Blood on the Tracks: Remixing The Replacements’ Tim

Rarely has an anthem of such defiant ambivalence thundered from your speakers as “Bastards of Young.”

And never has that thunder resounded with such sonic precision and clarity as it does on the new, improved, remixed, remastered, sparkling and spanking expansion of the 1985 album by The Replacements— the four-CD, single-LP Tim: Let It Bleed Edition. With a list price of ninety bucks—including a fully annotated and illustrated booklet–it’s like a coffee-table collectible from a band who sneered at such gentrification, whose reckless volatility suggested that if they were going to scale that ladder of success, they would have to be dragged there kicking and screaming.

As everyone knows, The Replacements coulda been a contender. Shoulda been.  The hooks for the hits were there, so was the spirit, and so was the backstory of how this ramshackle Minneapolis band came together. But if they fell short of the top rungs on that ladder of success, it was largely their own damn fault. And their own damn ambivalence, as if they would have to sell a piece of their collective soul to scale the heights that a major-label contract made possible. 

“The goal became simplistic and unrealistic, which was to have a hit. And that’s where we died. We weren’t made of the stuff that makes popular music,” reflects songwriting frontman Paul Westerberg in Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements. It’s as illuminating a rock biography as you’d ever hope to read—a slapstick tragedy of a band too cool or scared or drunk or dysfunctional or something to fly that close to the sun.

Whether they were Icarus or Peter Pan, few bands have ever seemed so obsessed with success—as in avoiding it.  To want it too much might mean it would hurt too much when you didn’t achieve it, when the big-league competition showed you weren’t quite good enough. Or at least not focused or disciplined enough. Maybe it’s easier not to care. Not to grow up. Not to worry about families or finances or the future or any of the other pressures that maturity might bring. 

VIDEO: The Replacements “Bastards of Young”

So, “Bastards of Young” would prove to be self-fulfilling prophecy. Not that the album “missed the whole first rung,” but even those of us who championed Tim sensed that there was something a little odd about it, a little off-kilter.  It sounded a little woozy. So typical of the ‘Mats, whose ID tag on Twitter/X remains “Getting it all wrong since 1979.” The album sounded wrong somehow, slipshod and muffled, like it was recorded in a closet, or individual closets for each of the four bandmates, as if those great songs had to battle their way through a wall of haze. 

And many of those songs were truly great, as melodic as they were propulsive, with even a hint of that dreaded maturity. The bittersweet side closers, “Swingin’ Party” and “Here Comes a Regular” signaled a reflectiveness never suggested by the band’s slam-bang, punk-rock origins.  Beyond “Bastards of Young,” “Hold My Life,” “Little Mascara” and other soon-to-be signature tunes seemed destined to be hits, at least in a better world than this.  

Producing the band’s major-label debut was Tommy Erdelyi, aka Tommy Ramone, who seemed like a kindred punk-rock spirit, with close ties to the Sire label and its owner Seymour Stein.  He had often teamed with Ed Stasium, but Steve Fjelstad served as engineer here, providing some hometown continuity in the band’s recording career. The studio sessions seemed to go fine and the material was first-rate. The band’s dynamic teetered along its typical edge between craft and chaos.

Yet the album as released sounded a little, uh, off. Erdelyi maintained that the mix reflected his vision for the album, that it was purposeful. Others said that Erdelyi (who died in 2014) had hearing issues, that he had mixed the tapes on headphones, that he was a good producer but not much of a post-production mixer.  The band themselves never liked it much, thought it fell short of capturing their collective power.  But it was released as Erdelyi had mixed it, and once it was out, it was on to the next. And then the next, and the next, and pretty soon the major-label deal was done. So was the band. 

Early on, there had been talk, or at least assumptions, that Stasium would also be involved in Tim. His association with Erdelyi and their work with the Ramones made him the natural candidate for this deluxe-edition remix. He was someone with plenty of shared experience who might provide a steadier corrective to the shaky mix of the original, but who wouldn’t want to look like he was throwing his former production partner under the bus. 

Yes, Stasium says in his booklet notes on the project, he would have mixed it differently than Erdelyi had, and he was a little mystified by some of the decisions that the producer had made. But his mix isn’t what he would have done then, “because I’ve evolved in so many ways.” As has music, and production technique and studio technology. As have the Replacements and the public’s appreciation of their legacy. Tim’s original mix might sound more like a period piece, an ‘80s production, but there’s little question that the new mix sounds brighter and punchier to contemporary ears. 

“In the end, I really loved working on this project, and I’m incredibly excited about how it came out,” he writes. “It’s a great record. And now you can hear even better what’s great about it. But the best thing for me was that in a funny and really beautiful way I got to work with my dear friend Tommy Erdelyi again.”

We can’t change history–can we? But the miracle of modern remixing can offer an alternative history, a parallel universe—one in which that album didn’t suffer from any post-production misfire. In this parallel universe, the band, the production and the material were firing on all cylinders, and the whole album became more powerful and galvanizing than its considerable parts.  Yeah, only four decades too late, but in our parallel universe, it’s back then, right now, and Tim: Let It Bleed Edition sounds like the album where the band known for getting it all wrong got everything right. 

Maybe, in this parallel universe, the band might even have achieved with Tim what Nirvana subsequently would with Nevermind. (Okay, bad example, because that band would find the ladder of success even more tragic, a fate no one would have wanted for the Replacements.)

Tim: Let It Bleed Edition is the latest and greatest in the series of deluxe-set Replacements reissues that biographer Mehr has co-produced (as well as providing the liner notes context). In their own way, these boxed-set expansions are as illuminating as Trouble Boys, though they have met with a little more pushback than the universally-acclaimed biography.  Not surprising when you’ve got a band so fiercely beloved, and an album that played such a pivotal role in their “beautiful loser” mythos. By changing the mix, you’re changing the narrative.  What if the band so celebrated for shooting itself in the foot (repeatedly) becomes one whose aim was true? It was the loose-cannon mix that did them in. 

This is the narrative that Mehr has advanced in response to some social-media sniping (edited and consolidated from the Twitter thread). He has maintained that the album’s original release “bears little resemblance to what those tracks sounded like in the band’s conception or in the studio… Paul wrote great songs, the band cut amazing tracks & they added beautiful touches during overdubs. But much of that work was fundamentally lost/obscured in the mixing stage. It doesn’t matter what a band creates in the studio if, in the mixing process, those parts, performances, & ideas are edited out, muddied up, or rendered inaudible. You can’t redeem a bad recording with a good mix. But you sure can nullify a great recording with a bad mix. 

“That’s what happened on Tim, and what’s being rectified with Let It Bleed. It’s a natural impulse for people to cling to things that are familiar and cherished. But when you hear this Tim remix there’s gonna be no doubt which version is the record The Replacements actually made.”

So, maybe we can change history?

This counter-narrative changes the band’s role in its own fate, at least where Tim is concerned, from co-conspirators or class clowns into victims. If this remix is what the band wanted the album to sound like in the first place, the major-label release must have somehow gone off the rails. If only the record company, or management, or whoever was the adult in the room, had recognized what a mess it was. It is only now, almost four decades after the fact, that we can hear it as it should have been.

Or should it?

The very idea of this remix sparked a tempest in a Twitpot, when the announcement and a sneak preview of the impending set were posted.  Even before the whole thing could be heard and appreciated, some responded as if their favorite black-and-white movie was being colorized, or if the band were subjected to some sort of ghastly “Immersive Van Gogh” transformation.

Why couldn’t they just let it be? 

“Honestly, the faults with Tim from a production standpoint are what make it perfectly Replacements,” maintained one fan on X.

“To me it’s just like the song ‘when it began,’” went another. “That’s the impulse to love the record you grew up with. It isn’t bad—it shows how much the band really moved people. And with the ‘Mats, it’s especially appropriate that their greatest work (imho) was kinda screwed up. . .”

And another: “If we like the Replacements because they’re raw, honest, and real, I don’t understand the point of subjecting Tim to a clinical ‘80s remix. . .” 

That third one then proceeds to open a whole new can of worms, but the point is well taken.  When you’ve got a band that was singularly beloved for its screw-ups, their tragic flaw is baked into their biochemistry. As a noted Elizabethan-era rock critic wrote, “The fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.” But in this counter narrative, the fault was not the band’s, at least not with Tim. 

One last counter-tweet: “[I] Have spent the last 30+ years dreaming of a version of Tim where the drums didn’t sound like a plastic spoon slapping against mashed potatoes.”

And, yes, there is that. Nobody is really arguing that the original mix sounded good. There was so little stereo separation, which resulted in a whole lotta mush in the middle. 

And there was a whole lotta reverb, a particularly quizzical decision for a guy whose Ramones and other productions featured little or none. The drums didn’t sound much like drums; the bass was all but inaudible. If we want to really get into the weeds, there’s also the issue of the mastering, which, according to the new set’s notes, “used brittle-sounding, late-‘80s technology, further boosting the higher frequencies, hollowing out the low mid-range sounds, and completely thinning out the low end.”

For those obsessed with A/B comparisons, the set additionally includes a newly remastered version of the old Erdelyi mix (restoring some of that lower end), along with the big sonic leap of the Stasium remix, which it includes not only on CD but also on vinyl LP.  (There was a previous CD remastering in 2008 for an expanded version of Tim.  One assumes that it has now been expanded as far as it can stretch, with another disc of outtakes and demos and a final disc of a raucous live set completing the box.)

There’s no doubt that this was a pivotal album for the band—perhaps the pivotal album–and not merely because it was the first on a major-label deal.  It was a time of turmoil (as if there ever wasn’t a time of turmoil for the band). This would be the last release with the original lineup, as guitarist Bob Stinson was largely AWOL, drinking heavily and barely around for the sessions. Manager (and sometime producer) Peter Jesperson was also on his way out, exiled by the band from the studio and soon to be out completely. 

So, this major-label debut was kind of a fresh start, kind of the end of the innocence, kind of a mess. And it was time to put up or shut up. Or at least grow up.  Westerberg’s increasingly melodic and nuanced songcraft had been heading in that direction, but the band’s attitude remained punk-rock, screw-it-all dysfunctional.  Or so it seemed from the studio evidence from the album as it was originally released.

The next album,1987’s Pleased To Meet Me, would apparently never need a remix, as producer Jim Dickinson seemed to channel the band’s essential spirit into a sound with more commercial punch.  (And a revision of the “Bastards of Young” credo in “I Don’t Know”: “One foot in the door/the other foot in the gutter/The sweet smell that you adore/Yeah I think I’d rather smother”). Then came 1989’s slicker and glossier Don’t Tell a Soul, a sell-out effort that failed to cash in. It has since been remixed and redeemed as Dead Man’s Pop, the first in the band’s series of deluxe reissues. And then there was that disastrous tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a falling-apart finale with 1990’s All Shook Down, and a farewell concert on July 4, 1991, a free show in Chicago’s Grant Park. It was sponsored and broadcast by a radio broadcast. Typically, the band hadn’t told anyone that this show would be their last. 

Does Let It Bleed Edition allow us to hear Tim as we have never heard it before? Absolutely. And for those who don’t want to hear it that way, the original mix remains readily accessible (as does the 2008 remastering of that mix, and the new remastering. We have entered an era when it’s hard to keep so many remixes and remasterings straight, with pretty much all of them promising a brand new listening experience. You’ve never really heard it until you’ve heard it like this.

As revelatory as they might sound, the Dylan and Beatles remixes didn’t receive much in the way of pushback, nor were they accompanied by any suggestion that these somehow enhanced new versions should replace the old versions.  They were more like a luxury item, conspicuous-consumption collectibles for well-to-do obsessives.

All these elaborate new editions represent a pretty old marketing gambit, since the music industry has so long profited in selling us music we alreadt own. Some of us might remember replacing mono with stereo, and then, briefly, stereo with quad, then junking our vinyl collections for the digital delights of CDs, and now tossing those CDs for the revival of a way more expensive vinyl, as we attempt to parse the sonic differences between 140 and 180 grams.  Meanwhile, we have come full circle with the streaming compression of mp3s, which recall the pinched sound of AM radio, but seemingly put all of available recorded music at our fingertips without having to buy or own it.

All the more reason to repackage the music we already love, in new format or new edition, deluxe and expanded, remixed and remastered, remake/remodel. At a certain point, you might be tempted to say that we’ve had enough, we won’t get fooled again.

But we have yet to reach that point. Particularly when we might be tempted to pony up for the Who’s remastered Who’s Next: Light House (Super Deluxe). It’s also out this month, with 10 CDs, 2 books, vinyl and assorted collectibles. Tons of outtakes and previously unreleased stuff, including versions of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in various stages. Only three hundred bucks.

Makes Tim Let It Bleed Edition sound like a bargain. (The best I’ve ever had?)

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Don McLeese

Don McLeese has been writing about popular culture since the Carter presidency. He was the pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Austin American-Statesman, a senior editor at No Depression and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He teaches journalism at the University of Iowa. 

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• Blood on the Tracks: Remixing The Replacements’ Tim - September 22, 2023