Tonight I'll be doing pull-ups on the toilet POLL - Artist Poll #104 - THE REPLACEMENTS Voting Thread

that's not tommy, that's tina weymouth's daughter

If anyone has or can link to a good post-PTMM list of their work it’d be appreciated.

*Eno voice* - “Their third record sold adequately, but everyone who heard it unfortunately became aware of Kiss.”

i don't even know - what are the early period consensus favorites? watching something like this, from 1981, the whole show is brilliant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHBE7o_WWsI

xxpost well i learned something today

if this poll is worth it’s salt it’ll go ahead and cancel two results in bc its too drunk to continue

<3

I listened to Tim last night and realized most if not all of it will be on my ballot

Same. And weirdly, I could only come up with one Don't Tell A Soul song that I would definitely put on my ballot, and three from All Shook Down...but I feel like I prefer DTAS as an album. Which doesn't make any sense. I have some relistening to do.

yep

I feel obligated to participate in this one but I dont' really wanna.

you w-w-w-w-on't?

I went through their discography on Wikipedia and jotted down the 16 easy picks for me. So I'll push my ballot to 20 songs--I don't like to fill out lists with songs I like but don't love.

Does a 20-song ballot get 340 points then?

just picked 16 songs from the big three albums, gotta reacquaint with the rest.

pretty positive I already know what my number one is, though

Anyone considering Dead Man's Pop instead of Don't Tell a Soul? (assuming either would have made your top 5)

Haven't but certainly would pick the one over the other.

Does a 20-song ballot get 340 points then?

An unranked one does, yes. A ranked ballot gets significantly more as 21-30 get the tiniest weightings.

A few polls back I toyed with giving 'shorter' unranked ballots approximately the same number of total points as a ranked one of the same length, but it meant deciding on a different value per entry for each ballot length, and ever longer explanations. Given that folks overwhelmingly (i) opt for a ranked ballot and (ii) torture themselves for ages over what to leave out, it felt like I was thinking too hard about a 'problem' that barely seems to arise. :)

Okay--I'll add up what #1-20 would get on a full ballot and work something out (I generally like to rank the top five songs and then cluster the rest in groups).

sorry ma, forgot to take out the trash kind of rules! it's a little inconsistent, but kick your door down, customer, takin' a ride, shutup...

i am not a replacements live footage connoisseur, but i thought this video was great too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHBE7o_WWsI

there's a second set, too

Seeing as I didn't explain it very well up top in English, the proposed scoring in is now in the spreadsheet in the second post. Just to the right of the tracks list. And I changed the side-project weights such that they follow the same basic pattern as the main tracks poll.

Clemenza: just confirming, the total points in a ranked list of twenty is 452, so take that as your total if you want go with bespoke weightings.

Sent mine in earlier--20 songs, 452 points.

Some of the Sorry Ma tracks that stick with longest after listening are ones that depart a little from the, er, formula. "Kick Your Door Down", "Johnny's Gonna Die", "Otto", etc. And "Go" on Stink... which is kinda amazing. The wimpy tracks, probably, LOL.

Oh, *three* ballots in already, in fact. Nice. Wasn't going to bother checking that mailbox for a few days yet.

Go" on Stink... which is kinda amazing.

so far, "go" has been my biggest "discovery" of this poll, it is fantastic.

also, i've always thought of pleased to meet me as a step down from tim and let it be, but i'm really loving it this morning. "the ledge" sounds like a guest spot from kurt cobain, at times

another connection/influence i didn't pick up on until recently was fogerty/CCR, down to sometimes pronouncing r's as w's. it seems like an overt nod at some times ("huwwy up! huwwy up!" in can't hardly wait) but other times, in live shows and stuff, it seems to bleed through as part of his dna.

i dunno, i might be overreading all that

“Go” is incredible, and PTMM might be — some days — my favourite ‘Mats record.

Stoked for this poll!

i think the slightly slicked up production on PTMM used to bother me a little more. even today, i think i like the rougher alternate version of Can't Hardly Wait on the expanded PTMM better than the album version (i like the slowed down acoustic version on the expanded Tim most of all).

but for the most part, especially the first side and the last couple on the other, it's so good!

for some reason it was "i don't know" that slapped me on the head, this morning. i didn't even remember that song. i can't figure out if it's an extremely simple song or if it's actually very strange - it makes me feel like an aggressive 1930s detective on amphetamines, and i'm not even sure what that means.

I was going to submit an album list--I could rank their albums compared to each other--but the truth is, I don't care for at least a third to a half of every one of them. The one album of theirs I almost uniformly love is the Rhino compilation, Don't You Know Who I Think I Was?. 20 songs, just like my ballot, and the overlap is 13 songs.

I don't think they were very good at telling great from good from mediocre--or, more likely, they just didn't care. And I totally realize that that was intrinsic to why they were so great. They didn't fuss a lot trying to make a Perfect Album.

Please! I say these things as a huge fan (one of my ten favourite bands for sure--not top five). I'm not trying to be a downer on this thread. Picking out my 15 favourite songs took approximately a minute, those songs are so good.

I didn’t get into The Replacements until the last 10 years or so. I knew Paul’s solo songs from the Singles soundtrack which I liked, but never dug any deeper or even came across any Replacements through friends or radio

Which is a weird regret I have, just in terms of knowing how much I would have dug them if I had come across them in high school or college, they are just so completely my bag as far as lyrics/music goes.

Confession: playing/singing “Alex Chilton” on Rockband was when the floodgates opened & I bought their whole discography in like a week

Can one vote for the All Shook Down demos in the album category? They were released on the 2008 expanded edition but never on their own, afaict. It's a toss-up between that and Dead Man's Pop for the #5 slot, for me.

Confession: playing/singing “Alex Chilton” on Rockband was when the floodgates opened & I bought their whole discography in like a week

same deal with me and steely dan's "do it again" on guitar hero. as i was learning the solo and hearing it over and over (and drinking heavily), i gained a new appreciation for the vibe of the song that i never understood before

Can one vote for the All Shook Down demos in the album category?

This is tricky. I'm inclined to say no, given they weren't packaged as a standalone entity. Dead Man's Pop seems way less problematic. Seems slightly unfortunate for the ASD material: if they did transform it into a Dead Man's Pop-like package a year from now I guess I would be saying it was eligible. :(

Somewhat related: any objections to Stink being treated as an album for these purposes?

Wait, someone doesn’t consider Stink an album?!

Haha. It's just that it's *checks* 14:24 minutes long and frequently listed as an EP. Thought I best raise it now to eliminate any possibility of "wait, we were allowed to vote Stink?" during the rollout. I may even vote for it myself!

Fun fact: 7 ballots so far. 72 distinct Replacements tracks and 30 solo/side-project tracks have appeared.

I knuckled down & did some homework this weekend; now have 30 tracks locked & loaded...

ballot should be forthcoming this wk

Rhino may put together a disc of demos or alternates for All Shook Down like they did with Pleased to Meet Me, but I doubt they'll do a brand-new, full-on remix like they did with Dead Man's Pop - that was a special case because not only were they unhappy with the final result, Westerberg and Matt Wallace discussed in detail what a remix would entail many times over a long period of time and they had the original rough mixes as physical foundation. Tommy Stinson actually believes All Shook Down is their best album, so he definitely would not see a need to "fix" it.

Re: the Replacement's imperfect construction of their albums, I agree with this to a limited extent. I wish Bob Stinson hadn't vetoed "You're Getting Married" from Hootenanny, the circulating full-band outtake is a great, lost track, but otherwise there's nothing I'd change about any of the Twin/Tone records, I love them all and would listen to them start-to-finish. Even "If Only You Were Lonely" feels perfect as a left-field B-side gem rather than an album track.

It's only the Sire years where it gets a little frustrating for me, but the reissues have more or less rectified any problems with track selection. On Tim, I swapped out "Dose of Thunder" and "Lay It Down Clown" with "Nowhere Is My Home" and "Can't Hardly Wait" (from All for Nothing/Nothing for All). On Pleased to Meet Me, to avoid redundancy I swapped out the horns-and-strings "Can't Hardly Wait" for "Birthday Gal" (again from All for Nothing/Nothing for All) - I do wish "P.O. Box (Photo)" progressed beyond demo form, that would've been great to add. And thankfully we now have Dead Man's Pop to go with "Portland," "We Know the Night" and "Wake Up," so with some adjustments, those first three Sire albums now hang together for me from end-to-end. Some songs are better than others, but I still find plenty to like about the "lesser" tracks.

It seems particularly insane that the likes of "Portland" and "Wake Up" were discarded circa DTAS. Both of those, plus the aforementioned "Nowhere Is My Home" and "P.O. Box (Photo)" remain on my shortlist...

Yeah, but it sounds like they were scared shitless on what to put out next because their career was very much on the line. If the two prior Sire albums had, say, easily gone gold within a year (i.e. doubled their modest sales), I wonder if that would've taken off enough pressure for them to be much more comfortable with where they wanted to go musically-speaking.

trying to figure out what i think of don't tell a soul and dead man's pop?

i keep going back forth on 'talent show' - again, i hear the springsteen influence and can't tell if it's supposed to be an homage or not (the verse melody of 'dancing in the dark' runs throughout it, and he hums it at times after the choruses)

Solo-wise, will be fun to review what I have (most all of Paul's cd/digital stuff, Tommy's Perfect and first Bash & Pop, though no Chris, Slim or Bob albums). Pretty sure "Good Day" will be my number one. That and "Sunrise Always Listens" have been great cushions over the years.

Reading this thread is a good spur to pre-order the PTMM set.

i liked the Paul & Juliana Hatfield collab album from a few years ago (2016? 2014?) .. released as The I Don’t Cares

the tracks where they harmonize together are the highlights for me

i love Good Day by Tommy! i will def be votong for that

voting even

oooo, first poll that's lured me back in in a while. I will definitely vote. On the solo stuff I need to go back to those Chris Mars albums, haven't listened in a while.

So if I'm reading this right, Chinese Democracy qualifies as a Replacements project, right?

Solo projects was easy for me. I've listened to Westerberg's twin albums Stereo & Mono far, far more than anything else they've done outside of the band, and that was pretty much my list. I still remember when it came out and Westerberg did those in-store appearances (including Virgin in Chicago, where a fan handed him a lyric sheet when he forgot a 'Mats classic mid-song).

Ha, my first off-the-top-of-my-head cull gave me exactly 30 songs. Probably leaving some out tho.

So if I'm reading this right, Chinese Democracy qualifies as a Replacements project, right?

I changed that "central creative or songwriting role" sentence up the top a comical number of times. It initially ended with "(so possibly not G'n'R or Soul Asylum, etc)" or similar. Stinson definitely gets a few songwriting credits on Chinese Democracy so... maybe?! Let your conscience be your guide...

Make sure to give Bash & Pop's first album a spin before you submit a ballot full of Westerberg solo trax.

I kind of have Can't Hardly Wait like this.
1. Horns and Strings PTMM
2. Blistering TSHTF version
3. Tim-acoustic take

ffs

works for me, kinda like a rolling pin.

SENT!

Okay, I'll close this thing now to finalise the albums and solo/other stats. I'll begin the rollout with those, hopefully in the morning (my time), perhaps 10 hours from now.

Though if anyone sneaks in a last minute submission for the main tracks poll while I sleep I'm hardly going to exclude it from the tally. :)

wait for me!

sent!

*thumbs up*

I would think you'd get a lot of voters in that one--at least 40.
― clemenza, Friday, September 18, 2020

Pretty close, it turns out: 38

XXXPOST:
If it's too late, and 'Never Mind' gets an extra vote skew - 'Never Mind' I guess!

I meant to mention that. I removed the duplicate at the time and intended ask whether you wanted to substitute something else in. Sorry!

Anything you want, I’ll Nag! Nag! Nag!

38 votes, nice! i'm excited for all of this.

re: albums you know it's not that I think PTMM is exponentially greater than any of the records from the classic run. I just think for really the only time in Paul's career solo or otherwise, they found a perfect producer where the whole ends up being more than the sum of the parts.

Ha, that is definitely clear from listening to all their albums back to back. They were recorded and mixed badly in many different ways! Although I don't mind the murk on Let It Be, it suits the album.

38 votes, nice! i'm excited for all of this.

When I listened on LPs the messed up recording could bother me a bit, but now with streaming/remastering/listening through earbuds there is kind of a flattening effect.

Hell-o-o?

nag3, it's your man on the inside, reporting in. central time is 2:28pm, i repeat, CST is four teen two eight, charlie mike

Haha. Okay, I think I'm ready....

wow, almost exactly 10 hours later!!

tbh, such punctuality seems at odds with the spirit of the replacements, but still, i'm here for it

I hate ILoveMusic, it's got too many POLLS - Artist Poll #104 - THE REPLACEMENTS - RESULTS