Pages tagged “tommy stinson”

When head (ex-)Replacement Paul Westerberg found out that country star Glen Campbell covered the Minnesota band's "Sadly Beautiful" on August's Meet Glen Campbell, he called his manager. "'Tell Glen I'll be his next Jimmy Webb,'" Westerberg said, according to The Guardian. Webb, who penned hits like "Up, Up, and Away" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" for Campbell, now performs his own songs and recently released live record Live and at Large.

The beautiful thing about rock ’n’ roll is that whenever your faith waivers or you become the least bit jaded, along comes someone unexpected to restore balance. Tonight in Atlanta, at candle-lit venue Smith’s Olde Bar, it’s Tommy Stinson.

After rocking out in various acoustic, electric and pedal-steel duo incarnations, the former Replacements bassist declares, “I’m getting a drink. You can come with me if you want.” And sonofabitch if he’s not dead serious. Acoustic guitar in hand, Stinson steps off the stage into the crowd, saunters over to the bartender and orders himself a stiff drink. He takes a long slug, hops up, plants himself on the bar and starts strumming a few chords. “I’m a lot more comfortable up here,” he says. Then, unexpectedly, he breaks into Loudon Wainwright's "One Man Guy." The few people chatting it up across the room are instantly silent, and the crowd draws closer, forming a semicircle around the impromptu troubador. When the chorus comes around, the club becomes a drunken, late-night living room singalong. Stinson plays another unplugged tune, just sitting there on the bar amidst old Atlanta friends, fans and recent converts. It’s music in its purest form—for a lucid moment, stripped of all pretension.

Suddenly, a ghostly sound emerges. Opener Ken Will Morton—who proved a hell of a songsmith himself, spilling inspiring, whip-smart ballads full of social commentary, heartbreak and beauty—materializes from the crowd blowing sweet, lonesome harp. Stinson welcomes him to the bar and they jam a bit before finishing the song. Finally, Stinson returns to the stage, fully amplified to close the show.

Earlier, he’d played a heartfelt cover of his beloved Big Star and now he finishes with an encore from his days fronting Bash & Pop. Inevitably, someone calls for a Replacements tune, totally missing the point and all Stinson has to offer on this mild winter night in Atlanta. “Paul’s still around to play those songs,” Stinson says of his former bandmate, Paul Westerberg. “There’s no point in us both doing it.”

Before going out solo in a hazy blast of dim blue light, Stinson pours his soul onto the stage in front of a room of people happy to share a moment of transcendence—isn’t this why we listen to music in the first place?

After the show—though I almost never do this—with a cheap beer buzz surging through my veins, I wait in line with the other fans for an autograph. I tell Tommy I enjoyed the show, that I write for Paste, and that we did a story on him last year when his solo debut Village Gorilla Head came out. I tell him I wasn’t planning on writing about the show tonight but that I was so moved I felt I had to. With a sly grin, Tommy extends a hearty handshake and signs the back of the napkin on which I’d scribbled my thoughts about his performnance. I say goodbye and stagger toward the staircase, pulling the memento from my pocket as soon as I’m out of sight. With anticipation, I unfold the note and start reading:

All Lies. Tommy.

Rat bastard. Well, what did I expect? Punk rock to the core.

Because we record geeks so deeply lament the demise of our beloved Replacements, it’s a bit difficult to hear Tommy Stinson say that he was actually quite ready to move on when frontman Paul Westerberg bailed for a solo career in the early ’90s. Selfishly, we want him to remember the band’s end as being anguishing, crippling. He must have nearly drank himself to death or done equal amounts of soul-searching and coke, right?

It stings just a bit when he says he was actually so prepared for the band’s collapse that he’d already taken demos for a new band, Bash & Pop, to Warner Bros., who then released Friday Night Is Killing Me.

Twenty-four when the ’Mats split, Stinson remembers being hopeful and excited by his professional future. “I had confidence that I had some kind of talent and had been a big enough part of [The Replacements] that I would be able to pull from it to some degree,” he says.

Yet Friday Night turned out to be B&P’s only release, and his next band, Perfect, went nowhere after a five-song EP for Restless dubbed When Squirrels Play Chicken. By 1997, he was again without a band. Stinson’s friend, celebrated drummer Josh Freese — then a member of Guns N’ Roses — half-jokingly suggested that he try out for the bass gig in G’n’R, as Duff McKagan was on his way out. A heartbeat later, Stinson was in the band, ready to decompress and sort of slip back into a more anonymous role as a backup player.

“I was kind of beaten up, I was kind of thinking in my head, ‘I think I want to just play in a band for a while, just get out of this. I’ve been working at [trying to get a new band off the ground] since I got [to L.A.], and it’s been fun, and it’s been good and it’s been bad all at once. But I’m tired and beat up.’ So, really, for the first year I was in Guns N’ Roses, the only thing I did was play Guns N’ Roses music and write music with them.”

Some six years and scores of unheard G’N’R tracks later, it’s as if it’s 1993 all over again. Having recently wrapped work on Village Gorilla Head, a solo debut on a label (Sanctuary) that’s actually enthusiastic about working with him, Stinson’s career is once again full of promise. The album is full of the Faces- and T. Rex-style ballads and the rockers ’Mats fans love and expect from Stinson. There’s the strummy, top-shelf ballad “Hey You,” bearing a vague reggae influence, the snotty, garage-y tune “Motivation,” and the danceable, stoned-out title track that could serve as a Xanax jingle in a cooler universe.

After experiments with a Pro Tools knockoff called Logic congealed into a set of songs, Stinson asked Pixies main man Frank Black, a friend of a friend, if he could borrow Black’s studio while he was on the road with his group, the Catholics.

“I think I asked him if he’d let me rent his space and his gear for the time they were gone,” Stinson says. “He basically just said, ‘No, you can use it. All you have to do is pay my guy ’cause he’s gonna be sitting there anyway.’ At that point, it was like, ‘Wow! You mean, all I have to do is pay for the engineer?’ So I pulled all of my money out of savings.”

Once again, Stinson’s enjoying a healthy dose of optimism. “I feel like I’ve finally gotten to a place where I can almost distance myself enough from The Replacements to be starting over and, also, I feel really fortunate to be in the spot where I am,” he notes, adding with a laugh, “The world looks like it’s my oyster right now.”