Somebody oughta tell Paul

Lots of love for Westerberg, the Replacements

Wherever he is these days, shoveling snow, waiting for the Twins’ season to open or slamming around in that cluttered basement with his guitars and screwdrivers and busted-up mirrors, somebody ought to let Paul Westerberg know how much he’s loved. And missed.

Not that it would necessarily change anything or bring him roaring back with a new album “Paul Westerberg’s: When I’m 65!” and a worldwide tour. He’s said his piece, written his songs that he felt like sharing with us and that may be that. I’m grateful and I suspect thousands of his fans are, too. Here’s why I say that.

Somebody ought to let Paul know, don't ya think?

When I sat down one January afternoon, the Replacements playing in the background, and started to write a Substack post about missing the music of Paul Westerberg and the Replacements, I had no idea that the post “The Sadly Silent Paul Westerberg” which posted on January 11, would blow up, go viral, light up computer screens across the Internet, which it seemed to do. At least, way more than other posts I’ve done, some of which got into the 2,000’s. But never 8,000.

I started writing today’s post at about noon on February 25 and at that point, 8,171 souls had brought up the Substack and read it, 46 days after I first posted it. To this point, 136 of them clicked “love,” it drew 33 comments, 22 re-stacks and 45 “forwards” and 101 new subscribers. By 2:54 p.m., that total grew to 8,186. And maybe that’s it.

First off, thank you so very much to each and every one of you 8,186 readers. As a writer, I’m genuinely not exactly sure what I did here, vs. what I’ve done on the other 302 posts since May 8, but I’m delighted that so many people — almost twice the population of my hometown of Brookline, New Hampshire — enjoyed it, recommended it, shared it with others.

Bruce Springsteen said once that you can write a great song but it’s not great until you share it with someone. I don’t know that “The Sadly Silent Paul Westerberg” is “great writing” — writers really aren’t equipped to judge their own work. But in listening to it again, (you know that little triangle on the top of your post when you call it up on your phone?) a month and a half later, the sentence that jumps out at me was this one: “tunes full of humor, candor, sarcasm, sensitivity, goofiness as well as left-handed, half-assed anthems for the disaffected, disappointed, dejected denizens of a country that “got no war to name us” as he wrote in one of his greatest “anthems” — “Bastards Of Young.”

Judging from what seems to me, at least, to be the overwhelming response to that Substack piece — and I might be dead wrong in this — it seems as if many people, well, I can say thousands now, felt akin to the way Westerberg felt about things. Though, like Bob Dylan before him, he certainly wasn’t aiming to be any sort of spokesman for his generation, in some ways, he sort of was. Or that what he saw around him was what we saw and felt, too. Like “You ain’t nothing but a waitress in the sky.” Or “We are the sons of no one…” Or “You be me for a while and I’ll be you.”

If he’d reject that “spokesman” label, which Westerberg, you would think, automatically would, maybe he would agree that finding ways to express himself working through the filter of a band that had very different views about what they felt like playing, altered his music. In other words, finding a way to “sell” the band on these different songs perhaps made him refine those ideas or maybe broaden them to include or feature or spark his bandmates’ sentiments. “Where are the fast ones, Paul?” or “Yeah, let’s rock this one.”

It may be that in some ways, Westerberg compromised what HE might have wanted for what THEY were committed to or would want to play — for the good of the order. And whether he’d admit it or not, it likely helped him and the band connect with a wider listening audience. It’s rare that a successful artist who established his notoriety as part of a band can do a solo album that matches his best work with a group.

Tom Petty’s “Full Moon Fever” and George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” (full of songs he held back or were overlooked by The Beatles) might be exceptions, but think of the solo albums from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, Pete Townshend, etc., and to me, they don’t quite match the standard set by their group work, do they? (A couple of Townshend’s solo albums might be the best of these.)

It might be the same sort of inadvertent filtering that John Fogerty had to do with his older brother, Tom, Doug Clifford and Stu Cook in coming up with those Creedence classics, coming up with tunes they all bought into, were committed to play with passion and a complete buy-in. We’ll never know, exactly, there’s such bad blood between them now, but what the process was is interesting.

There is a difference between writing for yourself and for a band, clearly. And that may be why The Replacements albums, as all-over-the-place as they are, connected with so many of us so strongly because they were all in there, the smart ass, the sensitive soul, the raucous, the outrageous “let’s wear a diaper on stage.” Maybe that was part of what drew so many pairs of eyes to “The Sadly Silent Paul Westerberg.” I don’t know and I’ve asked some expert editors who shrugged and said “There are a lot of Mats’ fans out there.” Maybe.

If there could ever be such a thing as a Replacements coalition, something we could all agree on or find something in, as their wry album title explains then “Let It Be.” They can quote The Beatles on “Mr. Whirly” (“Oh, Darling”) and mock them with an album title posing on a roof as The Beatles’ final performance was also on a roof, but we know and they know we know, it’s all in good fun, a laugh on them and us.

I don’t think they ever covered “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees. People say we monkey around. But we’re too busy singing to put anybody down” but they could have.

By not directing his band in an easily mapped-out route, letting inspiration, frustration, aggravation, revelation fuel what came out of his hands and his guitar, Paul Westerberg and The Replacements perhaps unwittingly struck a nerve that nobody knew was there, that nobody before them ever took aim at, a nerve that those of us who loved the band and his work felt. And still feel when we put it on in the house, the car, in our headphones, forever in our ears.

Maybe I’m being too sentimental about the whole thing but it’d be nice for him to know that, wouldn’t it? When he was shoveling snow, waiting for baseball season to start, strumming a guitar in an empty house.

HERE’S THE POST AS OF 2/25/25 - 2:50 p.m.