Then Brad Paisley texted, just as it started to snow
Would Dave be able to back him at an awards show?
Then Nickelodeon called, would he help salute Starsky & Hutch?
Of course! When it came to TV, there was no such thing as too much!

Then suddenly came a knock at the door
It was Mission of Burma, to discuss a reunion tour.
They already had a drummer, but that wouldn’t get in the way
Dave could sing back-ups and play djembe.

Then the phone rang with a terrible clatter
Dave sprang from his chair to see what was the matter.
The voice on the receiver said something crass
Jann Wenner needed Dave to come help wipe his ass.
Jann barked “Get here soon! I need to go badly!”
It was one of the services the Concierge provided gladly.

Quickly, Dave summoned his ‘copter via his phone
So he could attend to the hygiene of his master at Rolling Stone.
More rapid than eagles the whirlybird came,
Then Dave whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Taylor! Now, Pat Smear! And Nate and Chris, too!
We need to assist ol’ Jann with a poo!
To the top of the porch! With all due speed!
He said he’d put me on the cover anytime I need!”

So high over the housetops the Foo Fighters flew
With a trunk full of Charmin, and some sani-wipes, too—
On the way they stopped briefly to see Stevie Nicks
For a ballad she was writing, Dave had promised some licks.
Oh, they also had to drop by the house of Bob Mould
Dave had to pay him for all the Husker Du songs he stole.

As leaves before a hurricane did they fly,
And before long they had arrived at Jann’s penthouse in the sky.
Ol’ Jann was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
“Sorry for the mess, Dave Fricke and I had a fight,
Let’s get going boys, I don’t have all night!

“Now, I’ll sit and do my business, then I’ll bend over the tub,
And then Mister Dave can give me a rub.
Be gentle and soft, and as thorough as you can,
Because, you must remember, I can always find another band.
Why, just one rough scratch, and you’ll be back where you started
And I’ll hand the TP to my ol’ pal Chris Martin.
Oh and Dave, please don’t forget how you got here
Future Islands are simply dying to clean up my rear.”

Dave reassured his master with an eager grin,
And spoke these words while wagging his tiny chin:

“I’ll polish, I’ll dab, I’ll powder you, too,
Please don’t desert your most loyal Foo.
Oh, sadly, it’s true, all your warnings and stories
If poor Kurt hadn’t died, I’d just be Tico Torres.
Last week I had a nightmare, I awoke with a start,
And realized I wasn’t half as talented as Grant Hart.
So that’s why I keep wiping, and working ‘til I fall over
I don’t know the meaning of over-exposure.”

Jann was chubby and plump, jolly and full of sass,
And laughed when he saw Dave wiping his ass.
“You’ve done well tonight, and don’t mind the stench
Now hurry along, you just got a call from Benmont Tench.
He’s working on a track with G.E. Smith and Liz Phair
It’s not very good, but cameras will be there.”

With a wink of his eye, Jann rose from his throne
And beckoned Taylor and Pat to quickly go home.
Of course Dave had to stay, even as it neared 12 O’clock
A call had just come in from 30 Rock.
Dave shouted after his friends, as they sped into the night
“Happy Christmas to all, Fallon needs me for a cameo tonight!”

So I was not especially engaged, as so many of my peers were, by the prospect of their reunion. But my personal feelings about the Replacements are hardly relevant to the point I’d like to make here.

RELATED: Revisiting My Thoughts on The Replacements and The Captain (Plus Let’s Honor Malcolm Young)

The Replacements, 3/4ths of whom are still alive.

See, whenever I consider the reunion of the so-called Replacements, I remember this: If Paul Westerberg went out on a solo tour, he would probably get a guarantee of (let’s call it) X dollars (“X” would be a decent amount of change to you and I, but that is not the point here). Now, if Westerberg and Stinson went out on the road billed as, oh, “Westerberg and Stinson,” that number would probably change to X times 5. But…if they call the same band The Replacements, the original “X” becomes X times 15. And X times 15 is a lot of money.

I can pretty much guarantee that this didn’t happen: After many moments – nay, years – of grave consideration, Paul Westerberg didn’t decide to “reunite the Replacements.” Instead, Westerberg very likely thought “I can make fifteen times as much money – shit, add merch and we’re talking twenty times as much – if I can rope Tommy into this and go out as the Replacements.” See, personally I have certain semi-articulated criteria regarding a reunion. Let’s examine these, shall we? If a band originally had four members, one writing/singing member going out with one other member who didn’t write or sing lead and only one other member who didn’t write or sing does NOT feel like a legit reunion to me. And don’t bring in the dead (Bob) or incapacitated (Slim) members issue…even Led Zeppelin, who stood to make about a billion dollars from a reunion tour, I mean literally a billion dollars, only performed as Led Zeppelin when they had three of the original four on-board, and otherwise went out as Page/Plant.

David Minehan, around the time he was America’s answer to Paul Weller.

Let’s look into this a little further.

Now, the Buzzcocks are also out on the road (and have been, for many years) with “just” two original members. Yet I consider this a “legitimate” reunion, even though I don’t consider the Replacements legitimate. Why? Well, the two “original” members of the Buzzcocks in their current touring line-up were both primary vocalists and composers – in fact, the only singing/writing members of the band. Let’s take this a step further into history: Through much of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Pink Floyd toured and released records. This band contained two of the original four members of the band, and three of the four “prime” members of the band. Was this a real “Pink Floyd”? Why, yes it was. 1) Any band that includes three out of four “prime” members, including one of the prime vocalists, can always claim legitimacy; 2) Roger Waters is a bitter old sexist dickwad, and I endorse anything that made him frown. Having three-fourths of the prime line-up PLUS one of the prime vocalists, as the ‘80s/’90s Floyd did, means that you are way legitimate.

Roger Waters, a bitter dickwad.

Yet, Tim, you’re still insisting the Replacements weren’t legit? Why, yes I am. A lead singer and the non-singing/non-writing bassist do not comprise a legit line-up, but just a money grab.

“Now, how about The Damned?”

Poet Siegfried Sasoon, who came back from the dead to discuss the Damned with me.

“The Yachts Make Me Glad
Strong songs, great organ sound, yet
I sense much irony”

Sasoon, wavering between this world and the next, doesn’t care about my archival literary efforts (though he does express a mild degree of pleasure in another haiku that goes “Oh, Bram Tchaikovsky/I’m glad you left the Motors/to do Byrds + Who”). He is only interested in my assessment of the legitimacy of the current line-up of the Damned.

“The Damned! Two original members, like the Replacements and the Buzzcocks,” Sassoon notes, in a pleasant Cambridge lilt. “Legitimate or not?”

Captain Sensible and Dave Vanian of the Damned, whom I discussed with the hovering spectre of Siegfried Sasoon. I really wanted Siegfried to discuss his relationship with Robert Graves, but we didn’t get around to that.

Schooled on the linoleum floors and bleach-stink’d hallways of Punk Rock School, boiled in her Canal Street lunchrooms, bullied on her Bowery playgrounds and first-time fellated in punk rock’s crumbling old ballrooms;

First job’d in her flyer-flooded cubicles and first-fired while slashed on acid in her briny toilets; re-hired in narrow punk rock stairways leading up to low-ceiling’d Park Avenue South shrines and fired again in 2 AM Tompkins Square Punk Rock parks lit by lights yellow’d and joyless, casting squinting shade over our shadowed, Holiday high’d punk rock heads;

Aging fast, as punk rock pipe-glass crisply cracked underneath creeper’d feet in Eldridge Street punk rock doorways smelling of piss and hash; punk rock trash’d and shellacked as the ’80s turned arty but still at a screaming Birthday Party.

Born in ’76 a fully sentient infant knowing of no other language but punk rock, we believed, believed, believed, believed, through metal eras/errors and swelling bellies and punk rock babies and the shabby crow of nostalgia, replaced by the happy glow of nostalgia for punk rock, punk rock, punk rock; and we had to believe, because without belief we believed we would vanished; even as we strolled with put-on pride on the deck of our mid-life Titanic, clutching deflated life-vests labeled with the lie 50isthenew40 and 60isthenew50 and so on, denying that we were finally our own sad dads, we had to believe in our punk rock, we had to believe we had witnessed Trinity in the 2^nd Avenue Desert, we had to be able to boast that we were there

We were there!

We were there (and not you),

so we shrieked, coughing from 30 years of Camels and Canal Street exhaust, exhausted were we but still we were there at the Zero Hour in the Lower Manhattan Project, our bar chord sun was brighter than a thousand others!

Of course, it was all a lie, I mean not a mean one, I mean not a bad one. See, we all ache for the wheel to be reinvented, it is essential to our myth that our lives, our time, our era is more important than anyone else’s; so every grown-fast suburb-sick teen calls their age 18 Year Zero, and it’s true, every newly free (eight)teen is the pilot of the Enola Gay (or just curious), every newly free eight(teen) feels  Shiva-rock was unleashed for them and them alone; and, necessarily, we believe not in Mendel’s Peas but in Eve’s Apple: we alone discovered sin, we alone discovered lust and drugs and girl drummers and dive bars.

Who wants to admit that they are just another consumer, subject to just another market correction?

We, The Sentient Babies of ’76, did not know that to every wide-eyed and wide-lipped teenish, their time under the heatless city moon is the hottest time under the heatless city moon:

See, every teenager is Vicodin’d Columbus discovering the Kingdom of Outsiders and the Kingdom of Night-Rockers, every teenager is their own and only Vasco de Gabba-Gabba-Hey, sailing their ship around the Cape of Godless & Horny and sighting natives underneath the Manhattan Bridge; every teenager of any era believes that the lowscrapers and old polish rooms and new model barrios were built only for them to discover and colonize, and that they are the only midnight children with a life so bright and sweetly dark and too fast and full of love crouched in cabs (and every single one of them doomed one day to be they).  But anyway –

We, the sentient babies of ’76 (and ’82, and ’80, and ’84) believe that we came upon St. Marks’ Place a midnight dreary and we invented the wheel.

But we didn’t. So appalled were we, Watergate cynical an’ lonely an’ dreaming of Loud and Kinks, each of us made so lonely by the High School hallways full of blown-dry boys and Peasant-Blous’d foxes on the run humming Dust in the Wind, so distressed and shut out by Saturday Night Fever were we that we saw 1976 and insisted it was 1776.

We wanted to believe we were part of a revolution, but it was only a market correction, alas, at last.

The frippery of the second half of the ‘60s and the slow burn solocides of the ‘70s left the Teen Soundtrack corrupt, lousy with wilted flowers, sodden with sitars and sibilant horns and shitty songs about money and the suede-vested high-life; so we shot at the Tsar (but only damaged his car), and we wanted Stalin (but only got the New Deal), we wanted revolution but all we got was a Market Correction, layers of winter clothes and Commander Cody hair left on the dorm room floor and pissy fringes given away to Love Saves The Day.

The lie was that it was revolution, it was just evolution,

I mean, so thrilling it was, it was our lives, our lives, but just a market correction.

One of many.

But this was actually as it was supposed to be.

We, the newly-free grown-fast children of suburb-sick, eternal, never aging, regenerating always and forever, never crossed the same East River twice; and we would not recognize the next incarnation, and nor would we be young for it; and we did not want to admit that no river that ever slashed through the Kingdom of Outsiders ever stopped flowing just for us. No river in any city, Camden Town to Chapel Hill, Aylesbury to Athens, Brighton to Brookyn to Brookline, ever halted its inexorable, inevitable, and majestic march from the continental divide to the sea; no river stopped and proclaimed that we were the only colonists in the Kingdom of Outsiders.  See, we were tourists, for a while happy tourists, replaced by the next army of the newly-free grown-fast children of suburb-sick.

Perpetually replaced by new seekers of the eternal chord,
Nourished at the maternal breast
of the evolving punk rock mother
who stroked the hair, dyed and knotted and fair, of every new incarnation of eternal seekers of egg creams and 4 AM plates of French Fries.
And this mother calls us by one of our 108 names,
And each of the named is convinced that they invented the wheel,
and that the echoes of their name will fill the chiliochosm,
Each one certain that they are the only janitors of lunacy.
But each is only a version of the other,
each one is loud and artful and beautiful,
Part of a collection of one trillion solar systems,
each positive that the universe exists for them alone,
and that they alone invented sex and open tuning and late-night trips to Wo Hop.

And we embrace the moving river, and we say
Hey Ho Let’s Go, go, go
Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, enlightenment.

Long live evolution.

(For Jahn Xavier, Jack Rabid, and Michael Alago)