The Replacements broke up just before my first birthday, so I never thought I would get to see them play a show. I was wrong.
The Replacements in 1986.
NBC/Universal
On my way to the final Replacements reunion show of this year, I make a brief stop in a King Sooper's parking lot, where I pick up Charlie and Ike, errant teenage twins looking to hitch a ride. They're also headed to Riot Fest in "Denver" (as it's billed, but which here means "a rural nothing-place called Byer an hour by car outside of the actual city"). The band is headlining all three of the festival's dates, which are the first shows they've played together since 1991. As we drive, Charlie gets annoyed with me for slyly trying to skip the butt-rockier songs on the classic Replacements album Let It Be, which is playing over the car stereo. Unfortunately, like me, he knows this album about as well as he does the English alphabet — we are, after all, listening to a CD copy he pulled out of his own pocket just after I made sure he was buckled in — so he calls me out with a quickness.
"Don't you realize that this is the best part?!" he screeches, prompting me to reluctantly rewind to the beginning of a song called "Gary's Got a Boner."
"I'm just anxious to hear 'Sixteen Blue!'" I whine back, betraying my preference for the band's more raggedly melodic tragicomedies. I do as he says anyway — I'm eager to please my charges lest they decide to stop arguing the finer points of Stinsons trivia with me. (Just in case: The Stinson brothers are Bob, the band's first guitarist who died in 1995, and Tommy, the band's bassist, who started playing with them when he was 12.)
Whether a truly rabid Replacements fan is more inclined to love the band at their trashiest or their most introspective, we all share some version of one single opinion if you ask us to describe just why their music is so important: When the Replacements existed, they were the greatest band in the world, and no one has come close to achieving the level of majesty established by their work since. They were the band that every other band fails to be, the band with nothing missing. For me, this is because no one else has captured the feeling of fucking up really badly (something that young people like, for example, everyone in this car, happen to be very good at), with the same urgent, subcutaneous itching to somehow be better. Here are the opening lyrics on Tim, from the track "Hold My Life":
Well, well, well I / Found it / It's my life
Down on all fives / Let me crawl
If I want, I could dye / My hairTime for decisions to be made
Crack up in the sun, lose it in the shadeRazzle, dazzle, drazzle, drone, time for this one to come home
Razzle, dazzle, drazzle, die, time for this one to come alive
Hold my life / Until I'm / Ready to use it
Hold my life / Because I just might lose it
Tell me that's coming from someone who isn't trying to scratch at the same unreachable spot that we are. I don't want to misrepresent the Replacements' best music as accessible only to people under 25, because I think the humanity in it can resonate with anyone with a heart that's currently in the process of pumping blood, but Let It Be and Tim are particularly great because they perfectly capture the adolescent dread that stems from the immense self-doubt and uncertainty that might cause one to crack up and/or lose it in the face of having to make significant decisions. Throughout the end of my teenage years and now, into my 20s, the Replacements always seemed to know what I was going through as I figured out how to live (and wasn't always all that great at it). They were there as I tried not to fall off of strangers' fire escapes, skipped class after class, bit my nails to shreds, and broke up with a beautiful junkie I was very much in love with, and they were there as I did my best to maybe not do those things anymore. The band stares down the barrel of the very hardest feelings instead of choosing not to acknowledge them because they're distasteful or unattractive. That honesty, to me, is everything. And although the wayward teenagers in my car and I are on different ends of the cusp of adulthood, we're likely all processing some version of this same insecurity — the reluctance to claim responsibility for the lives we're not quite ready to use yet. In fact, I'm willing to bet that they know that sensation well, seeing as when I first picked them up, they were stranded in a supermarket parking lot.
