Playin' Makeup, Wearin' Guitar
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
- Groucho Marx
Two years ago in Goodwill I spotted a copy of the 2016 book Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr on a shelf. I immediately thought to myself one single thought: Oh, fuck yes, I can resell that for a profit. So I paid my 3 bucks for it and went on my way. For a while after that it sat for sale in our booth at a local antique mall. Surprising to me, no one bought it. Then- strangely- I kept thinking about the book; thinking maybe I should keep it. Why though? I practically never read music bios anymore. Why would I want to have this one around? One day a few months ago when Arle was heading to the booth to restock, I mentioned to her that I’d like to have the book back. Can you bring it home? I said.
Sure, she said.
And then she did.
It sat around after that. It sat around on various bookshelves downstairs in our house, edging up to the lip of dust that inevitably forms on the small cliffs separating the bindings and the drops. For most of the books I own, this is as close as they will ever get to me after that initial day I bring them home. They will see me walk by relentlessly, some for decades now, but most will find no satisfaction if their idea of a good time is actually being opened and read. Trouble Boys was no different, really.
The only things that maybe saved the book from its almost certain fate in the end are these.
First off, it’s fat and so it doesn’t fit well in a lot of our bookcases. This means it’s often laid on top of a row of books that do fit well, giving it, by random stroke of luck, a position where it stands out to me like a sore thumb each time I pass by which is probably 25 times a day minimum.
The second thing is that it’s a hardcover/ and I loathe hardcovers/ always have/ who the hell knows why/ but it’s probably because I’m poor and I have always been poor and paperbacks are the tomes of the peasant, now and forever.
The last reason the book got lucky as hell was the death of Slim Dunlap, one of the defunct band’s members, who died this past December at the age of 73. Slim’s death kicked me in a shin I hadn’t been kicked in for years. This band who had been so tremendously paramount to me in my teenage formative years, they’d been more or less abandoned by me now. My love and adoration had been replaced by apathy and a sense of awkward discomfort. Much like a vital vein in the very arm of the body of work they’d created, everything they’d mean to me/ everything they’d stood for and fought for in a world that doesn’t give a shit/ it had all collapsed. My immersion, my baptism, my 17-year-old stoner passion had retreated and in its shadow now lurked a feeling of being triggered instead of being lifted.
The Replacements, it turns out, had been replaced. Not by another band or even a different genre. But by silence. Quiet. No sound. No music where there’s had been. They’d almost singlehandedly changed my life, made me see rock-n-roll as something possible yet impossible at the same time as opposed to just fucking purely impossible from the get-go. Their existence had lent me hope as a kid.
And here’s the kicker.
That sentence right there? That is a sentence that I am absolutely certain would make Paul Westerberg, the band’s de facto leader, throw up in his mouth.
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I began reading the book this past week. In the first few pages, I felt weird about it. Something in me had no interest in revisiting a story that I loosely knew. Their childhoods were not especially enchanted. In some cases, there was excessive abuse, the kind that ultimately ruins people. Or causes them to join bands. In examining why I have this kind of trepidation towards band bios (especially this one) I’d probably have to submit myself to a lot of laying under the microscope/ nude. Which no one really wants to have to deal with, I know.
But still, I remain certain that The Replacements, more than any other band in a long storied history of a kid who loved bands, they fucked me up. Not on purpose, I don’t think. Although I can’t speak for the surviving members. More likely, the idea of this music and the way it was presented to the world, or at least the small amount of the world who gave a shit about it when it was unfolding in real time, it reminds me now, at age 53, of a couple of, shall we say, slippery slopes.
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The first thing that might have fucked me up when it comes to The Replacements is that I actually played in a real life band. For something like 25 years, from roughly 1995 to 2022, I really gave it my all. Hell, I gave it more than my all. I gave it my fucking soul. I allowed that beautiful beast of possibility which any unknown band truly is, I allowed that to live inside my skin, to flow freely down in my veins/ in and out of my heart. Marah, our band, was this cancerous gift that I have never understood and never ever will. For anyone not in the band, it was- at best- a good time. Good music to listen to, exciting shows to watch. Don’t get me wrong, we had some wildly devoted fans whose love of what we did (and whose gentle smiling at what we maybe meant to do) remains to this day one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
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