It’s now abundantly clear, both in sound and performance, that Tim is really among the best albums ever recorded…ex post facto. It’s the apex of the Mats, how they should have sounded, how they did sound, how they should be remembered sounding. As diverse as it is dynamic, Tim is full of diamond-sharp songs about the mess of young love, old love, loneliness, dead-end jobs, amphetamines, and alcohol. Rarely does a remix raise a crucial epistemological question about a small Midwestern rock band who would stumble through a bunch of pop and country covers if the audience asked them to play their “pussy set,” but here we are: Should this new remix be considered the real and definitive version of Tim?
Like the CIA one day revealing who really and definitively killed Kennedy, I’d argue it’s complicated. Here is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Replacements: They were drunks and losers because their press releases said they were drunks and losers. So they wore the mask, played the clowns, and became lost in the version of themselves that got banned from SNL, didn’t play ball with the label, showed up wrecked to gigs, put out a mix of Tim that the band themselves didn’t much like, sabotaged their career at every turn, and by the late ’80s softly melted into a Westerberg solo project. Even if Westerberg thought he could be as big as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones—or even contemporaries who caught major label deals like R.E.M.—there was always some Midwestern fatalism dragging him down. He led a band caught in a perpetual cycle of fear, self-loathing, drinking, and destruction that amassed a cult fan base who loved them precisely because of this cycle. If you saw a Mats show, you knew they weren’t ever going to be superstars, but a part of you knew that the Mats were right and everyone else was wrong.
The reason this Let It Bleed Edition tastes bittersweet is not because of what should’ve been, but what could never have been. The box set—which also features a re-mastering of the original mix, demos from an aborted session with Westerberg’s hero, Big Star’s Alex Chilton, a pretty good live set recorded at Chicago’s Metro, and extensive liner notes from Mats biographer, archivist, and compatriot Bob Mehr—is another path not taken by a band defined by and loved for its wrong decisions. The Replacements were so innately talented and alluring that they should have been playing arenas and climbing the charts every year, but then they wouldn’t have been the Replacements. Tim, especially this remix of Tim, offers a painful glimpse at a butterfly effect, one where the Mats were maybe slightly more put-together, had a slightly larger audience, and Westerberg was slightly more recognized as one of the best songwriters of his generation.
