MR BAD VIBES NEIGHBORDHOOD GENE GREGORITS WRITTEN FOR VICE: 7-8-16 August 2016: 20 BELOW ZERO: KICKING IT OLD SCHOOL WITH THE GHOST OF BOB STINSON “You can really get some good, cheap stuff around here. I don’t really do it, but if you wanted to, we could get some stuff and do it, you know, later, if you wanted.” —Bob Stinson, 1993 “Mama send me downtown/ Saturday at noon/ I gotta service that transvestite/ or I’ll get kicked out of my room/ ya want the king of the losers?/ hey, I know that road through and through” —Danny and Dusty, “King Of The Losers,” 1985 “I’m for rollin/ I’m for tossin’ in my sleep/ it’s not guilt though/ it’s not the company I keep” —Neil Young, “I’m the Ocean,” 1995 At the risk of alienating the dozen or so readers I have left, I’ll tell ya, with a long face, that I never was a Replacements fan. I’ve had more’n a few girlfriends who were, including one that fucked Westerburg in 92 and one that got to third base, whatever the fuck that means, what is that a fucking BLOWJOB, with Tommy Stinson in 95. But me? Not even close. Not even a handshake. “Oh here we GO! Bashing anything and everything, just because it’s popular, that’s all you do, Gregorits.” Ah HAH. Well. That’s lazy thinking, sir. “Blah, blah, blah. No one cares about your snooty New York shit, man.” Lazy and IGNORANT thinking. I haven’t been to New York City in 30 years, people. And I’m no SNOB. In fact I’m — always have been, which is obvious to anyone who ever actually READ my journalism — a POPULIST. In FACT, a pretty extreme populist, I’d say, albeit one with standards. When Hollywood gets it RIGHT, I’m the first to shout its name in ecstasy. But STANDARDS, people — I’ve been imploring you for 50 years now: have some fuckin self- respect. And yes, I am a POPULIST. No sarcasm in this statement. When THE KILLS came out with their second album, I mailed them a care package containing Springsteen’s Nebraska on CD, the actual CD, not a burned copy. And also David Peace’s 1977, a British novel then- unpublished in the states. (I’d paid thirty dollars for my import copy, and here I was paying another 75 to mail the fucking thing BACK to England, with 200 dollars’ worth of Springsteen CDs and First edition Larry Clark books and photos of Lydia Lunch’s pussy and god knows what else…ask them…and talk about SNOBS…my populism emerges bright and clear now.) My finger was on the pulse of pure ART in the POP CONTEXT back then…I had to explain to the Kills who they really were, beyond all that hipster preening and gibberish. They’re too hip to acknowledge my influence…the point is, Springsteen gets it right often enough. And so do the Kills. They attack the void from opposite directions, opposite places. The only REAL difference between Springsteen — when he’s DARK — and the Kills is that the Kills are stupid enough to let me backstage with them. I am a PARAGON of populism. Are you fucking kidding? I was first in line to see An Officer And a Gentleman at the age of 4. I thrilled to Breaking Bad and True Detective in more recent times, right along with the dimmest o’yas. Uh….Fleetwood Mac! Joaquin Phoenix! Mickey Rourke! That “Xs and Os” song! Budweiser! Maxwell House! Netflix! Speed Stick! Frito-Lay! Palmolive! Aerosmith! But the REPLACEMENTS? Eck. “ECK?” Well COME on. Allow me to point out that it’s Paul Westerberg who never left my CD tray for TWO-FUCKING-YEARS, 2004-2005, whose 7th solo effort “Come Feel Me Tremble” was my reigning obsession for damn near a THOUSAND DAYS AND NIGHTS, breaking all kinds of records for morbid pop music fetishes, at least in the circle of drunks I ran with at the time…I know the entire album by heart, and I feel almost as strongly about “49:00 (of Your Life),” Saucy Paul’s ill-fated download-only experiment which broke ALL the rules: you’re a BASTARD, Paul! Songs fade out, maybe to return later, maybe not, while new ditties kick in at the halfway point, like to spit in your face, kinda, and “what happened to the first half of the song, Paul?” (Boy are YOU not on board here.) New Westerberg shit, and it’s HOT SHIT alright, hot fuckin SHIT but hard to make out the finer points at times since Surly Paul has 2-3-4- even 5 of these bad boys laid down one-atop-the-fucking-other, if you can even imagine such hubris, let alone the racket, as Sassy Paul comes at you like a fucking Butte Blitzkrieg (maybe Green Baby would work better there, it’s all STARKWEATHER COUNTRY to me) ultimately producing an effect which veers dangerously close to PURE NOISE, and then we have the MEGAPOP MEDLEY at the end, featuring Sonny and Cher, The Monkees, Elton John, Alice Cooper, in short bursts, you know, until THESE start playing simultaneously also, AW HAW HAW HAW, it’s the FAWKIN GREATEST THING since Anal Cunt’s “1,000 Songs” 7” EP, dontcha know. “That’s got nothing to do with The Replacements, Gene honey.” And certain tracks on “Stereo/Mono” are so good they’re…just…fucking BLISS, you know, like the finest shit ever recorded in a basement, but it wasn’t until he went RAW — “Gene…” “The Grandpa Boy shit is excellent!” “GENE.” The Replacements — “Yes?” — were mediocre. <sputtering, gagging, hacking, crying> And MAWKISH, yeah, MAWKISH is what they were. MAWK is Paul’s middle name, and he runs headfirst into that shit every single time, unless he’s secretly falling down drunk in his fucking basement churning out yet another Chilton-esque “roughie.” <small explosions in the distance, car alarms whooping and howling, lights flickering around me now. Children screaming.> OFFERCHRISSAKEWHAT. I’m TIRED of this now. That Midwestern MOPE facade, that POSE, is the EPITOME of mediocrity, and I KNOW, see, because I grew UP with the fucking shit, neck DEEP in the fucking shit. And it’s LAME, LAME, LAME. My former brother-in-law, back in 95, fronted a punk band called the Prostitutes, and it was the same gutless, bogus, “Ramones” trip, the “loser” trip, that the cretinous Replacements were on. It was a lot of the same music. It was flannel and shit beer and shit-for-brains beerhands. No one read BOOKS. Mentally retarded working class punk rock kids who live with MOM and buy cartons of Kools with coupons at the local Exxon station don’t read BOOKS. It was minimum wage HELL living with those fucking people. It was gasoline stations and road saltstains and numb fingers and toes and Scandinavian depression, it was suicidal ideation, and eating lots of toxic fucking waste at MCDONALDS, see? And I am not NOSTALGIC for starving-class post-industrial squalor. Beer drinking in the winter time? Go fuck yourself! NUKE the rust belt. NUKE the western Mid- Atlantic. NUKE the Godforsaken Midwest. (“I think I’d rather SMOTHER!” That’s what Sassy Paul sang on “I Don’t Know,” isn’t it? Well, I know, Paul. I knew that you ain’t got the guts! Not to REALLY smother, sweetheart. Personally, I’d rather SMOTHER WHILE A SUBNORMAL EXTRA LARGE JUNGLE RODENT GNAWS MY COCK OFF than live in Minnesota. THAT I KNOW!) The main problem with the Replacements’ “loser-trip” is that it’s anti-intellectual, which means it is both lazy and cowardly, and in essence no better than any other conformist trip, including the ones your family and neighbor are stuck on. This shit— and really, the bulk of 1980s punk — had different aims than the vulnerable, aggressive, and most importantly, literary underground rock which preceded it. If anything, America’s “college rock” phenomenon was a softening and a simplifying, a sugar coating, of what had developed in the squalor of CBGBs and the psychosis of The Factory. When the suburbs became part of the picture, the game was up. You don’t halfway bust out of jail anymore than you halfway rob a liquor store. It’s either revolution, or it isn’t. The Replacements just never grew up, and that’s boring. It’s horribly boring. They were never about growing up (neither were their contemporaries) and that’s idiotic. Ah, all these endearing deficiencies of the Replacements. (I think that was their original name, “The Deficients,” or something similar. Would they have even been remembered with that name?) Well, fuck that. They were a precocious bar band with limited charms, those mainly having to do with Westerberg’s lyrical flourishes, and of course, he was perfectly alright as a vocalist. By their 3rd or 4th album, The Replacements had kinda mastered “perfectly alright” as would appeal and apply to the increasing snugly wuggily-ness of US underground rock, now defined by terminally self aware charlatans like Sonic Youth. This was the emergence of “indie” and the absolute death of “punk.” (Those at the center, like Thurston Moore or J. Mascis, may recall it differently, but of course they would, wouldn’t they?) There were moments, mostly on or around 1985’s “Pleased To Meet Me,” like “Kiss me on the Bus,” “Left of the Dial,” and the rousing tribute “Alex Chilton.” These were enough to prop up a legend that at its base, was nothing more than navel-gazing slacker romanticism.