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All Things Reconsidered: The Replacements Hootenanny

<= previous I'm Not There | Defiance, Ohio next =>

by Jim Warner Music Reviewer

It’s easy to over romanticize The Replacements as the beautiful losers—a band unable to get out of its own way.  Self-destructive, self abused, self deprecating, self (un)aware—the perfect band for the uncool teenage nowhere that was the gap between Friday night and Monday morning.  Unfortunately, with such a categorization, it is easy to see such a band as a relic, trapped behind the cellophane and adhesive backing of a photo album—the yearbook photo with bad hair and crooked smile.  In the rearview mirror of nostalgia, typically a band so wrapped up in youth can only hope to become an album occasionally revisited when the big picture is fragmented in the latticed-glass confusion of late night blurry stagger.    The Replacements refuse to be scapbooked to obscurity; the music resonates with an awkward poignancy no one truly outgrows.  What’s remarkable is the consistency Paul Westerberg and company can echo from the bones of this insecurity without it being condescending, revisionist, or most importantly, sad.  There is a solace in the damaged and the damned; The Replacements offer the keys to the kingdom, one blown chord after another. 

In the valley between a recently-reconsidered “classic” (the debut Sorry Ma I Forgot to Take out the Trash) and the 1980s indie masterpiece (Let it Be), The Replacements third release, Hootnanny, slumps in the shadows, crooked smile in tact, holding its secret close to the chest.  Much in the way that Bleach transitioned Nirvana into Nevermind, Hootnanny sets up the rest of The Replacements’ musical arc (as well as laying the groundwork for Paul Westerberg’s solo career).   The fire and fury of the first two releases still exists in Hootnanny, and still peels rubber from tire treads (“Run it” is a single-car head-on collision into a median of feedback and Marshalls), but there is emotional depth that had only been hinted until now by Westerberg’s writing.   

The energy is manic and unpredictable, undisciplined and indignant, but within this stir of disorder comes “Color Me Impressed.”  Suddenly, what may have been misconstrued as delinquent behavior on previous releases has a saccharine underbelly.   The romantic Westerberg (until this point reserved to the B-side of their first single) comes out of the woodwork—of course it’s fractured, clumsy, and well-intentioned; the heart learning to trust its self-doubt.  Bob Stinson’s guitar squeals like Peter Brady’s voice at the song’s start, which only adds to the gathering power as “Color Me Impressed” rushes to its close—you can almost hear his guitar sound mature right before your very ears.  This maturation shouldn’t be misconstrued as refinement but definition: the sound of six strings aware of its power--Bob Stinson starts shaping sound with a newfound confidence.   

story continued below

What a Change from Four Years Ago

Much of my time as an undergraduate student at West Chester University had been spent getting involved with local political organizations and even helping to create an anti-war group on campus, Students Stand Up for Peace. For four years, I joined friends to hold vigils, rallies, open-mike nights and whatever other events we could think of to raise political awareness. But I...

While “Color Me Impressed” might be the public spectacle and fumble to sentiment, “Within Your Reach” closes the door to a quiet room and speaks with a shaky sobriety to the tender heart.  While all the rooms in the Hootnanny house clang and clatter with a manic glory, “Within Your Reach” whispers, removes the sunglass callus of wounded fear and stares at you, open hearted and knowingly blind to the inevitable hurt.  Love without the anxious energy, careless to the risk being so vulnerable may bring.  The moment, amplified by the one-man-show quality to the recording (it’s all Paul and a drum machine for this song), is a pinhole to a private universe, quickly swallowed up in a self-conscious jangle of noise.  The song’s heart beats with as a desperate desire, and a poet’s inability to reconcile the sensitive and the protected—hurt has a home in every extracted strand of strummed guitar.  A pinhole is all someone can take. “Lovelines” is a found poem of personals that attempts to remove the teeth from the romantic bite of “Within Your Reach” by providing a cynical distance, although the cat is out of the bag (even if Westerberg is half in it). 

Of course, to say there is any sense of restraint on this album would be a flat out figment of the imagination (it would be hard pressed to find a track like “Willpower” on a previous album as it sounds like the emotional evolution to a track like Sorry Ma’s “Johnny’s Gonna Die”).  Songs like “Take Me Down to the Hospital,” “Mr. Whirly” and “Heyday” all ramble and shake with all the subtly of a five day bender thanks in part to the lock step lurch of rhythm section: Tommy Stinson (still a teenager) and Chris Mars.  On Hootnanny, there seems to be a chance, at any moment, the whole band may implode, like someone has loosened the lug nuts on three of the four tires and this Buick full of broken hearts and listless smart asses are way too busy howling down Buck Hill to notice or care.   

This sentiment may be typified in the closing song “Treatment Bound.”  The low-fi bookend to the album’s piss-take opening (and title track), Westerberg’s lyric “We’re going nowhere just as fast as we can,” lit the lamp (and probably the gravity bong) for an entire generation of slackers.  The active act of not caring is on full display—tongue in cheek lyrics, a happy-go-to-hell bounce in the shambles—“the label wants a hit and we don’t give a shit.”  This is punk re-imagined and revisited at the same time.  The song is irreverent, sardonic, but has a knowing darkness about it.  Perhaps it’s the fact that history has already unfolded for The Replacements, but there is something else going on—a gallows humor to the song lingering independent of their history.  The sad smile that would later doom The Replacements (and eventually take Bob Stinson from us too soon) first furrowed its brow right here. 

The fact that Rhino has begun to re-release the entire ‘Mats catalog (with the post-Twin Tone albums yet to be reissued) is long overdue.  The bonus material is what you would expect—demos and rough takes.  To say the album sounds better in the reissue would be a misnomer—The Replacements are not Emerson Lake and Palmer; we’re thankful for this fact.  In the foggy glory of noise and nonsense, the heart beats true. 

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Copyright: 2008
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