Living With 'Let It Be'

1984 was the year I graduated high school. It was also the year that I heard The Replacements for the first time. The album was Let It Be and, to hear critics tell it, it was an album as close to perfect as anything those four Liverpudlian mop tops had ever concocted.

Naturally, I was skeptical and one listen proved that the critics were wrong. It wasn't perfect at all. In fact, it was a ragged mess held together by a healthy dose of spit and electrical tape, yet always on the verge of flying apart at any given moment. In songs like "Answering Machine" and "Unsatisfied", I heard and understood a level of desperation and disappointment that I had not yet experienced.

"Look me in the eyes and tell me that I'm satisfied/Are you satisfied?"

Those days were still so full of discovery that failure and despair had not yet become a part of the equation, yet in the songs of Paul Westerberg, so many of us were able to feel every word as if it were a part of our very being. Of course, what makes it all the more remarkable is the fact that it was just a little band from Minneapolis making a little record for a little record label called Twin/Tone.
While the major labels spent millions hoping to come up with something capable of changing the world, these guys managed to do it on a shoestring budget and zero market research.

Who could've known that, by 1991, their entire look and sound would become a pose worn by a generation of self-conscious, whiny pretenders?

I can still remember the chill I felt the first time I heard "Answering Machine". Here was a song comprised of a single cranked-up guitar and a singer straining at every note. No drums or bass, but the truth is that if they'd been there, they'd have only gotten in the way. The message was so much clearer standing there in front of us, completely naked and thoughtfully brave. Not your garden variety brand of bravery, mind you, but, rather, the sort of bravery attained only after reaching the point where there is nothing left to lose.

I was twenty years from knowing that type of bravery when I wore out the grooves on my first copy of Let It Be. Over the years, I have bought and re-bought the recording on any number of formats…LP, cassette, CD, mp3…and I can honestly say that each first listen has, without exception, provided the same kick to the heart as any injection of adrenaline.

Several months after discovering Let It Be, my grandmother passed away. I had seen her recently at one of my band's first major gigs and I had been struck by how happy and alive she seemed. A couple weeks later, just days into her first real vacation in ages, she had suffered an aneurysm. At the dinner following her funeral, held at my parents' house, I tried to be social, but eventually fled to my bedroom. My girlfriend followed after me and tried her best to console me, but I was having none of it.

She finally walked over to the stereo and put on Let It Be, knowing how much I liked the album. She could have picked any number of albums that she knew I liked, but she chose that one. She then came over and sat next to me, running her hands through my hair, getting up only to flip the album over when the first side finished. We listened to the entire album in silence, but I felt the sadness give way to a wish that this moment would never end.

A few days later, she would surprise me with Replacements tickets. I should have married her. I often wonder whatever became of her and chide my former self for breaking up with her for reasons important only to a 19-year-old dipshit.
Truth be told, anytime I hear a song from Let It Be, I think of that moment…she and I in my bedroom, a cheap stereo breaking the silence, and, despite my grandmother's passing, the unwritten script indicating that it would be all downhill from here.
Now, don't get me wrong. Let It Be is by no means all heaviness and gloom. In fact, parts of it are downright joyous…flippant…and completely non-essential, but it's the best kind of non-essential. Like a joke that's true and funny that always makes you laugh, somehow managing to lift your spirits, even on your worst day.

That Westerberg was capable of touching upon so many emotions while also swinging the pendulum so wildly from that of introspective genius to drunken clown prince is still one of the greatest achievements in all of music.