REPLACEMENTS’ WILD ACT ON TARGET

“Is there a drummer in the house?”

How’d you like to be the drummer in a band and hear your lead singer make that crack after the show’s first song? It didn’t seem to faze the Replacements’ Chris Mars Friday at the Variety Arts Center. He obviously knows how to deal with the wit of Paul Westerberg, so he kept leaving the stage and letting the drummer from the opening band take over.

The Replacements, clearly, are still untamed, even after making it through a second LP for a major record company. The Minneapolis foursome’s ability to deliver great music on record (and sometimes on stage) and then completely up-end everything in their chaotic live shows remains the most thrilling high-wire act in rock today.

Friday’s concert--the first of two nights at the downtown theater--was part circus and part short circuit, a perverse outing full of false starts, wing-and-a-prayer experiments, off-the-wall song choices (best one Friday was Alice Cooper’s “Honky Tonk Women” knock-off, “Be My Lover”), switching instruments, wrestling with invading fans.

It all came off not as willful sabotage, but as an unavoidable outcome of the way they are, a reflection of their refusal to jump through the hoop. The spontaneity and uncertainty are worth the price, and every now and then the band would play a full, straight version of a top-notch Westerberg tune and the result was absolutely incandescent rock ‘n’ roll.