Westerberg and Stinson Working Together Again!?!

[paulisded]

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b213/fruitjar/IMG00226.jpg

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b213/fruitjar/IMG00245.jpg

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Prince/Soul Asylum drummer Michael Bland posted these pics and the following message on <a href="http://paulwesterberg.proboards107.com/index.cgi?board=generalpw&action=display&thread=6270">the Man Without Ties message board</a>:


<blockquote>hello folks!! long time, no message..

anyway, i thought i'd get on here and try to explain what went down, a couple weeks ago.

tommy called and said that paul was in a particularly good mood and felt like getting together to jam. no pressure. no expectations. so, we did. it was alot of fun. jim boquist dropped by, the second day, and played some guitar with us.
as far as covers go, we toyed with a handful of folk songs, oddly enough. "if i had a hammer".. "the streets of laredo".. etc. things like that. of course, the treatment was pretty ramones-ish..
as far as 'mats songs go, we de-composed "little mascara", "left of the dial" and "bastards of young" so badly, all we could do was laugh about it.
however, we did get through "i'll be you", "i.o.u", a country rendition of "alex chilton", and surprisingly, "unsatisfied".
we also kicked around "bored of edukation", and a couple other new songs paul had been working on at home. we tried a tommy stinson song.. i believe it was called "a match made in hell". that one went pretty well..

as for the change in clothes, paul tends to travel with more than one change of clothes. but, we did jam on 2 consecutive days, as well..
the reason you see no pics of tommy actually playing is because i took these shots from behind the drum kit.. which means there were no photographs taken while music was being made.

oh yeah.. and, the reason the bricks are crooked is because the backdrop from the "grave dancers union" tour is covering the not-so-flattering walls of our (soul asylum's) rehearsal space, which is where this auspicious occasion took place. it hangs a little crooked..

any questions?

M.B.</blockquote>

[mikeyboy]

Nice!

[badorties]

would a paul & tommy (minus chris) outting constitute a 'mats reuinion ...?

regardless ... at this point in my life, it'd be the one show i'd pay through the nose for

[yojimbo7248]

great news! I would love it if Paul and Tommy put on a show where they played Let It Be tune for tune like Sonic Youth did with Daydream Nation in the Wiliamsburg pool.

[Dirtybird12]

Both Stinson and Bland are currently full time members of Soul Asylum now. Stinson is also the bass player for Guns & Roses. Rumor is a GNR tour will start soon.
Soul Asylum is playing a few dates here and there...

I recently read (about a week or two ago) in an interview w/ Westerberg that 1 week, Stinson wants to jam...the next week he has zero interest in playing w. paul.
BTW - Stinson also has a solo CD out that really is mind blowing. It's getting more and more clear ( to me at least ) who the brains were behind the replacements.
Bland has toured w/ Westerberg as well. He is one of the best in the pocket rock drummers out there today. If anyone caught Soul Asylum at Webster Hall a few weeks ago, along w/ Stinson on bass - you know what I mean. Bland & Stinson are def on the same page.

Im a huge fan of the Mats. I always rush out and buy Paul's solo work and am always disapointed in it. All this time I thought PW was the brains behind the Mats. Im really starting to think he was the weak link. Tommy is a genius. Bob Stinson too. They created the Replacements after all. But I could take or leave a reunion tour. Id like to see Paul, Tommy and MIchael write some new songs tho. Then I may be a little more jazzed about a tour.. But to just cash in on a matts tour w/ no new material? I think that is lame/weak.
Plus, I don't see how Tommy has time for all that - w/ Soul Asylum and Guns and Roses both on his schedule - plus his solo stuff..

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soul asylum - easy street. ( bass heavy to give those who dont know - how tight Stinson is )

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[paulisded]

The interviews from both have said that each of them goes back and forth about playing together. One week Paul wants to, but the next week when Tommy does he's not interested. When they had the benefit for Karl Mueller a few years ago, while Paul was playing Tommy was eating at a restaurant across the street from the venue (he hadn't stepped in for Mueller yet). I don't really believe he's the brains behind the 'mats, but Tommy is certainly the heart.

Michael Bland is definitely a fantastic drummer, and a helluva great guy. I first saw him play with Paul at the beginning of the '96 tour. He only played a couple of shows on that tour before Prince summoned him to return for some recording. I saw three of the '04/'05 shows with Paul, including a gig in Kansas City where I spent a few minutes chatting with both of them on Paul's bus.

Speaking of that tour, I had a bootleg live track from that tour as my myspace song. Kevin Bowe, the guitarist on that tour, contacted me about getting a copy. I shocked him with a package of 14 shows from that tour. He sent me some nice swag in return.

[TheMojoPin]

It's getting more and more clear ( to me at least ) who the brains were behind the replacements.

All this time I thought PW was the brains behind the Mats. Im really starting to think he was the weak link. Tommy is a genius. Bob Stinson too.

They were the sum of their parts. The Replacements would have sucked without Paul, and they sucked for the last couple album when the Stinson brothers were basically gone (I know Tommy was still technically in the band, but that was Paul's show on those last two). It seems silly, in my opinion, to say Paul was the "weak link" because that implies they could have made the amazing music they did without him.

Tommy is a kickass musician and has really grown into his own since the Replacements split up and I'd love to see him and Paul working together again. I really liked the stuff they put out for the last best of disc and the Open Season soundtrack.

[paulisded]

Another post from Mr. Bland:

jim boquist is actually an excellent guitar player. his brother is a multi instrumentalist, as well... but i dunno him..

BTW- yes, stewart copeland is awesome!!!

as far as feeling like a member of the 'mats, i dunno about all that. i mean, whenever i step onstage with tommy, we just start to laugh, because we enjoy playing with each other. so, there was that. and also, knowing that paul and tommy were just kinda returning to being friends in music, that put an extra smile on my face. i've been wanting those guys to get together, ever since i met tommy.

M.B.

[paulisded]

Some interesting quotes from both Paul and Tommy, including plan for Paul to write more material for Glen Campbell.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/24/popandrock1
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/24/popandrock1)
'We kicked a lot of doors open' Shambolic, gifted and drunk - the Replacements staggered their way to the edge of fame in the 1980s, only to realise they didn't want it. But their sound - and influence - lives on. By Graeme Thomson

Paul Westerberg is recalling the Replacements' finest hour. "There was one night in Madrid in the mid-1980s where these Gypsies followed us. Thirteen Gypsies who couldn't speak English and had no idea who we were, but they came down until they were practically touching us and, boy, we won those people over. We were the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world that night."

It's a classic Replacements vignette, a tale of casual magnificence tossed to obscurity. The most gifted, explosive rock'n'roll band of the 80s routinely threw their most glorious moments to the wind, preferring instead to grace crucial gigs with a selection from their vast catalogue of monumental screw-ups: clanking through a set of drunken, off-key Jackson 5 and Cher covers to an audience of influential industry suits, or performing at stadium volume in a prestigious folk club until even the sound engineer gave up, leaving them playing to an empty room.

"There were times when it was done in the spirit of things and was really funny, and there were times when it was just pathetic," says their former manager, Peter Jesperson, who put out the early Replacements records on his TwinTone label. "They bit the hand that fed them and shot themselves in the foot time after time." According to Jesperson, the Replacements were simply "unable to pretend".

"We wasted a lot when we used to drink," agrees Westerberg today from his hometown of Minneapolis, where he lives with his wife and their 10-year-old son. "Sometimes it made us fearless and sometimes it made us ridiculous, but it's all part of what made us great. We were what we were supposed to be."

The Replacements formed in Minneapolis in 1979 and disbanded in 1991. Seventeen years after they limped into port for the last time, listing more than slightly, their entire back catalogue is being reissued with the requisite bells and whistles. Despite Westerberg's apparent ambivalence at such an orderly piece of rock curatorship, the timing is neat, with the likes of the Hold Steady, Green Day and the Decemberists publicly lauding the band and often specifically referencing their music. "We kicked a lot of doors open from what I hear now on satellite radio when I flip the dials with my son," he agrees. "I hear that voice and that garage band feel, although a lot of it sounds crap and forced."

The reissues also shed fascinating light on the troubled evolution of the band. In the beginning, the Replacements - singer and songwriter Westerberg, drummer Chris Mars, bass player Tommy Stinson and his stepbrother Bob on lead guitar - were just four more high-school dropouts exploring, as Westerberg puts it, "the American Midwestern punk ethic of No Future" through a jagged howl of teen alienation. Their 1980 debut Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash is an 18-track, 40-minute classic of its kind, raw and ruthlessly tuneful, its despair laced with the same sense of all-too-knowing dumbness patented by the Ramones.

Though he would never deny his inner idiot - witness the song Gary's Got a Boner for ample proof - as Westerberg became a more confident songwriter, his horizons widened and the sense of emotional empathy with his subjects deepened.

Listening to the demos stretching back to 1979 that accompany this year's rereleases, it's clear that from the very start there was a bruised butterfly of a balladeer straining to emerge from Westerberg's grubby punk chrysalis. Peter Jesperson recalls that, while he was listening to Johnny Thunders and the Sex Pistols and writing songs like Shut Up and Fuck School, Westerberg was also obsessing over Joni Mitchell and "slipping me these solo piano and acoustic guitar demos on the QT. It was like this incredible secret. One time he said, 'It's like world war three going on in my head all the time.'"

Westerberg's creative division caused considerable internal tension. Tommy Stinson recalls that the band, particularly Bob Stinson, were uncomfortable playing Westerberg's more introspective material. "We were full of testosterone, drugged-up drinking kids, and here's Pauly with some fucking torch ballad. It was like, 'Who wants to hear that shit, dude?'"

Looking back, Westerberg can see the irony. "It's funny now to see [the reissues] with all my home demos considered deluxe, extra bonus, blah blah blah. At the time those songs were looked at like, 'This isn't rock'n'roll. Take this back home, Paul, and keep it in your basement.' Twenty years later, of course, that's the stuff they're trying to sell. It was frustrating at the time, but I lost myself in the whole fervour of the noise, the loud amps, loud clothes and louder girls. That was as much a part of me."

As they quickly established themselves as one of America's foremost alternative rock bands, they also earned a reputation for being notoriously undisciplined, usually drunk and downright wasteful. "People would come up to me and say, 'Man, I saw you once, it was the greatest show I ever saw - you were so fucked up you didn't even play any of your own songs!'" recalls Tommy Stinson. "And I'd think, 'Why would that be a great show? What made that so good for you?' Chances are it was terrible."

Following 1984's Let It Be, their fourth album for TwinTone and arguably their peak, the Replacements made the leap to a major and signed to Sire. As they watched contemporaries and tourmates such as REM slip into the mainstream, they, too, engaged in sporadic attempts to "serious up". Bob Stinson - a heavy drinker - was by 1985 no longer stable enough to make a regular contribution and was sacked - "The most painful thing I ever had to deal with," according to his brother - and the loss of his wild guitar runs levelled the sound out into something a little less primal and thrilling. Though the songwriting was frequently still superb, the later albums suffered from trying to perform an impossible balancing act: trying to make records that might sell without losing the sense of unpredictable wildness that was what made them attractive. Westerberg nailed the dilemma in the song I Don't Know, from the Replacements' second major label album, Pleased to Meet Me: "One foot in the door," runs the chorus, "the other one in the gutter."

"We embraced the idea of having a hit, but the thing that always got us was our personalities," says Stinson. "We were oil to the industry's water. We just couldn't play that game. Fundamentally speaking we were all doing it for age-old reasons - girls, drugs, fame, fortune - but as you go along and you see people like REM getting successful, and you see what it turns them into, you turn away from it a little bit. There may have been a subconscious self-destructive streak, sure, but when you see what happens to people, and what they have to do to get there, you realise it's maybe not worth whoring yourself out." Jesperson reckons they were simply "scared shitless" of success.

The Replacements fell apart in instalments. Following Bob Stinson's departure, Chris Mars left in 1990, having made only sporadic appearances on the band's final album, All Shook Down. At the end, only Stinson and Westerberg were left standing, surveying a few golden chances that had slipped through their fingers.

"Like any good, young, stupid idiot of a band, we had no idea when we were at our peak," says Westerberg. "A serious amount of money was thrown at us later on, but we were really drunk. Ten thousand people would show up to hear [the song] Alex Chilton and could not believe the kind of monstrosity we were on stage. The label didn't know what they had, but sadly I don't think we did either until it was too late. When we started to slide downhill we thought, 'Oh my God, is that it? How come there's less people this time? How come we have to play a club instead of an arena?' I'm totally fine with it now. I can laugh at it. We just weren't cut out to be pop stars. We got to the party and we saw it wasn't for us."

Yet despite Stinson's current day job playing bass in Guns N' Roses and Westerberg's increasingly off-radar solo pursuits, you sense that neither has quite succeeded in putting the Replacements to rest. The day before we speak, the pair were playing together in Minneapolis (with a new drummer and guitarist in tow; Bob Stinson died in 1995 while Mars has retired from music), kicking around the ashes of the Replacements' past and contemplating its future. They played old hits-that-never-were like I'll Be You and Can't Hardly Wait, some new Westerberg and Stinson songs, and "a little medley of Rocky Top Tennessee and Won't Get Fooled Again which I thought had something going," says Stinson.

It was, says Westerberg, "fun-ish". Stinson concurs. Promoters are waving tempting sums under their noses for a reunion tour and few fans would begrudge them a second tilt at it, but there's an obvious reluctance to commit to anything. Westerberg claims he's unafraid of the band's legacy - "none of this is sacred, holy stuff" - but acknowledges "there's a missing element. Tommy has become very grown up and efficient, and I feel I have to bend the other way to add the extra let's-make-fools-of-ourselves element to make some magic. I sat there and pondered for a moment and said the unspeakable words: 'Perhaps this requires alcohol.' And at the moment I'm not drinking."

Instead, after Glen Campbell covered the Replacements' Sadly Beautiful on his new album, Westerberg is busy writing songs for the next Campbell record - "I called my manager and said, 'Tell Glen I'll be his next Jimmy Webb' and he took the bait" - while Stinson has his finger in "too many fuckin' pies". At 48 and 42 respectively, they're adopting a tentative wait-and-see approach. "Certainly Tommy and I could go around as the Replacements and draw 10 times more and make some money," says Westerberg. "But I'm not there yet, I gotta say." Perhaps the same strange, self-defeating spirit of skewed nobility and fool's honour that prevented the Replacements ever fully grasping the nettle of fame and fortune may yet prevent them from clearing up any unfinished business.

[paulisded]

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[mikeyboy]

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DP1GyHTA9Cs/STx-uxscdwI/AAAAAAAAFZI/AE9EPInn_lE/s1600/matstoon.jpg

45 years? I ain't that old.

[paulisded]

45 years? I ain't that old.

I didn't understand that part either.

[mikeyboy]

I didn't understand that part either.

I wonder if it was just a coincidental band name choice. They also said 3 of the original 5 members were still alive.

[paulisded]

I wonder if it was just a coincidental band name choice. They also said 3 of the original 5 members were still alive.

I think you may be right.

Or the cartoonist read there is a band with that name but has no clue.