Tonight’s selections from the Replacements 1985 album, Tim. I covered this album a couple of years ago so here’s the twist. Last fall, a different mix of the album was released. I think the rejected mix is better than the “real” mix. The rejected mix was done by Ed Stasium (producer and musician — he played the guitar solos on a couple of Ramones records because Johnny couldn’t play ‘em). The Stasium mix, the original mix plus live and unreleased tracks were released last year as a box set named “Tim (Let It Bleed Edition)”. It sounds fantastic.
Like so many other Replacements fans, no doubt, the first thing I did with the new version of Tim was skip right to “Left of the Dial.” One of those “bury my soul in these guitars” songs that any music fan collects over time. It’s a highlight of the classic 1985 album from four Minnesota punk boys, the great American rock band of the Eighties. “Left of the Dial” is the Replacement’s most heart-on-fire confession, a rager about losing your friends over time, missing them over the miles, until you turn on the car radio and get jumped by that stupid tune you used to sing together. Every note in this damn song triggers a neural rush. But now, every note is different.
In Tim: The “Let It Bleed” Sessions, a new Ed Stasium remix finally cleans up the murk on one of rock’s most infamous production disasters. There’s so much more to this music than any of us knew—so many details that got lost until now. In “Left of the Dial,” it’s the rasp and crackle in Paul Westerberg’s ravaged throat. It’s the live-wire buzz of Bob Stinson’s guitar, which you can now actually hear. Sometimes the new mix sounds too busy — at the end, when kid brother Tommy Stinson plays his poignant bass throb, he gets drowned out. But you hear Westerberg sing and hum and moan to himself in the final minute, as if he’s so swept up in this tale he forgot his mic was on. It’s insane that this exists now.
Listening to the new Tim is full of these revelations. It’s like watching Get Back, the moment where Paul sits at the piano to play “Strawberry Fields Forever” and John plucks his guitar, both pretending this is no big deal, not fooling anyone. You think, “Wait, these details were buried in a vault all these years? This music, this history, it’s all different?” — Rolling Stone
Left of the Dial (Ed Stasium Mix)
The genesis of this, their first major label stab, starts with the near-universal accolades accorded to Let It Be (1984). That set, recorded for the small indie Twin Tone, created a bidding war of sorts for the suits to enter the picture and attempt to push the prickly indie rockers to national stardom. Legendary Sire impresario Seymour Stein loved what he heard and signed these rough around-the-edge Midwesterners.
Then the story of Tim’s somewhat convoluted path from recording to release gets complicated. The result was that songwriter/guitarist/frontman Paul Westerberg wrote his best, most focused material to date. His streetwise lyrics never got too obtuse yet delivered poetic, sharply penned words to offerings that have become band classics and benchmarks of this era in garage/punk/rock history. [...]
The creation of Tim was difficult, however. Initial producer Alex Chilton, one of the band’s heroes and the subject of their song named after him, didn’t have the chops to pull off this project, so Stein suggested Ramones’ drummer Tommy Erdelyi (aka Tommy Ramone). He occasionally clashed with the members but generally got the job done, albeit with a final, slightly muddy, almost mono mix few were satisfied with. Additionally, troubled lead guitarist Bob Stinson barely showed up for the sessions, and when he did, he was often drunk or in a foul mood (he was fired shortly thereafter).
Regardless, when the finished product hit the shelves in October 1985 it was greeted as a flawed but major statement with broad critical raves and has since become one of The Replacements’ classics. Unfortunately, those positive reviews did not yield sales; the album only scratched out a lowly position of No. 192 on the Billboard charts, moving a disappointing 75,000 copies. — American Songwriter
Bastards of Young (Ed Stasium Mix)
1984 would be a landmark year for the band. Their third full-length album, Let It Be, was released to critical raves and turned the Replacements into one of the most buzzed-about bands in the country. Rolling Stone gave the album four stars, and in December, the Village Voice put the ’Mats on its cover, with Let It Be ultimately finishing fourth in that publication’s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. (No small feat in a pretty great year for music.) Let It Be’s breakthrough helped land the Replacements a deal with Sire Records, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. that just a few years earlier had signed another up-and-coming Midwesterner named Madonna. Sire sent the ’Mats back into the studio with the esteemed producer Tommy Erdelyi, better known as Tommy Ramone, a seemingly perfect fit for a band revealing itself to be some missing link between the incendiary energy of classic punk and the sparkling pop of the Beatles and Big Star.
It finally sounds like four guys in a room together, and you’re there too. [...]
It’s barely an exaggeration to say that Stasium’s new mix is like hearing Tim for the first time. It is quite literally revelatory: guitar flourishes in “Bastards of Young” and “Little Mascara” that were previously buried are now excavated; the piano and strings on “Here Comes a Regular” are newly intelligible; Westerberg’s worn and yearning vocals on classics like “Swingin Party” and “Left of the Dial” have never sounded more alive—you can practically feel him breathe. Sometimes when an eminent producer is tasked with a project like this, there is a tendency to over-tinker, to impose their own sonic vision to such a degree that it once again drowns out the band’s own work through overcorrection. (And make no mistake: The version of Tim that everyone’s been listening to for the last 38 years is a phenomenal album, sonic peccadilloes and all.) But every choice made here feels in concert with the spirit of the Replacements and everything that made them great. It finally sounds like four guys in a room together, and you’re there too.
Had Tim gotten the mix it deserved back in 1985, would things have gone differently for the Replacements? Probably not. In the second half of the 1980s, mainstream American rock would be increasingly dominated by blockbuster glam-metal acts like Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi. The Replacements, God bless ’em, weren’t cut out for that. (Although in a delicious twist, Tommy Stinson has spent a decent chunk of the 21st century playing bass in Axl Rose’s reconstituted Guns N’ Roses.) They’d release three more albums on Sire before breaking up in 1991, just a couple of months before Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. In the coming months and years, it started to feel like every one of those 75,000 people who’d bought Tim had started a band. I discovered the Replacements as a teenager in the late 1990s after an adolescence spent in a post-grunge era, and the first time I heard them was like listening to a band stumbling onto the future. Sometimes a work like Tim is too good for its time, until it becomes timeless. — Slate
Little Mascara (Ed Stasium Mix)
Of all the bands that formed American underground rock in the 1980s, the Replacements were simultaneously the best- and worst-suited for making a jump to a major label. Paul Westerberg wrote both driving rockers and heartfelt ballads informed by radio rock traditions, and the band, while adjacent to punk and hardcore, weren’t especially a part of those traditions and, as a result, likely had less of the moral baggage about taking a check from Warner Brothers. At the same time, they were chaos personified, a quartet of fuck-ups perpetually on booze and drugs who would zag when told to zig just to see if they could. As such, the discussion around the Replacements even now inevitably floats back towards the realm of “What Could Have Been?” That’s not just the domain of rock critics and music obsessives on the internet, either; this has been the tenor of Rhino’s run of Replacements reissues, all of which feature substantial changes that seek to offer an alternative to the album that was officially released. It’s worked so far, especially on Dead Man’s Pop, the 2019 remix that effectively recast Don’t Tell a Soul as something better than the band’s artistic low point. It’s one thing, however, to perform an aural facelift on an album generally regarded by most as a noble failure. How would it work to perform the same treatment on Tim, an album in the running alongside Let It Be as the best thing that the ‘Mats ever recorded?
There’s a lot that the expanded edition of Tim (charmingly and irreverently titled Let It Bleed) has to offer to any Replacements fan, but the main attraction is inevitably Ed Stasium’s new mix of the album. Tim, for all its songwriting merits, always suffered from a muddy sound – a combination of weird mixing and the horrid practices that were commonplace in producing rock records in the ‘80s – and this mix does more than clean things up. The new mix of Tim is the Replacements at their idealized best: loud, brash, sensitive and yearning in equal measure. Parts of the album that one could have considered low points are lifted up; the twin rockers of “Dose of Thunder” and “Lay It Down Clown” morph from being noisy, boneheaded rockers in the worst sense of the term to being noisy, boneheaded rockers in the best sense of the term while also giving the late Bob Stinson a platform to show off. The reverb on the drums is largely removed, which both elevates the impact of Chris Mars’ playing (his intro on “Hold My Life” in particular kicks more ass than it did initially) while also taking the album out of 1986. If there is a mission statement for this remix, that’s it: it’s an effort to remove Tim from the era which its original production is irrevocably tied to and to present these songs as fans would want to hear them.
This, though, presents an interesting conundrum: was it even necessary to create a new mix of Tim in the first place? For all of its muddiness, the original Tim is just as beloved as Let It Be in the hearts of some fans, and no one in the band has expressed dissatisfaction with how the original sessions with Tommy Ramone worked out. For better or worse, Tim’s original mix (which is included in a remastered format as part of the Let It Bleed set) is what the Replacements intended to make. Now, one can question the wisdom of the decisions that led them to make some of the choices on Tim – it can be assumed with some certainty that the band were not sober when recording the original album – but it does have the commercial sound that Westerberg and company definitely wanted to make. One could make the case that the Replacements were just as much about their failures as their successes, and a few writers have made that argument about Tim. However, if someone were to come to this album for the first time, the remix is where they would want to start. There’s a brightness and melodicism to the new mix that recalls a more muscular take on Let It Be’s sound; that is almost certainly not the album that the Replacements wanted to make, but it’s a better album nonetheless. It’s impossible not to hear those opening chords of “Left of the Dial” sound more crisp and emphatic than they ever have and not feel invigorated. — Spectrum Culture
Waitress in the Sky (Ed Stasium Mix)
It’s now abundantly clear, both in sound and performance, that Tim is really among the best albums ever recorded…ex post facto. It’s the apex of the Mats, how they should have sounded, how they did sound, how they should be remembered sounding. As diverse as it is dynamic, Tim is full of diamond-sharp songs about the mess of young love, old love, loneliness, dead-end jobs, amphetamines, and alcohol. Rarely does a remix raise a crucial epistemological question about a small Midwestern rock band who would stumble through a bunch of pop and country covers if the audience asked them to play their “pussy set,” but here we are: Should this new remix be considered the real and definitive version of Tim?
Like the CIA one day revealing who really and definitively killed Kennedy, I’d argue it’s complicated. Here is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Replacements: They were drunks and losers because their press releases said they were drunks and losers. So they wore the mask, played the clowns, and became lost in the version of themselves that got banned from SNL, didn’t play ball with the label, showed up wrecked to gigs, put out a mix of Tim that the band themselves didn’t much like, sabotaged their career at every turn, and by the late ’80s softly melted into a Westerberg solo project. Even if Westerberg thought he could be as big as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones—or even contemporaries who caught major label deals like R.E.M.—there was always some Midwestern fatalism dragging him down. He led a band caught in a perpetual cycle of fear, self-loathing, drinking, and destruction that amassed a cult fan base who loved them precisely because of this cycle. If you saw a Mats show, you knew they weren’t ever going to be superstars, but a part of you knew that the Mats were right and everyone else was wrong.
The reason this Let It Bleed Edition tastes bittersweet is not because of what should’ve been, but what could never have been. — Pitchfork
Here Comes a Regular (Ed Stasium Mix)
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Lionel Richie, Sandra Hüller, SHAED
Jimmy Fallon: Queen Latifah, Margaret Qualley, Brittany Howard
Stephen Colbert: Billy Joel, Chappell Roan
After Midnight: Guy Branum, Lisa Gilroy, Marcella Arguello (R 1/24/24)
Seth Meyers: America Ferrera, Brooks Wackerman
Watch What Happens Live: Amy Schumer
The Daily Show: Cord Jefferson
LAST Week’S POLL: ARE YOU SURE ABOUT WHO'S GOING TO WIN THE SUPERBOWL?
Kansas City Chiefs 36%
San Francisco 49ers 50% (but alas, they did not)
Pie 14%