Synopses & Reviews
Here, finally, is the rollicking story of the notorious and celebrated band, as told by veteran music journalist Jim Walsh, an eyewitness who was always at the periphery of the storm, and often at its eye.
“The Replacements were superheroes: They rescued a whole planet from ’80s music. Jim Walsh’s loving, engrossing oral history is the book they deserve.”
—Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, Fever Pitch, and Songbook
“The Replacements were all at once 100-percent right and totally and completely wrong; absolutely inspiring and thoroughly infuriating; gloriously brilliant and utterly stoopid. Any writer who would dare tell their story would have to match those attributes and contradictions, but there was only one up for the task, and Jim Walsh has done a tremendous job of it.”
—Jim DeRogatis, pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, co-host of Public Radio’s Sound Opinions, and author of Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic
“The rest of us have only seen the Replacements through ‘a crack in the drapes.’ Jim Walsh actually took the wheel from time to time and managed to get closer to the band than I ever thought possible. He makes me lonesome for the ’80s.”
—Joe Soucheray, St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist and host of KSTP-AM’s Garage Logic
“The Replacements made a mark on Minneapolis ‘serrated and deep, like a battle scar,’ as one person remembers in this book. Can the life of a band be captured in mere words? Jim Walsh uses oral history as the way to know if any of it mattered, or if it even happened.”
—Diane Middlebrook, author of Suits Me, the biography of the cross-dressing jazz musician Billy Tipton and Her Husband, about the marriage of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
“(Seeing the Replacements) changed my whole life. If it wasn’t for that, I might’ve spent my time playing in bad speed-metal bands.”
—Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day
“Reading Jim Walsh makes me think things that are kinda corny and totally powerful and true: that rock and roll can save your life; that even scruffy punks can form real family bonds; that you may only be young once, but if your spirit's right you can kick ass forever. Listening to the Replacements makes me feel the same things, and in that I'm like a lot of folks in my generation. Walsh was a participant observer in the counterculture that birthed this great band, and this insider account is as honest and insightful as oral history gets. You can really smell the beer.”
—Ann Powers, pop-music critic at the Los Angeles Times and author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America and Tori Amos: Piece by Piece
“Whether you were there when it all went down or just wish you'd been, this account of the ’Mats' enduring chokehold on music history is as ragged as a punk's pedicure, as bittersweet as an illicit pot brownie, and so pure it floats to the top of the rock-lit heap. Immeasurably more transporting than an ordinary memoir, Walsh's book is a poetic toast to a band so effusively careless that everyone who saw them instantly cared. If you've ever fallen in love with ‘that song,’ followed your favorite band from the VFW hall to the arena tour, or felt a Frankenstein-like primal spark at the sound of an opening riff, you'll get it. At turns wounded and joyful, the communion of voices brought together in All Over But the Shouting chimes like a Strat and builds like a heartbeat.”
—Diablo Cody, author of Candy Girl: A Year In The Life of an Unlikely Stripper; the film Juno, and the blog Pussy Ranch
Review
"The Replacements were superheroes: They rescued a whole planet from '80s music. Jim Walsh's loving, engrossing oral history is the book they deserve." Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, Fever Pitch, and Songbook
Review
"The Replacements were all at once 100-percent right and totally and completely wrong; absolutely inspiring and thoroughly infuriating; gloriously brilliant and utterly stoopid. Any writer who would dare tell their story would have to match those attributes and contradictions, but there was only one up for the task, and Jim Walsh has done a tremendous job of it." Jim DeRogatis, pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, co-host of Public Radio’s Sound Opinions, and author of Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic
Review
"The rest of us have only seen the Replacements through 'a crack in the drapes.' Jim Walsh actually took the wheel from time to time and managed to get closer to the band than I ever thought possible. He makes me lonesome for the '80s." Joe Soucheray, St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist and host of KSTP-AM's Garage Logic
Review
"The Replacements made a mark on Minneapolis 'serrated and deep, like a battle scar,' as one person remembers in this book. Can the life of a band be captured in mere words? Jim Walsh uses oral history as the way to know if any of it mattered, or if it even happened." Diane Middlebrook, author of Suits Me, the biography of the cross-dressing jazz musician Billy Tipton and Her Husband, about the marriage of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
Review
"(Seeing the Replacements) changed my whole life. If it wasn't for that, I might've spent my time playing in bad speed-metal bands." Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day
Review
"Reading Jim Walsh makes me think things that are kinda corny and totally powerful and true: that rock and roll can save your life; that even scruffy punks can form real family bonds; that you may only be young once, but if your spirit's right you can kick ass forever. Listening to the Replacements makes me feel the same things, and in that I'm like a lot of folks in my generation. Walsh was a participant observer in the counterculture that birthed this great band, and this insider account is as honest and insightful as oral history gets. You can really smell the beer. "Ann Powers, pop-music critic at the Los Angeles Times and author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America and Tori Amos: Piece by Piece
Review
"Whether you were there when it all went down or just wish you'd been, this account of the 'Mats' enduring chokehold on music history is as ragged as a punk's pedicure, as bittersweet as an illicit pot brownie, and so pure it floats to the top of the rock-lit heap. Immeasurably more transporting than an ordinary memoir, Walsh's book is a poetic toast to a band so effusively careless that everyone who saw them instantly cared. If you've ever fallen in love with 'that song,' followed your favorite band from the VFW hall to the arena tour, or felt a Frankenstein-like primal spark at the sound of an opening riff, you'll get it. At turns wounded and joyful, the communion of voices brought together in All Over But the Shouting chimes like a Strat and builds like a heartbeat." Diablo Cody, author of Candy Girl: A Year In The Life of an Unlikely Stripper; the film Juno, and the blog Pussy Ranch
Review
"[Walsh's] oral history recounts the differing reactions of musical contemporaries such as Bob Mould of Husker Du, rock critics such as Steve Albini, and members of the Replacements themselves. But the best remembrances come from ordinary fans." Booklist
Synopsis
At the dawn of "Morning in America" a period that would nurse the rise of suit-and-tie culture there emerged a national network of anti-corporate record shops, college radio stations, fanzines, nightclubs, and entrepreneurial record labels.
In the watershed year 1981, this "indie" scene fostered several seminal releases. Among recordings by bands such as Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Husker Du, The Minutemen, and R.E.M. was an album called "Sorry Ma...Forgot to Take Out the Trash," recorded by a scruffy, flannel-clad quartet from Minneapolis called The Replacements. Now, for the first time, all of the hearsay, half-truths, legends, and allegations associated with this maelstrom of a rock & roll band are unraveled in this oral history by longtime Twin Cities music journalist Jim Walsh.
Through interviews with family, friends, and fans; former manager Peter Jesperson; Twin/Tone record label cofounder Paul Stark; and musicians around the nation influenced by the band, Walsh lays bare with painful clarity a tale that unfolds like a tragic comedy in three perfect acts. Celebrated by national publications, "the Mats" often seemed more hell-bent on sabotaging their status as critical darlings than parlaying it. With their markedly apolitical stance amid their decidedly political peers, their uncool embrace of "classic rock" influences like KISS and The Faces, and their Dionysian appetites (and the resulting tendency to literally fall on their own faces), The Replacements lasted 12 years despite themselves.
From the bands founding to their rise through the local and national club circuits, their major label deal in 1985, and the slow and painful implosion that followed, The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting lays down the gripping oral history behind the little band that could but didn't.
Synopsis
The inside story on one of the ’80s most interesting and influential indie rock bands, from unlikely rise to slow implosion.
Synopsis
Formed in a Minneapolis basement in 1979, the Replacements were a notorious rock ’n’ roll circus, renowned for self-sabotage, cartoon shtick, stubborn contrarianism, stage-fright, Dionysian benders, heart-on-sleeve songwriting, and—ultimately—critical and popular acclaim. While rock then and now is lousy with superficial stars and glossy entertainment, the Replacements were as warts-and-all “real” as it got.
In the first book to take on the jumble of facts, fictions, and contradictions behind the Replacements, veteran Minneapolis music journalist Jim Walsh distills hundreds of hours of interviews with band members, their friends, families, fellow musicians, and fans into an absorbing oral history worthy of the scruffy quartet that many have branded the most influential band to emerge from the ’80s. Former manager Peter Jesperson, Paul Stark and Dave Ayers of Twin/Tone Records, Bob Mould and Grant Hart of rivals Hüsker Dü, the legendary Curtiss A, Soul Asylum’s Dan Murphy, Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, power-pop hero Alex Chilton, Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, and replacement Replacements Slim Dunlap and Steve Foley: all have something to say about the scene that spawned the band. These and dozens of others offer insights into the Replacement’s workings--and the band’s continuing influence more than fifteen years after their breakup. Illustrated with both rarely seen and classic photos, this, finally, is the rollicking story behind the turbulent and celebrated band that came on fast and furious and finally flamed out, chronicled by one eyewitness who was always at the periphery of the storm, and often at its eye.
“[T]his consistently engaging and poignant work . . . . [is a] loving, appropriately ramshackle tribute to one of the most beloved rock-and-roll bands of the 1980s. . . . The band's story is an archetype of the joys and pitfalls of underground success.”--Publishers Weekly
“The Replacements were superheroes: They rescued a whole planet from ’80s music. Jim Walsh’s loving, engrossing oral history is the book they deserve.”—Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity
About the Author
Jim Walsh spent several years singing in Twin Cities bands before turning to rock journalism. In 1990 he became the music editor at City Pages, an alternative weekly in Minneapolis. Three years later, he joined the St. Paul Pioneer Press as the pop music columnist and as a feature writer, and in 2002 he left Minnesota to study at Stanford University on a John S. Knight Fellowship. Walsh returned to Minneapolis in 2003, where he lives with his wife and two children, and performs and records as his musical alter ego, The Mad Ripple (www.myspace.com/themadripple and www.myspace.com/madripplemusic).
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One Raised in the City
Chapter Two When It Began
Chapter Three What’s That Song?
Chapter Four Someone Take the Wheel
Epilogue Waiting to Be Forgotten
The Players
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Song and Album Index
General Index