Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements

"In a tome the size of a hardcover Bible, Bob Mehr charts the births, deaths and small resurrections of Minneapolitan rock icons The Replacements. It is the sort of music journalism that reminds you why people bother with music journalism in the first place: Mehr gives us tales of granite-jawed, precocious boys getting drunk, commercially successful and self-destructive through voluminous reportage with seemingly everyone who ever crossed their path. For a band that attracts a cultish level of adoration, this is a welcome quality. Mehr fortifies the book against the typical melodrama of the music biography with a willingness to be fully absent from the work. Objectively, thoroughly and tragically, he shows us trouble."