Have You Seen Lucky?

Let's shake things down.

A shy child goes to speak their first words, and is told to be quiet. A lady flips through a fashion magazine on a train while gulping down Singapore slings with abandon. A man arrives at his wedding and realizes to his horror that not only is his bride a stranger, he is a stranger to himself. These are snapshots from the first few songs on the Replacements' 1991 swan song All Shook Down, a strange and mesmerizing journey through Paul Westerberg’s fragmenting psyche which remains polarizing even — or perhaps especially — among hardcore fans.

As a person who didn’t grow up with the Replacements and loves their music but is bored by their antics, it has always been a bit difficult for me to parse the ambivalence regarding All Shook Down throughout much of the fan base. Certainly it is a dark LP, though far from humorless — I always considered that it sounded a bit like Jackson Browne taking a tour of Neil Young’s ditch. There is not much flat-out punk energy, but there are plenty of quality rockers — “Bent Out Of Shape,” “Happy Town” and “When It Began” could all be outtakes from early ‘70s Kinks or Faces. None of the songs are called “Fuck School,” but that makes sense: Westerberg had dropped out of remedial education something like fifteen years earlier. All Shook Down trades in the old grievances of extended adolescence and re-seeds the ground with new resentments about adulthood. That terrain is trickier and slipperier. It is not so clear who your enemies are. It is not so clear that your enemies are not yourself.

People don’t talk about this enough, but Westerberg is incredible at evoking the feeling of sad food. “Fingernails and cigarettes are a lousy dinner.” “Popcorn for dinner/ Last night it was cheesecake.” Sad food and drink is kind of a leitmotif for All Shook Down.

In “Nobody” he dissects the fate of two newlyweds with the vaudeville-witticism “You like the frosting/ you just bought the cake.” On the sobriety-ish closer “The Last,” Westerberg orders a drink and then gets down on his knees. He is, in so many ways, the ideal catholic, tying off psychic loopholes from my childhood.

Maybe All Shook Down is a girl’s record? Westerberg, very nearly alone in his generation, was a man capable of writing about women in a multi-dimensional way. As I wrote in the New Yorker, about the 2023 reissue of their major label debut Tim:

“On ‘Little Mascara’, Westerberg demonstrates a trait that was glancingly rare among male songwriters of his era, the ability to write credibly about women. The story of a struggling young mother trapped in a loveless marriage and still dreaming of some way out, ‘Little Mascara’ evokes Tennessee Williams in its depiction of a gifted individual circumscribed by their social context. When he sings ‘For the moon / You keep shootin’ / Throw your rope up in the air / For the kid you stay together / You nap him and you slap him in a highchair,’ the sublimated implications of multigenerational trauma are made explicit. On some level, and to varying degrees, all of the members of the Replacements had been born into a cycle of abuse, addiction, or depression. In ‘Little Mascara,’ you wish the best for the mother, but your heart breaks for the baby. Fear and sadness will be the psychological foundation on which they’ll have to build a life.”

To paraphrase the great Paul Harvey, All Shook Down is the rest of the story. And I think about Paul Harvey a lot. I also think there is something of the more or less contemporaneous PJ Harvey’s (no relation to Paul Harvey, as far as I can tell) debut Dry to All Shook Down. All backwards Bo Diddley riffs and nightmarish Bowie costume drama, PJ Harvey's "Dress" is one of the great songs ever written about the soul-destroying demands of consumer culture and the complicated pact we as women make every time we wake up.

One for the money, two for the show. I think the source of the derision that frequently attends All Shook Down is the way in which it feels lightly cognizant and embarrassed about all of which has come before. It’s needlessly ashamed of not being punk. In its cokey and scary way, this is Westerberg waving a white flag at the suicide he’s on. It was recorded before Nirvana’s inevitable Nevermind, but of course they knew the alternative wave was coming. Of course they knew this last one would be the last.

They left us sadly beautiful.