Paul WesterbergCome Feel Me Tremble (Vagrant) Come Feel Me Tremble DVD (Redline Entertainment)
For a moment they stood face-to-face, the two storied Minnesota songwriters, each hailed in his heyday as rock’s preeminent poet, separated by only a pane of glass. The image is metaphorically rich–mirror image or fun-house distortion, take your pick–but what sticks with me about the story is the distance between the two. There was Westerberg, caught in the act delivering a heartfelt but characteristically fucked-up homage at full volume; and there was Dylan, silent and reserved, his reaction unreadable behind the dark shades.
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Where Dylan could bring a crowd to a hush with a naked epic like “To Ramona,” Westerberg’s most profound lines were usually buried behind a wall of squalling guitar and shredded larynx, couched in the context of some elaborate joke, or mumbled unintelligibly, like a secret he didn’t want anyone to divine. Yet it was ultimately his earnestness that accounted for the Replacements’ unique charm. Playing a cover of Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” on a radio broadcast in 2002, Westerberg closed the song by announcing, “This was the only one he ever meant.” That Westerberg responds best not to any of Dylan’s postapocalyptic warnings, cryptomessianic ramblings, or poison-pen diatribes, but rather to something as simple and honest and ultimately silly as “All I Really Want to Do” makes perfect sense–as if in Dylan’s Jimmy Rodgers yodel the younger man recognized the same clownish, self-protective urge that lay behind his punk caterwauling.
Both Westerberg and Dylan closed their respective decades of dominance with albums that perplexed critics and fans alike. The Replacements’ second-to-last LP, 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul, was derided as overly polished, self-satisfied, and fake-sounding; the same criticisms had been leveled at Dylan 20 years earlier for his affected country croon, lightweight lyrics, and pie-eyed romanticism on Nashville Skyline. But unlike Dylan, Westerberg then had to make the tricky transition from front man to solo artist. His post-Mats career started off promisingly enough with a contribution to the Singles sound track and his politely received debut, 14 Songs, but follow-ups like 1996’s Eventually and 1999’s Suicaine Gratifaction, on which the gentle mood pieces outnumbered the scuffling rockers, met with declining interest.
Dylan likes to talk about the epiphany he had onstage in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1987–how a phrase that came to him from the blue, I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not, gave him the will to go on. But Westerberg’s moment of truth was, fittingly, far more mundane: he bought a new guitar, a big Gibson ES-335 hollowbody, and found that the chords still lined up under his fingers.
Greil Marcus, writing in Rolling Stone, responded to Dylan’s 1970 curio Self Portrait with the now infamous line “What is this shit?” Much of the negative criticism of the Come Feel Me Tremble CD asks the same question. Like Self Portrait, it’s an indulgent scramble of odd ideas, leftovers, curious covers, and the occasional brilliant gem. Dylan hurriedly released the more substantive New Morning just a few months after Self Portrait; Westerberg has already completed the more substantive Folker for release early next year.
