Rewind: The Replacements - Tim

He had me at "down on all fives... Lemme crawwwwwl!"

There aren't many records that from the first listen caused me to have a bona fide visceral reaction. I wish I could say the album that made me a music fan was Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, or Tori Amos or anything else that seemed to resonate with a lot of women born in the 70s and 80s. The Replacements' Tim is, for better or worse, my "it" record though, the kind of record that Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein said :will stop you dead in your tracks beacuse now, whatever path you were on no longer exists." I actually kind of recoiled when I first played it. This band can't play, I thought, and he surely can't sing, but it was so perfect. They were smart without being painfully intellectual, raw and nervy, but still fun. I wanted to break stuff and dance. Until then I'd been somewhat of a punk rock dilettante: The Ramones were goofy, and the Clash was smart and irreverent, but I was only a casual fan. And they were relics of another generation. I didn't yet know there was a crop of younger bands in garages and basements across America, pounding out their own version of rock 'n' roll. If it wasn't handed down from the gods at MTV or coming from the speakers on my shitty $40 boombox, it didn't exist in my world. Tim was the record I'd been looking for my whole life, and I didn't even know it.

Long before the internet became the great equalizer, the only way I'd hear about bands that didn't get much airplay was through the pages of magazines like Musician, Creem, or Spin. I had been reading about this mythic beast known as the Replacements for years. They were four working class kids from Minneapolis who had a taste of success with "I'll Be You," a song from their second to last album, Don't Tell a Soul. I'd heard the song on a local AOR station, probably sandwiched between Warrant and Lynyrd Skynrd. I wasn't that impressed.

I let a few more years pass. I was in my twenties then, out of college, and looking to expand my record collection. I was thumbing through the used cd bin at a used record store when I spotted what was probably one of the ugliest album covers ever: all purples and grays with a picture of a long corridor or tunnel on the front and the title, Tim, written in yellow cursive in the upper right corner underneath what I think were rough pencil sketches of each band member. I'd read enough reviews to know that it was part of the "holy trinity" of Replacements albums. (1984's Let It Be, brazenly named after the Beatles album, and Pleased To Meet Me, which came out in 1987, were the other two.) I had five dollars burning a hole in my pocket, the exact price.

I didn't play that it right away. When I got home I set it down on my messy desk where it stared at me for a few days. I don't really know when it hit me that this was going to be the turning point in my musical education, but I had to get past my idea of what good music is. I was raised on top forty pap, and this was anything but. There was nothing polished about it. It sounded like the type of music my guy friends in ad-hoc garage bands made. Because it kind of was.

I rarely listen to Tim anymore --  to be honest, it hasn't aged well, though I blame the production more than anything -- but I definitely consider it my gateway drug to more ambitious records.