The Replacements "Answering Machine"

If you could boil down the essence of this daily blog to just one post, this would be it.  This is a post about one song that appeared in my life at one point, and changed the course of who I was and who I'd become.

Fall 1987.  I had just entered college.  It was a moment I'd been waiting for, for years.

There is a wonderful kind of stability in growing up and staying in the same town from kindergarten through High School.

There is also a horrible kind of rigidity that comes from that same thing.  You are who they say you are, and once they say who you are, it's pretty hard to change it.

College promises a fresh start.  Nobody knows who you were, so there is nothing projected onto the template of who people think you should be.

I can't say that I was looking to create a whole new persona or shed some adolescent horribleness.  I just wanted the freedom to explore, and to have that be (socially) okay.

So when I was invited to a Punk Rock show at the Student Union Ballroom, I said yes.

Shockingly, at age 18, I had never been to a concert before.  I was a music fan, for sure, but had never been to a show.

Similarly, growing up in suburban outliers territory, my music tastes were pretty pedestrian.  The environment offered little in the way of accessible musical adventure.

I was curious to see what it would be like to go beyond Led Zeppelin and U2 and AC/DC, to see if I would like it.


Skipping ahead, let me tell you a little about the show.

The UMass Student Union Ballroom was dark, loud and rocking.  I guess I'd seen "slam dancing" on TV (this was years before they called it "moshing"), but it was a thrilling experience to see it just a few feet in front of me.

The band was either drunk or crazy or both, and I was surprised and bemused that they seemed to want to taunt the audience throughout the show.  Between songs they'd ask "Any requests?" and hardcore fans would shout out their favorite song, only to have the band say, "Never heard of it," and crank into something else.

It was a great experience, and I'm always proud to say that the first concert I ever went to was The Replacements.

But the concert isn't what this post is about.  This post is about the night before.


Keith was a guy I knew from home.  He went to High School in the next town over so we had some mutual friends.  Even though I was ready to say goodbye to the past and embrace a new tomorrow, it was nice to be with with a familiar face.

We were hanging out in his room, the night before the show.

I didn't know a thing about The Replacements, this band that I'd never heard of, that'd we'd be seeing the following night, so I asked for some details.  He pulled out a stack of vinyl.

As he put on a record, I flipped through his LPs.  There were some names that I'd read in Rolling Stone, but mostly, the pile was this world of unfamiliar bands.

We were listening to a record called "Let It Be" which was louder and looser and more ragged than anything I had in my collection.  I wasn't sure if it was good---I had no point of reference for what made a Punk Rock band "good."  But I was getting into the spirit of it.

Every few minutes, someone would walk by Keith's open dorm-room door, poke their head in and say, "Listening to The Replacments, huh?  Are you going to the show tomorrow?  Cool, see you there."

Girls.  Good looking girls.  Slightly offbeat, interesting-looking, good looking girls were sticking their heads in the door and saying "Replacements?  See you at the show tomorrow."

Girls like that, like bands like this?

I felt like I had just been given a password to a club that I had previously not known existed.

We'd flipped the album to the second side, which was winding down.  I heard a strange mechanical voice.

"Is that in the song?"

Keith heard it too.

We turned up the volume.  There was a voice mixed into the song.

"Play it again."  Keith moved the needle back and started the song over.

We each put an ear up to a speaker.

"If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again.  If you need help, if you need help, if you need help . . . "


And that's it.   That's the moment.  That's the image.

I don't think I radically changed that second or anything.  Change (growth, really) was incremental, evolutionary, over many years.

But I feel like that is the moment I became a music fan, a music listener, and a person who lived his life through music.

How many days and nights have I put my ears closer to the speakers, because I wanted to know what a song was really saying?  How many joyful moments have I had in the act of discovery, with other friends who love music?  How many records have I bought, played, loved and woven directly into the very fabric of my emotional being?  How many artists have I been turned on to, and quickly turned around and shared?

I used to joke that I wanted a career where I could be paid to simply be me.  I kind of got there.  Playing songs in darkened rooms as a DJ on the radio today, is a direct descendant of that moment in a UMass dorm room.

Without that moment, I can easily imagine I wouldn't have the musical tastes I have, the job I have, or for that matter, the life I have.

I'm thankful that I said Yes to that show, that I was open to opening my world up, and that 25 years later I'm still putting my ears to the speaker, every day.


Hear the song on Youtube.

For an interesting in experiment, you can read this issue of The Skyway from 1996, which is an online Replacements Fan Club.  I wrote to them 15 years ago.  So you can hear this same story, told in the voice of a 27 year old, instead of a 43 year old.