Replacements: A Band of Outcasts Voice Their Pain

There were several mundane but pressing questions facing Paul Westerberg as he sat in a hotel room in Phoenix earlier this week.

What was he going to do about the headache that had been bothering him since he got up? And where was he going to get a clean shirt to wear, now that everything he had packed for the road was all grubby? And would either of the above be resolved before he had to go off with the three other members of the Replacements for a promotional visit to a local radio station?

Setting aside the pain in his head and the odor in his suitcase, Westerberg gamely focused his mind on the more nebulous, existential question that had been posed to him over the phone. Of all the songs he has written and sung in nearly 10 years as front man for the Replacements, who play Saturday night at UC Irvine, which one would he stand behind as the best summation of what he and the band are all about?

After pausing to think it over, Westerberg gave an answer that wasn’t the least bit reticent but that also was full of ambivalence. That in itself seemed to sum up the Replacements pretty well.

The song he picked to stand on was “Bastards of Young.” The ragged anthem from 1985 is solidly in the tradition of the Who’s “My Generation” and the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” as an expression of adolescent frustration and defiance, except that the Replacements’ version is as anguished as it is angry.

The song bewails the diminished economic prospects and loss of parental time and caring that so many children have suffered growing up over the past 20 years or so: “God, what a mess, on the ladder of success/When you take one step and miss the whole first rung. . . . We are the sons of no one, bastards of young.”

But even “Bastards of Young” holds some ambivalence for Westerberg who, at 29, is far beyond adolescence. “It was meant to be sung through the eyes of someone younger than I was when I wrote it,” he said--a perfectly legitimate artistic device. Still, Westerberg said, “I always feel uncertain singing it” because of that gap between himself and the character in the song.

Actually, Westerberg said, he almost picked a 1984 song called “Unsatisfied,” in which his hoarse, cracking roar and cry conveyed unfathomable depths of disappointment with the world. The Replacements have always sung and played with full believability about outcasts and misfits, romantic yearnings unfulfilled, slights and intrusions from the music business endured. Dissatisfaction is a theme that continues to run through their current album, “Don’t Tell A Soul.” At one point, Westerberg dismisses the world that the bastards of young will one day find in their charge: “We’ll inherit the earth, but we don’t want it.”

Still, despite all that dissatisfaction, Westerberg said “Unsatisfied” doesn’t fully encompass what the Replacements are about. “I’ve gotta admit that there is satisfaction in what we do,” he said. “After a show, someone will come up and say, ‘This song you sang, I’ve listened to it every day for a year, and it helped me get through my breaking up with my girlfriend.’ I find that satisfying.”

The Replacements have made a tradition of acting out, as well as singing about, the adolescent rowdiness, turbulence and confusion in their songs. This is a band with a longstanding reputation for delivering drunken, chaotic live shows that can lurch about, then crumble, disappointing anyone who had come to see what bands conventionally strive to deliver: an earnest, best-shot representation of their work.

The Replacements’ response has always been that they were just being true to themselves: If they weren’t in the mood to play, they refused to assume the protective veneer of professionalism that bassist Tommy Stinson once dismissed as befitting “a cheap actor” rather than an honest rock ‘n’ roller.

“The attitude of the band from the beginning has been ‘snot-nosed kids to the end,’ ” Westerberg said. But nowadays, he said, defying expectations means playing concerts that are less chaotic and more effective.

“At the end of our last tour 2 years ago, a lot of the crowd was still coming to see this legendary (screw-up) band fall down. I think we’ve finally shed that and put it out to pasture. If we feel (a show) is not going right, we don’t quit. We take a deep breath and try to get it back to the level we want.”

Instead of lapsing into long strings of cover versions of ‘70s arena-rock hits and other oddities, as they would in the past, the Replacements only play two or three songs each night that aren’t their own, Westerberg said. And, aside from one or two lapses into their old ways, he said, their current tour has produced a steady run of good shows.

“We are proud of this record and we want it to come across” in concert, he said. “We want to prove we can play it.”

“Don’t Tell a Soul” has been by far the Replacements’ most successful album, kicking around in the upper half of the Billboard Top 100 for almost 3 months, and yielding a single, “I’ll Be You,” that is threatening to break into the Top 50.

“We’d like to be Negative 4 with a grenade,” Westerberg said. But the Replacements, much as they may desire fame and riches, continue to court it with an outsider’s suspicion for conventional approaches to commercial success.

“We don’t want to go on Arsenio Hall and play to a (studio) audience that doesn’t know who we are, just to break us to a new audience,” Westerberg said. In fact, the Replacements haven’t been on national television since a chaotic appearance on “Saturday Night Live” about 3 1/2 years ago in which Westerberg cursed at former lead guitarist Bob Stinson in front of the cameras (the older brother of bassist Tommy, Stinson eventually was fired and replaced by Slim Dunlap after the other band members concluded that his drug and alcohol intake were out of control). Westerberg said the Replacements will take their chances on television again later this month with a performance on the International Rock Awards show.

The Minneapolis group’s contrary streak extends to the name Westerberg has given to his song publishing company: Nah. “That’s us,” he said. “There’s probably no value in (being defiant outsiders). It hasn’t made us rich or terribly famous. I guess there’s no true value in it, except that it’s part of our spirit and humor. It’s the way we are, the makeup of our personalities.”

In “Achin’ to Be,” from the new album, Westerberg sings tenderly about a woman who is a confirmed outsider--striking enough to be noticed by others but remote enough to be beyond their ken. “Thought about, not understood--she’s achin’ to be,” Westerberg sings, leaving ambiguous just what it is that his heroine aches to be: understood or not understood.

“I’m attracted to people like that,” Westerberg said. “To me, these are the most interesting people in the world. In school, there were the popular people, the jocks, people I never associated with. The ones I knew were the loners and the quiet people and the ones who weren’t very comfortable with themselves. These are the ones who do go on to do big things.”

The Replacements play Saturday at 8 p.m. at Crawford Hall on Bridge Street on the UCI Campus in Irvine. Tickets cost $15 for students, $17 for others. Information: (714) 856-5000.