“Ain’t ya had enough of this stuff?/Ashtray floors, dirty clothes, and filthy jokes.”
When Paul Westerberg sang those lines in “Can’t Hardly Wait” on the Replacements 1987 album Pleased to Meet Me, he was declaring that he’d had enough of the band’s being adored because they were lovable fuck-ups, drunks, adorable losers. This, he was saying, is what that life entailed, and he was sick of it. Make no mistake, the band had done everything they could to feed that image, especially at the moments when it was crucial to show they were a lot more than that. The most notorious was a 1984 show at CBGB’s where they spent much of the set doing sloppy cover versions and baiting the industry honchos in the audience who had come to consider signing them to a major label. It was the career model described by Pauline Kael in her piece “Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah”: saying fuck you to the suits and fucking over yourself in the process. Bob Stinson, the band’s founder and guitarist, booted out of the band for his alcoholism in 1986, lived out the implications of that life: he worked as a cook while shuffling from one nowhere band to the other before dying of organ failure in 1995 at 35.
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