Paul Westerberg – “49:00″ (2008)
Braden Towne’s amusing review of Paul’s ramshackle, homemade internet-only release of last year. Taken from Crawdaddy!, Aug. 6, 2008…
Of all the various ways I could have experienced Paul Westerberg’s new album for the first time, headphones plugged into a PC didn’t even make the list. I stopped around #112: Hearing 49:00 muffled through my neighbor’s wall while trying to extract a rusty fish-hook from my finger. That would have been an experience. That would have been memorable. But for me, as I suspect it was for many others, the first time came pumped directly into my cochleae from the same box to which I am tethered day-in, day-out.
It should be pointed out to those that have been on holiday in Antarctica that the method of my initial exposure was not chosen by me; rather, it was chosen by Paul Westerberg. In an effort to side-step the usual label fiasco that surrounds all new releases, Westerberg has casually made 49:00 available exclusively by download. If it were anyone other than the guy that wrote “Sixteen Blue” and “Bastards of Young,” personally, I wouldn’t have bothered. But the thing that allows Westerberg a pass is the music, and once again Minnesota’s finest has delivered.
As we’ve come to expect, 49:00 is packed full of sweet hooks and thoughtfully simple lyricism shoved uncomfortably up against raunchy instrumental performances and haphazard arrangements. This is rock ‘n’ roll’s DNA, and Paul’s got a license to clone. Each song shuffles in the door just as the last is jumping out the window; a couple even get caught hiding under the bed while one or two others sneak up behind you before running back home to their master tapes.
Yes, Westerberg took full advantage of the fact that no one was looking when he made this record. It’s easily his most diverse album in years, offering something for fans of every stage of his career, and offering all of it to all of them. The download comes with no separation between tracks so you’ll have to listen to the whole thing to figure out what’s what, a task made more challenging by the fact that some songs play during other songs (yes, it’s exactly how it sounds). There is, of course, the ambling country crooning and Stonesy middle-aged swagger that has marked his more recent output, but 49:00 also showcases the snotty punk edge of Westerberg that never really went away, but certainly sounds a lot more Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash than 14 Songs here. This begins around the 14:30 mark with a song most likely called “Devil Raised a Good Boy” (I don’t think there’s even an official track list), and carries on a little later with what is probably “Everyone’s Stupid.” Even included is a Westerberg’s-former-band-style mélange of cover songs around 40 minutes in, culminating with “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family. If that’s not punk, I don’t know what is, and neither do you.
For sure, I would have rather heard this album for the first time playing on a transistor radio while I fixed a flat on Route 20 in Iowa (#37) or on the jukebox of a bar at 3pm after I just got dumped (#1!!), but these days you gotta take what you can get, and we’re all lucky someone is still making rock ‘n’ roll records like this one. So my advice to you is to download this album, re-master it, press it to vinyl, then lose your virginity while listening to it. Damn it, it’s what the music deserves.
Braden Towne
Ira Robbins – “Paul Westerberg Comes In from the Ledge” (1993)
Ira Robbin’s long article on Paul Westerberg, who had just recently released begun his solo career (with 14 Songs) after breaking up The Replacements 2 years earlier. This is taken from Pulse! magazine, August 1993…
Independence Day, 1991. Lincoln Park, Chicago. One by one, the Replacements — what’s left of ‘em, anyway — hand their instruments off to their roadies, leaving them the honor of nailing the Mats’ career coffin shut with a last-call rendition of “Hootenanny.”
The band that wrested punk rock back from the British, revved it up in a Minneapolis garage and drove drunk into the hearts and minds of thousands, the band that swilled down the ’70s wretched rotgut and spat up fiery, inspiring anthems of loneliness and confusion for a generation of young bastards too bored and bummed to allow themselves the luxury of an identity, the band whose chaotic live shows weebled with the tension and unpredictability that had become foreign to rock’n'roll, the band that unlocked music’s eternal mystery and proved that electric noise can make a difference … was over. Finito. One dead parrot. Like an Antabuse candidate — defined, sustained and nearly, but never quite, destroyed by alcoholism and antagonistic indolence — the Mats’ system simply would not tolerate maturity, ego and sobriety.
“I could say we ran out of picks, we ran out of strings, ran out of time, ran out of patience. They’re all true,” says former Replacements star Paul Westerberg, in New York for a week to audition sidemen for a tour this summer. It was the singer/ songwriter / guitarist’s sharp sense of irony that lit the Replacements’ raucous travels down a sensitive, intelligent, messy path of sardonic venom, reckless abandon and staggering tenderness, so it was his switch to flip. “We all smelled smoke, and I was the first one to say that the thing is on fire, boys, let’s exit the building quietly.”
But dissension and frustration were already burning down the band when Westerberg commandeered 1991’s All Shook Down, a dispirited, wan album that became a solo project in all but billing. “I sound very tired and weak on it, and I was. I was not healthy, not caring much. I sort of erased all the real angst, the pissed-off and the humor and took only the elements that were a little deranged, a little sad and a little pathetic and put them together. I was pretty fucking desperate there, and it shows.” His surprise. “I’m glad we captured it.”
Westerberg’s impetus for relegating his bandmates — bassist Tommy Stinson, guitarist Slim Dunlap (who replaced brother Bob Stinson when Bob’s appetite for self-destruction exceeded the band’s newly-struck functional sanity rules) and drummer Chris Mars — to session-man status, alongside a dozen other players on the album, was a growing tug-of-war over his artistic preeminence in the band. “I didn’t want to have to check with people to see if what I was doing was OK. If I like something, I’m at the point now that’s good enough,” says Westerberg. “From day one I led and wrote and sang,” he notes. Ten years on, his bandmates “had their own material, and they wanted to do my job. I didn’t want to do theirs.
“If I had been more together physically and emotionally I should have said, OK boys, I’m doing this [album] alone. I was hoping they would instinctively know, and say, ‘OK, Paul, do it.’ Then they could go and be their own singers and their own songwriters. Instead, they clung to the group and it was difficult for all of us.
“By the time the record came out I was sober for the tour, and it was difficult to play these songs that I didn’t feel anymore. It was like a traveling wake. Everyone knew it was the last, except for Steve [Foley, Chris Mars' successor in the Mats, who now plays in Tommy Stinson's Bash & Pop].”
Westerberg briskly announces his current weather report on the ex-Mats interpersonal front. “I’ll tell you in a nutshell: Tommy and I are pals. I don’t talk to Chris, don’t miss him. Slim and I never were that close; we stayed friends. That’s about it.”
“The ones who love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest …
The ones who love us least are the ones we’ll die to please”
— ‘Bastards of Young’
If punk died with the Replacements in Chicago that summer day, it was too dumb and lazy to lie down. A few months after the Mats quit, Nirvana’s Nevermind — a record clearly in debt to the rowdy brats responsible for tuneful slacker thrash (and beyond) songs like ‘White And Lazy’, ‘Gimme Noise’, ‘Color Me Impressed’ and ‘Nowhere Is My Home’ — launched a garage-rod salesquake that is still causing aftershocks.
But the success of Nirvana wasn’t the only irony visited on this rock’n'’ roll ghost. While the remnants of the Replacements evaporated into the terminal ozone, silent but for Chris Mars’ first album last year, their Minneapolis scenemates soldiered on, some to long-due victories. Bob Mould, the local patriarch who had lived through the dismal end of Husker Du and two adventurous (read: uncommercial) solo LPs, took a step back in style and formed Sugar, which promptly wreaked some major commercial damage. Then Soul Asylum whacked Grave Dancers Union — an album different from the band’s previous work only in its relatively forthright production and new corporate home — right out of the park. Add to that the minor indignity of Titanic Love Affair’s sonic simulation and the Mats-influenced Goo Goo Dolls, who got ol’ pal Westerberg to write the words and melody for the recent ‘We Are the Normal’.
New for ‘92, Westerberg guested briefly onstage with Joan Jett in Minneapolis (“I was terrified”) and recorded two new songs for the Singles soundtrack (the catchy, clumsy ‘Dyslexic Heart’ and ‘Waiting for Somebody’, the latter a candidate for the forthcoming live programme) which proved little more than his continued existence. Otherwise, this voluble, self-analyzing wiseacre with a fine line in egotistical self-deprecation kept a very low election-year profile.
With punk’s belated breakthrough following so close to the settling dust of his bygone job and marriage, the cleaned-up Westerberg — a troubled malcontent even in the best of circumstances — might have gone quietly mad, stewing in bitter, resentful juices. And who could have blamed him? Intentionally or unknowingly ignoring the clear and present dangers of their adolescent approach to playing in a traveling band, the ‘Mats wrote the book on a far-from-acceptable style and sound. They got the great reviews but not the cash, but then turned sensitive and respectable — Alan Alda taking the place of Mickey Rourke — just when a huge new audience was getting itself ready for a shattering fist in the face. Timing, as someone endlessly said, is everything.
“We were five years ahead of our time, 10 years behind,” Westerberg reckons. “When you see guys come out and sell three million right out of the garage, you wonder, what are we doing wrong?” But his hindsight is realistic. “If we’d have sold three million Let It Be’s when it came out we would have been dead in a month. We couldn’t have handled it.”
The class clown can now admit that his profession of indifference — to the press and success — was not entirely honest. “I always cared [about criticism]; I used to pretend I didn’t. I think I care less now, but a bad review is a bad review. It still gets to me.” On the other hand, he has a fascinating take on why rockcrits dug the Replacements so much. “I think we happened to like all of the funky quirks of the classic rock bands — the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Ramones [to a certain extent] — that critics found endearing. We didn’t have the things that made those bands huge, we had the thing that made them infamous and decadent and, perhaps, great.”
Reflecting on the overwhelming irony of it all, he says, “I’ve had to find heroes. Like Bo Diddley. Bo Diddley didn’t go; the Stones took it and they went. We were pioneers, and the pioneers — Iggy, Johnny Thunders, the Dolls — don’t get it. Somebody’s got to start it and somebody’s got to pick it up — maybe water it down, crank it up, do something to make it work. I’m not expecting to be revered as some sort of god of grunge shit, but I’m comfortable now.”
Comfortable enough that, last fall he finally set about making a solo record with co-producer Matt Wallace, the Mats’ studio collaborator on 1989’s coming-of-age album Don’t Tell a Soul. “I went through every phase thinking, what is this record gonna be? For a moment I thought, ‘Well, it’s expected; I guess I can get into the acoustic record.’ As soon as I made that decision, all I could write was rockers. ‘Two Raindrops’ and ‘Make the Best of Me’ didn’t go on the record because that would have been another cocktail-jazz thing. I like that, but I’m not gonna confuse you with that. I’m gonna give you stompin’ rockers and ballads that you know I can write. Matt told me to give ‘em a record of great stuff and leave off the ones that maybe someone’s gonna love but not 100 percent. So we left off the two cocktail jazz and the spiritual quasi-mantra. I gave you the meat, I left out the frills.
“I’ve made a conscious effort to not be the brilliant tale-spinner that I’m known as. I guess that’s me trying to keep ‘em guessing. There’s an art to writing simply, there’s a craft to playing simply. Less is more.” Musically, the new songs avoid the distinctively uncommon chord changes of many Mats tunes. “If you write music to impress people you usually miss your audience. Another guitar player will [comment on] a great suspended 9th, but to everyone else that’s the funny part of the song that you can’t sing along. I don’t need that chord.”
Westerberg and Wallace tried but quickly abandoned one rhythm section in New York and then settled down in San Francisco with drummer Brian MacLeod (ex-Wire Train) and bassist John Pierce. By February they had finished 14 Songs, an upbeat, emotionally stable look around and back that mixes loud rockers and quiet non-rockers and sounds roughly (on some cuts, specifically) like the saner sides of Don’t Tell a Soul.
“When we talked about making the new record, [I asked Matt] what he didn’t like about Don’t Tell a Soul. He said the right thing: We tried too hard. We spent a lot of money and time making the drums on time and getting my vocal on key. Fuck that. I don’t sound like that. Let’s keep it raw and wild. I stopped trying to sound like something I’m not.”
But he no longer sounds like what he was, either. Punk’s reckless fury is no longer in his blood. It’s become a learned memory, a musical skill that he can rev up but never again truly embody. Now 33, the hard-drinking idiot who could frantically scream a song like ‘Take Me Down to the Hospital’ and howl his anguish in the wrenching ‘Unsatisfied’, is proud to express his desire for ‘A Few Minutes of Silence’. On the same theme, the rousingly punk-styled ‘Down Love’ avers, “I got to turn you way, way down/ If I could only find your volume knob.”
Is that adulthood calling? “I’m not afraid to say that. Any kids that can’t handle that, fuck ‘em.”
“Do you remember me, long ago?
I used to wear my heart on my sleeve
I guess it still shows”
— ‘First Glimmer’
The inclusion on 14 Songs of several fine slices (‘Things’, ‘First Glimmer’, ‘Runaway Wind’, ’Even Here, We Are’) of what Westerberg reluctantly terms “ballads” amid jocular rock’n'roll selections like ‘Mannequin Shop’ (a plastic-surgery dig inspired by a People magazine cover) and ‘Silver Naked Ladies’ will assuredly lead die-hards to believe that time, sobriety or something more pernicious has softened Westerberg’s will to rock. And while the desultory energy in the record’s electric songs doesn’t really prove otherwise, that perception misses the point by an inch. Manic expression was never the Mats’ sole artistic weapon. From almost the beginning, the band’s unbridled wildness was cut up with the searing poignancy of understatement, pensive cries borne on a knife edge no less serrated or damaging than the willful ear-splitters. ‘Within Your Reach’ and ‘Here Comes a Regular’ were hardly wimpouts, they were devastating sob-ins. Few other artists have ever been so adept at eliciting the same emotional response with a nudge or a kick.
Beyond any superficial measure of volume or distortion, the handsomely crafted and unquestionably appealing’ 14 Songs never sounds like a matter of life or death. While ‘First Glimmer’ and ‘Things’ — finely wrought love songs that are moving and eloquent — reach Westerberg’s prime emotional resonance, what’s gone out of his songwriting is a trace of desperation. Suffering for art is well beyond an audience’s rights, but for someone who once fished satiric doctor terror from the mundane trivia of ‘Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out’, this album’s WYSIWYG charmer about backyard flowers plants him in an altogether different garden. (‘Black Eyed Susan’, recorded two years ago in Westerberg’s kitchen, was de-hissed and put on the album in its crummy-sounding original form because he couldn’t recall the one-off guitar tuning.)
Indeed, it’s hard to remember the smart, funny guy sitting on a Central Park bench this glorious spring Saturday noon as a maladjusted enfant terrible. Musing about how fans identify with songs, he says, “If they want to like the shit I’ll pretend like I wrote it just for them.” Hearing himself voice another gushy bit of enthusiasm, he laughs. “I sound like an old showbiz cat here.” Maybe that’s what he always was.
“When it came to writing the songs, I was never as fucked up and dumb as people assumed. There was always a method to the madness. Even on something as ridiculous as ‘God Damn Job’, I weighed the options. I knew it was very stupid, but I thought, ‘We can get mileage out of this.’” Does that mean my impression of the young Westerberg as an unselfconscious intuitive, blowing absurd chunks of his life into songs that made cleverness honest was just an illusion? He doesn’t think so.
“The songs were about what we were. It was never a pose. It may have come suspiciously close when we got attention for being fuck-ups. We accentuated it, and maybe even stretched the limits of what we actually were. Essentially, when we started we were mixed-up kids and we wrote about it.
“It’s funny that the people who related to it the most weren’t fucked-up kids. Our fans have always been, dare I say, a little more intelligent than the band was labeled as. I always thought that ironic.”
So were the Replacements more calculating than the chaos they presented? Westerberg concedes he had a bit more in mind than simply paying tribute to a musical idol in writing ‘Alex Chilton’, a memorable hymn on Pleased to Meet Me. “I thought it would appear hip. I can say that. He knows that. But a lot of it was genuine.”
The two musicians have grown to be friends. While starting on 14 Songs last October, Westerberg watched the World Series with Chilton, and invited him to drop by the studio. “He sat down and winged out a lead on ‘Knockin’ on Mine.’ It was good, but he gave it a real country flavor. We wanted something a little angrier, so I redid it. I think he’s got one guitar chord on there that we couldn’t fully erase,” Paul chuckles. “That one flat chord in the last chorus is Alex.”
Looking toward the release of 14 Songs and the start-off-small head-lining tour that will follow, Westerberg sounds like a zen showbiz cat. “This time I just feel so relaxed. I’m not expecting a lot. I’ve never been more willing to accept whatever comes. I used to be disappointed with records and record sales. All of my worst problems have come from myself. If I don’t set myself up to be disappointed, I’m not gonna be.”
Ira Robbins
The Replacements – “Pleased to Meet Me” (1987)
David Fricke’s review of The ‘Mats’ 1987 platter. This album still sounds as good as it did when it first came out. This review is from the July 2, 1987 issue of Rolling Stone…
When God was giving out self-confidence, where the hell was Paul Westerberg? Out buying beer? For someone so blessed with songwriting ability, the singer-guitarist seems unduly consumed with doubt about his own worth and that of the Replacements, his merry band of Minneapolis rock & roll idiot savants. “One more chance to get it all wrong … one more chance to get it half-right,” he bawled desperately in the semiautobiographical blitzkrieg “We’re Comin’ Out,” on the group’s 1984 album Let It Be.
The equally raucous “I Don’t Know,” on Pleased to Meet Me, the Replacements’ fifth full-length platter, is Westerberg’s latest ode to his own uncertainty. “One foot in the door/The other foot in the gutter,” he sings in his trademark rasp against the crude Stonesy gallop of drummer Chris Mars and bassist Tommy Stinson. While Mars and Stinson whine, “I don’t know,” like a stoned Greek chorus over the baritone sax of guest Steve Douglas, Westerberg details the tragicomic hopelessness of his dilemma and that of his vagabond band (“Our lawyer’s on the phone…. What did we do now?”). Too talented to play the fool, disgusted with showbiz protocol, he dreads the very success his undeniable gifts can bring. “The sweet smell that they adore/Well, I think I’d rather smother,” Westerberg snarls defiantly in the chorus. But near the end, when he asks, “Whatcha gonna do with your life?” a barely audible voice replies, with dreary resignation, “Nothin’.”
Pleased to Meet Me, like nearly everything in Westerberg’s oeuvre, is about not fitting in, about square pegs surrounded by nothing but round holes. What distinguishes Westerberg from the misfits populating his songs is his uncanny ability to speak for the tongue-tied, articulating their aspirations and insecurities with intuitive sensitivity, boozy whimsy and straight street talk – leavened with a little poetic license. As a lyricist, he is fond of the hilariously surreal (in “Can’t Hardly Wait,” he sings, “Jesus rides beside me/He never buys any smokes”), and he has a knack for dramatically potent non sequiturs (in “Shooting Dirty Pool,” he delivers the acidic put-down “You’re the coolest guy I ever have smelled”). As a melodist, he revels in a kind of perverted pop classicism, hanging his spiritual tensions and mischievous lyrics on offbeat hooks and change-up choruses like some grungy offspring of Randy Newman and Elton John; meanwhile, the band’s guitar-drums gunfire threatens to turn your brain to tapioca.
The result is an album alive with the crackle of conflicting emotions and kamikaze rock & roll fire. Nowhere on Pleased to Meet Me is that tortured vibrancy more evident than in “The Ledge,” a powerful study of teen suicide set to an urgent beat and death-knell guitar arpeggios. Westerberg makes no excuses here, no accusations. Instead, there is a haunting clarity in the face of eternal darkness, sympathy not just for the poor devil on the ledge but also for the people down below, whose help comes too late: “I’m the boy they can’t ignore/For the first time in my life I’m sure/All the love sent up high to pledge/Won’t reach the ledge.” There is no loss of life in the next song, “Never Mind,” but when Westerberg sings, “All over but the shouting,” in that hoarse bark of his, you can hear that same need to be understood, even as he walks away from an irreparably damaged relationship.
Life is not always a bed of nails in Replacementsville. “Red Red Wine” is a simple ode to the pleasures of the grape, a delightful rouser in the Mohawk party spirit of the band’s thrash classics Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981) and Stink (1982). “Skyway” and “Can’t Hardly Wait” are both songs of gentle longing, the former inspired by the elevated walkways in downtown Minneapolis (“Oh, then one day/I saw you walkin’ down that little one-way/Where the place I catch my ride most every day/There wasn’t a damn thing I could do or say”) and played on acoustic guitars, which lend a heavenly grace. “Can’t Hardly Wait” is a touching snapshot of road weariness in which Westerberg falls into dreams of love and hearth on a sweet pillow of strings and soulful brass (“I’ll be home when I’m sleeping/I can’t hardly wait”).
But what fuels Pleased to Meet Me is the combination of Westerberg’s instinctive grasp of adolescent trauma and the band’s basement-rock fury, brilliantly produced by Memphis studio legend Jim Dickinson, who gets it warts and all, like the loud amplifier buzz that opens “Red Red Wine.” Indeed, the jewel in this collection of wonderfully rough diamonds is “Alex Chilton,” a frenzied celebration of the precocious frontman of the Box Tops and Big Star, who skidded into artistic paralysis in the late Seventies before hitting the comeback trail three years ago. (Chilton produced demos for the last Replacements LP, Tim, and plays guitar on “Can’t Hardly Wait.”) With Mars’s snare drum echoing like a rifle shot and his own guitar balled up into a clenched fist of distortion, Westerberg salutes Chilton’s genius with a knockout melody the equal of anything in the Big Star catalog while examining the insane pressure of living up to one’s own myth – “Children by the millions sing, ‘Will Alex Chilton come around?’”
Will children by the millions sing the same thing about Paul Westerberg in a few years’ time? Not likely. In the Replacements (now back to quartet strength with new guitarist Slim Dunlap replacing Tommy Stinson’s older brother, Bob, who left after Tim), Westerberg is blessed with a band of renegade realists, sometimes pickled out of their heads in concert but tough as nails in the clinch, anchoring Westerberg’s meditations in bar-band bedrock. Tracks like “I.O.U.” and “Shooting Dirty Pool” practically sound like Exile on Main Street at 78 rpm. It is ironic that Westerberg and the Replacements can make such a joyful noise out of so much anguish and insecurity. But on Pleased to Meet Me, the pleasure is all yours.
David Fricke
Paul Westerberg – “Eventually” (1996)
Written November 13, 2004…
Having been a big admirer of Paul Westerberg since 1985, when he was the leader of the late, great Replacements, I have never understood the level of criticism leveled at his solo albums….especially this album. There are many longtime fans out there who seem to slag off Eventually as being some piece of tame, lame middle of the road hackwork. Nothing can be further from the truth.
I think alot of it may be due to the raucous, drunken legacy of The Replacements, which is unfortunate. Nobody can be young & crazy forever. The ones who try, either die in their prime or grow to be 60 & still try to act 18, which is even worse than death. Paul Westerberg quit drinking around the time of The Replacements’ demise and began to mature. Some people never will forgive Paul for simply growing up.
His first solo album 14 Songs was an excellent, if slightly uneven record. Eventually in my opinion is his most fully realized solo album. Every song is excellent. It’s an album I have listened to hundreds of times over the past 8 years and I still love it as much now as I did back in 1996. That’s the sign of a great, timeless album to me. And it’s an album that holds together terrifically, meaning every song follows the last one perfectly. It’s a brilliantly realized sequence of songs. Each song builds on the previous one to create a sum that is greater than its parts.
It starts off brilliantly with “These Are the Days” and continues to simply grow as it goes along.
“Love Untold” is a heartbreaking ode to two potential lovers who never get a chance to meet. Westerberg’s attention to small details is captured as perfectly here as it’s ever been. It’s those small details that has made Westerberg one of the greatest, if unfortunately underrated songwriters of his generation. He captures all the heartbreak, the angst, the joy and the passion that we all feel from time to time. He knows how to convey what we all feel inside.
“Ain’t Got Me” is another excellent song that segues beautifully into “You’ve Had it With You.” That segue always leaves me breathless. Westerberg has always left me breathless with these little kinds of details. He doesn’t need flashy guitar solos or special effects to get your attention. He does it with the little things. Just like Dylan and Springsteen and Lennon and all the great songwriters throughout the ages. It could be a clever line or a slight inflection in his voice or a little, seemingly insignificant guitar riff. It all adds up though without you even realizing it until about the 8th listen. And then it all of a sudden clicks & quietly blows you away. This album has many, many instances of this. Which is why I just can’t figure out what people seem to miss with this album. Am I hearing something they’re not?
And “You’ve Had it With You” is just as raucous & reckless & rocking as anything from his past. But never sounds like some forced return to youth. He makes it all sound so effortless. But if it were this easy to write songs of this caliber, there would be no such thing as a bad song.
“MamaDaddyDid” reveals his ambivalence towards having children & his own parents’ inability to raise him. Although I guess he had a change of heart a few years later, when he did in fact have a child.
“Hide N Seekin” is probably the type of song that his fans crucify him for. They claim he has turned into a middle-aged soft-rock sell-out. But that’s ridiculous. This is a gentle but remarkable song. And as much as I love his adolescent songs of yore, like “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out,” I will take “Hide N Seekin” any day.
One of the most touching songs of his entire career comes towards the end. “Good Day,” a piano & strings-based ballad, is a hopeful, positive ode to being alive sung with heartfelt passion. A tribute to fallen, former Mats guitarist Bob Stinson, it is surprisingly upbeat coming from a cynical guy like Westerberg. “A good day is any day that you’re alive,” is about as positive a message as has ever been written. And whenever I hear this song, it does indeed make me feel happy to be alive, no matter what kind of pain I’m experiencing. I’m happy to be alive, if for no other reason than to be able to experience beautiful music such as this. The best music should always make you feel this way. I couldn’t imagine a world without The Beatles or “Rhapsody in Blue” or Pet Sounds. I couldn’t imagine a world without Frank Sinatra singing “I’ve Got the World on a String” or “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” They are simply a part of what makes living worth all the pain & disappointment & heartache we all experience.
I don’t want to come across like some sycophantic fan but I just cannot find anything wrong with this entire album. There have been songs by Paul that just haven’t clicked with me. Many in fact. But there are none on this album. They all speak to me. Catchy, tuneful, well-written songs with clever wordplay & that mean something. And to some people who think Paul lost his sense of humour & became too “mature” and “serious,” there are plenty of funny lines on this album, especially “You’ve Had it With You” or “MamaDaddyDid.”
Paul Westerberg has always had a knack of saying the things we wish we had thought of first. And he continues to this day, although I do believe that the albums he has released since Eventually have not lived up to that album’s eternal greatness. It’s difficult to make timeless art every time out, but he continues to try. God bless him. And why he’s never become big is as big of a mystery as the Bermuda Triangle. Especially since The Goo Goo Dolls became huge by ripping off Westerberg’s entire sound & style, which doesn’t mean I’m condemning them for it. Johnny Rzeznik has actually out-Westerberg’d Paul at times. But still Westerberg should have been a star, rather than merely a cult legend. It’s one of the great injustices in rock ‘n’ roll history. But that does not take away one bit from what he has accomplished. The masses can go to hell for all I care.
This is one of those albums where everything came together all at once and is clearly a lost classic in my opinion. Being one of my all-time favorites, I recommend this album to anyone open to what it has to offer. Listen to it 50 times if you have to. I promise it will reveal all of its brilliance with time.
And for those who continue to compare it unfairly to everything that came before it, you are truly missing out. But that’s your loss.
For me right now, I can’t stop listening to this great album. And I thank God for it.
Jay Mucci
Paul Westerberg – “Open Season” (2006)
Written Aug. 24, 2007…
Though not technically a “Paul Westerberg” album (due to there being other artists on it), it is about three-quarters of a new Westerberg album. The soundtrack to last year’s children’s movie of the same name, this is a strange place to find St. Paul and an even stranger place to find perhaps his two finest solo songs ever.
“Meet Me in the Meadow” and “Love You in the Fall” have got to be his two most infectious, rocking and memorable songs since the heyday of the late, beloved Replacements. Okay, let me state it another way: these songs are INSTANT CLASSICS! The kind you simply don’t find much these days. Just for these two songs alone, it’s worth the price of admission. They simply have everything we ever loved about Westerberg. Hooks, catchy, sing-along choruses, great lyrics. They sound like long-lost gems circa 1987. One listen to these songs and you feel like you have known them all your life (just like all of Paul’s best songs over the years). Why is it so hard to write songs like these anymore? Why can’t anyone write a decent melody these days? I don’t know. But then again, Paul just simply makes it look easier than it is. He himself hasn’t written these type of Replacement-like songs since…well, not since the glory days of the Replacements. He has made many wayward albums over the years, as well as many great ones. But here he does what he does better than any other songwriter on this earth, just to show us he simply can still do it. And it’s a joy to behold.
Maybe the reason why he returned to that sound is due to the fact of former ‘Mat bandmate Tommy Stinson helping out. Or perhaps he invited Stinson to contribute to the proceedings because of the fact that these songs have that Replacements-like sound…? And if it took writing songs for a children’s movie to bring out the best in Paul again, I’m all for him doing more soundtracks.
The next song “I Belong,” is another great song from the master – one of his slow, heartfelt, heart-on-sleeve weepers. The kind that the Goo Goo Dolls borrowed from him and took all the way to the bank. The album ends in an orchestrated version of the song by Pete Yorn, that he does very well and which I think may have been up for an award. I’m not positive though. Anyhow, I like both versions.
“Any Better Than This” is a happy-go-lucky song with an infectious melody. Hard not to smile while listening to it.
“Right to Arm Bears” is another rocking song, with Paul’s great use of wordplay (check out that title again). Another memorable, catchy chorus. If you aren’t humming at least one of these songs three weeks after hearing them, there is something wrong with you my friends. And why these songs weren’t Top 10 hits is just another crime against humanity. It still amazes me that Paul never reached the top of the charts (the way his imitators did). But I guess he is just resigned to his fate as a semi-famous cult artist. Maybe it’s all for the best.
“Good Day” is a ringer on the album. This heartfelt tribute to former Replacement Bob Stinson (in the wake of his unfortunate early death) is taken from his 1996 solo album Eventually. It sounds great no matter where it is though. This is one of the great happy-to-be-alive songs of our generation. And done by someone who usually does not write optimistic songs.
“All About Me” is another winner, as is “Whisper Me Luck,” which has a quieter folkier feel to it, highlighted by acoustic guitar and harmonica.
The album also includes Talking Heads’ 1986 hit “Wild Wild Life,” which probably doesn’t need to be on here (although I guess it was featured in the movie) but always sounds good no matter what.
The group Deathray (of which I admit I know nothing about) also have two songs on here. I’m not sure if they were written for the movie or when they were recorded but they are actually very enjoyable. They are in more of a punk-pop direction with some touches of electronica. Both quite memorable. I would like to hear more from this band in the future.
And that wraps it up. Definitely worth investigating if you are a lifelong Westerberg fan. If you lost touch with him over the years, now would be a good time to jump back on board. And if you have never heard the man, this is just as good a place as any to begin.
The master is back and not a moment too soon.
Jay Mucci
Paul Westerberg – “Daydream Believer” (Live – 1993)
Paul performing Neil Diamond’s classic song (made famous by The Monkees). This appears to be an amateur video, taken from Aug. 20, 1993 at First Avenue Club in Minneapolis (where the live performances from Purple Rain were filmed). This is not long after The Replacements broke up.
The Replacments – MTV News Report (1991)
An interesting news report about the possibility of the ‘Mats soon breaking up. They did in fact break up after this final tour. I saw them during this time opening up for Elvis Costello.
The Replacements – “I Will Dare” (Live – 1989)
Amateur video of the ‘Mats live at Orange County Speedway 8-18-89. Quality is not bad considering the source.
The Replacments – “Kids Don’t Follow” (Live – 1981)
Another performance from this same 1981 concert (see below) from Westerberg, Bob Stinson & co.
Good quality – this is a solid performance by this notoriously sloppy (but always exciting) band.
The Replacements – “Johnny’s Gonna Die” (Live – 1981)
A very early live performance by the ‘Mats. This song was supposedly written about punk rocker Johnny Thunders.
This is a surprisingly good-quality video, considering when it was recorded.
