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I'm not going to try to convince you that The Replacements were the greatest American rock band of all time because A.) it's not even close, and B.) your favorite band is the greatest band ever, at least until you find a new favorite.

If you listened to Pleased To Meet Me driving around Indianapolis in the 11th grade, wearing it out until it started to skip just as your hand slid up the exposed thigh of Megan O'Reilly, then that's your favorite album, or at least the most important.

And there it is. A Replacements fan's inevitable decline into anecdote and epiphany, and it never ends well. I'll try to resist. For all the credit Paul Westerberg gets as a songwriter–though still not enough–it's rarely mentioned just how funny he is. It's always lost in the stories of debauched vomiting and indie-rock romanticism. Westerberg's ability to scribble down the graffiti of your soul and turn it into something more than just a song obscures how funny he can actually be, whether it's a whole song or just a line. 


1. "Waitress In The Sky" (Tim)
 
Winona Ryder once loved The Replacements (she may have dated Westerberg), and thus cemented the fact to a teenage Jeff Barnosky that her unspeakable hotness was actually transcendent, possibly divine. According to the Rolling Stone archives in my brain, she dreamed of a personal audience with the band as they played "Waitress" over and over again. After reading that, I think my exact words were ".." followed by total organ failure and a brief transformation into a vacuum cleaner.
 
Over the years, I've seen "Waitress" labeled mean. It's not. At least, that's not all it is. It's Westerberg's most political song. Stuck in the air, not rich or even in first class, the stewardess has the power and they always use it to suck up to the one's with power on land. Plus, they control the booze. The song's sort of like The Communist Manifesto for drunken alternative rockers.

2. "I Don't Know" (Pleased to Meet Me)

The 'Mats should have been Nirvana and this should have been "Teen Spirit." Not breaking new ground or anything here, but it still needs to be said. Like a lot of my favorite 'Mats songs, it's perceived as a goof and filler. There's nothing mainstream audiences and media outlets like more than earnestness, but when a potentially zeitgeisty line like "What do you want do with your life?/ Nothing!" is delivered with a laugh, it's not as easy to digest.

Everyone's always trying to sell comedy, but people are confused by funny. If Paul Westerberg had taken himself seriously all the time, as the radio stations and the rock critics wanted (whether they voiced it or not), then he would have ended up like Kurt Cobain (rich, famous, dead) or Michael Stipe (rich, famous, boring).

Hack journalists could never turn Westerberg into martyr saint, or a counterculture hero, or anything else because he would have made a joke at their expense. And that doesn't sell to graduate students and teenagers at the indie record store. 

3. "Customer" (Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash)

"I'm in love with a girl who works in a store but I'm nothing but a customer…"
I can't think of any song that more precisely describes my Midwestern teenage life than Westerberg's ode to the hot girl behind the counter and the fumbling, shy moron buying breath mints and plastic combs just to hear her voice as she told him how much he owed. The song's nothing more than a shopping list, but Westerberg delivers it with such comic timing that it almost sounds like stand-up comedy. 
4. "If Only You Were Lonely" (Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash Bonus Track)

The lovingly hostile vibe of the title and refrain sets the tone for the rest of the song and it also creates the archetype for the real Replacements–shambling, funny, yearning for real connection but perpetually cock-blocked by booze, other guys and ill-timed smart-ass jokes. What's the difference between someone who writes a purposely funny song (or anything else) and someone who's perspective on the world just makes people laugh? When Westerberg sings about doing push-ups on the toilet bowl is he telling a joke? What about "Swinging Party" or "Pretty girls keep growing up, playing make-up, wearing guitars" or "Bacon and cigarettes a lousy dinner"? He's making jokes to be serious. Or being serious to make jokes. The best way to be a genius, according to me.

5. Lovelines (Hootenanny)

I should probably write about "Treatment Bound" here, but Bob Stinson died after a career of playing Drinky the Drunk Guy and it just sours the whole thing. And sometimes that song sounds like your 30-year-old friend talking about how much he drank that one night when he was a junior at Penn State. But "Lovelines" is proof that The 'Mats genius cannot be defined. The song is nothing more than Westerberg reading from the classifieds of a Minneapolis newspaper. It's almost a new genre: found comedy.