Trouble Boys, journalist Bob Mehr’s excellently-researched and well-written 435-page bio of Minneapolis’s favorite indie-rock miscreants, the Replacements, isn’t just the story of a band, it’s the story of an era, and it’s a must-read for anyone who grew up in that time, not to mention anyone wishing to understand it, and its aftermath, whereby, as far as art goes, a lack of commitment, not to mention balls (call it chutzpah if you prefer), plus an overriding narcissism, and a built-in sense of irrelevance, pervades. Sad, but true, reading this narrative, it seems hard to believe there will ever be another movement as inherently iconoclastic as Punk.
Perhaps the most misunderstood of all major rock movements, Punk has come to mean many different things to many different people, and, for that matter, many different generations. And, in many ways, it was the Replacements and their indie-rock peers — Sonic Youth, Husker Du, REM, etc. — who forever altered the image of Punk so that it became something much more palatable to college kids. But that was no fault of the bands — it was a natural evolution, and while probably any of those bands could have served as this book’s template — as evidence by Michael Azzerad’s groundbreaking Our Band Could Be Your Life, which featured most of the aforementioned — it might as well be the Replacements: tough-but-vulnerable Midwesterners faithfully and recklessly living up to the Rock n’ Roll legend — so much so they earned the nickname “the ‘Mats” (as in “those that would be trod upon”).
