Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr review – how a great band destroyed itself

The Replacements’ third album Let It Be is hugely acclaimed, yet they never really made it – though there was much rock’n’roll defiance, drink and bad behaviour along the way

^‘We happened to … like all of the funky quirks of the classic rock bands – the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Ramones,” notes Paul Westerberg in the epilogue to American music writer Bob Mehr’s exhaustive biography of the Replacements, the band Westerberg led. “We didn’t have the things that made those bands huge; we had the thing that made them infamous and decadent and, perhaps, great.”

It was to be the fate of the Replacements that their greatness – which, these days, is pretty much undisputed; you’ll find their third full album Let It Be (1984) on scores of “greatest ever” lists – was recognised only by a small number of people. They were the band who walked and talked like the Rolling Stones, while existing on the kind of audience and sales befitting a scrappy group of misfits who emerged from the Minneapolis punk scene. Their inability to meet the music industry’s needs, despite the industry offering them every chance, meant they struggled and withered while REM, their contemporaries and kindred spirits, became one of the world’s biggest bands, much to the chagrin of Westerberg and his bandmates.

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