Listen to an Unreleased Live Version of The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young”

“We are the sons of no one, bastards of young.”

It’s 1986 and you’re at the rock club Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J.—in its prime. The year before, parts of the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” were filmed there. A few years later, Nirvana graces the stage supporting their debut album Bleach. If this sounds at all familiar to you (or by chance, if you were there) you probably had no idea that in the approaching millennium, Justin Timberlake would film parts of a commercial at Maxwell’s, and most things that you knew and loved in Gen X would become XXX commodified. By that time, The Replacements would be famous.

Today’s new live version of “Bastards of Young” is from a forthcoming album For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986, due out Oct. 6 via Rhino. The magic of The Replacements, at least from a historical perspective, is that they sprinkled internal drama with self-sabotage and show screw-ups, ensuring an authentic distance from the mainstream (they were announced as one of the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees, but they were not inducted). Their music bridged the gap of punk rock and what came to be known as alt rock by infusing catchier lyrics and triumphant musicality—a little bit of pop.