While the oral history form has its charms, it's a flawed method of recording events in book form. The writer steps back, letting his or her subjects tell the entire tale, the hand on the rudder a light one, steering the narrative by the choice of who says what and when. It worked to a certain extent on Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me, an oral history of the New York punk scene. As each of the musicians, critics and fans weighed in, they accomplished a sort of safety-pinned version of the blind men describing the elephant, the various tangents somehow a fitting way to describe such a strange movement.

I picked up Jim Walsh's The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting, with trepidation. How much could I possibly learn anything new what was my favorite band for well over a decade, a band for which I unashamedly still keep a file folder full of magazine and newspaper articles ripped from publications in my teens on the off chance I might need to refer to them again someday? Still, the prospect of hearing the words of those who were there in the early days -- my hippest friend turned me on to the band when I was a sophomore in high school, the year Tim came out -- was appealing. While there are moments of personal reportage that offer interesting tidbits, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

I knew to be worried in the preface when Walsh was recounting the reasons the Replacements were the best band in the world. After many passages that start "Because..." he starts one like this: "Because one night in 1989 the 'Mats were booked on something called The International Rock Awards on ABC..." Ah, here we go, I thought. Having watched the band's performance on that show at least 25 times in my life, I knew what was coming. Or so I thought. He gets it right that the announcer says, "We apologize, here they are -- the Replacements," and recounts some of what happened in the performance, but misses two key moments. The first he alludes to when he reports that censors bleeped Paul Westerberg's reference to "We're feeling good from the pills we took," writing that "Paul rolls his eyes, finishes the lyric and plows ahead."

I nearly put the book down right there, knowing that if it wasn't going to get this right, the whole thing might be flawed. Yes, Westerberg rolled his eyes, but more than that, at the end of the song when on the recording he sings, "It's too late to turn back, here we go," he instead sings "It's too late to take pills, here we go" again and again, smirking all the while. Walsh is trying here to write about the band's eternal status as out-of-step misfits unwilling to play the game, and misses a perfect chance to make the point. The other funny moment came during the song's brief breakdown. On the recording there's the sound of bottles clinking and Tommy Stinson saying something inaudible. Here, Stinson steps to the microphone and says, "The Elvis? Ha ha ha ha...!" mocking the statuette being given by this one-and-done awards show. The band doesn't just bite the hand that feeds; it pisses on it for good measure.

All that in a section where Walsh was doing his own reporting, not relying on others. If a guy who had been there from the very beginning could miss a softball like that, how good could the rest of the book be? Answer: It's about as spotty as that missed opportunity would indicate. Once gets a sense of the band and its members, but it's a flawed sense made more confusing by Walsh's decision to intercut fresh interview fodder from observers with old interview snippets from the band. Two-decade-old reminiscences are mixed with contemporaneous proclamations, and rather than illuminate things, the practice just makes things muddier.

It doesn't help that Westerberg and Stinson didn't participate, that drummer Chris Mars responded with an e-mailed paragraph or that guitarist Bob Stinson is dead. In fact, the only Replacements who truly contributed -- latter day guitarist Slim Dunlap and drummer Steve Foley -- offer the best dirt here, recounting what it was like to join a band full of promise as it climbed into its own coffin.

Then again, perhaps this is more fitting a tribute to the 'Mats than I've been willing to admit. The band subverted possible success at every turn, frustrating fans who knew there was better to be had if only Westerberg would let himself loose. In the same way, there is a better Replacements book out there for the writer willing to do more than cobble together quotes from magazine interviews and the nostalgic reverie of fans, confidantes and hangers-on.

Labels: books, music