The Replacements
Hootenanny

THE REVIEW

"In college I was in a rock band and dreamed of being the new Paul Westerberg". 

This phrase that Bret Easton Ellis, the most important contemporary American writer, has the protagonist of one of his most famous novels say, perfectly illustrates how fundamental the Replacements have been in the American cultural and social fabric, even without ever achieving mass success. Who knows what Bob Stinson, the original guitarist and soul of the Mats, who died in solitude in 1995 due to chemical and alcohol abuse, would have said if he had been told this anecdote in one of the last days of his life, when he wandered drunk through the bars of Minneapolis entertaining the bystanders with memories of when the punk flame warmed the icy winters in Minnesota. "Intellectual nonsense", probably.

Restlessness, alienation, anger, disenchantment. This is rock, and few have epitomized it like the Replacements.

 "Hootenanny" of 1983 is the album of maturity for the Stinson brothers' band, the work that liberates them from the tight confines of the Minneapolis hardcore scene. Take everything you like about the Mats: the raucous and irreverent punk energy, certain swaggering and ambiguous 70s rock forms taken from the New York Dolls, the desperate lyricism that Westerberg began to channel into perfect songs, the rough and robust guitar work - heavily borrowed from the hard seventies of Kiss - with which Bob Stinson added a steel edge to everything. Well, here you find it all perfectly mixed in a magical balance, in a journey that often does not fail to caress unexpected Byrdsian shores ("Treatment bound") and roots (the title track). It's no coincidence the album was treated as a betrayal by hardcore purists, especially since it was released after the incendiary EP "Stink" (which Steve Albini considers one of his main production influences). But it wasn't an abjuration, rather a simple evolution. Not that there were no fragments of supersonic rides on "Hootenanny" (from the alcoholic-rockabilly groans of "Take me to the hospital" to the caustic accelerations of "You lose" and "Run it"), but by then Westerberg was transforming into a fine craftsman of timeless adolescent melodies and vignettes, and the group accompanied him perfectly by expanding the sonic material being dealt with.

Three tracks give "Hootenanny" the stature of a classic, among the very best in Paul's songbook. The bittersweet folk gem "Color me impressed" is the archetype of all subsequent college-rock, with an enchanting melodic line nestled in the tough shell of Husker Du, who would have gladly pilfered a track like that for their "Warehouse: Songs and stories". Much of the successful "Tim" from 1985 - considered by many the creative peak of the Mats - mirrors its model, with the difference that if on that album Stinson is an impalpable presence, by then devoured by the heroin that would distance him from the group, here it is his fiery six-string that gives greater light to Westerberg's masterful writing, in two minutes and twenty-five seconds of anthology.

"Stayin' out late tonight
Won't be gettin' any sleep
Givin' out their word
Cuz that's all that they won't keep"

"Within your reach" is instead a surprisingly striking number: a typically 80s synth, an atmospheric keyboard running through Westerberg's hoarse confessions, with a drop of early U2 pomposity. But it is in "Willpower", boosted by a bass line from Tommy Stinson, as simple as it is insidious, that the Mats outdo themselves: a wrenching and cold ride in the ghostly suburbs of Minneapolis, among brilliant and wild psychedelic drifts that would inspire the edge of plagiarism in R.E.M.'s "Oddfellows Local 151" or "I remember California" and Westerberg raising his cry in a sparse and desolate text, showing despair and vulnerability in equal measure. The best prelude to the monumental "Let it Be", which a year later would definitively inscribe the name Replacements among the legends of the 80s.