If one sometimes longs for some critical analysis of the records, there is a sense that Trouble Boys almost doesn’t need it: the love all the interviewees have for Westerberg’s music and the band’s playing is enough to prove their worth.
The often dispiriting details behind the band’s notoriety and demise are laid out masterfully by Bob Mehr in Trouble Boys ... What elevates the book beyond titillation is the explanatory context Mehr provides for all this terrible behavior. Each member of the band was troubled in his own particular way ... He doesn’t present an argument for why the Replacements mattered—or why they might still matter. He likely figured that anyone already into the band enough to read a book about it wouldn’t require a case for significance. And he’s probably right.
The previous books and films have all postulated on the why of it all but Mehr digs deeper, thanks to a decade’s worth of exclusive interviews with the musicians, their families, their friends, their lovers, and seemingly every person who ever worked with them — or sat down to drink a case or 10 of beer with them — and the end result isn’t just a historical document about a band that should have been called the What Could Have Beens, but also an essential look into the machinery of artistry, and the foibles of trying to make music into business ... Trouble Boys is the true story of a great American failure; of a band that should have been huge — they probably could be huge right now, really — except for that small problem that real people, with real problems, were never able to get out of their own damn way.
Besides being a first-rate biography, Trouble Boys imposes order on an unrelenting barrage of grotesque behavior that was leavened by several of the most beautiful, inchoate records of the 80s.
Trouble Boys is a well-researched and thorough examination of their career, from the earliest days of their lives up through their recent reunion tour in 2015...There is an exhaustive index of sources, including magazine articles and interviews from the time period as well as more recent interviews with the surviving band members, their families, friends, and other players in The Replacements saga. The interplay of the views of the past and the present offers a sense of contrast and perspective, revealing a richer understanding of what took place.
Writer Bob Mehr has written a biography nearly unpredictable as the band that always seemed on the brink of total self-destruction. Unlike most other stories about the Minneapolis quartet, this one is authorized and built upon new interviews with Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson, as well as family of the late Bob Stinson. As such, it gets into the nitty-gritty...
Author Bob Mehr painstakingly tells the entire story of the band, and delves into every relevant detail necessary in order to accomplish this task. It took Mehr over a decade to complete his research, talking to literally hundreds of individuals. The book is not authorized, but rather written 'with the participation of.' That doesn’t just mean that the band members granted interviews, but also that they clearly gave the nod to anyone else in the continuum of their lives and history to speak to Mehr...Trouble Boys is a tremendous piece of research and writing, and absolutely the Replacements biography we’ve been waiting for.
Mehr chronicles the band's career through in-depth interviews with surviving bandmates, associates and family members. Resisting the temptation to editorialize or pass judgment on the band's often outrageous behavior, he allows the story to demonstrate how The Replacements' brilliance, ambition and self-destructiveness all played a part in creating their reputation as one of the most influential bands in rock history.
Bob Mehr's thoroughly researched and eminently readable biography of The Replacements, is the type of book any band (or any artist of any kind, for that matter) would kill for.
Mehr, a critic at the Memphis Commercial Appeal, conducted over 200 interviews for this book — just about everybody associated with the band, including Westerberg and Tommy Stinson. While only the most devoted fans will cherish the digressions on Minneapolis’s leading nightclubs in the 1980s, Mehr’s tendency toward over-documentation also gives the story behind just about every crucial Replacements song.
