One of the 1980s’ Best Albums Was Botched by Its Producer. Now You Can Hear It as It Was Meant to Be Heard.
The story of the Replacements is often told as a series of Greatest Misses, the tale of a famously star-crossed band that could rarely catch a break or stay out of their own way, always in the right place at the wrong time, or maybe vice versa. Like most legends of beautiful failure, theirs unfolds as a progression of tragic turning points, moments when if things had gone in a more fortuitous (or even just functional) direction, everything might have been different, disappointment becoming triumph, the Replacements becoming something other than the Replacements, which would of course have been the real tragedy.
Perhaps no such point looms larger than Tim, the Replacements’ 1985 major-label debut that flopped on arrival despite containing a decent handful of some of the best rock ’n’ roll songs ever written. On Sept. 22, Rhino will release Tim: Let It Bleed Edition, a four-disc set that includes a trove of mostly unreleased alternate takes and demos, a 1986 concert recording from Chicago’s Cabaret Metro, and a book-length set of liner notes by Bob Mehr, author of 2016’s exquisite Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements. But the true star of this show is a brand-new mix of the album by renowned engineer Ed Stasium. The Stasium mix is a watershed, the rare act of musical revision that refreshes its object in ways that should thrill diehard fans while also serving as a gorgeous welcome ’Mat for listeners experiencing this music for the first time. It also goes a long way toward redressing many of the more notorious aspects of the album’s original mix, long one of the more contested and controversial facets of Replacements lore.
The Replacements were born in Minneapolis as a hard-charging punk foursome made up of guitarist, singer, and songwriter Paul Westerberg, drummer Chris Mars, guitarist Bob Stinson, and Bob’s bassist kid-brother Tommy, who was only 14 when the band released its 1981 debut, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. Throughout the early 1980s, the band germinated in an extraordinarily vibrant Twin Cities music scene (Westerberg’s 2016 eulogy for Prince was one of the most moving tributes to the Purple One you’ll encounter), and almost in spite of themselves, they began evolving past the surly, who-gives-a-fuck ethos of their earliest work. By 1983’s Hootenanny, their music was growing more adventurous, with Westerberg proving himself capable of penning lovely, heartsick ballads and irresistible anthems of alienation.
1984 would be a landmark year for the band. Their third full-length album, Let It Be, was released to critical raves and turned the Replacements into one of the most buzzed-about bands in the country. Rolling Stone gave the album four stars, and in December, the Village Voice put the ’Mats on its cover, with Let It Be ultimately finishing fourth in that publication’s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. (No small feat in a pretty great year for music.) Let It Be’s breakthrough helped land the Replacements a deal with Sire Records, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. that just a few years earlier had signed another up-and-coming Midwesterner named Madonna. Sire sent the ’Mats back into the studio with the esteemed producer Tommy Erdelyi, better known as Tommy Ramone, a seemingly perfect fit for a band revealing itself to be some missing link between the incendiary energy of classic punk and the sparkling pop of the Beatles and Big Star.
And yet in true Replacements fashion, the wheels were already coming off. Behind the scenes, the group felt the weight of newfound exposure and expectations, while guitarist Bob Stinson was struggling with substance abuse, mental health, and his own diminishing role in the band he’d founded. (Tim would be the final Replacements album that Stinson would play on; he died of complications from drug use in 1995.) The band’s own self-destructive tendencies, the stuff of legend even before they’d signed to Sire, had recently surfaced at a disastrously drunk CBGB’s gig in late 1984 where they’d seemingly alienated every music-biz suit in New York City. The promotional push for Tim was chaotic at best: The ’Mats had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making a video for “Bastards of Young,” the hilarious minimalism of which all but assured it wouldn’t see the light of day on MTV. (In fairness, Sire should have seen that one coming.) A coveted slot on Saturday Night Live devolved into catastrophe when Westerberg said “Come on, fucker” into a live mic, enraging Lorne Michaels and ensuring that the band’s first SNL appearance would be their last.
Tim sold only 75,000 copies and peaked at No. 192 on the Billboard album chart, nowhere near what Sire or the band had hoped for. If the Replacements had played ball with the promotional efforts, if they hadn’t pissed off a national TV network, if they’d just had their collective shit together a bit more, maybe the album would have done better. (Though again, then they would have been something other than the Replacements.)
But there was also the matter that Tim didn’t sound very good. This isn’t to say that the songs weren’t incredible, or that the band didn’t play the absolute hell out of them, but rather the album’s overall sonic assemblage—Erdelyi’s mix, in recording parlance—just sounded off. There are plenty of albums whose mixes aren’t conventionally polished but where that quality is inseparable from their fundamental character, part and parcel of what makes us love them. To name just two monumental examples, the Clash’s self-titled debut and Boogie Down Productions’ Criminal Minded are two of the greatest albums ever made and both sound pretty amateurish, their sonic haphazardness only enhancing their breakneck insurgency.
Tim is not one of these albums. Its mix has long been a source of frustration, among the band members themselves and among fans, including the many of them who’ve found their way to the album in the decades since its release. Erdelyi’s work on Tim is frankly baffling, a set of sonic decisions that often seem either careless or excessively fussed-over. As Mehr notes, the producer deployed a strange excess of digital reverb throughout the album, while also pursuing an aggressively monaural aesthetic that tended to flatten out any sense of sonic dimension.
The end product leaves a lot to be desired. Mars’ drums sound washed-out and muffled, Tommy Stinson’s bass work is often nearly inaudible, the electric guitars sound touch-less and underdefined while the acoustic guitars sound like they’re being played with pieces of tinfoil. Much of the album sounds both cavernous and oddly cloistered, as though the musicians are standing hundreds of feet apart from each other, encased in Magneto prisons of cheap plexiglass. Few rock bands embodied the primal rock-’n’-roll thrill of a bunch of lovable louts in a room together blasting their way to glory more powerfully than the Replacements at their best. The mix on Tim often thwarts that feeling of intimacy and immediacy.
It’s barely an exaggeration to say that Stasium’s new mix is like hearing Tim for the first time. It is quite literally revelatory: guitar flourishes in “Bastards of Young” and “Little Mascara” that were previously buried are now excavated; the piano and strings on “Here Comes a Regular” are newly intelligible; Westerberg’s worn and yearning vocals on classics like “Swingin Party” and “Left of the Dial” have never sounded more alive—you can practically feel him breathe. Sometimes when an eminent producer is tasked with a project like this, there is a tendency to over-tinker, to impose their own sonic vision to such a degree that it once again drowns out the band’s own work through overcorrection. (And make no mistake: The version of Tim that everyone’s been listening to for the last 38 years is a phenomenal album, sonic peccadilloes and all.) But every choice made here feels in concert with the spirit of the Replacements and everything that made them great. It finally sounds like four guys in a room together, and you’re there too.
Had Tim gotten the mix it deserved back in 1985, would things have gone differently for the Replacements? Probably not. In the second half of the 1980s, mainstream American rock would be increasingly dominated by blockbuster glam-metal acts like Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi. The Replacements, God bless ’em, weren’t cut out for that. (Although in a delicious twist, Tommy Stinson has spent a decent chunk of the 21st century playing bass in Axl Rose’s reconstituted Guns N’ Roses.) They’d release three more albums on Sire before breaking up in 1991, just a couple of months before Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. In the coming months and years, it started to feel like every one of those 75,000 people who’d bought Tim had started a band. I discovered the Replacements as a teenager in the late 1990s after an adolescence spent in a post-grunge era, and the first time I heard them was like listening to a band stumbling onto the future. Sometimes a work like Tim is too good for its time, until it becomes timeless.
