Unsatisfied

My two cents on the Replacements "Tim: The Let It Bleed Edition."

This week saw the release of a new Replacements Box Set entitled “Tim (The Let It Bleed Edition)”, on Rhino Records. It is, as far as I can tell — sadly, I don’t own it — a bunch of remixes of songs on the album “Tim” plus a live show, plus other ephemera. Good times, right? And yet…I don’t know. The root word of nostalgia, ‘algos,’ is pain and suffering. And that is what it makes me feel. However, thanks to the reissue, the time seems ripe to revisit the Replacements, so here is something I wrote about them a few years ago. It appears in the book One Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology and the Art of the Pop Song, which is an amazing book and project. In it, a bunch of writers were given a decade and told to chose the song they thought exemplified it, and I was given the 1980s. Here’s what I wrote:

Chapter 10: Unsatisfied.

These days it’s hard to remember how much we hated Ronald Reagan and everything he stood for. In retrospect, he seems like a kindly old duffer – wrongheaded, for sure; politically insufferable, but not full-on evil, like others we could mention. But make no mistake: Ronald Reagan was an abomination of a President, and we were well aware of it at the time. Tax cuts, deregulation, re-militarization, “Star Wars” (the Strategic Defense Initiative), trickle-down economics…it was all a cover for making rich people richer, and the fact that people could look at his frozen dyed black hair and see into his stone cold heart and still think otherwise was appalling. This is the man, remember, who ordered troops to fire on peaceful protesters at UC Berkeley in 1969, killing one person; who, in 1981, fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers rather than negotiate with their union, and who once claimed that voting for the Civil Rights Act -- and later, the Voting Rights Act (that is, dismantling Jim Crow) -- would cause the U.S. to become “an antheap of totalitarianism.” In 1985, Reagan went to Europe to commemorate the end of World War II by visiting the grave site of Waffen-SS Officers – i.e., Nazi war criminals -- who’d been buried there. The Ramones even had a song, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” about it, and hell, if the Ramones were bothered by the sight of a President’s foreign diplomacy, then it must have been pretty bad.

Ronald Reagan was the winner of the first Presidential election I ever voted in, and the eight years of his reign coincided with the exact period of my coming of age -- that era when you form all your most important political opinions, aesthetic tastes, and of course find the music you love the most. It’s also the age when you’re at your most judge-y, which is probably why everything I associate with that time now – preppie chic, Presidential anti-AIDS statements, pro-South African apartheid remarks, date rape – is still utterly abhorrent to me. I hated people who were into him, and, by proxy, those things, as much as I hate them now, but on the flip side, I still love what I loved back then with a passionate intensity, because that time also encompasses when I was in college, when I worked on a college radio station, and when I first found out about the independent underground music scene. In 1984 I volunteered to be a d-jay at a college radio station, and the experience turned the decade which Bill Clinton (of all people) later called “a gilded age of greed, selfishness, irresponsibility, and neglect” into one that for me personally was one of glorious, memorable, abandon.

It was the decade during which Michael Jackson toured off Thriller and the two biggest singles were “Born In the USA” and “Like A Virgin.” But for me, the Replacements song “Unsatisfied” is the real anthem of the Reagan era. Family values. It’s morning in America. Let’s Make America Great Again. Those were the catchphrases of the time, and everything about them felt smarmy and disingenuous, like the opening sequence to the Netflix biopic The Dirt (2019) which begins with a montage meant to evoke how conservative the Reagan years were – shoulder pads, the moral majority and fluffy haircuts - and then falsely credits the truly abysmal band Motley Crüe with being some kind of a liberating antidote to it all. Ugh.  The Replacements song “Unsatisfied,” recorded and released in 1984, stands in direct opposition to that time. It crashed right into that era’s massive self-confidence and twisted it into the meaningless shards of puffed- up rhetoric that it was all along.

In an article in the Journal of Popular Music Studies on subcultural identity formation in alternative music, Holly Kruse explains how, in the 1980s, a loose network of college radio stations in cities across America created “the possibility that a band could break through to at least cult popularity without the aid of a major record label (and now can achieve mainstream success by graduating from the ranks of independent labels to the majors: witness REM and Nirvana).” This tight-knit network of musicians, listeners, labels and fans, (myself included), would at the time have described itself as being radically in opposition to the mainstream. As Kruse reminds us, Laclau and Mouffe state, “all values are values of opposition and are defined only by their difference”; similarly, Simon Reynolds has explained how, thanks to the college radio network, “[a] noise band in Manchester can have more in common with a peer group in Austin, Texas than with one of its ‘neighbours’ two blocks away” (Kruse, 1993). So it was that while the mainstream world was listening to music by Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, my friends and I were digging deep into a post-punk treasure trove of independent music, most of it made by bands of American white boys with four instruments and a shitty amplifier.

 If you put it that way, it sounds boring and awful, but the times were different then. Today, artists can potentially use new technologies and forms of dissemination to overcome barriers like gender and genre, but back then everything was pretty white and bland, which may be why the Replacements’ playful take on songs by the Bay City Rollers and Kiss and the Monkees seemed so funny: live, they mocked that bland whiteness with dry acumen, while simultaneously contributing songs like “Androgynous” and “Sixteen Blue” that elevated the form to something far deeper and more true. When the Replacements arrived in my town to play live, they blew up all my notions about what was ‘good’ music and where ‘good’ bands could come from. Before I heard the Replacements, whose hometown of Minneapolis barely registered in my consciousness, I thought only English people wearing tons of black eyeliner and New Yorkers were hip and cool, and that every band should cover the Velvet Underground. After, I wasn’t so sure. The Replacements were Midwestern goofs. But in the course of 18 months between 1983 and 1985, I had heard at least 12 original songs by them that would have gone – I mean, that GO -- on my top twenty songs of all time ever. After a lifetime of thinking musical excellence was the province of the Beatles and the Stones, it was so revelatory to see it appear in my own peer group. It was like hearing profundity pop out of the mouth of the class clown.

The Replacements oeuvre – or perhaps I should say, the mood that their oeuvre incited – was a revelation to me, but at the time I came to hear of them, the Replacements were already going on five years old.  They had come together in Minneapolis in 1979 and had recorded one EP (Stink) and two other long-play albums for the local label Twin/Tone, which also put out music by local favorites the Suburbs and the Suicide Commandos, among others. The Replacements had a vexed reputation in Minneapolis, due to their habitual drunken snarkiness and unreliably antic live shows, but there was no doubt they were wildly popular with locals, in part just because one never knew what they would do next. Appear naked? Wear a tutu? Cover a song by Jethro Tull? Break your heart? They were anarchic and bipolar, but few would dispute that they were also geniuses. Genii? Lead guitarist Bob Stinson, speaking to Goldmine magazine a little before his death in 1995, described their shows as “like watching Alfred Hitchcock with the cartoons on.”

During those years, the band played out a lot in the Midwest, but they didn’t come to California until 1984, when the Replacements released Let It Be, their third full-length album, and began a tour of America that went around it twice. I saw them at least 7 times between October 1984 and late 1985 – in cities that included Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose, Fresno, and Davis – and in 1986, when I was in Europe, I saw them play in both London and Paris. At the latter show, I was one of only a handful of people, all American, and I didn’t have enough francs to pay for a beer.

By that year, the band had signed to Warner Brothers Records, made a truly disastrous appearance on Saturday Night Live, and pretty much shot themselves in the foot on many a stage across America. This was a trend which would continue until their acrimonious breakup in 1991, and which was probably most apparent in their infamous opening slots for Tom Petty, in 1989. [i] But the shows I remember best came before that, and I remember their atmosphere as irreverent, defiant, explosive, and just plain fun. More accurately, as one writer once memorably put it, the overwhelming effect of the Replacements is homesickness. “Everybody in the band has cried in the van on the way to the show,” Westerberg has said. Exactly. I too have cried, both on the way to the show and on the way home, and for a wide variety of reasons. Very often when I saw them, the Replacements played like shit. Indeed, over the years I saw way more bad shows than good ones, and yet, there was something about the experience of seeing them live that captured what it was like to be alive and human, something about them that was just so poignant and true. And for me, “Unsatisfied,” the lead off song on side 2 of Let it Be is the song that exemplifies that feeling. Mixing perfect 80s jangle pop with the kind of vocal angst that would later populate the jukebox of grunge, it is, simply put, the sonic apex of that era. And possibly of any era.

This might sound like surprisingly high praise since although the ‘80s had its fair share of rock stars, the Replacements could not conceivably be counted amongst them. Despite being legends amongst college radio aficionados, their music got very little airplay, and no wonder: whilst on Warner Brothers, during the height of MTV’s reign of terror, rather than create a pretty boy cliché of themselves standing in the desert with their hair waiving back or whatever, they stubbornly released a video for the song “Bastards of Young” which was essentially a still shot of a speaker emitting the music. This was because, as singer and Paul Westerberg told David Fricke of Rolling Stone, if they had to do a video, it would only be one that “nobody would want to watch all the way through, much less twice,” and it is difficult to overstate just how perverse that gesture was. It is probably one of the main reasons the Replacements aren’t more widely known today, but it is that attitude – that is to say, their adamant belief in the face of every possible sign otherwise, that rock was sonic, not visual, and that MTV was stupid -- that is captured so poignantly on “Unsatisfied.” If you think about it, it is also the emotional, political, and ideological opposite of the Rolling Stones’ far better-known “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965). The latter is a tricksy, nasty piece of work, a whiny lament by an ultra-privileged douchebag who is sick of hearing advertisements and is flabbergasted to note that he has been turned down by a girl. The double-negative in its chorus gives it away: “I can’t get no…” meaning you CAN. Right, Mick? You CAN get satisfaction, but you want to complain about it anyway.

As Derrida says, we don’t speak language, it speaks us. Linguistically speaking, a song titled “Unsatisfied” ought to mean the same thing as one that proclaims “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” but there’s no question that the Replacements version of that phrase is an entirely different proposition. Just for starters, can you even imagine Mick Jagger asking anyone else if they were satisfied? I could leave the whole thing right there and have delineated the difference between the two songs for good and all. But “Unsatisfied” is a bigger and better song than “Satisfaction” for more reasons than that. It’s better, because rather than refer solely to the singer’s life and feelings, it refers explicitly to yours. This singer isn’t just frustrated by advertisements, or disappointed in his current romantic circumstances. He’s disillusioned with the world itself.  And why shouldn’t he have been, given that era? There is a story that the Replacements manager Peter Jesperson called the Replacements – back in the days before cell phones – to found out the final lyric to “Unsatisfied” for publishing rights purposes, and that Paul Westerberg took the call at a payphone on the highway. Reception being bad, as it usually was in those days, he was forced to scream his answer into the phone.

When I think about the Replacements, I like to think of that apocryphal moment: the barren highway, the empty gas station, the grubby young man yelling the truth into the cold Midwestern night.

 Peter: “What is the last line you sing, the one after when you say, “I’m so dissatisfied?”

“It’s ‘liberty is a lie!” yells Paul, into the telephone. “No, I said, “liberty is a lie!”[ii]

And liberty is a lie. We know that now, to our cost, and if I were a better historian, or perhaps a professor of political science, I would now use this space to explain to you exactly how the election of Ronald Reagan presaged the situation we find ourselves in now. But I am only a professor of critical race studies. I can argue that the Civil Rights and the counterculture caused a turn to the radical right. I can see the moments when liberty slipped away. But I can’t do more than suggest to you that the recognition – or precognition – that the whole post-World War II era that my cohort and I came of age in, when there were lots of jobs and pensions, no wars for the boys fight in, and you could go to a state college practically for free, was in fact not a permanent condition but a very brief lull that would be irrevocably changed by specific Reagan policies like deregulation, union busting, and (especially) the bogus War on Drugs.

According to Genius.com, the heavily frequented site for explaining lyrics, Westerberg wrote that song about how unsatisfied he felt with music, not with democracy: “It was just the feeling that we’re never going anywhere and the music we’re playing is not the music I feel and I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how to express myself.” Doubtless, that is what he felt, but what I felt then, and still feel now, whenever I hear it, is as if someone is clutching my heart. The song told me that I was not alone in feeling that there was no point in playing along with the rich kids and the status quo, that it was a loser’s game to do so, and therefore I, a bona fide loser, was fully justified in quitting it.

“Unsatisfied” also typifies the Reagan era because of the way the song was positioned against larger cultural movements. A band on an independent record label cast adrift in a major label world is a great allegory for many of the Reagan era’s signature changes. Reagan’s great mission was to deregulate all kinds of industries, including the media and the airwaves. Theoretically, that wasn’t a bad thing for independent record labels, as a plethora of new stations and media formats would allow for new niche markets and audiences. In actuality, it did nothing of the sort. Rather, the majority of those stations and formats peddled the same stuff to the same people. Besides, one of the things we always forget about the eighties is that they weren’t just pre-internet, pre-peer-to-peer, pre-streaming, they were even pre-CD.

Think about that for a minute, and all that it implies. Just for starters, in order to purchase music to play at home, people still had to drag their asses to dedicated record stores and interact with the clerks there (which often wasn’t the most pleasant experience). Then they had to take their purchases home and stack them somewhere safe where they wouldn’t warp. And remember the trouble we had to take in order to transport our collections between our dorms and apartments? For years, my record collection took up the majority of my belongings. It weighed the most and used up the most space, and yet living without it was unthinkable.

No wonder so many people were just not up for the commodity fetishistic practices a record collection required, instead just listening to the radio and whatever it decided to play for them. And the radio was tyrannical. If you weren’t into top forty, you could curate your listening in one of three or four ways: talk radio, country, hair metal, or its British opposite, new wave. It goes without saying it was all super white. All of hip hop, then at its best, was unavailable to be heard on commercial radio. Prince was practically censored for referring to actual sex acts and the rest was impersonal dross, full of squeals and angles, like the Missing Persons song “Walking In L.A.” (1982) which is about impersonality itself and sounds like it was sung by a fembot.  Whether it was the Thompson Twins, Human League and Soft Cell, or Def Leppard, Quiet Riot and Motley Crüe, it all sounded as clean as a whistle – and, incidentally, as white as wherever it was that the colonial rulers lived in the midst of the Indian city of Lucknow…. in 1885. 

Looking back, the idea that commercial radio would be entirely responsible for a person’s listening fare seems crazy and depressing but back then, we didn’t know any better. On the fell day in one’s teen years that you realized you were in thrall to some corrupt corporation’s choice of artists, the shock was visceral. The minute you realized, you went left of the dial, where the college radio stations resided, to engage with music that sounded like it was made somewhere – anywhere – not in a studio vacuum. This is what people forget. At that time, the jangle of the Rickenbacker being strummed by an actual hand was just totally antithetical to the smooth, synthetic sounds of eighties pop of any kind.

“Unsatisfied” opens with an especially good example of that raw, human sound. In contrast to radio fare of the eighties, the recording is so intimate that your fist almost cramps from the feeling of fingers clenching the fretboard to form the chords. About 30 seconds in, there’s an electric chord that keens over the top of that jangle, and it sounds like it was made by a violin bow on top of electrified honey. One upward swoop, and then – faintly, in the background, as if by accident -- a voice kind of upchucks into the music. “Ny’..uh?” 

And in come the drums. “Look me in the eye and tell me that I’m satisfied,” growls the singer, and his voice sounds exactly as if it came straight out of that boy you saw out of the corner of your eye when you were looking out of the window of the bus. It’s as if he looked straight back at you and asked you, personally, “Are you satisfied?” It’s the rhetorical question to end all rhetorical questions. In Latin, it would start with the particle ‘num’. Even today, I’d stake that first 45 seconds of music against anything ever recorded... and the next three minutes aren’t bad either. Every time I play it, the song catches at my heart. It’s everything I ever dreamed of, right in front me, and, well, you probably know the punch line.

 One way you know that “Unsatisfied” is more than a song, and more than a feeling, is that despite its brilliance, it’s all but uncoverable. The trans artist Laura Jane Grace once sang “Androgynous,” a song from the same album, and I’ve heard Freedy Johnston do a good cover of “I Will Dare” on a ukulele, but covers of “Unsatisfied” (by, for example, the bands Hole and Calexico) merely underline the truth that it’s not theirs for the taking. Sure, a person can play the chords and sing its lyrics, but it’s impossible to recover, reinsert, or change its import to listeners, because its emotional weight was sunk largely in the way that it contrasted with other songs of the era. It was a time when inhumanity in music was considered cool, and this was the actual opposite: authentic. This singer, this song, this sentiment, are so utterly honest it’s almost shocking to hear them, like seeing someone in kindergarten wet their pants in front of the whole class, or a guy get turned down in public after proposing to their girlfriend on the big screen at a ballpark. At first you have to look away, rather than suffer that secondhand embarrassment. But if you have the guts to look back, you’ll be a changed person.

The Replacements’ history bookends the 1980s nicely. Although they’d gigged around Minneapolis earlier, they handed their first cassette to Peter Jesperson, the manager of the record store Oarfolkjokeopus, in May of 1980; their last show was in 1991, but the writing was on the wall well before that. In the course of the decade, they released a bunch of records and played thousands of gigs, but despite receiving ecstatic press, the records were only moderately successful, even by the standards of the day –according to The New York Times archive, Let It Be only sold a total of 120,000 in 6 years -- and the bulk of the gigs were in nightclubs, rather than arenas (though in 1989 they did a tour as the opening act for Tom Petty) (Browne, 1991).[iii] The sum total of people who saw them in those years was probably diminished even more by the fact that many of them, like me, simply went to see them over and over again. The Replacements were an addiction, an obsession, almost a way of life for their fans, but they were never a household word, and their music wasn’t played much (if at all) on commercial radio. Disappointed, the band broke up under a cloud of bad fortune, at the Taste of Chicago Festival in Grant Park in Chicago on July 4, 1991, in a legendary gig which ended with their roadies finishing the set. Four years later, one of their founding members, guitarist Bob Stinson, died of a drug OD.

The band had long since vowed they’d never play again, but in 2013, two of its members, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson, reunited under the name, just for a few gigs to benefit their ailing guitarist, Slim Dunlop, who’d suffered a debilitating stroke. Later, they took the show on the road as the “Back By Unpopular Demand Tour,” and in 2015, on April 13^th, the tour came to my town, San Francisco.

At first I thought I did not want to go. I thought their history – my history with them – was over, and I didn’t want to sully it. But at the last minute I changed my mind, purchasing a ticket on Stubhub and sneaking there without a companion. If there was one thing I knew, it was that I wished to be alone in their presence - that is, alone in the midst of 3,300 people who loved them the same amount as I do. In the old days, I wouldn’t have believed there were that many people in the country who did so, much less that those people regarded them with the same Yeats-ian passionate intensity as I. I wouldn’t have believed it, because there weren’t.

But now there were, and this set of fans is better than the last set. The last set made a huge fuss when there were horns on “Can’t Hardly Wait;” talked about the Replacements being sellouts for signing to Warner Brothers, dissed Tim and All Shook Down, records that have proved their worth over and over again. This set of fans didn’t judge the Replacements on anything but their music. And this set of fans was earned fairly and squarely, through the beauty of technological change – to MP3s and YouTube and blogs and Pitchfork and social networking and that one last unquantifiable ingredient about music that sometimes, but only sometimes, allows listeners entry into the most romantic and remote little portals of the past. Remember that when you’re cursing Apple Music or selling a CD collection or wishing that some record store was still open or just generally maligning this generation: the internet has allowed the Replacements to survive when their contemporaries all either died or over-toured or simply faded away into obscurity. And that is so precious and lucky, like everything to do with the Replacements – it’s just so goddamned right.

As for the show…how did I ever think I could talk sentiently, or write sentiently, about a show? How does one talk sentiently about true love? It reminded me of the time I had a crush on a guy and I said to my friend, “I like him so much that what I can’t understand is why you don’t have a crush on him too!” And she pointed out that if she and I, and everyone else, had crushes on the same person, the world would literally stop turning: “We’d be like bees or ants or something…not even human.”

But at the Replacements last show, we were like bees or ants or something. There were times during that show when the air was like one big love balloon wafting up around the stage, when the ecstasy of the crowd was peaking. You know the break in “Can’t Hardly Wait,” the silent part? The balloon actually popped at that moment, and the love went spilling out all over, enveloping the whole place, causing tears to start out of people’s eyes. “Bastards of Young?” “Alex Chilton?” “Left of the Dial?” Forget about it. Puddles, actual pools of live, goopy, human sentiment, were visibly forming below me on the floor. During “Skyway,” the guy next to me literally burst into tears, and he was very much not alone. The band didn’t play “Unsatisfied,” and I for one am glad. I don’t think anyone – them or I – could have handled it.  The next day, a friend wrote on Facebook, “They did it in Minneapolis and I died.” Yup. That is what I was afraid would happen. We would all have died. True, it would have been a Romeo and Juliet-like death, i.e., death by love. But still. We’d be dead.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (who grew up in St. Paul) once said that American lives have no second acts, but he was wrong as hell about this one. What we always loved about the Replacements was their downhome-ness, the way they tied country music to punk and saw the beauty in cheesy top forty tunes, and took minute pleasure in the most manufactured and daunting aspects of life in these United States, at a time in the country when to do so was an act of daring. I went into the show thinking, “What on earth made me ever think indie rock was important,” and I came away going, “oh now I remember!”

Do you know, I think that in the modern world, it takes an incredible amount of courage, and is almost unbelievably honorable, to actually suck a little bit. To take a chance. To not care. That’s what the Replacements did; that singular thing that we all envied so much. They really didn’t care. Paul Westerberg, he just burns talent. He drips it off him in great globs and squanders it in front of your face. But that is all he does with it. Then he lets it go. At the time, and even now, it seems like a positively noble gesture, a grandiose ‘fuck you’ to a world of expectations and aspirations and responsibilities and tension: a giant sigh of relief. Loving the Replacements during the Reagan eighties was like that too: it was a way to just let go of desire and doubt, an antidote to phoniness and bullying and bluster. We loved and we love them, and our love is always unrequited, but that’s the best kind of love, in my opinion, the secret loves, the sacred loves, the things you’d love anyway, with no possible reward except the fact that you’re allowed to do it.

 That’s what rock ‘n’ roll music is for, in my opinion. It allows us to experience that absolutely selfless feeling of love which could honestly pass us by if we didn’t have a place to experience it. That’s what I get from hearing “Unsatisfied,” both then and now… in that seemingly endless era before the invention of CDs and then Napster and iTunes…when what you chose to listen to was a way to define who you were. To choose the Replacements was to declare yourself somehow outcast from the mainstream: against the massive conventionality that characterized the era, against Reagan’s consolidation of the media, against being against drugs, against everything that would soon coalesce into the institutionalized forces that are holding our society in check.

The Replacements weren’t very popular in their time, but they ushered in grunge. With Nirvana, that sound and the scene that spawned it became large enough – and profitable enough – to be co-opted by the mainstream, and so the sincerity, the authenticity, the very values that sound originally enunciated got lost. Maybe listening to “Unsatisfied” now doesn’t quite signal the call to arms that it once did, but it’s the song that made the eighties less unbearable for me. Is there a band that’s doing that for the young people of this era?

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[i] Bob Mehr’s meticulously reported biography Trouble Boys does a deep dive into the darkness that underpins the band’s career, exploring among other things the suburban family dysfunction that most likely underpins so many bands of that era.

[ii] This story was told to me by the Replacements manager Peter Jesperson. It appears in my book Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana.