The year was 1985, Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America was in full swing, and the Minneapolis-based Replacements were making moves. Following a string of critically beloved and commercially overlooked releases on the tiny local indie label Twin/Tone, the band members were preparing their first LP for the Warner Bros.-backed major label Sire Records. Their songs were ecstatic, romantic, literary, and heartbreaking. Their brand was chaos: live shows that were transcendent or tragicomic depending on the drugs involved; albums that interpolated brilliant Stones-adjacent youth anthems and devastating country weepers with slapdash Kiss covers and improvised jams where no one played their actual instrument. Some wag once termed the Replacements “The little engine that could but didn’t fuckin’ feel like it.” But the band cared too much, and now the industry they collectively both mistrusted and fetishized was knocking at the door, proffering an opportunity. The resulting LP was “Tim,” which has been given the deluxe-reissue treatment, in the form of a five-disk set called “Tim: Let It Bleed Edition.” Some forty years later, the album feels like a five-alarm blaze, prophesying an era of corporate-driven consensus and the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing sector.
The Replacements’ studied unprofessionalism had always been a point of pride, and possibly an aesthetic hedge. In a time of carefully crafted consumer products, here was a band so aggressively untamable that no one could ever accuse the group of selling out. In a world full of glossy fakery, its self-vandalizing, clown-school bloodletting was the genuine article. Or at least something genuine. And yet, unlike more avant-garde-influenced peers such as Black Flag and Sonic Youth, the Replacements made music that was a populist offshoot of influences like Rod Stewart and Marc Bolan, swaggering performers who had ridden meat-and-potatoes rock to global fame. However attitudinal the Replacements might have presented themselves, it didn’t take a great deal of squinting to see the possibility of the band as arena fillers. The lead singer and songwriter Paul Westerberg was a punk-rock Jackson Browne, a pugilistic but ultimately heartsick poet with matinee-idol looks. The bassist, Tommy Stinson—thirteen when he joined the band, all of eighteen when “Tim” was tracked—appeared to be assembled in a rock-star factory, with the lank frame and chiselled beauty of a spare member of Duran Duran. Warner Bros. didn’t sign the Replacements because the members oozed cachet. The company signed them because it saw dollar signs.