Mars Proves to Be the Fastest Replacement

Paul Westerberg, the leader of the rambunctious rock band the Replacements, will release his first solo music soon on a movie soundtrack. But he’s already been beaten to the recording punch by the drummer he fired during the volatile band’s final days.

Chris Mars, who kept the beat through most of the Minneapolis quartet’s erratic, decade-long odyssey, became the first ex-Replacement to release an album when his “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades” came out in April.

Its music might not be in the same league with Westerberg’s work, and Mars’ singing is a little rough, but the album has hooks, attitude, wit, energy, eccentricity--not unlike the Replacements.

“I think I did what I wanted to hear, and if there’s any (similarity), it could be a subconscious pickup of the whole Replacements sound,” says Mars, 31. “But I didn’t try to avoid that or try to do it. I just did what I did.”

Surprisingly, Mars played almost all the instruments on the album himself rather than recruiting help from his city’s thriving rock scene.

“I kind of wanted it that way because you get so used to not being able to call the shots when you’re in a situation like the Replacements, where I was just drumming,” he said in a phone interview from his Minneapolis home.

“I was really content drumming, until toward the end when I was even being told how to drum. This record is a reaction to being constipated in the Replacements. It was really democratic until toward the end, when it became a little bit more of a dictator thing, and then it just got really boring.”

Mars and Westerberg butted heads over that issue, and Westerberg ousted him in 1990, just before the band’s final tour. But Mars harbors no bitterness.

“He was great,” Mars said, recalling better days with Westerberg. “We were really good friends, we operated as a band, we hung out and practiced a lot together, we had a whole lot of fun, many many laughs.

“Toward the end, I don’t know . . . it was a sort of disillusionment on his part and on the rest of ours. It felt like it sort of ran its course. Toward the end we were kind of beating a dead horse.”

Mars intended to concentrate on his other creative pursuit, painting (some of his grotesque figures adorn the cover of “Horseshoes”), but he also worked on his music and hooked up with the independent Smash Records, which is affiliated with the major PolyGram Label Group.

With no plans to tour for now, Mars is far removed from the legendary perversity of the Replacements, whose inclinations toward chaos collided with the genius of Westerberg’s music to create a fascinating tension.

Said Mars: “I think a lot of the tension was probably more of, ‘What are we doing here?’ on the stage. A lot of times that’s why we tended to turn it into a sideshow.

“The attitude of the band was very self-destructive, and I don’t think we could take ourselves seriously as a band that really wanted to become a huge thing. Some nights we would go out and do a great show because we felt like it, and other nights, we didn’t want to be good. So we would just become a drunken sideshow.

“I’m sure a lot of people got a kick out of it, but sometimes it got to the point of being ridiculous. . . . It was definitely a roller coaster ride.”