Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements by Bob Mehr

DE CAPO PRESS | JUNE 2017

PAPERBACK | 528 PAGES | 6" x 1.8" x 9"

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – Based on a decade of research and reporting--as well as access to the Replacements' key principals, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson--author Bob Mehr has fashioned something far more compelling than a conventional band bio. Trouble Boys is a deeply intimate portrait, revealing the primal factors and forces that shaped one of the most brilliant and notoriously self-destructive rock 'n' roll bands of all time.

Beginning with riveting revelations about the Replacements' troubled early years, Trouble Boys follows the group as they rise within the early '80s American underground. It uncovers the darker truths behind the band's legendary drinking, showing how their addictions first came to define them, and then nearly destroyed them.

A roaring road adventure, a heartrending family drama, and a cautionary showbiz tale, Trouble Boys has deservedly been hailed as an instant classic of rock lit.

“The destruction. The volume. The cruelty. The charm. The songs. The songs. The songs. To live close to Paul Westerberg's material was to be lifted…then bent by it. The songs were that good. Mehr shows us that no one, Westerberg included, knew quite what to do with it all. It was underrated, overrated, obsessed over, ignored—never anything in the middle. But somewhere between the Replacements' path of destruction, epic but ultimately empty, and the beauty and honesty of Westerberg's writing, there was a band, a band whose story has for too long remained unknown and unknowable. This book gets us closer than we've ever been. Mehr brings us one of the great American rock ‘n' roll stories and all the hurt that came with it.” —Warren Zanes, author of Petty: The Biography and Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records—The First Fifty Years

Bob Mehr is an award-winning music critic for the Gannett-owned newspaper The Commercial Appeal and a longtime contributor to MOJO magazine. He's also served as an editor, writer, and columnist for Village Voice Media, New Times Inc., and Chicago Reader. He contributed liner notes to the Grammy-winning Big Star box set Keep an Eye on the Sky and has written essays for reissues by the Replacements, Kinks, Warren Zevon, Dixie Chicks, Al Green, and many others. A native of Los Angeles, he lives in Memphis, Tennessee.