THE REPLACEMENTS
“Left of the Dial”
from Tim

The college rock movement of the 1980s became increasingly self-conscious; in the 1990s it would become indie rock’s debilitating (and silly) obsession with selling out and so forth. The Replacements, like Mott the Hoople, seemed to infuse almost every one of their songs with this self-consciousness; in this context, the dramatic, searing “Left of the Dial” is both Paul Westerberg’s “Gimme Shelter” and “The Ballad of Mott.”

But unlike Ian Hunter, the pathos Westerberg finds here never falls into lugubriousness. The result is as wrenching a tale of itself rock has ever produced, the story of a doomed and uncompromising music’s past and future; “Left of the Dial”— an interior monologue, a transcontinental travelogue, a meditation on the music and its discontents—is, not insignificantly, Westerberg’s greatest song, which is saying something.

It’s a song about guitars (soaring guitars, chiming guitars, keening guitars, strangled guitars) and singing, too. Westerberg had a melodramatic streak (”The Ledge”) and as his fans know, a sentimental one as well; his underrated voice could make anything convincing. His vocal work here is a tour de force of whispers, murmurs, wails, conversation, hope, defiance, and ruefullness.

You can read the thing many ways, and back in the day there were many explanations for this or that line. (Among other things, “Left of the Dial” has a hidden love song.) I take the bigger view. The title refers to college radio, tucked down in the high 80s and low 90s on the dial. Our heroes, on tour, are in Georgia, apparently, part of the great random diaspora of the era, a movement (with stops and starts) of shaggy musicians that took them to college towns and big cities, clubs and dives, bad motels and fans’ houses, supported and connected by college radio and a few alternative papers and fanzines and not much else.

The opening, keening guitar line heralds both pain and excitement; we get the latter first, as the music pulls up short and a bunch of grubby rock boys on tour grab for what notice they can. But the ambiguities in nearly every line underscore the new territory all are in:

Heard about your band in some local page
Did it mention our name? Didn’t mention our name

On that second line, I don’t know which of those two variants he’s saying. The bands stay in contact this way, second hand, most evocatively, thrillingly, via the radio:

Passin’ through and it’s late; the station started to fade
Picked another one up in the very next state

As Westerberg rachets up the dramatic tension in the song, the band keeps moving west, and it’s hard not to hear, in the long instrumental break, the sound of a shitty van chugging up the Rockies and then, as those coarse, keening, single-double-triple guitars burst to the fore again, reaching a crest and barreling down toward the Pacific and … what? Stardom? The music industry? No, something different:

Pretty girl keeps growin’ up
Wearing makeup and playing guitar…

That’s what you hear, for a second, until you realize Westerberg is saying something different. He actually sings:

Pretty girl keeps growin’ up
Playing makeup and wearing guitar.

There’s a fabulous tribute to the female indie rockers of the time here, some of whom sported exaggerated smeared baby-doll makeup, delightedly confusing the signs associated with the image of a figure sporting a guitar fronting a rock band. But again there’s confusion, too; it’s hard not to hear a disconcertedness in the transposed words in those lines. In the very next moment we see why:

Growin’ old in a bar
You grow old in a bar

That’s a reality of the scene Westerberg can’t stop himself from thinking about. At this point, you can see why he’s sung the thing the way he does. He knew that his career would be OK, but he knew that too many others of his clan wouldn’t turn out that way. His envoi …

If I don’t see you for a long, long while
I’ll try to find you
Left of the dial

…is less optimistic than it sounds; he knows and you know it’s not that likely.

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Last week’s “Song About Rock.”

The complete “Songs About Rock.”