Ordinary Legends: The Replacements’ Let It Be

The Replacements had already cut three records of spit and vinegar by the time Let It Be dropped in 1984, but this was the moment they vaulted out of the Minneapolis dive bars and into the bloodstream of American rock.

Those early blasts — Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash, Stink, and Hootenanny — wore their influences proudly: the bratty derision of The Kinks, the sneering rebellion of The Clash, the raw nerve of The Stooges. That cocktail of British wit, punk urgency, and Midwestern recklessness gave them a sound equal parts homage and demolition.

With Let It Be, they finally figured out how to fuse all that chaos with clarity. This was the record where they stopped hiding behind noise and jokes, where Paul Westerberg let his bruised voice carry songs that felt too intimate to be shouted over a janky PA system.

“If you will dare, I will dare”

The Minneapolis scene mattered. Just a block away, Hüsker Dü were pioneering their own brand of hardcore transcendence, and you can feel that competitive energy pushing the Replacements to level up. Floating above it all was Prince, casting a kind of purple luminosity over the city — proof that you could make world-shifting music from a cold Midwestern outpost and that Minneapolis wasn’t just on the map, it was the map.

That halo effect gave cover to other local misfits and strivers seeking fame on the left side of the dial: Soul Asylum, who would chase ragged glory a few years later, and The Jayhawks, who bent country-rock into something sturdier and stranger. But where Hüsker Dü sprinted toward abstraction, the ‘Mats stayed human-scale — messy, sarcastic, heartfelt, always sounding like they were one false chord away from crumpling. That tension is what makes Let It Be timeless: both breakthrough and breakdown.

And it wasn’t just Westerberg. Bob Stinson’s guitar could swing from scruffy bombast to lyrical ache, the perfect foil to Paul’s cracked honesty. His younger brother Tommy, a mere 13 when the band started and still only 18 here, gave the music reckless propulsion, his basslines a jolt of kid energy that made everything feel combustible. Chris Mars was the glue behind the kit, steady but never smoothing over the edges. That brotherly bond between Bob and Tommy, Bob wild and uncontainable, Tommy barely grown but already essential, gave Let It Be a volatility that no producer could have faked. Together, they played like a gang always on the verge of collapse, which was precisely the point.

The opener “I Will Dare” sets the tone.  You can hear Westerberg trying to write his way out of the Stinson family basement, aiming higher without sanding anything down. Peter Buck of R.E.M. guests on guitar, underlining the kinship between two bands rewriting American rock on opposite sides of the Midwest/South axis. The jangle reverentially nods back to Big Star, another band of cult-heroes who never cleaned up their clutter but made it sublime.

Fast-forward and you find the DNA in The Strokes’ nervy cool, or even in the breezy weariness of The Shins. And listen closely, and you can hear the seeds of what the Drive-By Truckers later perfected: a mix of twangy saloon swagger and bruised confession, turning everyday screw-ups into something mythic.

“Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” is pure barroom ruckus, a gleeful blast of snot-rock that proves the Replacements never lost the Stooges’ anything-could-happen snarl. Juvenile, chaotic, and essential, it’s teenage boredom weaponized into joy. “Androgynous” pivots sharply, pulling from The Kinks’ sly tradition of wry, compassionate storytelling. Westerberg trades guitar for piano, treating gender fluidity with warmth and humor, decades before the culture caught up.

Their cover of Kiss’s “Black Diamond” lands between parody and homage, swaggering with the arena bombast they couldn’t resist mocking even as they secretly admired it. There’s The Clash here too — the ability to satirize convention while still reveling in its power. Then comes “Unsatisfied,” the album’s cracked open heart: Westerberg’s howl of restless longing aiming for the same kind of grandeur The Clash proved punk could reach, but turning that ambition inward.

Finally, “Answering Machine” strips it all bare — one man, one guitar, nothing to hide. The Stooges taught rawness, but here it becomes intimacy, punk spirit transfigured into a loner’s late-night confession.

What’s striking is how much of Let It Be has echoed forward. You can hear it in fellow Minneapolitans The Hold Steady’s literary bar-rock, in Jeff Tweedy’s cracked confessionals, in the whole alt-rock wave of the ’90s — Nirvana, Green Day, Goo Goo Dolls, and countless others learning how the ‘Mats made imperfection sound like gospel.

Even contemporary voices carry the torch:  Phoebe Bridgers with her unflinching intimacy, Karly Hartzman with her distortion-wrapped storytelling, Courtney Barnett’s sardonic plainspokenness — each channeling a shade of Westerberg’s willingness to bleed onto the tape without apology.

And that cover photo, with the four of them slouched on the Stinson’s rooftop after climbing out a bedroom window (undoubtedly not for the first time!), is as important to the Replacements myth as any guitar riff on the record. No leather jackets (they were rocking the grunge aesthetic way before that became a thing), no calculated menace, just thrift-store kids killing time. They look like they could be your neighbors, or (more likely) the guys ripping cigs behind the QuikTrip, yet there’s a charge in the air: they’re on the lip of something enormous, and they have no clue about it. That snapshot froze the paradox perfectly; the Replacements as both ordinary and accidental legends, true sons of nowhere, a band too restless and too reckless to realize they were remapping the future.

And here’s the catch: what made them great was the band itself. Westerberg was the beating heart, but without Bob’s chaos, Tommy’s propulsion, and Mars’ grounding, these songs wouldn’t hit as hard. It’s the same truth you find later with Pavement, another band whose legacy far outstrips their commercial success. Stephen Malkmus wrote plenty of brilliant songs on his own post-Pavement, but it was the erratic, combustible alchemy of the band that made them matter. In both cases, the frontmen could only be fully themselves inside the glorious mess of their groups. Alone, the magic dimmed. Together, it was unstoppable.

Let It Be is a masterpiece of contradiction. It’s loud and quiet, funny and devastating, sloppy and precise. Anyone who saw them live like Wendell did (sadly only) once can tell you they could collapse or catch fire on any night, sometimes both. That’s the legacy: you don’t have to choose between sneering and confessing. You can do both in the same breath. The genius isn’t in spite of the flaws. The flaws are the genius.

The sweet spot to listen is late at night, when restlessness outweighs fatigue. You’re sober enough to feel everything, tired enough to let the guard down. It plays best in the transitional hours — after the party’s ended, or when you’re staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m., equal parts unsatisfied and daring enough to keep going. That’s when Let It Be climbs onto the Collier Hills roof with you, cracks a half-smile and a cold beer, and says: yeah, me too.

Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Answering Machine”. There’s a saying floating around in the TikTok ether. It’s a comment often left under videos of frat boys dancing or finance bros rating girls, drinks, cars, whatever. The comment reads, “Men used to go to war.” Well, in the case of “Answering Machine”… men used to yearn. And they did it on tracks like this one — unfiltered, unashamed, with fingers crossed that the girl who is the muse of the song might hear it on the radio someday.

Westerberg’s desperate rasp is haunting, yet intriguing like the last few cicadas’ dreary mating calls, buzzing through the air as summer fades and turns to fall. It sounds like the pivot in every ’80s romance movie, where the lead guy realizes he wants the one who got away. Westerberg begs the question, “How do you say I miss you to an answering machine?”, as if to admit, “I should’ve said all of this when I had the chance”. But now there’s just a dial tone.

Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Unsatisfied” as it isn’t just a song, it’s a wound ripped open on tape. Westerberg’s voice comes in cracked and straining, less about pitch than about grasping for something just out of reach — happiness, escape, absolution. What makes it so devastating is that it doesn’t resolve; it just circles the void, staring straight into it, daring you to admit that maybe you feel the same way, too. Plenty of rock songs rage against the world, but “Unsatisfied” turns the anger inward and makes it sound like a mirror, as if flaws themselves were the truest reflection. It’s not a cry for help so much as the sound of learning to live with the hurt.

The Replacements can be found on all streaming platforms and wherever records are sold.  You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM stations First Wave, Underground Garage, and Alt Nation.