The Replacements song Paul Westerberg wrote for his sister
Punk rock has never been a genre known for its sensitivity. As much as artists can claim to write the traditional love song every now and again, the greatest of their time learn how to take the different pieces of their craft and turn them into verbal destruction whenever they sit down to write a song. Somewhere between the era of Sex Pistols and Green Day, there was The Replacements, and Paul Westerberg was more than happy to write songs about his family on ‘Waitress in the Sky’.
For the first few years of the band’s career, it wasn’t clear that Westerberg had many ambitions for songwriting outside of wanting to get wasted. At every opportunity, the band were some of the greatest drunk performers ever to grace the stage, writing songs that were both tragic like ‘Johnny’s Gonna Die’ or destructive like ‘Kids Don’t Follow’.
When the band got to making their sophomore effort, Hootenanny, something strange started happening: they had songs you could actually sing along to. Compared to the hardcore punk of their debut, songs like ‘Colour Me Impressed’ flirted with elements of power pop throughout their runtime, leading to certain lines that could have been radio fodder if produced better.
While the band would become darlings of the indie scene thanks to projects like Let It Be, Tim would be one of their first major forays into classic rock history. Outside of the occasional punk rager like ‘Dose of Thunder’, many of the greatest songs on the album had all of the punk cleansed from their DNA, turning in earnest tracks like ‘Hold My Life’ and ‘Kiss Me On the Bus’.
As Westerberg worked at making his name as a musician, his sister made ends meet as a flight attendant. Considering the amount of flak that she had to take care of many sorry saps in transit, Westerberg wrote the song ‘Waitress in the Sky’ as a small tribute to the pain that she had to go through every day.
For a song meant to be a homage to a family member, it’s strange to see Westerberg take things in the opposite direction. Instead of having to talk about the problems his sister is having, Westerberg sings from the perspective of one of the many on-lookers, trying his best to play it cool but coming off as nothing but a sorry excuse for a ladies’ man.
When talking about the song later, Westerberg said that the song felt more like a piece of musical acting, recalling, “I was playing the character of the creep who demands to be treated like a king. I’d heard all the stories from my sister about how passengers would yell at the flight attendants and how then they’d ‘accidentally’ spill something on them”.
While songs like ‘Waitress in the Sky’ were still decent boozy rockers from the golden age of alternative, they wouldn’t get their due until years after the fact. Once the grunge movement came to take over the world, artists like Pearl Jam and Nirvana would be citing Westerberg as a primary influence, eventually incorporating some of his sensibilities into their own songs like Pearl Jam’s ‘State of Love and Trust’. Just like his sister did, Westerberg knew to make do with what he had. He may have been an unintentional godfather of grunge, but he would always remain on the fringes of rock stardom.
