vantage point of the Minneapolis scene. Funny, intense, sad and joyful.

Chris Riemenschneider, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Recommended, maybe must reading for fans of the Replacements and indie rock in general.

Booklist

If anyones going to write a book about The Replacements, Jim Walsh is the man.

The Onion

fittingly irreverent tribute to the Minneapolis miscreants who might have ruled the world in the 80s but for the fact that they always appeared bent on self-sabotage. Walsh, an insider, gathers a vivid collection of reminiscences to recreate an utterly vanished pre-Internet world.

Ian McGillis, The Gazette (Montreal)

a wonderfully entertaining oral history.

Chicago Sun-Times

the passion [the Mats] inspired will be preserved in The Replacements for every kid who cares to trace the alternative rock scene back to its roots.

City Pages

The rest of us have only seen the Replacements through a crack in the drapes. Walsh actually managed to get closer to the band than I ever thought possible.

Joe Soucheray, St. Paul Pioneer Press and host of KSTP-AMs Garage Logic

a very necessary document of a time when you could still tell something about a person by their shoesor by the ultimate test: whether or not they liked the Replacements.

HARP Magazine

lovingly compiled with some typically fantastic yarns, vivid memories of great shows and colourful tales of often insanely wayward behaviour.

Uncut Magazine

not a moment too soon. Jim Walshs oral history adeptly measures the pulse of these Minneapolis heroes, and the myriad voices reveal their grand legacy to both fans and newcomers alike. Long live the Mats legend.

Crawdaddy!

Get a feel of their real ragged soul from this bio, cobbled together by a guy who was in a Minneapolis band from back in the drunken daze. since weve rarely been privy to those fellas thoughts, or the cool old pics throughout, this tome is invaluable.

CMJ News Music Monthly

Walsh presents the Mats in a multidimensional light, illustrating their talents and charisma, while also depicting a band that struggled with many challenges that early success can bring. But rather than turning it into a tabloid, the impression he leaves is sensitive and human.

ALARM Magazine

For The Falls (from South Minneapolis) and all the other new garage bands
whose parents gave them roots and wings and rock and roll.

The first time I saw the Replacements was at their first bar gig on the night of July 2, 1980. They opened for Minneapolis rockers the Dads, at the old Longhorn Bar in downtown Minneapolis, and they were tremendous, even then: a burst of song-to-song energy with a singer/guitarist whose heart positively pushed against his chest cavity; a teenage bass player with flailing, splaying legs and a Sir Lancelot haircut who would drop to his knees and yell Fuck you! to the bar; and his older brother, a Young Frankenstein with a wicked falsetto and an even more wicked wrist on guitar. They did covers by 999 and Johnny Thunders, and originals like Off Your Pants and Toe Needs a Shoe (Problem). By the end of the set, I ended up on the small dance floor with my friend Cecelia and a half dozen other kids, pogo-ing to what everyone in the dank, air-conditioned room agreed was an exciting new find.

The only reason Id ended up at the Longhorn that night was because I knew the drummer, Chris Mars, from DeLaSalle, the hippie-Catholic high school in downtown Minneapolis where his older brother, Jim, and I had become friends. So that night after my band finished practice, we all went down to the Longhorn, which was the launching pad for Minneapolis original music scene of the day. We snuck our guitarist, Kevin, and our drummer, Rickwho were fifteen and sixteen at the time and who smuggled a tape deck in to record the showthrough the clubs backdoor near the alley, which was always left wide open in those days.

Before the Mats took the stage, I remember watching Paul, whom Id never met, going to the stage and fussing with something on his guitar, and nervously drinking out of a plastic cup. Water, I think. I remember liking him immediatelyhe wore a raggedy green-and-white baseball/football shirt and tennis shoes, no safety pins or leather, and he pretty much looked not like a rock star or an antirock star or a punk, but like a dozen guys Id grown up with in South Minneapolis. After the show, Chris introduced me to Paul, who looked at me suspiciously. Already, he didnt trust people gushing over his music, which is what I did briefly that night. But I think he also recognized in me someone who knew what he was talking about.

A couple months later, after wed gotten to know each other a little bit, I called him at his folks house. He came to the phone and I said, What are you doing? He said, Listening to (Joni Mitchells) Blue, as if this was a code between usan acknowledgement of the fact that we both knew wed gleaned strength and self-understanding from our older brothers and sisters sensitive singer/songwriters as much as the ferocious punk rock that was blowing up all around us.

We were the same age. Like me, he was nervous to go on stage that first night at the Longhorn, but he couldnt help himself. My band, REMs (later Laughing Stock), was just starting up, we were a month or two away from playing out for the first time, and these bastards had beaten us to the punch and won Twin/Tone Records co-founder Peter Jespersons affection and devotion, and, yes, that is how it was in those days: healthy competition between young men who wanted to change the world and/or get laid. We wanted them to fail, Paul would tell Magnet magazine years later about their chief Twin Cities rivals, Hsker D. We wanted them to be the second-best band in town. My band wasnt even in the running, or so it seemed, probably because I liked to watch. And listen.

The Mats pissed me off, too, because I was trying to figure out how to be in a band, something that came to them so naturally (Soul Asylums Danny Murphy describes them as four guys in four different bands, another way of saying the sum is greater than the parts). One night when Paul and Mars and I were hanging out at Jespersons apartment, I bitched at Paul for playing like they were satisfied. It was during the Hootenanny days when most of the time they were just being funny or boring, and I needed so much more. It rankled Paul, and he stood in the doorway of Peters place, ticked off at me and saying to Mars, Im not satisfied. Are you satisfied? Are you satisfied? The song Unsatisfied came soon after; I dont recount that here to seek muse credit, only to show how songs sometimes happen and to head up the long, cosmic line of people who feel like they had a hand in writing Pauls (our) songs.