How did Paul Westerberg define “success” for The Replacements?
The highest charting record The Replacements ever released in their native USA was a live album that came out three decades after their break-up, 2017’s For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986, and even that one only got as high as number 52.
Part of what makes this band so endlessly appealing, of course, is that they spent their entire existence on the cusp, leaving their fans in a state of suspended anticipation and unflinching devotion; the way only a brand new discovery usually can. Whether your entrance into The Replacements’ universe was ‘I Will Dare’ or ‘Bastards of Young’ or ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’, you put down the headphones fully convinced that everybody was gonna hear this and feel the same way you did, and yet, time and again, the bandwagon came back mostly empty.
While they weren’t a punk band by anyone’s typical framing of that term, the Minneapolis-based Replacements arguably lived by the ethics of that community much more stringently than most of the bands who identified as such. As a result, they routinely refused to walk through some of the doors that might have quickly changed their fortunes in the 1980s, specifically the ones involving lucrative and high-profile endorsement opportunities.
“I think any rock ‘n’ roll that is acceptable for a TV commercial ain’t worth a damn,” frontman Paul Westerberg told the Tampa Bay Times in 1987, “The art form, if you will, of rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t lend itself to sell products on commercial TV. It’s supposed to be against that. I don’t know why, but it is. If it’s done right at least.”
The best part of that brief rant is Westerberg’s blunt acknowledgement that he wasn’t even sure why it was wrong to sell out. Doing so sure would have been helpful in loads of ways, as he was certainly aware by then, but some strange instinct, call it a conscience or a Jiminy Cricket on the shoulder, told him it just wasn’t to be done.
Westerberg and his bandmates were far from angels, but they weren’t willing to fake any bravado either, a type of play-acting generally required of the big rock bands of the period. Bassist Tommy Stinson did eventually wind up becoming a member of Guns N’ Roses in the ‘90s, but The Replacements were sort of the anti-GNR in the ‘80s, unwilling or unskilled at strutting and posing, and far better suited to connecting to listeners on a vulnerable, one-to-one level.
“I can feel for people who are young and don’t quite know what they want to do with their lives,” a 28-year-old Westerberg said, “We still feel the same way. We’re not sure what we’re doing, and we’re a little afraid of things that can get out of control with success. We’re just like everybody else. We’re wary of things we don’t know how to do. And I think we’ve been damn lucky.”
At the time, Westerberg was promoting their fifth album, Pleased to Meet Me, which was hailed by critics and, again, sounded like a slam dunk, a completely accessible radio record that never got higher than number 131 on the Billboard charts.
“As far as I’m concerned, we have made it,” Westerberg said, unfazed by those lacklustre sales numbers, “We don’t have to go to work, we get to go to parties. We’re still pretty much as simple as we were when we started. We get to play the music we want to play, and no one tells us what to do. To me, that’s success.”
