One Foot in the Door

Today's formative-album replay: The Replacements Pleased to Meet Me. The drama that drove Minneapolis's greatest rock 'n' roll band was the pitched battle between punk attitude and pop craft, dissolution vs. coherence, rock-star excess or wasted (in more than one sense) talent. And this wasn't just a behind-the-scenes struggle; you could hear it playing out in the music of the band's peak three albums, Let It Be, Tim, and Pleased to Meet Me. Where the first of these—a masterpiece that grows more towering each year—whipsaws with found-art serendipity from scouring rock to searching folk, from punk novelty to retro ragtime, and the second tries to merge these disparate impulses with mixed results, Pleased to Meet Me manages to hone the sound and vision of the Mats into a powerful and persuasive whole.

So why did I hesitate, ever so slightly, to fully embrace this record at the time, and even now feel the need to qualify my love for it? (Make no mistake, I do love it.) It's a bit hard to pin down, but if I had to name it, it would be my sense that somewhere along the line the tension between wildness and control hardened from a case of zig-zagging muses into a battle of wills. The determination to rawk has a whiff of contrivance here, a clenched bravado, and it's there right from the jump with "I.O.U.," a preemptive kiss-off to major label suits, with its line about "90 days in the electric chair" and the declaration, "You're all fucked." Are we supposed to be impressed? Threatened? There's something a little schoolboyish about the vibe, even if Paul Westerberg can't help but turn a sharp phrase: "Never do what you're told/There'll be time, believe me, when you're old."

I cherish the moments when this rock posturing is made into a joke, as in the self-aware comedy of errors "I Don't Know," with a saxophone blowing raspberries and Westerberg squeaking with mock innocence, "What did we do now?" But while I immediately glommed onto the record's pop bangers, "Alex Chilton" and "Can't Hardly Wait," and the quieter reveries of "Nightclub Jitters" and "Skyway," it took me a while to warm up to the rest of the PTMM's barroom proto-grunge, though warm up I did: to a pair of bittersweet, sneakily tuneful rockers, "Never Mind" and "Valentine," to the hilariously naked villainy of "Shooting Dirty Pool," to the minor-key swirl and afterschool-special urgency of "The Ledge." (I drew and still draw a line at the inane drinking catalogue "Red Red Wine.")

After some listening I found that these all hang together quite well with, even if they're not quite on the level of, the aforementioned four tentpoles: "Alex Chilton," a soul-lifting tribute song that, like "Killing Me Softly," arguably surpasses and at least handily equals the music that inspired it; "Nightclub Jitters," a broken-down jazz stroll that sneaks a breakup lyric into an agoraphobic's lament; the wintry "Skyway," whose upper melody ("high above the busy little runway") evokes the lonesome height of its title image; and the slyly expansive "Can't Hardly Wait," with its catchy guitar-into-brass hook and a lyric for the ages, "Jesus rides beside me/He never buys any smokes."

These classics by themselves were worth the extensive replays I gave this record, but the rest of it also grew on me, even as I could sense then, and still hear, the lurking exhaustion of the Mats' unstable blend of we-will-rock-you aggression and wry sensitivity. I don't want to armchair-pathologize them, but I hear the band's defiance-on-the-verge-of-collapse aesthetic as inherently alcoholic, like the drunk who tries harder and harder to enunciate the more sauced he gets. At its best, as on Let It Be, this beery background drama produced inspired, hilarious, and wrenchingly unguarded music; by the time of Pleased to Meet Me it had grown more effortful, less larky.

This was the album, infamously, for which original guitarist Bob Stinson showed up for precisely one session before being kicked out of the band, to be replaced by the competent Slim Dunlap; the Replacements broke up four years later, after turning out two more fine but very subdued records; Bob died in 1995. The dream was over but the wakeup call had started ringing years before, as long ago as the recorded operator messages that ended "Answering Machine."