My Best Concert

10 years ago today: The Replacements at Forest Hills Stadium

Ten years ago today, I saw The Replacements perform at Forest Hills Stadium on their reunion tour. It remains the best concert I’ve ever seen.

“Best,” of course, is subjective. From a technical standpoint, The Replacements were never the best at what they did. That was, at least in part, the point.

The Sept. 19, 2014 concert at Forest Hill Stadium in Queens was the “best” because I finally saw a bucket list band — albeit one with only two of the four original members — play a show at the top of their game. It was the “best” because it wasn’t in a club, but in front of thousands.

And it was the “best” because of everything that had happened before and much of what has happened since.

In 1986, my maternal grandfather died three days before I was scheduled to see the band in concert. The second time I tried to see them, almost three years later, my paternal grandmother followed suit. Two years after that, the band broke up.

Given the seeming effect on my family’s mortality, I chalked it up to a curse, a weird piece of karma matching the fate of one of the most influential groups of my generation.

The explosion of 1980s college radio — captured beautifully in “Left of the Dial,” an enduring anthem — was a mind-expanding alternative to the Yacht Rock, Heavy Metal, and other Top 40 crap that dominated my childhood and teen years. Major labels took note, signing groups like R.E.M., The Replacements, Los Lobos, The Blasters, and X, among others.

Like R.E.M., The Replacements (and those other bands, for that matter) should have made it big. They should have had top 40 songs and Grammy Awards. They should have been playing to stadiums of 15,000 instead of clubs and small venues.

Today, a decade after their 2013-2015 reunion tour, the reasons they didn’t are well documented, from Bob Mehr’s wonderful book Trouble Boys and to a series of carefully, beautifully produced box sets of the band’s studio albums. It’s telling that two of the box sets featured overhauls of the original LPs — the beautifully written but sonically challenged “Tim” and the late ‘80s glopfest production of “Down Tell a Soul.”

I didn’t know these things would happen when I left on the journey from Virginia to Forest Hills. All I knew, deep down, was I needed to see this band live. And this time, thank God, no one in my family died.

From Breakup to Reunion

After The Replacements broke up in 1991, I followed Paul Westerberg’s career — in part because he was the chief songwriter and lead singer — the closest. I read the stories about the slow, sad demise of Bob Stinson, the original lead guitarist who was fired from the band in 1986 for erratic behavior and a Keith Richards-like habit (though, sadly, not professional constitution) of ingesting various legal and illegal substances.

I also followed Stinson’s younger brother, Tommy, as he struck out on his own with Bash and Pop — “Friday Night Is Killing Me” is debatably the best post-Replacements solo effort — before forming Perfect and spending a decade as a sideman with Guns ‘n Roses. Original drummer Chris Mars, who left the group shortly before they broke up the first time, is a successful painter and occasional solo artist in his own right.

Westerberg stopped touring in 2005 and, despite the reissue of The Replacements’ catalog three years later, stubbornly refused to get the band back together. It wasn’t until Slim Dunlap, who replaced Bob Stinson as the lead guitarist, suffered a massive stroke in 2012 that Westerberg and Tommy Stinson decided to resurrect the band’s name.

They recorded a five-track EP to launch the Songs for Slim project, raised more than $100,000 to help pay for Dunlap's medical care, and — just as important — enjoyed it so much that they decided to play together again. Admittedly, it probably didn’t hurt that the offers to reunite were lucrative, and both Westerberg and Stinson were going through expensive divorces. And it was not a surprise that Mars did not participate.

The reunion tour, which started as a series of one-off concerts at major summer festivals, coincided with my layoff from my job in May 2013. The timing, along with the easy availability of concert tapes that surfaced as mp3s within days of each show, gave me a chance to listen to a favorite group and old songs with new ears.

During the festivals, I hoped Westerberg, Stinson, and the replacement Replacements would come our way at some point. In some respects, those mp3s from the reunion shows became a lifeline as I faced starting over in my career, knowing viscerally that I had stumbled and missed that whole first rung.

When the Forest Hills concert was announced, I had my chance. Short of family members passing away, I was determined to take it, even though the show was five hours away.

Battery and Balls

Forest Hills Stadium is in a residential section of Queens. It hosted the U.S. Open from 1924 to 1977 and, despite some renovations and the addition of some seating and a permanent stage, remains the same horseshoe-shaped concrete landmark befitting of the quiet neighborhood.

Concerts were held during the stadium’s heyday, with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Barbra Steisand, Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix and others performing there. After two-plus decades, the venue reopened to live music in 2013, with a strict curfew of 10 p.m. to keep the residential peace. The ubiquity of camera phones made it impossible to police the taking of stills and video, but Forest Hills had a strict policy of no professional cameras.

At the time, I had only shot a handful of concerts — all in small clubs, none professionally — and was just starting my freelance photography career. I tried to contact the promoter, the band, and the stadium, but was unsuccessful. Finally, in a moment of naive no fucks given rebellion, which I hoped The Replacements would appreciate, I decided to take my camera — a Canon 60D with a kit zoom lens — and see what happened.

Arriving an hour before the two openers (Deer Tick and The Hold Steady) began, I was promptly stopped and told my equipment was not allowed inside. Rather than take the subway back to Manhattan where I was staying — the neighborhood stadium had no parking — I managed to convince the head of security to let me in with the camera, but no battery.

It turned out the head of security, a nice guy I chatted with for about 10 minutes, had been a newspaper photographer. He also had been laid off in the recent past and said he sympathized with my situation. As I went inside, he said I could get the battery back if I could somehow manage to swing a VIP or press pass. The look on his face was “fat chance.”

Walking in, I looked around the stadium and thought about the events and history that had occurred there. With time on my hands — it was still about 40 minutes before Deer Tick was scheduled to be on stage — I walked over to Guest Promotions and talked to the two women sitting at the table as the sun started to set. We discussed Forest Hills’ history, the concerts the venue had hosted, and my desire to photograph my favorite band. They were sympathetic but said they could not provide a photo pass.

Instead, they did me one better, giving me a sticker that allowed me to go to the VIP tent and score free beer and food. I showed it to the security guard and noted my dumb fortune

Fishing the battery out of his pocket, he said, “I guess it’s your lucky day.”

The Show

I met a friend — Bernadette Jusinski — who joined me for the show and we found our bleacher seats off Stage Left in the lower bowl close to the VIP tent. As Deer Tick and The Hold Steady played their opening sets, we watched as the stadium rapidly fill up.

The pass allowed me to walk through the floor area and snap away, although I stood no chance of making it to the pit. It was — an anomaly on a day full of them — too full to get too close.

After the first three songs, pass or not, security said I could no longer take photos from the floor. I returned to my bleacher seat off stage left with a stack of pictures on my SD card and the warm feeling of finally being close to the band I had first tried to see almost 30 years before.

That allowed me to sit back (and stand from time to time) and listen to The Replacements perform their catalogue of should-have-been hits. This time, however, it felt like a valedictory lap as the crowd sang along to a band firing on all cylinders. Song after song, anthem after anthem, I found myself moved during each verse chorus verse.

Although I’m a writer, I could never be a true music critic. I love what I love too much to pick things apart and I dismiss the stuff I don’t like with barely a passing glance. A flubbed lyric here, a missed chord there means little to me if emotion and passion are in its place. Watching The Replacements become the rock stars they once ached to be, seeing the faces and hearing sing-along shouting of fans old and new, was more than worth it.

You could not help but join in, too.