I asked students this week to write for ten minutes on one, two, or three things they’re thankful for, as we approach the holiday. I’m thankful for so many things: My dog, my family, the tall eucalyptus tree by my office that looks like it belongs in Dr. Seuss. Since this is an arts and culture magazine, I want to point to a piece of art, a piece of culture I’m thankful for, which I came across today without thinking about it in a couple years at least: “Can’t Hardly Wait,” by the Replacements.
I was a sophomore in college, uncomfortable in my own skin, nursing a recently broken heart and an attempt to mend it with music and poetry and scattershot, melodramatic prayer. (I shudder at—and kind of love—that young version of me.) I’d recorded to one side of a Maxell C-90 cassette Pleased to Meet Me. On the other was Camper Van Beethoven’s Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. I wore that cassette out. While Sweetheart’s last song, “Life is Grand,” fortified me to press on, “Can’t Hardly Wait,” the last song on Pleased, suggested a vague destination and resolution.
I loved the band and the album because it felt as frustrated and sore of heart as I did. It also represented, in some form, a further step into adulthood and “figuring it out.” The band had fired their lead guitarist, Bob Stinson, whose behavior had become too much for a band known for its, uh, behavior (more on which, below). Pleased to Meet Me was a meeting, in hindsight, that proved both disastrous and inevitable. Until this point, the Mats—and Paul Westerberg, singer and writer—were content being a rock ‘n’ roll band in the most careening sense of the term. They forgot to take out the trash in the first place because they were loudly playing guitars or listening to records where Mick Ronson or Johnny Thunders loudly played theirs. “God Damn Job” is the name of a rock ‘n’ roll song and all the indication you need of the band’s professional aspirations.
That they weren’t professional is why their fans loved them so. Just look at ‘em chase each other around the set of Saturday Night Live: They’ve got a major-label deal and a national audience and don’t know—or don’t care to learn—how to act. And though they hired outside producers (emphasis on that adjective) for their first two Sire releases, these producers were Westerberg heroes—Tommy Ramone and Jim Dickinson, respectively—who botched the job: Tim’s gotta contend for the most brilliant, bad-sounding record ever; and Pleased is afflicted by ’80s compression-sickness.
Yet that, too, is part of the charm. Not getting it right, but trying—whether shambling drunk in front of an audience or locked in the sheeny resonance of dated production—gave credibility to Westerberg’s lyrics as offhand, unforced poetry. Since the music was raucous, and the words mumbled, we could believe that playing in a band screaming “gimme noise!”[1] was enough or that, for us lonely souls out here looking to connect with somebody, anybody, “somebody’s gonna show up—never fear!”
On “Can’t Hardly Wait,” the Replacements are augmented by another hero (Alex Chilton, another never-quite-made-it artist) on guitar, along with horns and strings, all recorded in Memphis. The guitar tone is crisp as Sunday toast, the bass as straightforward and unpretentious as the unpretentious heartthrob playing it, and the drums sprightly and locked-in (to a click track, no doubt). It’s that rhythm section and Westerberg’s voice that connect the song to the rest of the Mats’ catalog, and despite all the sonic addenda, the thing works, strings soaring to accompany the unadorned image, “Lights that flash in the evening, through a hole in the drapes,” guitar and tom fills amen-ing the voice’s testimony. It’s a recording that flirts with a new way (for this band) of making music: revised, well-rehearsed. [The demo version of the song, arguably much better, with Bob Stinson on lead, is a truer Replacements song. It also tells a different, less complicated story.]
Like early Springsteen, the Replacements wanted out—out of school, out of the house, out of work, out of whatever young-adult imprisonment they felt. “We’re coming out!” they’d sang/shouted, and it felt immediate, like it was happening right now. (In “Can’t Hardly Wait,” the longing is articulated right there in the title.) The problem is where to go once you escape. As anyone who’s seen The Graduate knows, Ben and Elaine’s elation dissipates pretty quickly, sitting in the back of that bus. What’s the plan? What’s our next step?
The moderate success of Pleased to Meet Me gave the band the means to pay their next producer, a real pro, to record them in Los Angeles. The words and music became mannered, slick, the kind of thing people expected from press-proclaimed geniuses. They lost their edge because outsiders don’t sound authentic when they’re so clearly—to the ear, anyway—inside.
But longing is still a sweet sound, the only subject of rock ‘n roll from the beginning: “I’ll be home when I’m sleeping,” Westerberg sings, aiming for the sweet by-and-by someone who never fit in longs for. “Can’t Hardly Wait” is a song, really, of Advent. The Man Himself is invoked right there in the second verse:
Jesus rides beside me.
He never buys any smokes.
Hurry up hurry up ain’t you had enough of this stuff?
Ashtray floors, dirty clothes, and filthy jokes?
Jesus shows up, as Jesus ought to always show up, to the desperate, to the sore of heart. The song spoke to me then, and speaks still to me now, because it expresses a hope in the scattershot prayer that however broken the heart it will soon (hurry up!) receive its true companion.
The original version of this article included a line from the song “Bastards of the Young”: “It beats picking cotton or waiting to be forgotten.” This much celebrated line bothers me in 2018 for reasons that didn’t even register to me in 1990. An oblivious Southern California kid (not an excuse but a description), I didn’t think or know “picking cotton” is loaded with racial implication. The most charitable reading of the line, at best, credits the writer’s, and listener’s, ignorance. Not, as they say, a good look–for either of us.
