Fixing ‘Tim’: how The Replacements’ flawed classic became their best album
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the A&R person for a major label in the 1980s, and you’ve just discovered The Replacements. They’ve blown your tiny mind during an intense, note-perfect gig at a rock club. It’s one that perfectly balances raw energy with tight technical chops, and the songs are all basically perfect, too. They need to be on your label yesterday, and joy of joys, they’ve got a second night at the club. You let their management know that you’ll be bringing the head of your label to night two because these kids are rocks next megastars, and he needs to hear about them.
From there, you bring your boss to the show the following night, and expectations sky-high due to your effusive praise. Then the show takes place. The guitarist doesn’t play a note, seemingly having an acid flashback while dressed in a tutu. The rest of the band are apocalyptically wasted. They spend 40 minutes bashing through out-of-tune, half-remembered country songs before the guitarist throws up, the singer and the bassist dissolve into a fistfight, and you just know you don’t have a job anymore.
Thus was the core dichotomy of The Replacements: the only people on God’s earth who didn’t want them to be the biggest band in the world were The Replacements themselves. They had the talent. The look. The connections. Sweet, ever-loving Christ, did they have the songs. Every single time, they had stardom in their sights, though, and it was many times they’d shoot themselves in the foot with an almost sexual degree of relish. Then Bob Stinson would probably piss on the rifle for good measure.
It’s a testament to their ungodly quality that so many people kept on giving them chances. No matter how many times they utterly humiliated themselves and their poor mates who vouched for them over and over again. It goes beyond just legendarily awful shows. The band’s run of mid-1980s albums, from Let It Be to Pleased to Meet Me, were already phenomenal. However, tucked among them could have been arguably the best rock album of the whole 1980s. Then the group, as they often did, willingly and knowingly fucked it.
There’s an argument to be made that they’d already made that “best rock album of the ’80s” with Let It Be, though, and with it, the eyes of the alternative world were suddenly on the Mats. The mainstream world of major record labels was also eyeing them up, too, keen to see if their fairly pop-infused take on alternative rock could be polished up for MTV consumption. The band finally kept it together long enough to sign with Sire and went into the studio to record the follow-up. Their choice of producer, when they could have gotten anyone else in the world… was the Ramones’ drummer.
In fairness to them, he’d also produced two Ramones albums, but still, one cursory listen to the record, and you can tell something went horribly wrong. The guitars are tinny and trebly. The drums, weirdly enough considering they brought in the sticksman for the literal Ramones, are weaker than a kitten with a milk belly. Everything floats along vaguely, while the year before, everything on Let It Be powered along with the immediacy and potency of an open fire. Also, they called it Tim. Bizarre.
For decades, it sat there as the odd one out of the Mats’ discography. Some of the band’s best-loved songs on this album, despite that, are still something of a misfire. Then, nearly 40 years later, along came Ed Stasium. The famed engineer for the likes of Talking Heads, Living Color, Gladys Knight and, ironically enough, the Ramones dramatically remixed the album in 2023. This led to a re-release of the album, with its working title added as a subtitle: Tim (Let It Bleed Edition).
This act of revisionism takes the misfire and singlehandedly makes the record what it should have been in the first place: The Replacements’ finest work. Making the likes of ‘Bastards of Young’, ‘Left Of The Dial’, ‘Swingin’ Party’ and ‘Little Mascara’ sound better is the dictionary definition of improving on perfection, and yet, Stasium does exactly that. This is absolutely the definitive version of the record, and if you haven’t heard it in a while, give it a spin again. If you haven’t heard it at all, either the original or the remaster, then I envy you and your discovery of one of the great rock albums of the 1980s.
