Other Cover Songs The Replacements Should Record For Their Reunion
- "Reckoner," Radiohead
- "The Big Guns," Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins
- "Love Story," Taylor Swift
- "You've Got a Friend In Me," Randy Newman
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'Mat Finds Place
"I lived in L.A. for 15 years, had great friends, but I never felt at home. It's a constant feeling of 'I have to keep moving or I'm going to get stuck.' And here I want to stop moving so I can get stuck." —Minneapolis native Tommy Stinson plans to remain shiftless when idle in his new home of Hudson, New York. He joins a thriving musical community there that includes Phillip Glass, Meshell Ndegeocello, Melissa Auf Der Maur and the guys from Vetiver. And with everyone already calling Hudson "the new Williamsburg," some people there are worried that their rural artist paradise will be ruined [...]
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The Replacements 1984-1987, In Order
33. Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out 32. Lay It Down Clown 31. Red Red Wine 30. Seen Your Video 29. I Don't Know 28. Gary's Got a Boner 27. Shooting Dirty Pool 26. I'll Buy
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Twenty Years Later: The Replacements, 'All Shook Down'
This month marks the twentieth anniversary of All Shook Down, the final album by the Replacements, a band from Minneapolis that I am now finding greater difficulty writing about than I thought I would because of their huge, huge importance to me. Let me puke out something like that, in the mid-80s when I was a teenager and they were at their peak, their fuzzy, blaring rock n' roll was the sound of truth and freedom and glory as I heard it, and that Paul Westerberg's lyrics carved what I felt to be a secret message into my soul that told me what it meant to be alive. Okay, [...]
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Replacements Reunite At Behest Of Stricken Former Guitarist
"He's in rough shape. He's sort of paralyzed, he can move his leg a little bit. When I mentioned this, it seemed like something he really wanted to happen. 'You guys get together,' he said in a whisper. 'Go play a song.'" —Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson went into a studio and recorded a four covers that will be pressed into 250 limited-edition vinyl EPs. The records will be auctioned online to raise money to help stroke-stricken former bandmate Slim Dunlap pay his medical bills. It's a nice thing to do, to help out an old friend in need, and I'm psyched to hear them "rock like murder" on [...]
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A Great Rock n' Roll Novel: Dana Spiotta's "Stone Arabia"
A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about the idea of “The Great Rock n’ Roll Novel” and how it had not yet been written. “I've yet to read a novel that convincingly sums up the experience and the value of making popular music,” wrote The Guardian’s Graham Thompson, “or that captures the weird, savage compulsion that keeps everyone from Bloc Party to Bob Dylan traipsing around the world, year-in year-out.” In fact, Thompson wondered whether such a novel could ever be written. “Perhaps pop music is essentially worthless as an abstract idea and must be experienced at first hand to have value.”
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Man Puts Old Essay About Replacements On Internet
"The Replacements were simply too good for the broad audience they tried so hard to reach. Even a casual listener would have to wonder why their catchy, pop/rock melodies never exploded across the radio and television. Each of their albums contains a handful of songs that seem to be inevitable hits, yet they never had a gold record or a song in the top 40 longer than a sneeze. To those of us who believe in the power of the general audience to occasionally love great material, the Replacements failure to become huge boggles the mind. Some would go back to the shaky argument that the top 40 world subconsciously [...]
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Jonathan Mann, "The Ballad Of Steven Slater"
Prolific Youtubist Jonathan Mann has written and recorded a song celebrating everybody's favorite new "bandit hero" style folk icon, Steven Slater. (A DJ on 101.9 played the song last night, followed by The Replacement's "Waitress In the Sky," which was a nice touch.) It's not quite "four dead in Ohio!" but it seems like it could be having a similar effect on society. College English professor Lynne Rosenthal was thrown out of a Manhattan Starbucks yesterday after refusing to order a bagel and coffee in accordance with the coffee corporation's famously frustrating menu-speak. "I just wanted a multigrain bagel," Rosenthal told The New [...]
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"Quaffing a Round of Beers Is Arguably More Vital to Many Jobs Than Nailing a Round of Golf"
“I would call guys I was friendly with, guys who had their hands on big ad budgets, to see if they wanted to go to happy hour or get something to eat. And they’d say: ‘Are you drinking? No? Don’t worry about it.’” —On the burden of having to drink for business. You know what they say: working in ad-sales is just like being lead guitarist for the Replacements. Related, below: all the drinks of "Mad Men."
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Germans Like Fake Meat
"He goes on about the ersatz food in Germany. He describes 'meat made of pressed rice boiled in mutton fat (and finished off with a fake bone made of wood); tobacco made of dried roots and dried potato peel; shoes soled with wood.' There are, he notes, '837 registered meat substitutes permissible in the production of sausages, 511 registered coffee substitutes.'” —From Dwight Garner's review of Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow comes an answer as to why the McRib sandwich stays on the menu all year 'round at McDonald's restaurants in Germany: Germans got used to fake bone shapes in their food during the first [...]
