Just wanted to take a minute to point out (another) article over at The Av Club which I *almost* wish existed ten years ago when I fell into a particular rabbit hole, a Beginner’s Guide to Paul Westerberg and the Replacements, which does a nice job of running through the band’s history and evolution, and hits all the high points.

I say “almost” wish it existed, because if it had, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to wade into this little corner of rock n roll ephemera myself, without the benefit (or hinderance) of the opinions of others. I managed to piece together the same information contained in the article above, but I did it over a couple of years digging around myself. I heard a couple of Replacements tunes somewhere (I believe it was the one-two punch of the end credits of the underapprecaited film Can’t Hardly Wait and a couple of semi-accidentally obtained Napster tracks I happened to come upon early in the 00s), which led to a quest through the bins at lots of used record stores tracking down the band’s catalog, out of order and without much direction; which, in the end, was an interesting way for the whole business to unfold, at least from the experiential perspective.

Stumbling onto a band well after the fact (though ressurections do happen), and being able to piece together the entire trajectory of a band’s career in fits and starts isn’t something people get the chance or opportunity to do anymore, given today’s instant accessibility to nearly any piece of information you’d possibly want*. It was probably the last time in my life I had the opportunity to tap into that experience that so many of us Gen-X music fans (and aren’t we all) had growing up – finding out about something new, then scouring the bits and pieces of information we could glean from record store racks, liner notes, informed friends, and supermarket rock magazines to put together a picture of a band’s career and catalog; and even then, there was still always a better-than-average chance that you’d still stumble upon some weird out-of-print import or bootleg somewhere with something you hadn’t heard before.

I kind of miss that experience.

_________________________

* – It’s not even much of a challenge anymore. Two examples from the past week. Example the first: I killed a few minutes watching robot chicken on netflix instant the other day, and ina little one-second interstitial, I heard a familiar, but semi-forgotten nonsense word. A couple of google searches later, and I learned that Fagabeefe (which, for some reason, I remembered as “Bagabeefe”) comes from the 80s cult film Midnight Madness, which I hadn’t seen since the 80s (I originally saw this one on HBO in the 80s like everyone else). Said movie will be in my mailbox on Blu-Ray this afternoon via netflix delivery, so I can scratch that particular itch.

Example the second: I was in my local comics and collectibles shop yesterday afternoon to pick up my weekly comics after work. Loitering around and BSing with the proprietor and staff after making my purchases like I often do, we got talking about the box of vintage Masters of the Universe figures they’d gotten in and were cleaning and cataloging. Many of the accessories had fallen loose in the box, and we spent a good bit of time mining our brains for memories of which guy went with which weapon, until somebody pulled up He-Man dot org on an ipad, which has pictures of everything, leading us to discover that Mer-Man’s “corn sword” was missing after all.