What a waste!
The ’Mats’ alcohol and chaosfuelled debut turns 40. By David Fricke.
The Replacements ★★★★
Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash
RHINO. CD/DL/LP
FOR A few minutes, on the way to its release on August 25, 1981, The Replacements’ debut album was called
Unsuitable For Airplay – which it was, starting with side one, track one. “The light was green/So was I/The radio’s blastin’/Turn that shit off!” singerguitarist Paul Westerberg bellowed in Takin’ A Ride, two minutes and 23 seconds of death-race frenzy with a necksnapping hook. Another title on the table was Power Trash, coined by Westerberg, the band’s songwriting captain, to describe the motley character of The Replacements’ noise and mission. As he put it to me later over a few cold ones in a Minneapolis bar, “We take the best parts of punk, pop, rock’n’roll and blues without really having a feel for any of them. I don’t know where our true roots lie.”
In this 40th birthday deluxe edition,
Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash is all about roots, raw meat and roads not taken – not yet anyway. The original machine gun etiquette – 18 songs in 37 minutes with a fidelity that suggested it was all cut in even greater haste – has been extended with more than 80 tracks of demo labour, studio outtakes, basement frolic and club gig velocity. In large part, the extras affirm the obvious. Sorry Ma…, as issued in ’81, was nearperfect delirium, a rude, taut joy of protracted beer-blast adolescence (eg, that final title) mined with Westerberg’s emotionally kinetic way with wrenched syntax and deceptively banal premise (the longing for a shop girl in Customer; his acidic memoir of an arena rock show, I Bought A Headache).
There is valuable discovery, however, in this density. You hear, in rough steps and long jumps, how hard The Replacements – Westerberg, drummer Chris Mars and the lethal family axis of guitarist Bob Stinson and teenage bassist Tommy Stinson, Bob’s half-brother – worked to sound that volatile. A studio demo of I Hate Music has a bruising edge on the LP version; Don’t Turn Me Down, an orphaned tune from the April 1980 demo that eventually led to the band’s record deal, sounds like a hardcore spin on Jailbreak-era Thin Lizzy, right down to the harmonised guitars. And there is an instructive lo-fi fragment of Johnny’s Gonna Die – Westerberg’s candid assessment of a star-crossed idol, Johnny Thunders – played at unwisely high speed during a session in the Stinsons’ basement. On the album, The Replacements pulled the brakes and played the song instead as raw, psychedelic anguish, a Midwest punk’s dream of electric Laurel Canyon already alluding to the reach and changes on 1983’s Hootenanny and ’84’s Let It Be.
Sorry Ma… was, in effect, a glorious dead end. Alcohol and chaos are not a career plan, and The Replacements never made another album like it. Growing up had its consequences too for the band. But this is how it started: innocence and impatience unchained, in every exuberant, rattling detail. And it’s still unsuitable for airplay.