Top five artist for me.
Unlike most people, I got into Paul Westerberg before I even knew there was a band called The Replacements. I first heard him in middle school when I got the Singles soundtrack. I became a huge Pearl Jam fan in the summer before the 8th grade. They were playing "Even Flow" every hour on the hour on the radio and my brother and I became huge fans.
Pearl Jam had only one album but I wanted more. At that point the only other available material came in the form of two songs on the Singles soundtrack, so I picked it up. The album remains huge to this day. It introduced me to Mudhoney, Alice In Chains, and some guy whose two, melodic pop songs stuck out like a sore thumb on the otherwise Grunge sampler: Paul Westerberg.
I liked "Dyslexic Heart" okay but loved "Waiting For Somebody." I played that song over and over again. Shortly after discovering Westerberg, I found his album 14 Songs at a record store and loved it just as much. I still do. I especially loved the first side of the album - I would rewind songs like "Knockin' On Mine" and "World Class Fad" every time I listened to them. I was hooked.
Around this same time I also saw him on Saturday Night Live. I didn't recognize the second song he played and figured it was a new song that would be on his next album. I remember buying his second album Eventually and being disappointed when the song wasn't on the album. Later I found out it was "Can't Hardly Wait."
It seems funny now to think that I was a Paul Westerberg fan for a full three years and remained unaware of The Replacements. This was before the internet when this information was a google search away. But I was a teenager in Dayton, my only music resources were Rolling Stone magazine and books at the library. I never came across the name Paul Westerberg.
It is at this point that I introduce the most influential book of my early music journey: The Spin Alternative Record Guide. It arrived one day at the library and I instantly checked it out. Over the next five years or so I probably spent 1,000 hours reading the damn thing. Had I put that many hours into my actual studies....well I wouldn't be the music nerd that I am today.
The book was the first in the library to include my favorite band that I had stumbled across the year before, Guided by Voices. I thought the entry on GbV was pretty good, even if they did give their second album Sandbox a score of 1 (out of 10! but more on that later). This book would be the first place that I would hear about so many groups that would become my favorites over the years. Husker Du. The Minutemen. Sonic Youth. The Replacements.
I ran across the entry for this band and saw that they reviewed Paul Westerberg's solo album with it. It turns out Westerberg had been making music for a full decade before he went solo. It also turns out that their album Let It Be, besides being ripped off from another of my favorite bands, The Beatles, was one of their Top 100 Alternative Albums. It wasn't long before before I used a Christmas gift certificate from my grandparents to buy Let It Be, thus beginning my journey into the world of The Replacements.
Looking back it amuses me that two throw away tracks on a movie soundtrack led me to one of my favorite artists. I've connected to so many of Westerberg's tunes and there are so many memories connected to his songs. I'll write about The Replacements and his under-rated solo work in time, but I wanted to leave with a memory that popped up while revisiting 14 Songs for this write up.
We've all had our hearts broken. It is experience that has fueled countless songs and is a rite of passage to everyone who has ever experienced love. A few weeks after I first experienced this universal phenomenon, I remember feeling sad and lost. I was in a the rut, sitting around and feeling sorry for myself. I had a day off work and wanted to do something to get myself out of that rut, so I did what any music nerd would do: I went to Columbus for the day to shop for records.
I don't remember what records I bought that day, or even what shops I might have gone to. I assume it was Used Kids, but I really don't remember. All I remember is driving back to Dayton, and somewhere between Columbus and Dayton I heard "Things" off of 14 Songs. It knocked me on my ass. It is vintage Westerberg: a touch of heart break, some great one liners about love and falling out of it. I'd heard the song countless times over the past five years, but I never really connected with it.
I don't remember what records I bought that day, or even what shops I might have gone to. I assume it was Used Kids, but I really don't remember. All I remember is driving back to Dayton, and somewhere between Columbus and Dayton I heard "Things" off of 14 Songs. It knocked me on my ass. It is vintage Westerberg: a touch of heart break, some great one liners about love and falling out of it. I'd heard the song countless times over the past five years, but I never really connected with it.
That day that song provided me with a feeling I so desperately needed: It made me feel less alone.
