‘Here Comes a Regular’: The most crushing song of the 1980s?
“I think it should be evident by now, but I’m as lost as anyone.” – Paul Westerberg
There are two types of ‘regular’: there’s the type of fellow who pops into a bar maybe twice a week, full of mirth and goodwill having happily found their place in the world. And then there’s the sort of fellow who shows up every day, dogged by a dreary routine that ticks them, like clockwork, towards death.
There is something profound and unknowable about the latter. Fortunately, they fade into the fabric of a boozer so readily that you are very rarely forced to confront the sorry essence of their existence. But like a damp patch that lingers behind a wardrobe or black mould on a section of ceiling you never really gaze at, on the occasion when you do have to consider these damning misfortunes, you are invariably filled with existential dread.
As Patrick DeWitt puts it in Ablutions, “You want to know what it is about their existence that fuels the need to inhabit not just the same building every night but the same barstool, upon which they sip the same drink. And if a bartender forgets a regular’s usual, the regular is cut down and his eyes swell with a lost suffering.”
Alas, you will never know from whence this self-imprisonment springs, and maybe that’s why the latter regulars fill you with a heavy sadness: they are an apparition of the purposeful aimlessness of modern life. Nobody seems to know them, and they don’t seem to know anybody, despite the fact that their routine should, by rights, make them the most knowable and social souls in the vicinity.
But they are simply adrift in a society that doesn’t care to ask. And if they did ask, they would never be content with the answer. That’s the heavy sadness that The Replacements tap into with ‘Here Comes a Regular’. The song – which begins, “Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst / after a hard day of nothin’ much at all” – is a slow, maudlin march into wearying driftfulness.
The next line might just be the saddest ever written: “Summer’s passed, it’s too late to cut the grass”.
It’s a harrowing fact that has minorly tainted every summer I have had the good fortune of encountering ever since a sad bastard carelessly uttered this to me at too tender an age to take it with a pinch of salt: ‘If you’re lucky, you’ll get 60 good summers that you’ll remember in a life’.
60 doesn’t seem like many summers, and as they pass, no new ones come along. The best days pass, haunted by the reminder of how few of them you have left. And then winter arrives with a haunting reminder of how few of them you have seized.
That’s why the line feels like it perfectly captures the sorry disposition of the latter regular. Summer is a season of hope and expectation. With stirring finality, Westerberg hints that all their summers have passed. In waving goodbye to the potential for positive change, of hope, in its dictionary sense, they have simply saddled themselves to a routine that not even they can be sure serves them well.
When The Replacements played into this reality in 1985, the timing of the track added to its crushing weight. The outlook in the Financial Times was profoundly positive. Technological fixes created a wellspring of potential. The booming economy was a daily boon. ET proved that there was even a place for a weird, little raisin-like alien among us.
But the regulars that Paul Westerberg solemnly sang of represented the greater truth that abided even among this momentary upturn: damnation was already upon our wayward society and even ET wanted to go home as quickly as possible.
Of course, this comes from a place of tremendous pessimism that is instantly dismissed by blasting Huey Lewis and the News, but as you listen to ‘Hear Comes a Regular’ there is a harrowing sense of exacting sorrow that drowns any positive thought out with ominous, eerie, unknowable truth.
Alas, you still can’t be sure if it is a truth that you can not fathom, or a truth that you do not wish to fathom for fear of what it will reveal. And that only adds to the sadness of this most dastardly song.
Eternal dreamers and happy-go-lucky fellows like myself can happily lift that cloud by turning away from the track and spinning the sunnier ‘You Can Call Me Al’, but as you nod your head and bask in proverbial summer, as Paul Simon sings “I want a shot at redemption,“ you realise with a wince of pain that prangs your heart that these poor latter regulars are beyond. even wanting that shot, unable to move on from the world of The Re00placements’ tragic track, they are trapped in its solemn march of melodicism on an unending loop.
