Paul Westerberg - Shaking & Trembling

The same can probably be said for the film. It’s shot mostly by fans who came to see Westerberg last summer on his first tour in six years, and it’s no mere nostalgia trip. Save for a few nuggets from The Replacements’ latter years, the live footage focuses primarily on songs from Westerberg’s solo career, and also shows him at work on some of the new songs that make up the soundtrack to Come Feel Me Tremble.

Watching a frozen Westerberg try to compose songs in his cramped Minneapolis basement studio looks like an outtake from a Marx Brothers’ comedy and should dispel any starry-eyed romantic notions about songwriting.

So what began as a tour diary eventually blossomed into a full-length film that, Westerberg says, owes as much to Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back as it does to the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter.

“We had no idea we were making a movie while we were making one,” Westerberg says. “The T-shirt man was shooting on the nights he didn’t have to sell T-shirts. In fact, the only professional shooting was done on the last night of the tour, and my voice was shot that night so we wound up using very little of that footage.”

Together with veteran rock video and filmmaker Rick Fuller, Westerberg (working under the pseudonym “Otto Zithromax”) put out a call for videotape and photos from fans who attended the tour, then funneled the avalanche of submissions into a manageable workload.

A month later they had an early print Westerberg sent to his friend, filmmaker Cameron Crowe. He then waited anxiously for a reply from the director. “I was about to start thinking, ‘Oh, man, he must think it sucks,’ when he called me up and told me it was brilliant, and he couldn’t believe how good it was, and I was about 10 feet tall for an afternoon.”

There was reason to celebrate. Come Feel Me Tremble is as much a portrait of Westerberg’s fans — and what his music means to them — as it is about the artist himself. In sing-alongs across the country, at bookstore signings and post-show meet-and-greets outside the tour bus — the overwhelming vibe is one of unconditional love.

Songs like “Pine Box,” off the Tremble soundtrack, won’t do anything to diminish the attraction. A five-minute slice of slide-guitar-powered swamp-boogie, the song is a thunderous bolt of energy that should humble musicians half his age mining the same territory. It’s one of several fierce rockers, including the intriguing “Knockin’ ’Em Back,” a mix of gentle, vintage swing-jazz chords played over the verses — “I’m drinkin’, drinkin’ again / Just to help the pills kick in” — that eventually explodes into a punkish raunch-rock chorus somewhere between The Ramones and Rolling Stones at the height of their respective powers.

It’s a tune that pits Westerberg’s black humor against his self-destructive demons (“I want to let the bad guys win,” goes one verse), a tactic sure to fuel the never-ending rumors he’s back on the sauce. But if there’s one thing he’s reluctantly come to terms with over the years, it’s that no amount of evidence will dissuade some people from believing whatever they want.