All language subtitles for Bob Mehr 2016 - Trouble Boys The True Story of the Replacements (read by Mary Lucia)

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Hachette Audio presents, Trouble Boys, The True Story

of the Replacements.

Written by Bob Mair.

Read by Mary Lucia.

For Bob and Joey Stinson.

MATES We controlled rage with humor, struck the

wrong chords first to acquaint ourselves with disaster,

to ease the inevitability of our next return,

our next assault.

Bearing all as an offsetting pose then, hit,

scream, jump, crash as one.

Quicksilver morons, we love it so we stop.

Why?

Because soon we won't, and this way it

won't hurt as much.

Afraid, terrified, outnumbered.

Retreat?

They'll kill us.

Never enters our mind.

We load and on four we charge laughing.

The enemy babble.

I don't believe my eyes.

What the fuck?

This is a trick.

Bang, we land in their trench.

Got a light?

Hey, what do you guys think you're doing?

See ya.

They aim at our backs as we fall

over each other.

The bullets always missed.

Paul Westberg.

Letter to Arthur, 2012.

Introduction February 22, 1995.

McDivitt Hag Funeral Home, South Minneapolis.

The family made sure his sleeves were rolled

up so everyone could see the tattoos.

He'd gotten them as a kid after being

locked up in the cursed halls of the

Red Wing State Training School.

His left arm said, love her, for Kim,

his first girlfriend who'd broken his heart.

On his right arm was a mystery.

His initials with three arrows shooting in different

directions.

He never told anyone what the arrows symbolized,

though friends would tease him that they represented

the three things he cared about most in

life.

Music, beer, and drugs.

For several days, local newspapers had reported the

basic facts.

Bob Stinson, former lunatic guitarist of the Replacements,

found dead in his uptown apartment.

He'd founded the group, then been fired from

it in 1986 when he couldn't curb his

out-of-control lifestyle.

A couple of stories hinted at his troubled

background, broken home in and out of juvenile

institutions, longstanding addiction problems, recent diagnosis as bipolar.

A syringe had been discovered near where he

lay in his apartment.

Given his history, everyone assumed he'd expired from

an overdose or even committed suicide.

Later, the coroner's final report would contradict the

initial suspicions.

Not an OD, but organ failure.

Just 35, Bob Stinson died of natural causes.

His body and heart simply worn out.

He'd gone to sleep and never awoke.

When he died, he had a turntable in

front of him, a bunch of records.

A Yes record might have been playing, I

think, said his brother, Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson.

That's the way he would want to go.

He'd put a hunk of vinyl on and

sit and listen and study.

He was probably going, fucking A, this is

great.

The tone of the subsequent outpouring, memorials and

obituaries and Rolling Stone and Spin, the New

York Times and the Los Angeles Times, was

revealing.

Nine years after Bob's firing, and four since

the group's breakup, the Replacements were suddenly spoken

of in reverential terms.

They'd become legends without ever really becoming stars,

an epitaph as unlikely as their beginnings.

They had come together as the children of

war veterans and alcoholics, from families steeped in

mental illness and abuse, products of Midwestern recalcitrance

and repression.

That held the bond in a peculiar way,

said frontman Paul Westerberg.

We hit it off in ways that normal

guys don't.

We understood each other.

Back when they got their first little flush

of fame, Westerberg would say as a cockeyed

boast that they were losers, that there wasn't

a high school diploma or a driver's license

among them.

They'd never had any clear-eyed ambition or

direction.

They got as far as they did only

because they hungered for attention, for love, for

sanction, for volume, for chaos.

The band's music filled the funeral chapel that

day.

An insolent soundtrack for a send-off.

Bob's mother, Anita Stinson, had asked Peter Jesperson,

the man who discovered the group and been

their closest ally, to make a tape of

their early albums.

He felt funny about a song like Fuck

School blaring in a mortuary, but you don't

deny a grieving family's request.

One by one, the surviving replacements arrived.

Paul, Tommy, drummer Chris Mars, and guitarist Slim

Dunlap.

This was the reunion none of them had

wanted and all of them had feared.

And there was Bob, still the center of

attention, lying in his casket.

When Westerberg walked in, Johnny's Gonna Die was

playing.

It hit him square in the face.

Johnny always takes more than he needs, knows

a couple chords, knows a couple leads.

He'd written those lines about the doomed ex

-New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders after seeing

him looking wasted and sounding brilliant at a

concert back in 1980.

And everybody tells me that Johnny is hot,

Johnny needs something, what he ain't got.

Bob picked up guitar, learned how to play

a few rock songs, and then just beat

the shit out of the thing for all

the frustrations in his life, noted Westerberg.

He was a lot like Thunders.

In his hands, the guitar didn't scream.

It cried for help, practically.

We used to say Johnny made a guitar

sound like an animal in pain.

Bob had that, too.

Two hundred or so mourners filled the pews.

Bob's acoustic guitar leaned against the casket.

In a quiet corner, the replacements gathered with

Jesperson.

The air was heavy for a moment.

The group had fired Peter, then Bob, then

Chris, and they'd sniped at one another in

the press and in song lyrics.

All of that was forgotten now.

They say death brings you together, said Mars.

I hadn't seen Tommy for a long time,

and I hadn't really seen Paul for a

long time.

We were talking, shooting the shit for a

bit, but it was bathed in this sad,

sad thing.

Mars had done an etching for the cover

of the Memorial Program, a Stratocaster with wings.

Bob's mother had asked Jesperson to deliver the

eulogy, but Peter demurred.

He didn't think he could get through it.

The duty went to local musician-turned-rock

writer Jim Walsh, who'd known the group since

its early days.

He spoke of Stinson's great appetite for life

and noted how un-Bob-like the occasion

felt.

He would have laughed at us in our

suits today, the pomp and circumstance.

He would have wanted to know where the

beer was.

Babes and Toyland drummer Lori Barbero, one of

Bob's close friends, sobbed through a reading of

the Lord's Prayer.

Afterwards, people stood up and told Bob's stories,

among them the young musicians he'd worked with

after the replacements.

Ray Reich's dad had played with Bob for

five years in Static Taxi, the band that

had given Stinson new life after the heartbreak

of his replacement's exit.

It was like his new family, said Barbero.

They were all like brothers, and they treated

him really wonderfully.

It covered up the sore spot.

It was the only time I was ever

laughing and crying at the same time in

my life, said Reich's dad.

Mike Leonard, who shared an apartment and a

group, the Bleeding Hearts, with Bob for several

years before his passing, recalled, It was such

a rock-and-roll funeral.

Every musician that knew him was there, paying

their respects.

Anita Stinson sat stoically through it all.

She'd been gripped by terror when she got

the call about Bob a few nights earlier.

Then that passed.

I don't think I got sad until, I

bet, a month after the funeral, before the

sadness and missing Bobby really hit me, she

said.

As she accepted condolences and sympathy, heard and

felt the story's emotion, a peculiar pride seized

her.

As hard as Bobby had it, he did

amazing things.

He was loved by a lot of people.

Bob's sister Lonnie would remember sadness, because you'd

always hoped for more for him, she said,

and guilt, especially because of the way we

were raised, what happened to us as kids,

and feeling like I could have made a

difference or changed him somehow.

And yet there was relief that maybe his

torture is over.

The one thing I know when he died,

and that was pretty immediate, was that he

was safer, said Tommy.

He had a hard fucking time.

He had a hard existence just trying to

be a human.

Up front near the casket was Bob's ex

-wife, Carlene, and their six-year-old son,

Joey.

Bob's only child was a quadriplegic with cerebral

palsy, unable to walk or talk.

But Joe was always very receptive to Bob,

and he loved taking Joe around, said Carlene.

When Joe saw his dad at the funeral,

he just reached out for his hand like

he always did.

He squeezed that great big hand of his,

and when he didn't squeeze back, he knew

his dad was gone.

A few rows behind, Paul Westerberg hung his

head and wiped away tears.

I went downstairs for a cigarette because I

couldn't bear it, he said.

Westerberg had been vilified when Bob had been

fired from the band.

The Paul was especially heavy now.

As he stood smoking, a couple girls who'd

known Bob in his final days approached him.

They made a point to come down and

talk to me.

They said, Bob loved you.

Whenever he asked you for anything, he said

you always gave it to him.

For those girls to seek me out and

tell me that, I was like, let the

world think I'm a villain, as long as

I know what Bob thought and felt.

I knew we didn't hate each other.

We were close, and I loved him.

He was Tommy's brother, but he was my

brother too.

And when he died, it all made us

feel that much more vulnerable.

As the service concluded, Paul called to Colleen.

He leaned in and whispered to her in

a broken voice.

We were just kids.

We didn't know shit.

We were just kids.

Part One Jail, Death, or Janitor We were

miscreants who had no other choice, had no

other road out.

We were one of the few, the chosen,

you know?

It's either this or jail, death, or janitor.

Paul Westerberg Chapter One Bob Stinson had dangerous

bloodlines.

His mother, Anita, came from Excelsior, Minnesota, twenty

miles outside of Minneapolis, on Lake Minnetonka.

Her father, Ernest Martin Hafner, was the first

mystery in the family.

All I know is he left home when

he was fifteen and started riding the rails,

said Anita.

Hafner spent time in the Navy and then

settled near Lake Minnetonka where he met his

wife, Virginia Liebens, born 1919 in Shakopee.

Her family was Dutch and Polish and big

drinkers.

I have a family genealogy that traces to

the 1840s or something, said Anita, and every

single relation was a drunk.

Virginia Liebens also battled mental health issues, problems

that would intensify among later generations of the

family.

Two of Bob Stinson's cousins would commit suicide

by hanging, one at the age of ten,

the other at seventeen.

Ernest and Virginia had seven kids.

Anita was the second oldest, born April 3rd,

1942, following big brother Tom and a head

of Mary, Eugene, Rosie, and twins Ronnie and

Rita.

Ernest was superintendent of the Water and Sewer

Department of Excelsior.

Despite his fancy title, Dad tried to feed

seven of us on his little salary, said

Anita.

We weren't poor, but it wasn't easy, I'm

sure.

Anita was a fourteen-year-old eighth grader

when she met Neil Stinson at a dance.

Some fifty years after the fact, she had

difficulty recalling their initial spark.

Beats the bejeebers out of me, can't help

you there.

Granite-jawed, black eyes, dark crew cut, Neil

wasn't bad-looking, the strong, silent type.

He was an introverted high school dropout.

He was also functionally illiterate.

Neil's family history was no less complicated than

the Hafners'.

Born in 1939 and raised in Mound, Minnesota,

Neil was the fifth child of ten.

His father disappeared early.

His mother was such a severe alcoholic that

the state eventually took her children away.

Some were adopted, and some were put in

foster care.

Those who were of age or close were

left to fend for themselves.

After running away from foster homes a couple

times, Neil moved in with his older sister,

Ruthie.

Her husband, a roofer, taught him the trade,

and Neil Stinson remained a roofer the rest

of his life.

His only other interests were hunting, fishing, and

drinking.

Neil and Anita started going steady.

I was still in Catholic school then.

I used to skip catechism class on Monday

nights to meet him, she said.

In the spring of 1959, she got pregnant.

My family, being Catholic, they didn't talk about

S.E.X. I hardly knew what was

going on.

She quit Minnetonka High and accepted Neil's shotgun

marriage proposal.

On December 17, 1959, she went into labor.

Since neither Excelsior nor Mound had a hospital,

the baby was delivered one town over in

Waconia.

Neil drove me there, and then he left

and got drunk with my brother for three

days, said Anita.

The only thing I remember is that they

put a mask on my face, and when

I woke up, it was three days later,

and I had a kid.

Then they tell you, now you have to

nurse him.

I was like, what are you talking about?

Her firstborn son, Robert Neil Stinson, had blonde

hair, blue eyes, and a sweet disposition.

Bob was a prince, just a prince, said

Anita.

A couple months later, Anita was pregnant again.

In November 1960, she gave birth to a

daughter, Lonnie.

Because we were so close in age, me

and Bobby were almost like twins, said Lonnie.

We were real close growing up.

Not yet 18, Anita struggled to care for

her young ones.

I was a child trying to raise two

children.

It was overwhelming, she said.

What little social life she had revolved around

drinking.

My parents took Bobby and Lonnie and said,

it's time you got drunk.

So that's what I did.

I was drunk for two days.

That was the culture.

Over time, Anita too became an alcoholic.

Despite the children, their marriage was soon failing.

Neil was a heavy drinker and tight-fisted.

He was also emotionally distant, particularly toward his

son.

When Bob was three, Anita said, Neil was

outside working on his car and Bobby went

to be around him.

Neil literally picked him up by the britches

and ran him back into the house and

told me, take care of this kid.

I thought, that's your son too.

There was no feeling there.

Poor Bobby, it started young with him.

When he was first rejected, I don't know

why that scene sticks in my mind so

much, but it does.

It's still difficult.

When I saw the way that was going,

how Neil was, it just led me to

think, I gotta get out of this mess.

The couple separated in 1963.

Anita got a job waitressing at Skipper's Cafe

in Excelsior.

Neil wouldn't give me any money for child

support, she said.

We went to court over that.

Being a roofer, he was making fairly good

money.

The judge asked him what he did with

it.

He said, I pay for groceries and rent.

I pay for my drinking and it's gone.

Anita looked west for an escape route.

My brother Tom had been in the Marines

stationed in San Diego and he just raved

about the place.

It sounded like there was opportunity there and

I wanted to travel.

I wanted to see new things.

It was a major leap of faith.

Other than a few trips to Minneapolis, Anita

had barely been out of her hometown.

Leaving was an act of salvation and desperation,

said Lonnie.

She didn't want to continue to live in

a family of major dysfunction.

Deep inside of her was that little piece

of healthy rebellion.

Her saying, I'm not going to live this

unhappy, suppressed life that you tell me I'm

supposed to.

In December 1964, Anita forged Neil's signature on

his tax return check, went to the super

value in Excelsior where the clerks knew her,

and cashed it.

She had 50 bucks, two little kids, and

three train tickets.

They hopped aboard the Twin Star rocket and

headed for the Golden State.

When he finally noticed his wife and kids

had disappeared without a word, Neil Stinson made

some cursory efforts to locate them.

I think he called my mom's brother Tom

to get a hold of us, said Lonnie.

I don't know that he ever found out

where we were.

Neil wouldn't bother much more than that.

In fact, he would not communicate with his

two children for another decade.

Anita never filed for divorce.

Technically, they remained married.

In San Diego, Anita and the kids settled

into a little cottage near the ocean.

First, she was a receptionist for rug cleaners.

Then she saw an ad for a job

at Lyman's Pizza and Bar on C Street

in downtown San Diego.

Popular hangout for Navy and Marine men from

the nearby ports and bases.

I was a go-go dancer, said Anita.

We danced to a jukebox.

I guess it would be comparable to hooters

nowadays.

I wore go-go boots and a bikini.

It was fun.

It certainly beat slinging hash at Skipper's Cafe

in Excelsior.

Pert and pretty, Anita was popular among Lyman's

clientele.

At Christmas, the whole side of the bar

was filled with toys for my kids that

the sailors had brought.

Among them was a Kenner Close and Play

record player that Bob claimed.

Life in San Diego was idyllic.

We'd go to the beach, catching starfish off

the rocks, trapping crabs, said Lonnie.

Bobby loved the water.

Sun and sand, freedom and excitement.

The move west had delivered Anita's dream of

finding a better future for herself and her

family.

But she would soon give up the liberated

lifestyle only to settle down again.

Everyone at Lyman's knew him as Nick, the

bartender.

He was a shade under six feet with

jet black hair and Gaelic features.

He looked like a total Frenchman, Anita Stinson

would recall, of the man she spent much

of the next decade with.

His full-given name was Neely Horton Griffin.

His people had been among the early Irish

and French settlers of Glasscock County, Georgia, in

the mid-1800s.

His forefathers fought on the Confederate side during

the Civil War, but could do little to

stop William Sherman's Union forces from scything through

their home county.

After the war, the Griffins remained in the

area, farming the land for a couple more

generations until the Great Depression hit.

Born February 13, 1932, Nick moved to Cloud

Lake, Florida, as a child living there until

he was 19, then joining the Marines during

the Korean conflict.

He trained at Parris Island in Camp Lejeune,

but never made it overseas.

Instead, he ended up at Camp Matthews outside

San Diego, serving barely seven months before being

discharged in 1952.

He stayed in San Diego and eventually landed

at Lyman's.

Griffin also had a musical streak.

He did play drums, but not professionally, Anita

recalled.

He putzed around with them, I don't know

where, but he had played.

Ten years older than Anita, Nick had been

married twice and had three children from their

first relationship.

His boys, Billy and Alan, were grown, though

another daughter, Linda, was still around in the

mid-60s when he and Anita met.

They were involved casually, then more seriously, and

she and her children moved in with him.

I was raised in that era where there

had to be a man in your life

or you couldn't do anything, she said.

You couldn't even write a check, and that's

not a joke.

You couldn't go into a bank and open

your own account.

Griffin didn't care for Anita's kids, Bob in

particular.

Nick worked nights, slept and relaxed during the

day and didn't want a six-year-old

boy tearing around his home.

Bob was always told he couldn't come in

the house, said Lonnie, so he'd go out

and wander the beach or the canyons nearby.

The record player he'd gotten for Christmas offered

a whole other world to explore.

He would save his money and buy these

little 45 records of the Beatles, said Lonnie.

Bobby and I would wander downtown and go

to record stores.

It didn't take long for Anita to realize

that she'd made a mistake.

Nick was a drunk and a degenerate gambler

whose mood swung with the betting results.

The affair might have ended early on, except

in the winter of 1966, she got pregnant.

Their son, Thomas Eugene, was born on October

6, 1966.

Anita named him after her two brothers, but

because of her marital status, the boys were

given the Stinson last name.

Tommy Stinson would inherit his father Nick's features,

round-tipped nose, triangular jaw, but got his

mother's coloring and bright personality.

As a baby, he was a joy, said

Anita.

He had charisma.

From early on, you could tell from the

look in his eye when he was little,

he was full of spit and vinegar.

Buried in the archives of the Minnesota Juvenile

Court is a thick case file on Bob

Stinson from the early 1970s.

In the section focusing on his early life,

there's a one-paragraph description that sums up

his decade living with Nick Griffin.

During the 10 years that Mrs. Stinson lived

with her boyfriend Nick, Bobby was subjected to

both physical and mental abuse at Nick's hands.

Nick was an irascible man who singled Bobby

out for abuse.

She estimates he beat Bobby with a belt

approximately once a month.

Bobby was the family scapegoat.

His sister Lonnie was a family favorite.

Bobby must have felt like an outsider in

his own family, and he freely admits that

he hated Nick.

It was probably during these years that he

retreated into fantasy.

According to his mother, he never had any

really close friends, which seems to indicate that

distrust was an early component of his personality

structure.

What the report didn't reveal was that for

much of those 10 years, Nick Griffin was

also abusing both Bob and Lonnie in far

more serious ways.

It was physical and sexual and verbal for

both of us, said Lonnie.

With me, it was more the sexual and

Bobby more the verbal, but all of it,

for sure.

I caught him molesting Bobby when we were

real young, but I only caught him once,

so I don't know how long or how

extensive it was.

Both children kept silent, largely out of fear

that they wouldn't be believed that they were

the ones doing wrong.

At the time, Anita was totally unaware.

It went on while she was away at

work.

You look back and you go, God, how

could I have not known, said Anita.

You feel like you failed.

Griffin, who died in 1989, was possibly a

serial child molester.

Though he was never charged with any sex

crimes, the Los Angeles County Sheriff once held

Griffin for a weekend in 1967 for loitering

suspiciously near a grade school.

When he got back, he told me straight

out that he'd been in jail because they

thought I was watching kids in the schoolyard,

recalled Anita.

Why the heck didn't that mean anything to

me?

Griffin's sexual abuse of the children started when

Bob was only seven.

I know exactly in my mind the first

time, said Anita.

I had been at work the night before,

and Nick was off.

It had to have happened then, because the

next day he was different.

He wasn't Bobby anymore.

That night we were having dinner, and Bobby

couldn't eat.

Then he started throwing up.

He ended up throwing up all over the

place.

Lonnie and I took him to the doctor.

He was throwing up nothing but bile.

He had no fever, nothing.

The doctor could not find a thing wrong

with him.

Compounding the physical trauma was Griffin's belittling of

Bob in private and in front of the

family.

Bobby never felt like he was worth anything,

because Nick always told him he wasn't, said

Lonnie.

He grew up even into his 20s and

30s believing that.

What hurts the most is what he did

to my relationship with Bobby.

We were tight until Nick came along.

I was kept in the house, and Bobby

was forced outside.

That's the part of my life that I

hate the most, what he did to us.

And I know my mom, she'll probably take

that to her grave.

Beyond their frequent verbal arguments, Nick was sometimes

physically abusive toward Anita as well.

She tried to end their relationship several times.

She'd leave him and she'd go back to

him, leave him and go back to him,

said Lonnie.

I think she knew in her heart it

wasn't the right thing, but she didn't know

how to not be there.

In 1969, Nick Griffin's mother died.

He decided to move back to Florida and

pledged to make a fresh start there with

Anita and the kids.

Eventually, he got a job bartending at the

Ramada Inn.

Anita started working for Howard Johnson's on Okeechobee

Road.

They got an apartment on M Street in

West Palm Beach.

Initially, things were stable, relatively speaking.

The couple had a daughter, Lisa, whom Nick

favored most in 1971.

Lisa was the only child that I ever

saw him be even a touch nurturing with,

said Anita.

Not so Bobby and Lonnie, who were reaching

adolescence.

We tried not to have friends.

We didn't want to bring them home because

of Nick, said Lonnie.

I was in the house taking care of

Tommy or Lisa, and Bobby was outside most

of the time.

Nick began taking fewer bartending shifts and tried

to earn his living instead as a gambler,

betting on Greyhounds at the Palm Beach Kennel

Club.

Only in his early 40s, he'd already developed

emphysema because of heavy smoking.

He was prone to dark rages or worse.

Anita had become the family's main breadwinner.

She served as a hostess for PGA Tour

events, as well as the fairly lucrative Howard

Johnson's gig.

I made big tips, sometimes 100 bucks a

night, which was amazing back then, she said.

Anita began socking the money away, eventually saving

enough for down payments on a new car

and a three-bedroom trailer home.

But the banks wouldn't guarantee her loans, so

everything was put in Nick's name.

Despite this new stability, Bob had started ditching

classes in sixth grade and ran away for

short periods of time.

Once he broke into a house and vandalized

it, none of it came to the attention

of the juvenile authorities.

Bob also developed into a bit of a

shut-in, holing up in his room to

avoid his drunken stepfather and to listen to

and play music.

First the Beatles and the Jackson 5, then

the era's wilder rock artists he'd developed an

adolescent affection for.

In particular, the albino blues guitarist Johnny Winter.

Bob badgered his mother to buy him a

guitar for Christmas.

The instrument quickly became an obsession.

It was nothing for him to sit and

plunk away at his guitar for eight, nine

hours, said Lonnie.

That was his escape.

From there, Bob found his way to prog

rock and the band Yes, whose guitarist Steve

Howe became his musician.