Hi, We’re the Replacements
A few favorite artists I missed on seeing live when I was younger and probably won’t ever get to now: Talking Heads, Hüsker Dü, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. (Okay, that last one definitely isn’t happening, because he’s dead.) The Replacements would have been high on that wish list, except I caught the reunion tour at Coachella a couple of years back–which was pretty much everything I had hoped for. I got to extend the glory days a little longer by reviewing Bob Mehr’s totally enjoyable history of the band, Trouble Boys, for the Barnes and Noble Review: go check it out.
A favorite story from the book that didn’t make it into the review: the week after I saw them at Coachella, Paul Westerberg did most of the next show reclined on a couch onstage, saying that he was suffering from back pain. Filling in as frontman was Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, who played with the band for some gigs after that. Mehr reports that when Westerberg decided his services were no longer required, he told him, “Billie, I’m firing the whole band—but we’re going in alphabetical order.”
posted 25 March 2016 in Outside and tagged Barnes and Noble Review, Replacements. 1 comment
May 15th, 2016 at 1:38 pm
I saw the Replacements at the Beacon when I was 15. Jess Dobkin and I went. We drank a $5 bottle of wine beforehand when a couple at the restaurant we ate at bought it for us. Not sure who was drunker, the two of us or the Replacements.