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 fourth ‘Revisit’ comes from our friend, musician, and music writer, Matt Derda of Matt Derda & The High Watts! Matt is a Chicago area-based musician who has released some incredible music. Thank you, Matt!
Recently, I saw a video where someone had a Fender Telecaster guitar and the paint started to wear off. Underneath the black layer of paint was an incredible paisley design. The guitar was perfect already and it played great, but with this discovery, it’s now an amazingly beautiful guitar. I think you get the metaphor here.
I was a huge fan of the Dead Man’s Pop reissue and it felt like a totally new Replacements’ record. I really didn’t have that much of an issue with the original Don’t Tell A Soul like everyone else did, but it was a welcome update. But I actually couldn’t fathom how they could make Tim better. Bastards of Young is already in my top 5 best songs of all time. However, Tim (Let It Bleed Edition) should probably become an adjective to describe something that is old, but yet new at the same time. I don’t know that there is a better example to ever exist.
Every single track is familiar, yet slightly different. I think what stands out the most is how much you can hear the clarity of all of the guitar parts. If you already thought Bob Stinson was a genius guitar player before, well now he’s a guitar god. And really the whole band just played incredibly well off each other. I prefer to listen to live recordings, either bootlegs or official releases. The Tim (Let It Bleed Edition) sounds like a live recording. It’s as if you’re sitting in the room with The Mats as they play all of these tracks together.
And everything seems to have a little extra swing to it. I don’t think I realized how danceable this record was before. Kiss Me On The Bus was already pretty peppy, but something about being able to hear Bob’s guitar and Tommy’s bass a little better makes me want to get up and dance. Dose of Thunder sounds a little less KISS and more like the Dead Boys. Waitress in the Sky could easily be a hit on Outlaw Country on SiriusXM radio. Bastards of the Young doesn’t sound all that much different, but it didn’t need to. It’s perfect.
A proud parenting moment for me was when my six-year-old asked me what song I was listening to one night while doing the dishes. It was the new Ed Stasium mix of Waitress in the Sky. She said, “I like this song.” I’ve never been prouder.
The stand-out song for me though is Swingin Party. I never really cared for this song. Of course, the lyrics are masterful, per all Westerberg tunes, but I just thought the song was kind of boring. Everyone always loves that song so I was kind of embarrassed that I didn’t care for it. However, on this reissue, it seems like a totally different song. It went from one of my least favorites to one of my favorites. I think it is because you can clearly hear Tommy’s bass lines. The song actually swings now.
Finally, I have always been a huge fan of the song Nowhere is My Home. It’s probably one of my top 10 favorite Mats songs, and it was originally cut from the album! This edition gives us two…TWO versions of Nowhere is My Home.
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.
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
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