Editor’s Note: Tucker Riggleman is one of our favorite humans we’ve interacted with since starting SWT. We’ve had a lot of conversations with Riggleman behind the scenes and have also loved his poetry, his previous band with John R. Miller, Prison Book Club, his last essay, which served as a great introduction to him and his band, Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, and their new album at the time, Restless Spirit, which Alex reviewed here. It was among Josh’s favorite albums of 2024, placing 18th of 100, and was also similarly highly rated on an unpublished list of Alex’s favorite albums of 2024. The band also released a Live album that we shared with you. A significant portion of its proceeds benefited relief efforts for the horrible flooding in NC and Appalachia.
Simply put, we enjoy advocating for Riggleman and his artistry. We’ve bonded over his own love for the Replacements and were so excited when we were emailing back and forth about him penning an essay about his relationship with the band in his own, well-written words. Today is the day we get to share it with you! This essay comes at the perfect time, following the recent deluxe edition release of the Replacements’ seminal Let It Be (1984) album, a box set with remasters and more goodies, which we at SWT can’t recommend enough.
I was probably riding shotgun in John R. Miller’s champagne Chrysler Town & Country minivan on the backroads of West Virginia’s eastern panhandle when I first heard Let It Be by the Replacements. I’d been listening almost exclusively to alt-country at the time: Lucero, Cory Branan, Drag the River, etc. Introspective music with a punk edge was something John and I bonded over and it would eventually lead to the formation of our own country-rock band, Prison Book Club.
It was the early 2000’s, I was away from home for the first time attending Shepherd University on a full-ride scholarship. Getting good grades was the only way out of my small factory town. Back home, I was one of the few kids interested in rock music. I taught myself how to play and began writing songs, but access to equipment and capable bandmates proved near impossible. Everything changed when I got to college. Pretty much everyone played music and I quickly found my tribe. All of us converging on this small liberal arts college town at that specific time would prove to be serendipitous beyond measure, spawning multiple bands, an indie label, and countless unforgettable shows.
Watch Prison Book Club perform “Been Here Too Long” live at Trackside below:
While I identified with parts of the alt-country scene, something was still missing. I grew up on Southern rock and 90’s country, genres rich in storytelling and pomp. In many ways, I felt disconnected from that music because I wasn’t hearing my story represented. Sure, lyrically I identified with some of it: small-town life, romanticized drinking and bar culture, heartache—but the longing I felt wasn’t there and musically I was itching for more. Then came the Replacements. On paper, West Virginia and Minnesota might not seem too similar, but there is an unspoken sense of understanding and camaraderie between the down-and-out dreamers and greener-grass chasers of both Appalachia and the Midwest (the first time I played Detroit, the venue staff immediately welcomed my band with open arms after finding out we were from West Virginia). I felt seen by this music.
Let It Be was the first album that really showed me that it didn’t matter what style or genre of music you played so long as the attitude and vision were wholly your own. Fittingly enough, I would learn this was probably also the case for the ‘Mats, as they had up until this point been playing dress-up as a punk band. I’ll go ahead and say it: the Replacements were never a punk band, but they sure as hell were a bunch of punks. That label held them back more than anything, and they gradually shed it with each album until they emerged on Let It Be as a fully-formed band playing their own honed brand of song-driven rock and roll with a side of “fuck you” grins thrown in for good measure.
It was freeing to listen to this record as a young songwriter. The lessons I learned from Paul, Tommy, Bob, and Chris— to stay true to yourself, write the songs you want to write, and to hell with the rest of it—would become my north star. To the up-and-coming songwriters of today, pay attention: if you follow these simple steps, you’ll always be proud of what you leave behind.
Let It Be begins with “I Will Dare,” a song that could easily hold its own on any of the best R.E.M. records of the day, and not just because Peter Buck plays a guitar lick on it. It’s a fitting way to kick off an album that saw the band fully lean into its new identity—this was now Paul Westerberg’s band and no longer Bob Stinson’s band, for better or worse. But Bob is still so integral to Let It Be, as evidenced by the soaring guitar work on track two, “Favorite Thing,” which finds the ‘Mats rollicking like their early days until a steady bass-and-drums bridge locks in with Westerberg acknowledging, “You’re my favorite thing, bar nothing.” Well, shit, it’s a love song after all.
“We’re Comin’ Out” blisters out the gate like something off of the band’s first record, proving they can still hold their own among the punks and hard-rockers, but then something bizarre happens. The song breaks down completely into an almost-jazzy piano and finger-snap bridge as Paul admits, “One more chance to get it all wrong,” before the band speeds back up like a tape deck on fast-forward as the track dissolves into feedback. It is unpredictable and, much like the band itself, somehow works against all odds. What a rollercoaster, and we’re only three tracks in.
Now this is more like it. “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” sees the ‘Mats aiming their working-class ire at the bourgeois, this time represented by a wealthy dentist who performs oral surgery while his Cadillac runs in the parking lot. As Elizabeth Nelson (who also wrote the liner notes for the new Let It Be Deluxe boxset) illustrates in her excellent piece about the Tim: Let It Bleed remaster for The New Yorker, the ‘Mats have always been a working-class band, and dare I say a somewhat political band, by taking on issues like labor rights or classism, even if it comes in the form of a song with a chorus like “Rip, rip, we’re gonna rip ‘em out now.” Paul found a sort of songwriting muse in young Tommy Stinson (only 16 when Let It Be was recorded). Perhaps Paul saw himself in Tommy’s potential, innocence, and talent, resulting in both this bombast of a song and late-album masterpiece, “Sixteen Blue.”
“Androgynous” is a song written 40 years before its time. Westerberg has always had a knack for writing from the “other”, whether it be a female perspective (which he does several times to great effect, see: “Little Mascara,” “Merry Go Round” and others) or the “sexually vague” and/or gender fluid, as he does here and later on “Sixteen Blue.” It is almost unbelievable that a song this tender and open-minded was written by a white male janitor from Minnesota, but damn if that just ain’t the charm of Paul’s writing—it is unexpected, smart, and by this point in time, inevitable.
Just when you think you’ve got them figured out, the ‘Mats deliver a KISS cover with the sincerity of a scorched-earth Bob Seger ballad. Their cut of “Black Diamond” washes away all of the gaudy facepaint and leather, leaving behind what makes the ‘Mats an all-time great rock band: Bob’s off-the-rails guitar solos, Paul’s desperate howl, Tommy and Chris’s pummeling rhythms.
In the unrivaled Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements, Bob Mehr includes a great quote from Westerberg about the slacker anthem “Unsatisfied”: “One of the most overrated, half-assed, half-baked songs. It doesn’t have nothing but one line.” That one line?: “I’m so, I’m so unsatisfied.” It’s fucking perfect. In the moment, Paul was likely referring to his own ambition and the band’s penchant for self-inflicted wounds despite displaying tremendous promise and talent. In the long term, this song has probably summed up the entire post-Vietnam generation, forever stuck, wondering if the American dream is actually real. This is a song that sticks with you, from the arpeggiated 12-string acoustic to Tommy’s rollicking bass line. Paul caps off the chorus by slyly breaking the fourth wall to ask the listener, “Are you satisfied?” He’s asking himself, too.
“Seen Your Video” contains some of Let It Be’s best riffs and melodies as the ‘Mats remind us that they are in their prime here. The song’s only lyrics, “Seen your video / that phony rock and roll / we don’t wanna know,” double down on the band’s well-documented opinion of MTV and music videos. In many ways, the ‘Mats were an old-school rock band earning it the hard way: countless time spent sharpening their skills in the Stinson basement, playing their guts out on the road to audiences of any size. In other ways, the ‘Mats were lucky: Peter Jesperson and Twin/Tone Records really took them under their wing and pushed them out of that basement. As the music and cultural landscape changed with the times, the ‘Mats were digging in their heels.
You didn’t think the whole record could be stonefaced serious, did you? Fear not, “Gary’s Got a Boner” is here to save the day. Another example of the band’s personal lexicon spilling out into their songs. An unsavory sort, or a “Gary” to the band, is the titular character here, similar to “Mr. Whirly” from Hootenany.
The outro solo on “Sixteen Blue” so perfectly captures the emotion of the song that it fittingly keeps soaring as the track fades out. Westerberg is done pretending he’s a punk or a janitor or anything other than an extremely gifted songwriter armed with sensitivity and a penchant for delivering it through cranked amplifiers and blown vocal cords. The best of the Tommy-as-muse tunes, “Sixteen Blue” musically almost sounds like a 50’s radio rock song before the lyrics shift it into a real Westerberg classic.
The Replacements wear most of their influences on their sleeves, but an often overlooked aspect of the group is just how experimental they were for a rock band with at least moderate “success.” It could be easy to view their previous album, Hootenanny, as one big performance art project. The record starts with the title track, finding each band member swapping instruments. It sounds about as good as you’d suspect. Hootenanny goes on to include an instrumental surf rock song, a lo-fi folk tune that falls apart more than it resolves, a gut-wrenching love song layered over an electronic drum machine, and many other interesting (if not “successful”) artistic choices.
“Answering Machine” is the fruit of the band’s previous avant-garde efforts. The song features only Westerberg’s tape-warbled chorus-laden guitar, his classic speaker-blown voice, and a myriad of sound effects, including an actual answering machine message, dial tones, and feedback. Paul screams various area codes at the end, desperate to find a connection with ex-lovers or anyone who will answer. Like the rest of Let It Be, it benefits from an unwavering clarity of vision and attitude. On paper, this song might be hard to pull off, and maybe for a less-steadfast band it would have failed, but the ‘Mats were so fully locked in during the making of this record that they couldn’t miss. Not even arguably the most self-sabotaging rock band in recent memory could lose with these songs. They were truly bulletproof.
As for the new deluxe version of Let It Be, the remaster sounds great (props to Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering, who has handled the entire ‘Mats reissue catalog along with my own band’s LPs), while not as revelatory as the Tim: Let It Bleed release from a couple of years ago. The fact of the matter is that Let It Be always sounded good. Personally, I believe the aspect of bringing these albums from the 80’s into modern times that works best for the ‘Mats is that you can now hear just how great Chris Mars is on the drums. I first noticed this discrepancy on the Bearsville cuts from the Dead Man’s Pop boxset. Mars sounds absolutely monstrous on those recordings, but on the final version of Don’t Tell A Soul the drums sound too polished and gated, a side effect of the era’s production.
The included b-sides and demos are a nice touch, as always (check out those home demos of “Answering Machine” for some real lo-fi awesomeness), and the live set featured here shows the Replacements teetering between the greatest rock band of all time and the sloppiest dive bar cover act—in other words, an ideal ‘Mats set.
Let It Be sounds as fresh today as it did in 1984. As a piece of music history, it captures a window in time when one of America’s great rock bands hit their stride. Let It Be, Tim, and Pleased to Meet Me is an almost unrivaled run of records in my book. The songs are timeless, even if the production wasn’t always so on those later albums. I hope the Let It Be Deluxe version introduces my favorite record to some new folks, but most importantly, I hope it inspires some new songwriters to find their own voice, lean into their vision, and write someone else’s favorite record.
Tucker Riggleman is a writer and musician from West Virginia. He is a recipient of a 2025 West Virginia Creative Network Literary Arts Fellowship and the author of two poetry books. Tucker has been traveling in bands and making records for over 20 years. He currently fronts country-rock group Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates and plays bass for songwriter William Matheny.
