The Post-Rockist

When the Replacements released Don’t Tell a Soul in 1989, their core base of fans received the record like a swift sucker punch to the abdomen. While devotees were expecting another set of drunkenly perceptive riffs and verses, instead they  received a cohesive series of earnest rockers and pared-down AOR anthems that seemed to beg more comparisons to jean jacket balladeer Bryan Adams than to their hardcore contemporaries Hüsker Dü. With founding guitarist Bob Stinson kicked out two years earlier due to addiction problems, and with him the band’s brash and ironic disdain for contemporary music, Don’t Tell a Soul was perceived as a shameless power grab by singer Paul Westerberg in this last ditch acquiesence to mainstream radio.  Still, despite cries of foul play akin to Dylan going electric or the brothers Reid going acoustic, the Replacements’ sixth studio album turned out to be their most commercially succesful effort.

Of course, this was all back in 1989: George Herbert Walker Bush was president; Nirvana hadn’t yet become a household name; and this Post-Rockist was probably just learning his multiplication tables. So what effect do these historical dramas and conflicts have on today’s listener, who’s casually familiar with the ‘Mats’ “classic” output (Let It Be, Tim) and happens upon this melancholy black-and-white cover while searching for other historical artifacts at the local library, like Chuck Berry or the Yardbirds? Did the critics of yore have a valid argument, or were they merely building an insurmountable argument, holding the band to an impossible standard of repeatedly accomplishing what they had already done earlier in their career?

Any time a beloved band stakes out on a new direction, their fans have to decide if it’s worth it to follow, and crossing the boundary from irony to sincerity, as the Replacements had on Don’t Tell a Soul, is an especially taxing journey. But Westerberg, the clever Midwesterner, doesn’t start down this path without a healthy dose of self-reflective parody. The album opens with “Talent Show,” an unassuming acoustic ditty that captures all the hopes and fears and expectations of a pilled-up young group’s first public gig. “Well, it’s the biggest thing in my life, I guess, the band’s all a nervous wreck. He-eyy, we go on next,” Westerberg sings before the track inexplicably - but thematically - cuts out for a few moments of on-stage chatter.  “It’s too late to turn back, here we go,” heralds the fade-out, making clear that the band makes no apologies for whatever it is they’ve become. At the end of the road, bookending Westerberg’s songwriting arc for the album, is the mournful “Rock ‘N’ Roll Ghost,” in which a singer at the twilight of his career reflects whether he was abandoned by his fans or whether he abandoned them.

If this level of storytelling sophistication seems a far cry from the band that once penned tracks like “Gary’s Got a Boner,” very little measures up to the meticulous literary craftsmanship that went into “We’ll Inherit the Earth.” The chorus is framed as a generational crisis that the singer has picked up on, whether as a message washed ashore or the cries of two lovers facing a crossroads of purpose: “We’ll inherit the earth, but we don’t want it. It’s been ours since birth, what you doin’ on it?” The quick-wristed acoustic strumming and brisk drumming set the song off to a sprint, as though the culmination of decades of rock & roll rebellion could be summed up with a simple “leave me alone.” But then the song slows down and reconsiders this lifestyle of non-involvement: “We watch the world from the bannister, and our eyes scream what our lips must quell, oh well.” Then, in a move that defies any odds of commercial breakthrough, the following verse is sung by two conflicting voices simultaneously before coming to the realization of the modified chorus: “We can’t hold our tongues at the top of our lungs! We’ll inherit the earth, but don’t tell anybody. It’s been ours since birth and it’s ours already!” Suddenly this proto-slacker anthem has gone from being a finely articulated way of saying “I don’t know and I don’t care” to being an urgent cause to care. Westerberg’s anguished scream at the end of this final chorus is simply too much for words.

Ahh, life’s lessons learned.

Listening to Don’t Tell a Soul with (relatively) fresh ears it’s easy to appreciate it as a better than average rock record: there are catchy choruses, memorable one-liners (hey, it’s no wonder Tom Petty copped the line “Rebel without a clue” after opening for the Replacements), and a variety of musical styles that still manage to maintain a consistent pace throughout. Tainting your listening with stories of the band’s post-punk beginnings, their notoriously sloppy live appearances, and their cursing live from New York one Saturday night may cause you to consider this album a fall from grace. Don’t Tell a Soul is clearly no Hootenanny, but of course they were a different band by this point, and that’s what makes it such an interesting artifact to listen to. Pastiche isn’t as crafty a technique as you might think. Here we have a band that’s not afraid to hide their talent behind drunken debaucheries and willing to fully inhabit all the styles they play - the longing honky tonk of “Achin’ To Be” (Oh, that harmonica solo!); the surly fist-pumping chorus of “Anywhere’s Better Than Here”; the Combat Rock funk of “Asking Me Lies”; the teary-eyed waltz of “They’re Blind”; even the album closer, “Darlin’ One,” the only track with songwriting credits going to the entire band, swells to an epic good-bye.

Some people scoff at Don’t Tell a Soul for being a “Westerberg solo effort,” as if that were a bad thing, as if Urban Hymns was just tolerably a Richard Ashcroft vanity project or Loaded was merely a Lou Reed solo album. Granted, both those albums signalled the end of two illustrious bands’ careers as last ditch attempts to get popular airplay, and Don’t Tell a Soul was essentially the beginning of the end for the ‘Mats (they had one more album left, and a decade and a half later a few new tunes for a Greatest Hits compilation), those facts are given. Heck, even Westerberg himself eventually dismissed this as an inferior album. But if you put your ironic expectations away for one minute you’ll realize that this is a sincerely powerful catalogue of maturation, full of lament and anger and dreams and damn good songwriting.

When was the last time you put this album on? Give the late Replacements another shot this afternoon and share your thoughts below.

The Replacements’ Don’t Tell a Soul was originally released on Sire Records. You can buy it online here.

VIDEO: The Replacements - “Achin’ To Be”

-Posted by Todd