Dreams Unfulfilled: The Replacements & the Tragedy of 'Tim'
Things could have been so much different.
I was all jacked up to write about Tim: Let It Bleed Edition, the startling new box set that includes a miracle remix of the Replacements’ best album that was released on September 22, 2023.
The hardback 12” square box set includes a vinyl copy of Ed Stasium’s new mix, an impressive set on liner notes, and four CDs that include the new mix, a remastered (and vastly improved) version of Tommy Erdelyi’s original 1985 mix, a CD of bonus tracks and demos, and a live show from the Chicago Metro.
And then, Tim disappeared.
Tragedy, Pt. 1
Unfortunately, that box set never made it to a large number of independent record stores and is currently unavailable from Amazon, the Rhino online store, Rough Trade online store, or Barnes and Noble. You can find a few copies on eBay or Discogs.com, with either huge markups over the $89.98 list price or eye-watering shipping charges from countries like Poland or Spain.
Tim: Let It Bleed Edition was effectively out of print less than a week after its release date, and this is a reissue that got more press than anything the band has ever put out, with universal raves and even a rare 10/10 review at Pitchfork.
Wait, you say, anyone can listen to the music as much as they’d like on Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, or Spotify.
That may work for some listeners, but it destroys the pleasure of a trip to the record store for the rest of us. The label industry has broken a decades-long contract between fans and musicians. If you heard a new song on radio, you could reasonably expect to go down to the local record shop or Sears Roebuck and pick up a copy for yourself. The record companies would manufacture as many LPs, cassettes or CDs as necessary to keep up with the demand and everyone would make money.
Now, there’s no assurance that any new release will ever make it to stores and there seem to be an unlimited number of color variations and special editions that are designed to get fans to buy as many copies as possible of the exact same music .
Worst of all, there’s zero transparency about how many copies of any title were manufactured and how many more versions might be in the pipeline for release at a future date. If you bust your tail to get that sparkle purple edition of a new LP, what’s to stop the label from releasing a fluorescent orange version next week or, even worse, making more copies of your formerly rare purple version?
Tim: Let It Bleed Edition is a particularly weird version of this phenomenon. There are folks who would’ve loved to buy a four-CD box set edition of this reissue and plenty of kids who are baffled by the CDs that jack up the price when they just want the vinyl.
Will Rhino press more copies of this box set? Release a vinyl-only edition of the new remix? Will there be a four-LP version at some point? Will you be able to buy just CDs? Don’t ask an independent retailer, because he or she will have no idea whether they’ll ever see the music again, and they’re likely to let you know just how frustrated they are about the information blackout.
The worst part of this situation is that people read the positive reviews and decide to make their first trip to the record store in months (or years) to pick up their own personal copy. Once there, they’re shocked to encounter a clerk who can’t tell them why the music is not in stock and when they might be able to buy it. Anyone raised on Tower Records is likely to blame the retailer for being too dumb to stock the music, because who would ever believe the reality?
Artists and fans should demand transparency. How many copies of a new album are being pressed? Will there be multiple colors coming later? We’re never going back to the era of labels that have regional market reps and street teams, but there has to be a better way to communicate with retailers about new releases and which titles a label is certain will generate a demand.
Finally, artists have to release their stranglehold on direct sales. Yes, your most devoted fans will put in advance orders six months in advance when you send them a solicitation email, but you’ll never grow your fan base unless you reach out to the broader music audience.
Record retailers are still a valuable way to reach potential listeners, perhaps the best one left after the locally-programmed radio disappeared and took down the music ecosystems those stations created.
Since everyone can still stream the music, we’ll move on here and talk about Tim, but I promise the CDs sound better than Spotify and the box set’s liner notes are essential. If you love this LP as much as I do, you want a physical copy.
(Update: As I was about to publish this newsletter, third-party sellers have started to make “Tim: Let It Bleed” edition available on Amazon, suggesting that a few dealers were hoarding copies in hopes that a panic would drive prices up sky high. Since you can now find a copy at just below list price, maybe demand wasn’t quite that high.)
Tragedy Pt. 2
Tim could have been one of the biggest breakout albums of the ‘80s, speeding up the 1991 alt rock overthrow by half a decade and causing a branch in the timeline. If Tim had gone gold, Pleased to Meet Me would’ve sounded a lot different and the band might not have taken such a mellow turn later in the decade.
There would have been a rush to sign American underground bands, so Green River would have gotten signed and we’d have no Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, or Mother Love Bone albums because those bands wouldn’t have needed to exist. There would have been a far greater opportunity for bands like Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ to get international acclaim if the Replacements had done it first. Game Theory would have been on Warner Bros. and the Dream Syndicate would’ve gotten another shot at A&M instead of getting banished to indie label hell at Big Time.
Does a new set of mixes really make such a radical case for Tim and the Replacements?
The answer is an unequivocal yes. Lots of us loved the album in 1985 because songs like “Bastards of Young,” “Left of the Dial,” “Here Comes a Regular,” and “Little Mascara” captured the conflicting ideas yearning and hopelessness, opportunity and failure as well as any band ever had. There also wasn’t a dud on the album, which a new development for a band that was notorious for its filler tracks and an achievement they’d never match again.
Underground rock fans who were used to independent albums recorded on microbudgets were better able to hear past the muck of the original mix and embrace the songs. The rest of the world just heard the muck.
Ed Stasium somehow managed to approach the record in the context of its original era, filtering out all the advancements in recording and changes in taste of the past four decades to mix the record in the style he would have used in 1985.
And the results are shocking. There is a clarity I would have thought impossible in these new mixes and the performances are far better than any the band delivered on its other records. Even “Dose of Thunder” and “Lay It Down Clown” are far more nuanced songs than the hard rock throwaways they seemed to be on the original mix.
The new remix reveals that Tim is nearly a perfect record. The band’s greatest songs are matched with outstanding arrangements and performances that demonstrate that the band was able to answer the bell when given the opportunity to expand its audience. Ed Stasium has uncovered a masterpiece, one of the best records of its era.
A few decades of experience would lead me to suggest doubling a couple of guitar parts, beefing up some back vocals and (possibly) adding some keyboard pads in a few places. That’s ultimately some minor producer/A&R tweaking, suggestions that might have been ignored at the time and maybe shouldn’t be taken seriously today.
I realize a few people who lived through that moment won’t like these new mixes, no matter how much better they are. They still have the newly remastered version of the original mixes on this box set, and Apple Music has left up the original version for hardcore originalists. That’s a minor victory for the historical record in an era when new and not necessarily better remasters replace beloved versions of catalog albums every single week.
God, What a Mess on the Ladder of Success
I visited Minneapolis during the summer of 1985. Hüsker Dü was looking for someone to work in the band’s office and I stayed with Bob Mould for a few days while I got a feel for the city. I ultimately went back to Boston because all the skyways made me realize just how cold Minnesota was going to be in January. While I was there, I had a chance to visit Nicollet Studios during the Tim sessions.
Steve Fjelstad was engineering Tim and also mixing Flip Your Wig (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) after recording the album for Hüsker Dü. This was really my first time in a professional recording studio environment and I learned a lot.
The vibe between Paul and Tommy Erdelyi was weird. I was meeting Tommy Ramone for the first time and he was a cranky old man. Paul was sullen and seemed incredibly bummed. Of course, the fact that Bob Stinson wasn’t really participating in the recording session may have contributed to the overall mood.
Based on that vibe, I’d always figured that the weird mix on Tim was a salvage job from a recording session that had gone very wrong. Now we know that wasn’t the case.
The other thing I remember from that trip (aside from being my first time eating exclusively vegetarian meals for several days in a row) are those Flip Your Wig mix sessions. I was blown away by Steve’s rough mixes. Unfortunately, Bob didn’t hear the tracks the way that Steve did and cranked up the ride cymbals in a way that laid that signature Hüsker Dü high-end sizzle across the entire track.
A few years of experience suggest to me that Bob might have blown out the top of his hearing onstage and that he was overcompensating for what he could no longer hear when he turned up the high end. Now that I’ve heard these proper Tim mixes and have remembered my Flip Your Wig experience, I’m thinking that Steve Fjelstad is massively underrated and could have played a far bigger role in the alternative producer scene if people had only heard his work at its best.
Here’s something else I remember: My second big experience in a recording studio was in Los Angeles during the Redd Kross mixing sessions for Neurotica (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), in early 1987 at George Tobin Studios in North Hollywood. The studio staff was mocking George because he was producing and managing a teen singer who turned out to be Tiffany. By the end of the year, her cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now” (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) had gone to #1 in both the USA and the UK, so I guess George won that round but Tobin later lost the war after word got out that he had signed Tiffany to a particularly onerous contract before she left him behind.
Anyway, I remember hearing that Tommy was mixing the album himself after firing recording engineer Randy Burns because Randy’s mixes had been too clean. Burns had gotten his start as an engineer with the 1981 Los Angeles punk compilation Hell Comes to Your House, recording every song on the LP except for the one by Red Cross (a/k/a Redd Kross before they got sued and/or threatened by the charity and had to change their name).
Burns engineered the debut album for Suicidal Tendencies and had worked with both Megadeth and Stryper. Randy was one of the few L.A. studio guys comfortable with both metal and punk rock. Also, Jeff and Steve McDonald were either rabid Michael Sweet and Stryper fans that year, or were having a blast pretending that they were.
The point of this digression is that Randy Burns mixes of Neurotica might have given the record a shot with the RCA promo staff who were responsible for pitching Big Time Records to local radio stations around the country. I learned a lot when I got to make a couple of road trips to the local branch in Seattle and corporate headquarters in NYC to play the record for RCA brass. They thought everything sounded weird, and that was that.
(I went back and checked the above story with someone else who was around for that mixing session, and he didn’t remember the details that I did. That doesn’t mean things didn’t happen the way I remember them, and I’m not sure I knew enough about studio politics to have jumped to any conclusions about the situation, which makes me think my story is an accurate one. As always, I’m open to correction from someone with a better memory than mine.)
Tommy Erdelyi is no longer here to defend his mixes, and I’m sure there are a few Ramones fans who don’t want to hear that his ears may have been shot. At this point, I’ll credit an Ed Stasium/Tommy Erdelyi collaboration for the sound of that incredible 1977-78 run of Ramones LPs: Leave Home (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), Rocket to Russia (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), and Road to Ruin (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify).
Not Making Sense
If the Tim reissue is a mystery, the Talking Heads Stop Making Sense remaster is a disaster. The band have come together to promote the newly remastered version of their 1984 concert film and garnered the most press attention they’ve received in decades.
As previously discussed here, Jerry Harrison and engineer 'Eric ‘E.T.’ Thorngren remixed the concert for the new release and the results are fantastic.
See also: ‘Stop Making Sense’: Still the Greatest Concert Film Ever
You can stream the new mix (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), but you can’t buy a physical copy. There was a vinyl-only reissue in August, but that’s completely out of print at this point. You can track down copies on eBay or Discogs.com if you’re willing to pay two or three times the list price, but Rhino has let the title go out of print for retail sellers.
Will there be a CD or SACD included with a future 4K, Blu-ray or DVD release of the movie? No one outside of the record company really knows. At a moment when the band is enjoying its highest profile ever, casual fans cannot buy a copy of the album and retailers are left to deal with the fallout when they make a rare trip to the store and find out there’s nothing to buy.
If labels want to support the retail community, they could keep popular titles in print and tell the store owners when sold-out titles will be getting a new pressing. Record Store Day has been a great way to draw attention to brick-and-mortar retail, but that’s only two days a year. Give retailers the information they need. Open communication would be far more valuable to stores than any exclusive vinyl color.