Nowhere Ain't Too Far From Here

Here's a mess of ancient Replacements outtakes that I put together just for you (yeah right). Actually, none of these tracks have been anything too hard to find of late, with a couple of them popping up thru 'legitimate' sources while the rest already appeared on a couple of other blogs 4 or 5 years ago. Of course, those particular blog files are probably long gone by now if you tried to google 'em anyway, plus they were on the sort of music blogs that think the Gaslight Anthem are hot shit, so fuck 'em. I'm gonna post these now because I've owned these tracks practically since before Blogger was even invented, when I paid 25 bucks for a bootleg CD full of them about ten or eleven years ago. Screw you, crappy music blog people. Go fuck off to Tumblr or something.

There's like 26 tracks on this CD, but I'm not gonna bother posting every slightly-different variation of already-released songs, although I will include "Careless" -- recorded in '80, pre-Sorry Ma apparently -- because it shows how solid the 'Mats intent was, even from the very beginning. There's also a tossed-off version of "Red Red Wine" which is pretty nice, too; the blazing-fast version on "Pleased To Meet Me" is probably my 3rd favorite track on that album, but the version here chugs along at a mid-tempo pace and does a much better job of bringing out the groove in the song. I also like it because it reminds me of when the 'Mats would do slower country versions of songs like "God Damn Job", plus the made-up reference vocal is kinda funny ("Keep suckin' the soda/Wisconsin and Minnesota").

As for the other stuff, "Nowhere Is My Home" was one of those 'legendary' 'unheard' 'Mats tracks at one point (similar in stature to the original version of "Can't Hardly Wait"), finding itself passed around in lore for a year or two based on word-of-mouth accounts of live shows long before any real studio-recorded version surfaced, which in this case ended up being the unused Chilton sessions that also produced the "Tim" version of "Can't Hardly Wait". Most of the other tracks I'm posting here are basic rockers, some of which morphed into other more recognizable songs and some which didn't. "Temptation Eyes" and "Street Girl" are both pretty corny, at least compared to everything else in the Replacements' oeuvre at the time. "Temptation Eyes" in particular seems to be an attempt to cultivate some sort of Journey/Loverboy-type 'radio hit' (*duh, it's a cover), so maybe it's a good thing that idea wasn't developed any further. If some of these tracks seem a little crappy-sounding compared to cleaned-up versions that might've come out sometime later, keep in mind that this was probably bootlegged from a cassette tape that had been sitting in someone's pocket since the '80s, but that's what things were like back then; the only way to trade music back-and-forth was on crummy cassettes, so people expected things to sound like a bunch of suck. It was all part of the fun.

For whatever reason the booklet was printed with two different sets of artwork, depending upon which way you wanted to fold it, so I scanned a little bit of both. The girl-with-the-candle photos are by Richard Kern, and yes, they credit him on one of the other pages in the booklet.




The Replacements -

"Careless"

"Nowhere Is My Home"

"Who's Gonna Take Us Alive"

"Temptation Eyes"

"Street Girl"

"Perfectly Lethal"

"Time Is Killing Us"

"P.O. Box"

"Red Red Wine"

One More Chance To Get It All Wrong

They never told us if the trophies were Bob's or Tommy's...
I thought it was great when The Replacements' Twin/Tone albums got re-issued a couple of years ago, although it was only for nostalgia's sake, as I wasn't all that motivated to run out and buy them right away. Not that I didn't think they'd be worth it, just that I had most of the bonus tracks already, between "All For Nothing" and a bootleg that I'd bought about 8 years ago (bootlegs being the old way to steal music, before mp3 blogs were invented). Besides, my CD tower is still stocked with all of the Twin/Tone albums from the first time they started coming out on CD, on suspect labels like Chameleon and Restless.

After I started buying Replacements records in 1984, I ended up owning vinyl copies of everything up through "Tim" (which I sold almost immediately after I bought it). If there's one thing that all of the CD re-issues are missing, it's the printed inner sleeves that Twin/Tone started using for their LPs at one point, featuring goofy thumbnail descriptions-- possibly written by Peter Jesperson or Blake Gumprecht-- for all 41 of Twin/Tone's releases up 'til then, with each blurb falling at varying degrees between unintentionally comical and beneath stupid.


Sometimes while listening to "Let It Be" back then you'd have nothing better to do, so you'd start studying the back cover, vaguely wondering what in-jokes the scrawled "parrot dink on tap" and "Twin/Tone eats slotty crap" might've been referring to. Then you'd look at the tiny 2" x 2" album covers that were printed on one side of the inner sleeve and think to yourself, "Jeez, how come The Replacements have to be on a label with so many uncool bands?", knowing just by looking at albums like Safety Last "Struck By Love" or Curtiss A "Damage Is Done" that there was no way in hell you'd ever want to come close to hearing any of those records in your lifetime.


Eventually there'd be nothing left but to read all 41 inner-sleeve blurbs in order. After enough readings, the blurbs would become stuck in your subconscious and phrases like "clenched teeth acid boogie" or "more than a stack of amps can indicate" would start popping into your head at odd times during the day, the way some people are with Monty Python sketches or something. I know I'm not the only one this would happen to, because I'd trade letters with other Replacements fans or read Bill Callahan's Willpower zine, and it was nearly the same way with everyone else. Having a winking knowledge of all the Twin/Tone (or Twin/Toaster, as we'd lovingly call it) inner sleeve blurbs was one of the marks of being a true diehard/idiotic Replacements fan.

Not wanting all you kids who bought the re-issues to miss out on this monumental experience, I've taken my original copy of "Let It Be" (bought in 1984) and scanned most of the inner sleeve blurbs to post here. Now you can listen to your re-issued "Let It Be" the old-fashioned way, or at least snicker at bands like The Phones and The Hypstrz the way I used to (although Bruce says The Hypstrz are okay).










As a bonus, here's a couple of tracks, ripped from beat-up 26-year-old vinyl...

The Replacements -

"We're Coming Out"

"Answering Machine"