A bit over 10 years ago, I wrote a piece about the spate of band reformations, in which I complained about Thin Lizzy going back out on the road, despite their frontman Phil Lynott being no longer of this world. “Imagine Laurel and Hardy, without Laurel,” I wrote. “Or Hardy. You get the picture.” Then, in 2011, I went to see the then-current iteration of Thin Lizzy – fronted by Ricky Warwick of the Almighty – playing live. It wasn’t like watching Laurel and Hardy without Laurel. Or Hardy. It was great. No, it wasn’t the Thin Lizzy of 1976, but then nor would it have been if Lynott had still been alive. But it was a group of musicians – two of whom, Scott Gorham and Brian Downey, were key parts of the classic Lizzy – playing great songs with passion and commitment.
That evening rather changed my mind about the need for bands to return with something as close to their classic lineups as possible. So where once I might have been upset that my first ever opportunity to see the Replacements – who have announced two London shows in June, and their first full US tour in nearly a quarter of a century – will be to see a band consisting of two founder members and two touring hired hands, I’m now no longer fussed.
In the case of the Replacements, there’s no chance of seeing the band with one of the two original guitarists: Bob Stinson is dead, Slim Dunlap unable to play following a severe stroke in 2012. But it’s not just the impossibility of seeing more than half the actual Replacements that means I’m not fussed about the lineup. It’s the fact that’s what’s important is the songs, rather than who plays which parts of them.
After all, while music fans might get quite pernickety about their favourite lineups, they rarely drop a band when members leave – so why be picky if a band reforms with a different lineup? No one says the third and fourth Velvet Underground records don’t count because Doug Yule had replaced John Cale. Heaven and Hell is a great Black Sabbath album even though it’s got Ronnie James Dio on it instead of Ozzy Osbourne.
I still need some connection to the original band – so it wouldn’t be the Replacements, for me, if Paul Westerberg weren’t fronting it. But I’d far rather see a group of hired hands, who might well be playing the songs because it’s what they’ve always wanted to do, running through the set with vim and vigour, than the musicians who recorded them plodding their way through 90 minutes with the air of people whose minds are on their pension funds.
The oddest reunion gigs of all, though, are when the hired hands are clearly having the time of their lives, but the original member obviously isn’t. When Alex Chilton agreed to play again as Big Star in 1994, he and Jody Stephens were joined by Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of the Posies. The two Posies were quite obviously delirious with happiness: they were Big Star obsessives, and were now playing in a band no one would have imagined would set foot on a stage again. Chilton, by contrast, looked bored out of his mind. Without him it wouldn’t have been Big Star, true, but he also did his very best to chisel away the audience’s excitement at seeing Big Star.
In Paul Westerberg, the Replacements have a frontman who’s just as ornery and cussed as Chilton (and who once wrote a song about him), so one might have suspected the band’s reunion to be very much a case of take the money and run. But last summer’s first round of reunion shows seemed to belie that. The Hold Steady supported them in New York and Minneapolis, and Craig Finn told me they were blisteringly good, that any doubts were dispelled the minute they hit the stage. Admittedly, they are Finn’s favourite ever band, but then again, hardcore fans can be extraordinarily demanding. And a look at their setlists shows the group switching around their discography, adding songs in and taking them out, not just playing the same show night after night.
So I’m refusing to sneer. I’m just happy I’ll get to hear Favorite Thing and I Will Dare and Achin’ to Be. I wish I’d seen them played by Bob Stinson, but this will do just fine, thanks.
