The alternative icons Kurt Cobain never understood: “I just didn’t get it”
A key concept of alternative music was to give bands and artists outside of the mainstream a chance to show their skills. There’s no shame in having a handful of acts that you can’t get into, and most of the time, bands like Flipper were far too weird to have any kind of reaction on MTV. Although Nirvana changed all that for a while, Kurt Cobain admitted that groups like The Replacements were harder for him to grasp.
Then again, Paul Westerberg did come from a somewhat similar background to Cobain. All good alternative music tended to start off as an answer to punk, and the hardcore sounds of Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash was the first significant step towards Westerberg refining his sound. Once Hootenanny came along, though, something changed.
Suddenly, it was OK to write songs with a little bit of melody behind them, even if it meant that everything wasn’t perfectly in tune. Regardless of how many technical screwups are in a piece like ‘Colour Me Impressed’, it’s probably the closest to a perfect pop song that Westerberg ever wrote around that time.
Even for an underground scene, there was still competition, and almost a friendly rivalry was going on between The Replacements and R.E.M at the time. As much as the Athens band became the critical darlings everyone loved, they weren’t above working with their friends, either, with Peter Buck eventually throwing a guitar solo onto their semi-hit ‘I Will Dare’ off Let It Be.
For all of his songwriting credentials, though, Cobain was always in the R.E.M camp compared to Westerberg’s style, saying, “I really didn’t like The Replacements when I was into punk rock music. I listened to them, and I liked the sound of it. I think my appreciation for R.E.M, The Beatles and stuff like that had a lot more to do with it because I really wasn’t aware of The Replacements and those bands. I actually saw them live and stuff, and I just didn’t get it.”
That might just be a difference in musical approach. Whereas Cobain still had that punk rock ethos, it was always in service to songs with melodies like ‘About A Girl’. Westerberg didn’t mind if he sounded a little rough around the edges, and tracks on their early hardcore pieces benefited from being more than a little bit atonal.
Even if Seattle’s finest didn’t like The Replacements, the rest of the scene was more than willing to play along. Half of Pearl Jam’s early tracks were about as close to a Replacements ripoff as someone could get, and they at least repaid the favour by debuting two of Westerberg’s solo tracks onto the iconic soundtrack to the movie Singles. After grunge came and went, Green Day ended up being the next answer to The Replacements, almost like they found common ground between their Tim era and old-school Cheap Trick.
While Cobain didn’t get it, Dave Grohl certainly did later, eventually taking that sort of sound to the next level when working with Foo Fighters. If anything, Westerberg feels more like a patron saint of Seattle at this point. He wasn’t there when the true rapture began, but his spirit was in the background every step of the way.
