I'm doing the quality parenting thang with the kids watching Pokemon and me crankin' open the newest from Anderson Valley, the Imperial IPA this time checking in at a whomping 8.9% on the richter and with nothing to say I say this to you having made my way through the entire Replacements catalogue up to but not including Don't Tell a Soul, the greatest disappointment in my record buying life when I returned from Asia a brown spider and found that Paul Westerberg had sold his ass to a whisper. They've just reissued the first four upchucks from your placemats of yore, and since I haven't taken a trip down that lane of memory in time longer than I can recall I thought well hey hey hey what the hey, let's just see what all the fuss was about when certain histrionic scribes were calling these ragamuffins the greatest thing since Almond Vanilla Cream Cheese Spread on a Toasted Cinnamon and Raisan bagel.

What strikes me is Westerberg's voice- other than the spirit and the legend and fuckall attitude, it's the best thing about the band. Plenty of these songs don't travel, but that voice could kick ass in a time capsule. I remember late afternoons in college with Hootenany blaring and me half-naked on the vinyl couch with a head full of Schaefer and this sounded like the perfect companion of my drunken dreams. I didn't think you were allowed to play out of tune or trade your instruments or have the first-class gonads to drop "Treatment Bound" on a record album for sale to the general public. They were my instant heroes, the band I'd been waiting to hear my whole life. Today only a few songs grabbed, like "Take Me Down to the Hospital," "Color Me Impressed," "Heyday," the aforementioned ode to booze as cure and "Mr. Whirley." Once it was the perfect fuck you to a world I hated, and for that I remain grateful.

I was that loud asshole screaming the praises of Let It Be as the greatest record of the 80's, and while it may not be all that, the assinine stuff sounds even more assinine but the good stuff passes middle-aged snuff. "I Will Dare" is a goddamned triumph of pop music, and that Mr. Ambition could not recognize its genius and chose the way of Tom Petty strum ballads for his solo career is a testament to the fact that genius can not recognize itself and generally needs a bullet in the head after the creative window closes. "My Favorite Thing" is wonderfully complicated and catchy for all its punk fury, and the ballads still move, if not quite as weepingly. "Androgynous" is charming, if you don't listen to the lyrics. "Answering Machine" is just a riff without a full band to kick in, but what a fucking monster he got out of a guitar and a voice and a little tinkering. "Unsatisfied" remains the perfect closer and the ultimate slacker anthem, as a nation of overeducated and underappreciated (in their own minds) suburban hipsters pumped their fists and cried their eyes out alone in their studio apartments while dreamin the big dreams that will never come true. Tommy and Gary and some of the others have their juvie charms, and maybe they act as foils for the purtiness lying around them. I don't know. I hear an amalgam of twentysomething yearning covering its bases by pretending not to care, but what a winning formula. It takes ya back, and that ain't always such a sad and pathetic thing.

Later, the rest of the early catalogue, even two on Big Daddy Major.