Stuff I’ve Been Reading: June/July 2018

BOOKS READ:

• Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements—Bob Mehr
• To Throw Away Unopened—Viv Albertine
• Who Is Rich—Matthew Klam
• The Adulterants—Joe Dunthorne

BOOKS BOUGHT:

• The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England— Christopher Hilliard.
• Janesville—Amy Goldstein
• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams—Matthew Walker

Fathers: can’t live with them, can’t exist without them. The father of Bob Stinson, guitarist of the Replacements, was a boozer who lost touch with his kids when he split up with their mother. Bob’s younger halfbrother, Tommy’s father was also a boozer who sexually, physically, and verbally abused his stepchildren. Bob’s second stepfather was merely a mean drunk. Bob was in and out of care homes and dead at thirty-five. Viv Albertine’s father was a jealous, violent bully who made his wife give up her child from a previous marriage. The Stinsons and Albertine both went on to make glorious, significant, provocative rock music.

The title of Bob Mehr’s sympathetic, gripping, exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting book about the history of the Replacements, Trouble Boys, is missing a d from the end of the first word of its title: these boys were troubled long before they formed a band, and carried on being troubled long after it had split up. Drugs and especially drink were both the symptom and the cause of it all, but this was not the glamorous, Keith Richards version of dependency, the sort that makes rock critics swoon, nor was it the Faces’ laddish determination to bring their local pub onstage with them every night. This was the nasty, mean, inexplicably self-destructive version, with blackouts and puking and broken marriages.

If you’re unfamiliar with the work of the Replacements, it’s probably too late now, but they meant a lot to me and people like me in the 1980s, when punk rock was dead and guitars were hard to hear among all the Syndrums and keyboards. Songwriter Paul Westerberg’s best songs have an ache to them that couldn’t be smothered by volume or self-destruction. The band competed with REM and lost, and were then swept away by Nirvana’s tide. I loved them, but I didn’t think I wanted to read four hundred pages about them; however, Mehr’s book is so clear-eyed, and the stories are so extraordinary, that it was gone in a flash.

Tommy Stinson was thirteen when the Replacements formed. His brother had bullied and cajoled him into picking up the bass a couple of years before, partly because Bob needed a bassist, and partly because Tommy was already well down the...