WHERE DID THAT QUARTER CENTURY GO? [profanity alert]:

As is the case with any impassioned faith-based group, opinion amongst ardent Replacements fans regarding what constitutes their best work is vocal and fractious. Many contend that the 'Mats never improved upon their seminal 1984 indie swan song Let It Be, while others believe that despite slipshod production and faintly ridiculous artwork, Paul Westerberg never put together a better group of songs than on the band's 1985 major label debut Tim. Certainly no one would be wrong by asserting either of those classics as the finest record the band ever made. But for a small minority of diehards, the patented formula of big hooks, boozy raunch, and lonely midnight-hour laments never got better than on Pleased To Meet Me, released on 7/7/1987, 25 years ago.

Seemingly by design, every single year was an ordeal for the Replacements, but even by their established standard of practiced professional incompetence, the period leading up to Pleased To Meet Me was a mess. Having made the jump to the big leagues, the 'Mats proceeded to demolish commercial ambitions with the same studied attention to detail that their contemporaries R.E.M. impeccably used to build a mass audience. Despite its slow-building brilliance, Tim received only a lukewarm commercial reception, while the band introduced themselves to mainstream America with a not-atypically addled performance on Saturday Night Live. Founding member and lead guitarist Bob Stinson was fired by Westerberg and Stinson's own younger brother Tommy. The explanation that Bob had simply become too unreliable in his excesses seemed at once plausible and ironic. Stinson WAS unreliable -- he could show up at gigs too drunk to play, or miss them altogether, leaving the roadie to play his parts. But then, it wasn't like this was Barney Gumble stumbling into Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers -- Bob had always been the wildcard in a band filled with jokers. For years after Bob was dismissed, and until the band's final rueful end, they were never much more then a 50/50 proposition in terms of a live act. Catch them on the right night and you might never see a better show. Catch them on the wrong one and it was difficult to imagine these individuals had ever played together. No one even seemed to know the songs. Intoxicants were a factor.

For many, the band would never be the same minus Bob Stinson's sad clown act and over-the-top lead playing, which often pushed Westerberg's soaring anthems into the ecstatic. Clearly, though, the Replacements were heading ostensibly in a more refined direction. For their follow-up, they decamped to a kind of spiritual home base: Ardent Studios in Memphis, where they would record with legendary producer Jim Dickinson, who in the previous decade had produced the three classic albums by Westerberg's heroes Big Star. It is seems fair to say that the affinity the Replacements felt for Big Star was a product not only of musical admiration, but a sense of living through the same thing trajectory. It had begun to seem that their surpassingly great music would never quite be the fashion of the time, and that the delicate, diffident nature of the personalities involved might be the final blow to any chance of being genuine hit makers.

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