THE REPLACEMENTS--STILL STANDING ON THE LEDGE

The Replacements are--according to who you talk to, and on what day--variously the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, the world’s loosest and sloppiest rock ‘n’ roll band, the new Rolling Stones, the new Bachman-Turner Overdrive, poet laureates for America’s tail-end-of-the-baby-boom generation, idiot savants, strikingly thoughtful and sensitive, amazingly immature and careless. . . .

Or, as singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg admits, “just big babies.”

Bless them or blame them, there’s no disputing that the Replacements have spent much of their eight-year history as incorrigible rock renegades, considered unlikely to ever sing or play a well-polished note with the express purpose of achieving radio air play, much less pleasing an executive.

So now that it’s been a couple of years since the quartet left its small hometown independent label (Minneapolis’ Twin/Tone) and signed with a conglomerate-type company (Sire/Warner Bros.), one might wonder: Which mentality will prevail? And just what sort of steps have the Replacements taken to reconcile themselves to the music business “system”?

Not many, though the irony of their position doesn’t escape them. The cover of “Pleased to Meet Me,” the latest album, pictures the frayed-jean-jacketed arm of a scroungy musician type shaking the diamond-ringed hand of what is presumably an executive. If that wasn’t self-commentary enough on their assimilation into the machinery, there’s also a tellingly titled track called “I Don’t Know.”

“ ‘One foot in the door, another one in the gutter’--that sums us up,” says singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg, quoting from the song while lazily nursing a beer in the lounge of the group’s Hollywood hotel the day after a recent show. “Just take that line and we’ll never have to do another interview. That says it all.”

The song goes on: “Sweet smell that you adore / Well I think I’d rather smother. . . . “ Strong words from a band with strong viewpoints about what it will and will not do to affect the aroma of success.

Primary on the list of things not to do as a group is grow up.

“The most fun people to be around are the people who retain their youth or retain the fun and silly things you did when you were a teen-ager,” says Westerberg, waxing serious in the servitude of lightheartedness. “I hate people that act their age. I guess the seriousness of the band loving a good joke and laughing it up a lot on stage stems from that--we don’t take what we do very seriously.”

Says Westerberg: “We don’t want to fail, but we are going to have fun, and if we don’t make it big having fun, then we’re not gonna make it big and we’re not gonna care about it. We realize that it’s our living and we shouldn’t play with it so much, but we just can’t change that. Because if it became a job and it wasn’t any fun, then we’d just as soon do something else that isn’t fun, where we can make money. We’re already in debt enough; it better be fun.”

And there does seem to be a target audience for this sort of thing--an audience much of which is around Westerberg’s age (27) or older, and which grew up on the same class/trash pop culture, like early Alice Cooper. He resists any labeling of Replacements records as “classic teen Angst” albums, as some critics have suggested.

“I don’t write with teen-agers in mind. The stuff comes from me, and I’m just as unsure of what I’m doing now as I was then, in a different way. . . . We reach a lot of maybe frustrated teen-agers who grew into adults that live their teen years 10 years after they should’ve.”

Not that Westerberg’s songs are without striking maturity and depth.

A riff-heavy guitar cruncher like “Bastards of Young” may sound like typical rock bravado at first, but it’s really post-nuclear-family tragedy at its most decimating: “The ones who love us best / Are the ones we’ll lay to rest / Visit their graves on holidays at best / The ones who love us least / Are the ones we’ll die to please. . . .” Those are nagging ghosts of lyrics, the rare kinds of lines that come back to haunt you at different points in your life.

What creates special intrigue is that Westerberg consistently mumbles his way through even his best songs.

“Now and again,” he relates, “someone will come up to me and say, ‘I’ve been waiting two years to ask you: What’s the last line in the song on “Tim”?’ I like that, for people to really want to listen and figure it out. . . . That’s part of my style, too, because I don’t enunciate very clearly, singing. Rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t meant to be enunciated clearly, anyway.”

The Replacements recently lost out on some air play because folks could understand the lyrics. Though the group currently has the No. 1 most-played album on the college radio charts, commercial stations have been unforthcoming with air play, and Sire hoped to rectify that by promoting a song called “The Ledge” to album-rock radio--but many stations (and MTV) turned it down because it deals with suicide.

And this isn’t your typical Billy Joel don’t-try-it-you-have-so-much-to-live-for suicide song. “The Ledge” is from the point of view of someone who is going to jump. And it’s scary as hell, capturing true suicidal feelings with no apologies or explanations: “I’m the boy they can’t ignore / For the first time in my life I’m sure / All the love they send up high to pledge / Won’t reach the ledge. . . .”

“It came from personal experience,” says Westerberg, whose melancholy streak runs hand-in-hand with his raucous spirit. “I never stood on a ledge or anything, but I’ve been messed up before in the past, and I know how it feels. I wanted to give someone a sort of hope in a way, because it ain’t that bad. I mean, I’ve been screwed up, and I’m fine now. You’ll get over it. It’s not necessarily pointing toward teen-agers, either.

“But the board of standards and practices at MTV feels the lyrics are detrimental to the youth of America--plus they probably don’t like the video. But for them to play Motley Crue and not play our video. . . . If it had a bunch of sexist bull . . . , they would’ve played it. But if it’s something deeper, if it’s emotions, it’s taboo.”

Sing a sad song and make it better? Celebration, brattiness and abandon figure prominently in the mix as well, but like compatriots Husker Du--only with a sense of humor--the Replacements are often at their peak when singing a sad song louder and making it better.

“Maybe that is our one and only claim to fame, cryin’ in our beer at 120 decibels. We’re the loudest crybabies in show business.”