Tommy Says So

(Star Tribune) Like a lot of things that involve rehashing the Replacements' legacy, Tommy Stinson admitted he was a tad skeptical about reissuing their eight albums with bonus tracks. In the end, though, he realized "you get a little more of the story of those records in those extra tracks."

After reissuing the Minneapolis band's first four discs in April, Rhino Records put out new versions of the final four albums two weeks ago with six to 10 bonus cuts apiece.

"We grabbed the best that there was, and some of it was still pretty rough," said Stinson, who joined the Replacements on bass when he was only 12 and stayed alongside frontman Paul Westerberg until the end (1991). "All the tracks we picked helped tell the story. You can hear the time and the moment captured. Whether it was a good moment or not is open to debate."

Stinson talked by phone last week from New Orleans, where he was writing songs with Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, another band he sometimes plays in, along with Guns N' Roses. He also jammed with Westerberg in Minneapolis recently but described it only as "messing around." We'll see.

Here's how Tommy described some of the extras on the reissues.

"TIM" (1985)

"Nowhere Is My Home," an outtake from scrapped sessions with the band's hero Alex Chilton producing: "It wound up being probably the best track of those sessions. It was one we had played quite a bit before it came time to record, so when we did record it, we were probably kind of sick of it.

"We were inspired to work with Alex, because we were such big Big Star fans. Like so many things, what it was supposed to be and ended up being wound up completely different, and in this case it wasn't all that fruitful."

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