Why did The Replacements steal The Beatles’ album title?
If there’s one album by legendary Twin Cities alternative rockers The Replacements that’s been canonised within the wider world of popular music, it’s Let It Be. Featuring iconic tracks like ‘Answering Machine’, ‘I Will Dare’, and ‘Unsatisfied’, the album showed that the Minnesota punks could be more than just shit-kicking drunks (their sense of humour was also left intact on songs like ‘Gary’s Got A Boner’).
In what was seen as a very punk rock move at the time, The Replacements opted to call the album Let It Be, even though there was already an incredibly famous album by that title that existed. The Beatles’ Let It Be had only come out a decade and a half earlier, but it had become one of the most controversial albums of all time by 1984. Still, it had some of the band’s most beloved late-period songs on it, so stealing its thunder certainly came with some difficulty.
“It was our way of saying that nothing is sacred, that the Beatles were just a fine rock & roll band,” singer Paul Westerberg later claimed. “We were seriously gonna call the next record Let It Bleed.” In fact, The Rolling Stones had more to do with the album’s sound than The Beatles did. “I was writing a lot of the songs on acoustic and taking them to the band and playing them electrically,” Westerberg said in the book Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements. “In the back of my mind, for that album, I was thinking Beggars Banquet.”
So how did they decide to rip off The Beatles instead? “We were riding around… kicking around silly [album] names, and we thought, ‘The next song that comes on the radio, we’ll name it after that,” Westerberg claimed. The very next song that came on was, indeed, The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’, and The Replacements were beside themselves at the idea of stealing one of the biggest album names of all time.
“We peed our pants [laughing], and Peter [Jesperson, the band’s manager] is at the wheel, silent as hell, thinking, ‘They’re not going to do this,'” Westerberg added. “We did it pretty much to piss him off and pretty much to show the world, in a Ramones kind of way, how dumb-smart we were… Just to figure how many feathers we could ruffle.”
Check out ‘Unsatisfied’ down below.
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