Wigged Gigs In November 1985, when the Replacements rolled into the Lawndale Art Annex on the Tim tour, they were the hippest young band in America. Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson, Bob Stinson and Chris Mars had welded punk spirit to Neil Youngian songcraft and come up with a mix that was as vital, if not quite as popular, as Nirvana would be five years later. Their live shows were always memorable -- they generally followed a pattern of drunken train wreck one night and a hungover beauty the next. Houston got the business end of one of their down nights. Cactus Music and Video general manager Quinn Bishop was there.
(Reached at the Austin American-Statesman , veteran Texas music critic Corcoran disputes sleeping at the show, and doesn't remember if he was one of the two or three people in his group who puked.) "So later I ran into Tommy in the bathroom before the show, and he was so wasted he could not speak, and I was like, 'Okaaay,' and as I finished up talking to him I heard this banging on the stall door. Paul had basically locked himself in the stall. And then he climbed over the top of it and fell in the water, or urine, or whatever it might be on the floor there. Remember, he was in a dress. Bob was in a tutu and flashing the audience with great regularity. Penis, ass, the whole deal. "So anyway, there's this long, long break, and then they finally get up there and there's a false start to about 20 different songs, about 20 seconds to one minute per song. Paul [who, according to the Houston Chronicle 's account of the show, was carrying a fifth of Jack Daniel's] kept falling down and knocking over the gear. At one point he fell over and knocked over half the drum kit. "And that was when the beer-can shower started. There had been, like, 15 minutes of insanity by that point and people were sick of it, so they were chanting, 'You suck! You suck!' and throwing beer cans. And every time their roadie -- who was wearing this American flag getup of red striped pants and a blue shirt with white stars on it -- would try to set their shit back up, Tommy would just start kicking the crap out of him, until he would finally leave the stage. So everybody's chanting, 'You suck!' and Paul gets up in this one guy's face, and they're shooting the bird at each other, and I don't know if Paul spit on him or something, but the guy just went berserk. The guy just grabbed Paul and pulled him in the crowd, and Paul's just swinging wildly around, drunk. Right before that Paul had tried to throw a beer can at somebody at the back of the room, but he was so drunk he hit my girlfriend -- who was, like, four feet away -- right in the head. So when he went down she proceeded to kick the crap out of him. "Finally Paul got back to the stage, and his attitude had shifted from arrogance to apologies. He was bleeding -- he had a big cut on his forearm, and he just reached in his pocket and just threw a wad of money into the crowd, and a melee broke out. A few people got, like, $20 a pop, but most of us got nothing. So the crowd was still pretty unappeased. So then he slurs, 'We're not gonna get any better, so if you want your money back, go get it,' and he points to the ticket booth. And the attendant, who was just sitting there staring at the spectacle, just closed the window, grabbed the cash box and evacuated. Eventually the cops arrived; the promoter got on stage and told everybody to leave orderly. They tried to calm everybody down, but it was just a riot." BY JOHN NOVA LOMAX |
"Before the show, I remember, the guys were just sitting near the stage in a kiddie pool with no water in it, just drunk off their asses. Alex Chilton opened for them, and they were sitting in that kiddie pool heckling him. They were all wearing women's clothing -- some costume-type stuff they had found somewhere. And after Alex gets done there's this long break before the Replacements came on. When we first got there, we noticed that there was this guy asleep on the floor in front of the stage, and we thought, 'Hey, no big deal, he must have really tied one on.' So we forget about him, and a few minutes later the crowd parts and this guy lurches up and stumbles toward the back of the room, projectile-vomiting in all directions. It looked like he had eaten a bellyful of spaghetti -- there were millions of one-inch noodles all over the place -- and he slipped in it, stumbled and fell in it. It was terrible. Later, we found out it was Michael Corcoran."