Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements

Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr, 474 pages.

Bob Mehr, who it seems, is normally a columnist and writer of liner notes, does a really good job on a readable, informative, and consistently even story of my favorite band from the 1980s. I saw the book on the review shelf and put it on request because it was about the Replacements. I was a little dismayed when I saw that it was 474 pages long, and more dismayed when I realized how little white space there was; we're talking narrow margins and a small font. How could someone write so many words about a band? I figured it would be repetitive, and in the end, boring, despite it's subject, but I was wrong.
Mehr constructs the book carefully, with each new situation, each chapter starting with a brief bio of the person introduced. He begins with the parents of the band members, then the four Replacements, their friends, lovers, management, and their musical contemporaries. They all get an introduction and all get their say. There are no real heroes here. The book is by no means a hatchet job, though the truth, as Mehr tells it, could easily support one. The author does attempt to answer, in a sympathetic way, the question of how a band which so many people thought would succeed in a big way actively and aggressively avoided that success. How four people who were all capable of playing so well together always let it all fall apart. It's a fascinating story, and a pretty sad one.  The sadness begins with founding guitarist Bob Stinson, who died in 1995. Bob lived with the scars of being abused as a child, and then struggled with substance abuse, violent tendencies, and mental illness all his adult life, and it took a heavy toll on his music and his life. The whole band was right there with him in a lot of ways and seemed to relish living out their reputation as the most dysfunctional hyper-talented band going. They drank pretty much constantly, until they couldn't anymore. Paul Westerberg, the most famous of the Replacements, struggled with depression, along with his drug problems and alcoholism. Tommy Stinson, Bob's younger brother, started playing with the band when he was twelve, and dropped out of high-school during his sophomore year in order to tour nationally with the band. He waited a year or two before becoming a full-fledged member of the chemically-fueled destructive team, but he caught up quickly. Alcohol and drugs aside, the band seemed determined, throughout their existence, to go out of their way defy the advice of anyone and everyone in the business, to slap away any helping hand offered, and to sabotage themselves and their careers with their fans, radio stations (including Lin Bremer and Johnny Mars at WXRT in Chicago) their own lmanagement team, and their record label; all in colorful and almost unforgivable ways. Eventually they seem to turn on each other. There's never any real redemptive moment for anyone, but that seems to be the way the band wanted it.
Interesting stuff.

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