As we celebrate the Ed Stasium remix of The Replacements album ‘Tim‘, we thought gathering other music lovers’ thoughts would be a great way to stop and consider the impact of this record. The third ‘Revisit’ comes from our friend, musician, and music writer, Jeremy Porter, Detroit, Michigan-based musician (Jeremy Porter and The Tucos), Author (Rock and Roll Restrooms: A Photographic Memoir), and Co-Editor in Chief (Pencil Storm).

The Replacements were a pivotal band in my life on so many levels. I was an awkward 15-year-old stoner metalhead (Still a metalhead, not so much a stoner) living in a new city. I was terrible around girls, but I had some new friends and they were into (gasp!) PUNK. It was all punk…REM was punk to me. I was trying, I really was. I needed friends, and these guys seemed ok, but this music! Where were the epic guitar solos, high-pitched screams, pointy guitars, and chained-up bikini-girls in the videos? 

One day my friends were in the living room with their girlfriends doing whatever teenage boys do with their girlfriends when mom and dad weren’t home, and I was (typically) alone in my buddy’s room, sitting on the bed, with some PUNK album playing, thinking about leaving. 

“WE’RE COMING OUT! WE’RE COMING OUT!! WE’RE COMING OUT!!” 

What the hell is this racket? What am I doing here? Wait a minute, this sounds familiar… 

“Out on the streets for a livin’, you know it’s only begun…” 

HOLY SHIT they’re doing a KISS song! What is this? WHO is this? That was the very moment I rounded the corner. Across that bridge between KISS and The Replacements was my door to a new life. I sat there staring at the cover of Let it Be and it may as well have been my new friends and me sitting on that roof, shaking off an afternoon hangover before band practice and more partying.

A few months later The Replacements released Tim and we got it the day it came out. I was in a band called The Regulars long before “Here Comes a Regular” hit the streets. Our singer’s name was Tim, and he was quite literally, as the song goes, “A drinkin’ buddy that’s bound to another town” as his family was moving away, despite his desperate objections and pleas. We’d sit around out of our skulls and analyze these coincidences like they were prophecy. 

It didn’t hurt that the music was fucking incredible either. Paul Westerberg was me and I was him; the skinny, flannel-clad, gangly, zitty burnout who waits all day for the bus ride home just to see the girl I’m obsessing over, wanting so bad that kiss, but ultimately keeping my fantasy to myself, somewhat spoiled by the sausage-stuffed, Skoal-chewing, football player boyfriend sharing her bench. It’s an old story that’s been told a million times: Guy wants a girl and can’t have her. “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” basically. “I Want You to Want Me.” “Layla.” “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.” Half of rock and roll is about unrequited love. But Westerberg’s genius was making “Kiss Me on the Bus” about the bus, the transfer, the stop, the gazing classmates, the juvenile heartache, all setting the cliche on its head, and then, more importantly, putting me on that bus, two benches back. “Okay, don’t say hi then” is a genius adolescent play-it-cool-but-I’m-really-not line, Paul somehow tapping the mind of every pubescent loser kid who ever muttered it. “They’re all waaaatching uuuuuuuusssssss!” OK, no one was watching me, but that movie played in my head every day for an entire school year. 

Swingin’ Party hit a similar chord. Back to that awkward kid, this time not on a bus but at a party, terrified to talk to anyone, but wanting nothing more than to do just that. “If bein’ afraid is a crime we’ll hang side by side…at the swingin’ party down the line.” It’s poetry, and it’s the raw truth, up against the fraud and facade of the flag-carrying, lampshade-wearing protagonist earlier in the song who makes it like everything’s cool on the outside, all the while dying on the inside. Two party-goers, a boy and a girl, hanging by their necks from a leafless tree, their silhouettes gently swaying against a burning red, orange, and black sunset, perfectly content to sacrifice it all rather than risk the possibility of rejection at their mutual friend’s kegger party. That’s what I see, and what I lived more than a few times at parties in the basements of my friends’ houses and in the woods adjacent to the beaches in our town. And that match strike and cigarette inhale at the end? Yeah, we heard that in 1985 and thought it was the coolest thing ever. A message from Paul. He was one of the best when it came to that kind of thing, the everyman’s songwriter, and Tim is his high water mark.

Over the years I put The Replacements on less and less. I don’t like the band any less – well, I sort of do after reading Trouble Boys, the great book by Bob Mehr that exposed them as damaged, selfish, and often horrible people – but I don’t like the music any less. I’ve heard those records a million times, I can play them in my sleep. When a random song comes on shuffle I perk up a little, and the flood of live albums and reissue box sets has been a great way for an old fan like me to revisit and reinvigorate their catalog. 

The recent Tim: The Let it Bleed Edition box was just that – a chance to revisit this pivotal album and hear it with fresh ears. It takes me back to that bedroom in 1985, those parties, and that goddamn bus. But Stasium has elevated the experience beyond a nostalgic look back. He’s stripped the neon paint job down to the bare, exposed metal and stucco and allowed us to not only relive the music – but to rediscover it, to hear things we’ve never heard, and to feel things we’ve never felt. Front and center in the new mix is the visceral rawness and emotion in Paul’s voice. He gets the credit for the songs and for being the ringmaster of the shitshow, but rarely the accolades he deserves as an incredible rock vocalist. When I focus on the vocal performances that for the first time are clear and audible, I just get shivers. A discovery that profound on an album that’s 38 years old is quite extraordinary. 

But that’s what art does – it affects you when you consume it. So you go back and consume it again if you can, or if you want to, and eventually, if you spend enough time with it, it becomes a part of you. And that’s what Tim did for me in 1985, and what it’s doing again in its new form today. It’s a gift, this remix, and one not to be taken for granted. We get a limited time on this toxic and flawed but beautiful and unpredictable marble, and it feels like we’ve gotten away with a second hand in the cookie jar with this one. Few things in life and art have this impact, and significantly fewer are given a second breath, a second chance at ripping your heart out, an opportunity for redemption. Here’s to rock and roll, and finally finding the courage somewhere to tell that girl on the bus that her boyfriend is a douche and she really needs to hang out with you. Xx