Featured Essay: You're My Favorite Thing

by Jim Parisi

True Replacements fans—not the ones coming to live vicariously through them for their own behavior—were a different breed. “When we started, we were mixed-up kids, and we wrote about it,” said [Paul] Westerberg. “It’s funny that the people who related to it the most weren’t fucked-up kids, though. Our fans always have been, dare I say, a little more intelligent than the band was labeled as. I always thought that ironic."

Replacements partisans were, on the whole, literate, dark-humored, and a bit confused about their place in the world. They weren’t the go-getters or yuppie types, but they weren’t hopeless wastrels either. They were, Tommy Stinson would note, “more like us than they fuckin’ knew. They didn’t really fit anywhere. They probably didn’t aspire to a whole lot, but also didn’t aspire to doing nothing either. That’s the kind of fan we probably appealed to most: the people that were in that gray area. Just like us." [Mehr, Bob,  Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, p. 114-115, 2016.]

If you have ever walked around with a bull’s-eye on your forehead, you have some idea of how I felt when I read this quote. I thought immediately of my friend Liam. I suppose he thought about me when he read the book. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to share my thoughts with Liam until 2019. At the time that I read the book, in 2016, I had lost contact with him. I knew nobody else who would take it the same way that it hit me. All that would change in due time, but as I read the book, I had only my own thoughts to churn in my head. And churn they did.

This quote not only made me feel seen, as the kids say (do the kids still say that?), it sparked a lively conversation in my head, and also aloud, usually when alone but sometimes in the presence of my wife, Beth, who knows after more than thirty years to ignore my rambling monologues. A conversation about what it means to be a fan of a band; what your favorite band says about you; how your favorite band stands the test of good, bad, and indifferent times; and how the same goes for your oldest, dearest friends.

When asked to name my favorite anything, I default to equivocating, either because I draw a blank when I’ve been put on the spot, or because I can’t elevate a single favorite among several choices, or because my favorite changes over time, as I become exposed to more, as the times change, and as I grow (or regress, in some instances) emotionally and intellectually. It’s an impossible question for me to answer, especially when the subject turns to music.

When it comes to bands, I would give different answers at different times in my life. Middle school me would have said the Cars. High school me would have gone with Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and the Police, with a brief infatuation with early Def Leppard. College me was all in on U2, then R.E.M., the Smiths, the Cure, and any number of bands that caught my fancy as I expanded my musical horizons. 

For a brief period in the early ’90s, almost every sentence I utter contained, to paraphrase Joe Biden’s takedown of Rudy Giuliani’s constant invocation of 9/11,  “a noun, a verb, and Fugazi." And what to make of local D. C. favorites, Mother May I; a band I latched onto when they were still figuring things out, then watched as an anonymous superfan as their short-lived career showed promise but ultimately flamed out. They are definitely my sentimental favorites. 

All of those bands still hold a special place in my heart, but my favorite rock group, if I were forced to choose among the many candidates, would have to be those brilliant, uneven, self-sabotaging fuck-ups, the Replacements. They might not be my favorite band all the time; for instance, I’ll frequently find myself on an R.E.M. bender, during which nothing can convince me that they aren’t the greatest American band. But they are my favorite band of all time, for the reasons that the quoted passage from Trouble Boys illustrates so clearly.

I have seen the Replacements live four times. In July 1987, I saw them at the Beacon Theatre in New York City; a classic drunken shitshow that was either the greatest or worst concert I have ever seen. My opinion changed minute-by-minute that night, as I watched the scene unfold from the rear of the upper level. I still don’t know what to make of it. What I do know is that the band that couldn’t make it through a cover of “Whipping Post" came out for a flawless, scorching encore of “Alex Chilton.” As I said, I have no idea.

The second time was at the Warner Theatre in D. C., in April 1989. They were on fire that night, blowing the roof off the joint but coloring within the lines, with enough classic ‘Mats looseness to ward off any fears that you had ventured into a Steely Dan concert. The highlight was a soaring cover of “I Can See for Miles." It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended.

The third time was at Lisner Auditorium on the GW campus, in March 1991. That one fell somewhere between the drunken chaos of the Beacon show and the transcendence of the Warner tour de force, with none of the highs or lows of either of those shows. It was a solid performance that could have used the anarchy of the long-deposed Bob Stinson to liven things up. The highlight of the show was Westerberg’s callout to a woman in the crowd, supposedly the one who inspired him to write the greatest of all Replacements songs, “Left of the Dial.” 

The fourth time, they opened for Elvis Costello in June 1991, at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. Reduced to being an opening act, they were workmanlike, which might be the most depressing adjective I could use to describe the Replacements. They might as well have been called Paul Westerberg and the News. 

Each of those performances captures one aspect of the band that resonates with me. Each also captures how I feel about my own life at any given moment. Depending on my mood, I will think of myself as the drunken fool trying to remember the chords to “I Will Dare"; or as the confident editor tearing through an essay for I Have That On Vital as if I’m laying down a slamming rendition of “Bastards of Young”; or as the competent but unsure of himself screw-up trying to make good, who hopes the girl he knew thirty years earlier will still remember him as he sings “Left of the Dial”; or as the afterthought, in the mix but not relevant, trying to find a place in the world, when all signs are pointing toward the exit, afraid that this time will be “The Last.”

A concert to match any mood or any swing in brain chemistry. That will bond you to a band.

Liam was with me for the first three shows. Just as those concerts mirror how I think of myself at any given moment, they also reflect the stages of my friendship with Liam. From the tentative early days in college and early years after graduation, when we were often drunken idiots having a good time, trying to figure out our place in the world (the Beacon show); to the golden age when we lived a short bus ride away from each other in D.C., still often drunken idiots having a good time, trying to figure out our place in the world, but also growing up and finding our way to the next stage of our lives (the Warner show); to family time, when responsibilities for kids took precedence over all else, but we still got to hang out because we lived near each other and had kids close to the same age, even if those times were less drunken and freewheeling than before (the Lisner show).

The next phase of our relationship is the bleakest, but one that shows how the greatest friendships endure, just as our favorite bands remain important to us, even when they fade out of lives for years at a time. 

At some point in the mid-2000s, Liam and I lost contact with each other. I have no idea how it happened, but we went from occasional contact, when Liam was still commuting to D.C. from his home in Pennsylvania, to no contact whatsoever for years. To this day, I don’t understand how I let that come to pass. But come to pass it did, for close to 15 years. This is the sad Merriweather show, when the former headliners were reduced to a mere opening set.

The drought ended in 2019, when Liam happened to see a work anniversary announcement on LinkedIn, of all places, and sent me an email. I didn’t see his message for months, because what self-respecting Replacements fan checks his LinkedIn on a regular basis? It turns out that the anniversary message was wrong, as my LinkedIn résumé hadn’t been updated in years. But it served one purpose: getting the band back together. 

We had a very long phone conversation—catching each other up on fifteen years of personal and familial details takes time—and vowed not to let another decade and a half pass between phone calls. Over the past six years, we’ve managed to stick to that promise, and then some. 

When Beth and I went with our daughter, Nora, to Nationals spring training in West Palm Beach in 2020, just before the Covid pandemic shut down everything, we stopped by to see Liam and his wife, Ann, who had relocated years earlier to a neighboring town. Much to our good fortune, Nora soon moved to Florida, at first to the Keys then to the Naples area. Whenever we visit Nora, Beth and I always plan a side trip to see Liam and Ann.

Our friendship sprang to life again as if the fallow fifteen years had never happened. In fact, I have more contact with Liam now than I have had since the early days in D.C. Nora makes fun of how we text each other constantly, as she phrases it, “like schoolgirls.” For more than a year, we’ve kept up a weekly textfest in which we each weigh in with our top five songs for a musical artist or a musical theme, with an accompanying playlist. Music remains, as it always has been, the throughline in our relationship.

One constant in that throughline is the Replacements. Just as your best friend doesn’t stop becoming your best friend because life’s messiness pulls you away from each other, your favorite band doesn’t stop being your favorite band just because you don’t listen to them for a while or another group grabs your attention. That’s because having a favorite band is about more than the music. It’s about identifying with the band. 

And did I ever identify with the Replacements! I missed the early explosion of punk, and I would never have been able to pull off a punk look or lifestyle, even if I had been inclined to try. New Wave was always more about the music to me than the fashion, some of which might as well have come from an alternate universe. But I connected almost immediately with the Replacements, even if I could never hope to be as cool as Westerberg or either of the Stinsons. 

One difference between Liam and me that is impossible to overlook is that I am a gangly six feet four inches of nervous-guy energy, whereas Liam stands around five feet five inches and always appears more at ease in social situations, even though I know that he’s got his own anxieties roiling (or so he tells me).  I always think of Liam as the more affable of the two of us. He’s certainly more at ease in conversations with people he doesn’t know—he’d be hard-pressed not to be—and more outgoing with everyone. 

Despite those superficial differences, we have much in common, as you would expect of two people who get along so well. To take a cue from the Trouble Boys passage quoted above, each of us is literate (although I think Liam is better-read, even if I’m no slouch), dark-humored (I have Liam beat here, but he can hold his own), and a bit confused about his place in the world (this would be a steel-cage match that ends in a draw after each of us simultaneously knocks out the other). 

We definitely aren’t go-getters or yuppie types, but we’re also not hopeless wastrels. We turned out just fine. The young, unattached, confused twentysomethings are now older, permanently attached (hey there, Beth and Ann!), still confused close-to-sixtysomething family men who never strove for professional success but hold (or held, as I was recently laid off) responsible jobs in which we’ve achieved some small measure of success on our own terms. 

As  Tommy Stinson put it so succinctly, we didn’t aspire to much, but we also didn’t aspire to doing nothing. We are, and always have been, in that gray area, making us the prototypical Replacements fans. That’s just fine with me. I hope Liam feels the same way.

Jim Parisi lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth, and Dolce, a spicy mix of boxer, pit bull, and Australian cattle dog. (Their two kids, Aidan and Nora, have flown the coop.) After a long career as an editor of  research products for the academic  market, he is setting out on his own as a freelance editor.  He is a writer of various fictions and the occasional essay (none of which has managed to find its way into print until today). Much of his free time is spent coaching Little League softball. He also plays a mediocre bass and has been known to make sounds that some species might recognize as music on the guitar. He grew up in New Jersey but urges readers not to hold that against him.

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