The Midwest is a huge, weird place.
Its boundaries are somewhat amorphous, but traditionally they start at Pittsburgh. From there, draw a line due north to Erie, and there’s your eastern border. Next, follow the Ohio River out of town and stay on it along the southern edges of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, all the way over to the Mississippi. Once you hit Big Muddy, trace around the southern and western borders of Missouri, and then shoot north to Canada along the western borders of Iowa and Minnesota. That area contains a little over 8 states and is roughly 900 miles across by 1100 miles north to south.
(And if you want to include Omaha and Fargo, that’s fine, too.)
This area was America’s first frontier, for a good long while the coolest place to be. Unfortunately, that was back when Lewis and Clark were banging. Nowadays, it begins “flyover country”, the supposedly empty, sprawling nothing-much the intrepid keep moving through to get to the good stuff, leaving behind, so the story goes, only those without enough courage, imagination, or good sense to follow.
It’s no one place, of course: Ohioans aren’t like Iowans; Chicago’s a pile of shit apart from the state it inhabits; Minnesota bears no resemblance to Indiana; and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is basically a foreign country. For all its unifying aspects (distance, lakes and rivers, minimal traffic outside of Chicago, inexpensive living), the Midwest is more a state of mind than anything else. To be Midwestern is to know the coolest shit’s going on someplace else, but that’s okay, life is good and there’s space here.
Another unifying aspect: the American Dream died here first. Somewhere around the end of Nixon, captains of industry began to see American workers’ basic needs as too much hassle, an unfortunate development for an area where factory work bankrolled the middle class. Individual areas have bounced back in relation to how forward-thinking local leaders were, but a decimation took place that a lot of the Midwest is still digging out from under. Some places chased emerging industries or instituted programs to mitigate the fallout, and others left the rubble where it fell and got angry.
Coastal folk usually can’t imagine why anyone would want to live here, but it works for a lot of us. Not everyone wants to live in New York or Portland, you know? Chicago’s enough to deal with as it is, and wonders never cease in the hinterlands, if you know where to look.
For all the mountains of bullshit out this way, the area has contributed some of the very finest voices to American popular music. You want four? Dylan, Motown, Curtis Mayfield, and Prince. Hell, Iggy Pop in Michigan and Uncle Tupelo in southern Illinois birthed entire sub-genres of 20th-century rock virtually on their own. And that Les Paul guitar everybody plays? Waukesha, WI, if you can believe that shit.
Taken together, though, perhaps no single rock band summed up its Midwestern place and time quite like the Replacements, the pride of Minneapolis. The fall, what was left, how shitty it tasted: the music isn’t political so much as what four drunk maniacs with nothing better to do came up with in the free time granted by industrial blight and American cultural indifference. The Replacements’ classic songs speak to the shitty, honest details of where they were, when they were: what it meant to dream in a place where dreams were a bad idea; what it meant to have a voice no one wanted to hear. Had they not been so Midwestern, had they not, say, gotten drunk as fuck before their disastrous first and only Saturday Night Live appearance, they could have been huge. As it happened, they became folk heroes to a place that needed some, Paul Bunyan in band form, and not terribly pleased to be so.
Three generations have been raised since the Replacements did their thing in their moment, and every single Midwesterner outside of the youngest millennials has at least once stared into a bar-backing mirror and asked the same simple question:
What the fuck am I doing here?
In the Replacements’ songs, lead singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg stands in as the regular at the end of the bar that doesn’t want to hear that shit, sliding you a dollar draft and asking if you want to play pool, loser buys the shots, and plug some dough in the jukebox, will ya? Something with a beat.
If you don’t know the songs, fix that. Looking for hits? Let It Be and Tim. Completist? Take it from the top, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash on through All Shook Down. You’ll find almost as many misses as hits that way, but the hits hit far harder than the misses miss.
But before you begin, ask yourself: what kind of idiots name their best album after a Beatles’ record? And not only that, they put a Kiss cover on it! That alongside two of the band’s more heart-wrenching numbers, “Androgynous” and “Unsatisfied,” the latter the anthem the Midwest has needed every day since it was first released.
“Look me in the eye, then tell me that I’m satisfied. Are you satisfied?”
The song is mostly just those words over and over for three minutes, backed by five chords around a single change, and here’s a big middle finger, too. “Bastards of Young,” from Tim, takes that feeling one step further, celebrating the power of nobodies going nowhere on their own terms, and how that “beats picking cotton and waiting to be forgotten.”
Hear these tunes for yourself. Find them tomorrow. Especially if you’re not from the Midwest, do yourself a favor and learn a little more about your country’s music.
As for seeing the band in the Midwest in 2015? That I wouldn’t recommend as highly.
The Replacements’ last official show the first time around was in 1991, at the achingly lame Taste of Chicago, of all places. They broke up back then because, for all the critical adoration, they got sick of playing the same tunes to the same people in the same places each time they passed through a given town. Westerberg and bassist Tommy Stinson put the band back together with two younger musicians in 2015 because enough years had passed that a critical mass of people decided the band was worth sixty bucks a ticket to see in a big, charmless room on Milwaukee’s near-west side, among other, similar venues in other, similar cities.
That charmless room was totally full, too, with a polite Milwaukee crowd super-excited to see its beloved heroes. So polite, though, that it refused to move much, lest anyone be inconvenienced, and so excited that the four guys for every woman present couldn’t be bothered to hold in their beer farts, regardless of the pass they’d been given on their meat sweats.
Rock and roll, motherfuckers.
Here’s the original gangsters, together in the flesh, ripping everyone’s hearts out and raising the still-beating muscles high, and not only did no one dance, no one fucking moved. Even an impromptu JACKSON FIVE COVER couldn’t shake out more than a few extra fist pumps and head-nods, or a few extra glances around the smartphone screens capturing the historic moment for posterity at the expense of actual engagement. And this from people who supposedly waited their entire adult lives for this exact thing in which they weren’t participating.
It wasn’t just depressing; it was disheartening. No one knows about the Replacements’ genius unless one has made an effort to know about it. At the very least, no one pays sixty bucks at a venue as shitty as Milwaukee’s Eagles Ballroom without at least some love involved. And for all that ardor, a couple sing-alongs and maybe some bouncing, but the latter with both feet firmly planted below thick physiques that combined with the stench to make ideas of pushing forward among the more industrious in the room not just impossible to imagine, but inadvisable to attempt.
Over the course of the show, it became obvious that the breathlessly-anticipated, sold-out Saturday night offered the Replacements themselves little more than a grip of cash and a chance to play music, soak up applause, and get going in one piece. That must have been a thing on the tour: Westerberg talked shit about one night’s Chicago crowd to the next night’s Chicago crowd, and the week after the Milwaukee show the band postponed stops in Columbus and Pittsburgh without much fuss or notice before eventually cancelling both outright in much the same manner.
A month later, Westerberg said their tour-ending show in Portugal was the last time they’d ever play together. No one doubted him.
At each show, Westerberg wore a white t-shirt with a different individual letter written on it. By tour’s end, the letters spelled out, “I have always loved you. Now I must whore my past.” When the guy who made his name calling bullshit on bullshit calls that past you love his prostitute, there’s no way to argue.
It didn’t feel skeevy, though, toward the Milwaukee show’s end, to find room in a corner far removed from the smelly, dead-end crowd and use the space and relatively fresh air to jump up and down to “Bastards of Young” with a couple other refugees. To shout those lyrics that meant so much to us as loudly as we could while trying to give the band what energy we found in that area we made ours.
It just didn’t matter, was all. Our doing that wasn’t the point.
A theater show might have changed the stakes a little. Good sound in a beautiful, acoustically-enhanced room any band would be proud to fill, as opposed to a total shithole that sounds like ass but maximized profits for four dudes with no intention of doing this again. A couple popular one-offs put the idea in their heads, and a couple feelers made them realize that, especially in the Midwest, there was much money to be made.
But there’s another thing about the region: Midwesterners like other Midwesterners, but we don’t like each other that much. Minnesota and Wisconsin; Milwaukee and Chicago; Ohio and Michigan; St. Louis and everybody else: it’s nothing but rivalries. We know what we are, and it’s fucking disgusting. What else is “Unsatisfied” about, after all, other than total disappointment with what’s up where you live, and what’s available to you there?
Still, I’m glad I got to see the Replacements live, in the Midwest, in 2015. At the very least, now I know what “we are the sons of no one” really, truly means.