Ready To Jump Again

A Lookback At Paul Westerberg’s Stereo/Mono

Grandpaboy playing “Silent Film Star” on Dave Letterman. That’s NPG’s Michael Bland on the drums in the back.

Originally published on my brief-lived Patreon.

Five years before Bandcamp became an online hub for DIY bands and artists, who now had more access to cheap audio software and instruments than ever before (even when sound systems got boosted during the 70s blackout), and right at the peak of a New York post-punk scene delivering often self-consciously gritty rawk (bless them), a 50-year-old ex-college rock god was getting back in touch with his inner teenage musician.

By 2002, Paul Westerberg was in an even stranger place in his career than usual. After the Replacements burned out through a combination of bad luck and the musicians actively pissing away any chance of making a real hit record, Paul actively tried to pursue success as an alternative singer-songwriter. No self-sabotage, more introspection. On 90’s singles like “Runaway Wind” and “Love Untold", his sound was now somewhere between Bryan Adams and the snotty upstarts who’d aped his style. Albums 14 Songs and Eventually had some stunning tracks, while others were just…fine. (1999’s Suicaine Gratification, where he got an expensive piano and Don Was’ help to no commercial avail, has not been heard by me, but “Born For Me”, remade by the I Don’t Cares, is a wonderful little song.)

So what can a college rock legend cum sensitive songwriter cum middle aged dad to do? Well, for starters, he goes to the basement and starts tinkering around.

The songs on the twin albums Stereo (by Paul Westerberg) and Mono (by the alter ego Grandpaboy) are covered in echoes, pops, and slight hisses. “Dirt Turns To Mud” is literally cut short when the tape runs out. All of them were recorded in his basement, and they feel thrillingly, frustratingly imperfect compared to the light gloss of his previous solo work. They also have so much life and feeling to them. In Westerberg’s basement, the ballads and confessionals that make up the bulk of Stereo are stripped of any unnecessary augmentation or pretense. The devastation of his lyrics (“Just add water, I’m disappointed/Like my father I miss the point”) becomes impossible to ignore with few other instruments to distract the listener, much like John Doyle’s minimal orchestrations of Sondheim musicals.

Many of the songs on Stereo, as is often the case with Westerberg, are narrated by broken characters or addressed directly to them, offering a mix of pity, judgement, and empathy. Opener “Baby Learns To Crawl” depicts a young woman born into a miserable life through a brooding, stark kind of lo-fi anthem. (Westerberg’s solemn, spoken “Let’s go” before the move into the solo is the kind of spontaneous, exciting moment his previous albums badly needed.) But there is also the hope throughout, like “I Will Dare” and “Talent Show,” of the beautiful loser. In this incarnation of the old Christian song “Mr. Rabbit,” big dry plodding drums hit the backbeat, and “Every soul must shine” becomes an exaltation of simple, energetic grace. It’s beautiful. This also wouldn’t be a Westerberg joint without a kiss off anthem, and “Call That Gone?” is a darkly funny goodbye to an ex who won’t hit the door already. But the music, with that funny little electronic trumpet(?) and backing vocals, is also genuinely triumphant.

If Stereo is mostly comprised of Westerberg’s singer-songwriter side, the one that Bob Stinson never cared for, Bob would’ve approved of Grandpaboy’s Mono. In fact, one reviewer believed Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson is all over the album and on Stereo, making it a Replacements reunion of sorts. I haven’t seen anything confirming that Tommy is on these. But I would like to note that the credited bass player is “Zeke Pine,” and his credits on Discogs are just these albums. (Tommy Stinson, or Paul Westerberg backing himself?)

Mono is a rocket blast: a distillation of loose, romantic, drunken rock n’ roll, as perfected by the Faces, the Rolling Stones, and the ‘Mats, into 35 minutes. Westerberg and whoever else is playing sound liberated and ready to go - they’re not reinventing anything, just playing fun, fast songs with big catchy riffs. “Knock It Right Out”, the kind of scrounging, entrepreneurial rock track Berry would write (“GOT AN IDEA/GOT TO MAKE A LOT OF MONEY”), even has a big duckwalk solo, for fuck’s sake. “Silent Film Star” ended up being the song Westerberg played on Letterman, but “Let’s Not Belong Together” and “2 Days Til Tomorrow” feel like the better single choices here. What made Westerberg a darker, smarter songwriter than his eventual Goo Goo/Soul Asylum/Whiskeytown progeny is on full display during “Together” especially: “Yours is tense/Mine is dull/You take offense/I take a full minute just to notice.” The Grandpaboy moniker hints at the unique quality of these records: a guy writing and taping ramshackle, limber rock songs typically about middle age, relationships, and wisdom.

The albums were released together as Stereo/Mono on Vagrant Records, with Stereo as the second disc, so “Call That Gone?” was listed as the last track on the album. However, the hidden track, a cover of “Postcards From Paradise” by Flesh for Lulu, is really what finishes this whole experiment. The version Westerberg sets up has stripped the more glossy original of it’s harmonica, dual vocals, and fat keyboard sound. This is a guy playing with his buddies. It’s a little slow and it lurches, like the band has only played it together two or three times, and you could interpret it as a pisstake on the sort of 1980s rock radio track the Replacements tried to do with “I’ll Be You,” one that barely missed the top 40.

But I read the cover a number of ways. Not just as a tribute to Flesh for Lulu, another strong Stones-influenced alternative band, who, like the Replacements, didn’t quite make it, but as a middle-aged rocker channeling a younger man’s swooning music and lyrics (“So I fell under your spell/and I lay where I fell”), remembering the part of him that once scribbled “Within Your Reach” and “Skyway” in fits of sheer, irrepressible yearning.

When Westerberg sings, with a happy whine,

“There goes love again
seven day wondering
out on the ledge again
and you’re ready to jump again
here comes temptation,
dragging me out again”

it’s like he’s tapping back into those heady, passionate feelings for the first time in years, and the result is overwhelmingly powerful. Throughout Stereo and Mono, Westerberg chooses to take that plunge, to take a risk with his songs, recording for the sake of raw, spontaneous emotion. And every time I put it on, I’m ready to jump again, right alongside him.

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