156. The Replacements, "Let It Be"

 

I had 4 big albums my senior year of high school:  R.E.M.'s Reckoning, The Smiths' Meat Is Murder, the Velvet Underground's VU, and this album.  Me and my friends probably looked like the dirtbags on the cover.  I was 17 and wearing ripped jeans and smoking cloves and going to underground shows and doing sound for local bands and drinking Schaefer (God bless it) and smoking the shittiest weed you can possibly imagine.  It was pretty much fucking heaven, and the Replacements and this album were a huge part of it.

Released in 1984, it's a perfect snapshot of a band transitioning from punk fuckups to post-punk fuckups.  By that I mean there are actually well-crafted songs with ideas and heart; this transition had been hinted at in their prior record, Hootenanny, but that one was still not as developed as the songs here.  The album starts with "I Will Dare," still one of the finest songs of the 80's, with its loping bassline and Paul Westerberg's classic strangled vocals and a guitar solo by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, it's far more pop than you would have expected from the band but also rough enough around the edges to keep it real.  It's just an amazing song.

The second track, "Favorite Thing," is also melodic enough to presage the arrive of pop-punk a few years down the road.  But the band doesn't leave its punk roots behind entirely; "We're Coming Out" is a blast of near-hardcore, and both "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" and "Gary's Got a Boner" have that juvenile swagger and smart-aleck humor that underlies a lot of teen punk.  On its face, "Tommy" is a funny story about a doctor who has to "Get this over with/ I tee off in an hour/ My Cadillac's running," but it's really a song about how powerless you feel as an adolescent when you're coming into adulthood but adults can still order you around.

There are also some more gentle songs.  "Sixteen Blue" is a great exploration of the confusion and angst of being a teen:

Try to figure out, they wonder what next you'll
You don't understand anything sexual
I don't understand
Tell my friends I'm doing fine
Your age is the hardest age
Everything drags and drags
You're looking funny
You ain't laughing, are you?
Sixteen blue

And then there's "Answering Machine," an aching ode to longing and sadness:

Try and breathe some life into a letter
Losing hope, never be together
My courage is at it's peak
You know what I mean
How do say you're okay to
An answering machine?
How do you say good night to
An answering machine?

God, you can just hear the pain in Westerberg's voice.  I can remember listeing to this song and staring meaningfully out the window of my car and feeling very much like the main character in a doomed romance (which I was, although it wasn't yet doomed and we were both 17).  

I haven't listened to this whole album all the way through in years, and while it's probably not as good msuically as I remembered, it's very good at triggering a specific set of memories about a moment in time and space where I could conquer the universe but I was also a big piece of shit.  Has any band nailed adolescence better?

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Absolutely.  I want it to sign my yearbook.