"If he'd lived, he'd be dead by now."
Those are the first words out of my mouth any time someone asks about, or mentions Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson, who, sadly, seems to be known only for being unceremoniously ousted from a band full of drunks for drinking too much.
In the words of Guster, the man was a one-man wrecking machine, but anyone with two eyes could tell that this was a fragile spirit not long for this world. On the outside, he looked like a grown-up eight-year-old with a mischievous look in his eye and energy to burn, but inside, compliments went ignored while even the faintest criticism pierced his soul.
The guitar was his only defense and he played as if fighting off a swarm of bees with a butter knife. That he lived as long as he did was a testament to his heart's desire to stick up for the rest of him when nobody else would.
Imagine a young Bob Stinson showing up to audition for your band and bringing his little brother along. As he sets up his ramshackle amp and fiddles with a guitar that has surely seen better days, you're already thinking up excuses for why he's not right for your band, but then you hear him play and suddenly you're considering letting his kid bro be in the band too.
Westerberg won the lottery the day Bob Stinson walked into his life. Without him, there would be no getting to the next level, or the next after that, or getting signed by fucking Sire Records. Grandpa Boy would be a janitor somewhere and we as a generation would never know what we missed.
As for Stinson, I see no scenario where he'd be alive today. If success hadn't killed him, failure sure as hell would have. Or maybe it did. It's hard to tell which is which sometimes.
The Mats albums I find myself reaching for, all things considered, are Let It Be and Tim; two albums where Stinson goes for broke and leaves no riff unplayed.
If some technical genius ever gets around to uploading isolated tracks of Stinson's guitar playing from either of those albums, a wave of newfound respect for Stinson's playing will sweep the hipster-verse like beard rash.
For all the loyalty he had shown his kid brother, and Westerberg, Stinson was shown very little in return.
You see, Bob had gone out of his way to not be the sort of older brother who abandons his younger sibling to go play with the big boys and his reward was getting kicked in his teeth by Tommy, loyalty be damned.
Was it tough love or a business decision?
Either way, "former major label rock star" Bob Stinson was left out-in-the-cold by the very band he helped create, left to walk the streets of his hometown to whispers from the locals who'd once greeted him with a smile everywhere he went.
Stinson wasn't the guy who'd founded the Mats anymore, he was the guy who somehow managed to get kicked out of the Mats. He may as well have had "I blew it" stamped on his forehead.
Thing was, he didn't blow it.
He'd actually managed to break out of the rut he'd been born into and managed to escape the Earth's atmosphere for a little while, which is a helluva lot more than can be said for those who mocked him in the days, weeks, and years following his dismissal.
If, by some miracle, he'd still been alive when the Replacements reunited, one would hope that he'd have been involved, seeing as how his replacement Slim Dunlap is no longer in any shape to do after suffering a debilitating stroke.
It would have been a nice pay-off for the fucking hassle of starting a band from scratch and making it into something special enough to still be talked about in glowing terms four decades later.