Everyone is at Coachella seeing the reunited version of The Replacements. Everybody but me. But I am here listening to everything they ever did and you know how nostalgia is the sweetest poison, right, don’t you?
I never saw them live and didn’t own any of their albums until well into the 1990s but there were friends who when I would visit I would just walk up to the record player or the cassette player or the CD player and put on whatever Replacements record I could find. And it was always sublime and nobody ever walked over and put anything else on.
They were controversial. Every rock critic was rooting them on and they got more press, more worshipful press, than any band I can recall, but they did their own thing and were self-destructive, career-sabotaging, actually often dumb and in hindsight perfectly reasonable; refusing to make videos and then making videos that emphasized anti-stardom (along with the Pixies) they had this same retrograde stubborness, they would not play to the camera – and this is in the day and age when even Bob Dylan was sucking in his pride and lipsynching to the glam camera, MTV being seen as the only way IN and the Replacements shrugging their way out.
Their live shows had all sorts of stories about how fucked up they were. Never sober, often one member too incoherent. And yet their was magic as it was told to me by those who had gone. Like them I was just too fucked up to get it together to dance with Ticketmaster.
And the howls of bitter anger from so many corners when they named that album Let It Be. One of the great shit-stirrings of all time.
But seriously, I recall where I was and who was in the room and how bright the lights were the first time I heard “Alex Chilton”. I remember the color of the carpet and the shape of the wine stain nearest my hand as I listened. I’ve been in L.A. so long that evry damn intersection has a memory and there are streets that call up their music clearly and some blocks in town that I am almost high again on something I drank almost thirty years ago as the memory is more alive and real than the consciousness of the present driving by – and when it is that buzzed, sloppy and soul-consumingly expansive, that thing that is the replacement of stasis is, yes, The Replacements. I’m in love with those songs.