I was only in Minneapolis, Minnesota, once. It didn’t seem very punk rock to me. But I should probably offer a couple of qualifiers.
First, it was 1992, several years after hardcore and post-punk were at their peak. Grunge, pop-punk, metalcore, and the catchall alt-rock had been siphoning off the cream of the punk crop for a while. Black Flag was no more. Minor Threat had morphed into Fugazi.
The other possible explanation for why I didn’t get that punk rock vibe from the Twin Cities is that I was in town for Super Bowl XXVI. The NFL and punk rock aren’t exactly on a first-name basis. Despite the presence of a team from Washington, DC, the league didn’t feel the need to invite Bad Brains to play any of its major donor events the week of the big game.
The most incongruous of the punk bastions in the 1980s
I didn’t exactly seek out the punk scene in the few days I was there. The bands I would have most wanted to see – Husker Du and the Replacements – had broken up by then. Soul Asylum had moved so far from their punk roots that they were about to win a Grammy for Best Rock Song for the definitively alt “Runaway Train.”
Less than a decade earlier, Dave Pirner had growled out...
“I’m sick of that song about sex, drugs, and rock
I’m sick of that song about how you love your c**k”
Now he was plaintively asking...
“Can you help me remember how to smile?”
Be that as it may, I never stopped wondering why it was that Pirner, Paul Westerberg, and Bob Mould all launched punk careers in Minneapolis at around the same time in the early ‘80s.
It wasn’t something in the Twin Cities’ maternity hospital. Mould wasn’t born there. He was a transplant from the northernmost part of New York. Maybe that had something to do with it.
There are plenty of theories as to why a particular town spawns a particular artistic movement. In Athens, it was the presence of an experimental, gay-influenced University of Georgia art school in the middle of redneck America that led the Ricky Wilsons of the world to create something as counterculture as the B-52s.
Seattle thrived on its remoteness. It’s more than 600 miles from San Francisco to Portland, and almost 200 more to get to Seattle. Bands could hit a dozen different decent venues on the East Coast with that amount of travel. So the Sonics and the Melvins and all they begat developed their own thing.
The same is partly true of Phoenix. The distance may not have been quite as long to Los Angeles, but toss in that 100+ degree heat, and you can see where Alice Cooper and the Meat Puppets might go a little mad.
But the Twin Cities? I mean, they’re a bit of an outlier, sure. But you’re not all that far from Madison, which means Milwaukee is also close by, and from there you practically in Chicago. No, Minneapolis is not quite as isolated as the towns that use isolation to explain their journey into punk.
But it is cold. And dark. Some locals will tell you that is why a punk rock scene evolved. In the winter, there just isn’t that much to do, especially if you don’t like cross country skiing or ice fishing. If you wanted a jolt of energy, like so many young people do, crowding into a rundown club and moshing the night away with anywhere from ten to two hundred intimate strangers was a pretty good way to work off some energy.
Maybe it just comes down to the people. If Paul Westerberg had grown up in Cedar Rapids, maybe Iowa would have become a punk hub. But I don’t think that’s it. Westerberg had to meet the Stinson brothers and Chris Mars, or there would not have been the Replacements.
And if the band hadn’t crossed paths with Peter Jesperson, the Replacements probably would have split up before they ever got discovered.
Would Jesperson have founded his own label that became as important to the punk scene as Twin/Tone had he grown up in Fayetteville? I guess said label would have needed a different name. Twin/Tone doesn’t make sense in North Carolina. But I don’t know if Fayetteville – or anywhere else, for that matter – had a record store like Oar Folkjokeopus to serve a gathering spot for so many creative types.
There were a lot of specific details about the Minneapolis scene in the early ‘80s that came together at a fortuitous moment in history.
Westerberg and Mould were the driving artistic forces and I suspect there’s a great story to be told about their respect-despise relationship. But I can’t tell it. It needs to be told by the people who were there at the time.
Actually, pieces of it are already well-documented in books like “Trouble Boys,” Bob Mehr’s detailed history of the Replacements, or in the appropriate chapters of Michael Azerrad’s “Our Band Could Be Your Life.”
But I think Mould and Westerberg merit an even deeper dive. It’s hard to find two artists – and two bands – that were simultaneously as alike and as different as the two frontmen of the Replacements and Husker Du.
In the early days, volume and speed were integral parts of both bands. As the songwriting improved, both began to broaden their scope. And both ended up disintegrating by the end of the decade, not long after leaving their indie roots for Warner Brothers – as mainstream as it gets. (The Replacements signed with Sire, a subsidiary of Warner.)
The bands played gigs together and often expressed a grudging mutual respect.
But there was also plenty of jealousy. Husker Du was stung by the fact that Jesperson and Twin/Tone never signed them, but instead fell all over themselves to turn the Replacements into the next Beatles. But what they really resented was the fact that the Replacements never seemed to take their jobs as musicians very seriously.
To be fair, I’ve seen a litter of kittens with better discipline than the Replacements often showed.
For their part, Westerberg and the Stinsons thought Husker Du took themselves too seriously. Husker Du actually wrote up set lists and then stuck to them, something the Mats (as the Replacements were known) would never have done.
Worst of all, at least according to Mehr’s book, Mould got the job of attending to the punk legend Johnny Thunders when the former New York Doll brought his new band, the Heartbreakers, to Minneapolis. Westerberg wanted that gig, and Westerberg was good at holding grudges.
In the end, both Westerberg and Mould proved to be songwriters of great dimension. They could write headbangers, and they could write heartbreakers. Eventually, both would outgrow their bands and launch long, successful careers.
Not as successful as their more famous Minnesotan brethren by the names of Dylan and Prince. But not too shabby for a couple of punks.
If either or both bands had still been together in January of 1992, I hope I would have had the good sense to seek them out. Even an outsider can tell that it was a special time and a special place. I guess I don’t need to understand the why of it. I can just content myself with listening to the music.