Paul Westerberg “Folker”
When 1984 Paul Westerberg screams “I’m so! I’m so! un-sat-is-fied!” you participate in the dream that you and he might be satisfied someday. Just by screaming along with him you start to strengthen your resolve that you’ll be okay. The calculus works a little different when he’s 45 and by the standards you were dreaming about, he hasn’t made it, and neither have you.
But “Made it” is all relative, isn’t it? Westerberg certainly left his mark. The Replacements were the little garage band that could. They were legendarily out of control. Really smart and funny, but really dumb and drunk too. All day, all night drunk. At the center of their hulabaloo they had this songwriter who could wrestle melody out of all that clatter. When “Within your Reach” starts its controlled sonic build out from the din of “Hootenanay” you’re like, “They can do this too?” It’s like a midwestern John Lennon in the middle of the Sex Pistols. The Replacements sound was the friction between post punk thrash and a gifted melodist. In that pocket, there was no one else like them.
Westerberg solo and sober had difficulty finding his voice. He was so branded as a wild rocker, it was hard to switch modes. When he rocked with expensive producers he could sound like watered down Replacements. When he switched to a piano and tried to be a singer songwriter, he sounded like a morose Carole King. And after 1999’s “Suicane Gratification,” his third almost but not quite what anyone hoped for solo album, he took a break. Fans moved on. But hen, something happened. From 2002-2004, he released four albums of material — five if you count both discs of the double album “Stereo/Mono.” The malcontent outcast had found his voice again. Also-ran music. Desperate middle-aged music. Music about regret and compromise, music about remembering something from a long time ago you shouldn’t have done, music written from your knees.
This spurt of productivity ending with” Folker” was all made the same way: from his Minneapolis basement with Paul playing all the instruments. It’s a lo-fi Prince approach, rock without fuss. He rediscovered the music to match his sandpaper voice, letting it crack to get across the struggle. The middle-aged magic trick he pulls off is the resurrection of The Replacements’ boozy looseness as a one man band but without the virtuosity of Prince. Imperfection as strategy. Westerberg found a sober way to get his energy back.
“Folker” finds him dealing with the recent death of his father, and he handles with it with the just right amount of rock, resignation and sentiment. He writes “My Dad” about visiting his emphysema stricken Father. Chronicling his armchair bound parent could dip into somber pity, but he steers the tune with the stoic, stubborn, spirit of its subject — a spirit clearly passed down to Paul, who famously put out a single long take of a speaker playing their single “Left of the Dial” on MTV, because he thought videos were lame. The other tribute to Dad is “Looking up in Heaven,” which reads like Clapton’s tear-jerker, but actually sounds jaunty and light without being insincere. It gains resonance from an inferred grief. Sequenced after the living subject of “My Dad”, “Looking up in Heaven” is given a weight from the loss that occurred between; it’s a little boost from something that’s not even there on tape.
Westerberg always knew how to get take a subject at an angle. He says his style of writing comes from his dyslexia. It lets him see things a bit mixed up, and helps him find other directions to attack a subject at. In “Folker’s” “Anyways All Right” he plays with that nonsense phrase to tell a story of a relationship with a girl who might be gay, but who the singer desperately needs to be with tonight. It’s a fraught concept, and yet he almost pulls it off. He finds a way to get the word “anyway” to carry the desperation of “any way you can make it happen” and the despondency of “anyway, whatever, nevermind.” “Anyway All Right” has all the things fans love him for: the intelligence, the nakedness, the yearning for a higher state from whatever broken set of circumstances he’s in. A terrible idea for love? Westerberg’s artful spleen-on-sleeve openness has you opt in to that bad idea. He’s a rehabilitator of losing propositions.
Westerberg was always a sensitive punk, but I don’t know if he could have written a line like “Come feel me tremble, feel my marrow in the bone” at his former peak. From his new perch in the basement bunker, after the war of his initial solo debut was lost, his work has something it didn’t have before. It has sacrifice in it. After the crowd dies down, this is what a life of sticking to your guns sounds like, when you have to decide if you go on without an audience. In “How Can You Like Him” he sings about a girl who’s with another man, but it could just as well be a song for all the people who showed up for the Goo Goo Dolls concert or any of the countless higher selling bands influenced by the Replacements. He’s the reason not to skip over a past prime artist; his very lack of outward success brought him to the marrow.