Eric the Blue

I saw a Replacements tribute show at the Turf Club a week ago and have been listening to their records again ever since. My God. A friend and I like to play the game, Favorite album? Favorite song? For me, it’s changed, and it will again, but tonight my answer for the first game is Tim. Notwithstanding the most common free association responses to “punk rock,” so many of their songs are, um, tender. Here is the remastered “Swingin’ Party”:

Not sure the phrase “toxic masculinity” had any currency, or had even been invented, when in the mid 1980s Paul Westerberg wrote this song, but today it sounds like a prescient rejection:

If being alone's a crime I'm serving forever
If being strong's your kind, well,
I  need help here with this feather.
If being afraid is a crime we hang side by side
At the swingin' party down the line.

Trouble Boys, Bob Mehr’s history of the band, recounts how their first show ever was scheduled for a Minneapolis halfway house, and that it was cancelled when they showed up drunk. I think I remember that accurately; I seem to have lost my copy. For sure, the band was famous for sometimes being too drunk to play, and on at least one occasion Westerberg reached into his pockets and threw money into the crowd to compensate at least a couple attendees for having bought a ticket. These episodes are part of the legend, and some of my fellow fans may feel almost romantic about them, but “Here Comes a Regular,” which closes Tim, is an alcoholic’s lament. The lyric begins:

A person can work up a mean mean thirst
After a hard day of nothing much at all.
Summer's past, it's too late to cut the grass
There ain't much to rake anyway in the fall.

And sometimes I just ain't in the mood
To take my place in back with the loudmouths.
You're like a picture on the fridge that's never stocked with food.
I  used to live at home, now I stay at the house.

If you’re still with me, here’s the whole thing; hard to describe in words the elegiac force of the song:

And my current fave song, answer to the question posed by Game 2, is the one that includes this memorable representation of futility:

For the moon you keep shooting
Throw your rope up in the air

You get the idea: the rope just falls to the ground, right? The song, about a break-up from the point of view of the dumped woman, a mom, is called “Little Mascara”: