Paul Westerberg - Shaking & Trembling

Paul Westerberg has to remind people he’s now been out of The Replacements longer than he was in the band. But it’s a measure of the great emotional distance he’s traveled since then that the man who used to bite — no, make that maul — the hand that fed him has learned to peacefully coexist with both the past and his chosen career path. So much so, in fact, that this fall may eventually go down as the high point of his career. He released his touching and revealing documentary, Come Feel Me Tremble, as well as two records of all new material — the soundtrack to Tremble, which is full of Replacements-worthy songs, and Dead Man Shake, a low-down, dirty blues record from his mythic, rock-star alter-ego, Grandpaboy.

Believe it or not, this is the same Westerberg who threw the master tapes from The Replacements’ Twin/Tone catalogue into the Mississippi River and gleefully sabotaged any opportunity his band had to impress the people who signed its paychecks. But The Replacements always were about contradictions.

“For us to succeed would have been to fail,” Westerberg says of his old band in one of the film’s telling moments. “It was our job to fail, and on as big a scale as possible.”

But The Replacements, and Westerberg in particular, were too talented to fail in any meaningful sense (yes, they even failed at failing). Their exploits are the stuff of rock ’n’ roll legend, and their leader is widely recognized as the voice of a disenfranchised generation, a pivotal post-punk songwriter.

But Westerberg’s challenge as a solo artist has been to loose the songwriting genie responsible for the beautifully damaged music The Replacements made — without repeating the same missteps that nearly led to career and personal suicide.

“I think my goal now is just to entertain,” says the 43-year-old singer-songwriter, at home in Minneapolis, “whether it’s card tricks or just to keep people guessing. The fact that I’m having a blues record and a soundtrack and a movie all coming out on each other’s heels — that’s the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to do.”

He concedes the timing of the three releases was just a happy accident. “If we would have planned it this way, it would never have happened,” he laughs.