A little while ago someone posted to Metafilter a link to old live videos from 1981 of the Replacements singing a number of songs. I looked to see if “Johnny’s Gonna Die” was there, and it was.
The first Replacements album, 1981’s “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” was an explosion of punk brattiness in ultra-short bursts. The band members were still basically kids, and a lot of their music was fun but, well, disposable, as the album title promises.
Nestled there at the very end of Side One, though, was this desolate ache of a song, and it’s still a heartbreaker. The music begins with a sarcastic nod to the Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” — a tongue-in-cheek vision to begin with, but the Replacements turn its rollicking bass line and chiming guitars into something hollow and stark. The lyrics simply declare the certain fate of a certain musician: Johnny Thunders was going to die. A decade later, he did. (Heroin will do that.) A few years later, so did Bob Stinson, the Replacements guitarist whose simple barren solos fill the song’s empty spaces. Watch him in that video, hammering on the high string.
From Elvis to Vicious to Cobain, self-destructive rock stars have cut a path across the decades that young musicians understandably find magnetic. Somehow, here at the very start of their career, the Replacements managed to stare down that whole bundle of mythology. When I saw the band play this song at a tiny club in Cambridge a few years after that video was recordered, I remember wondering about the snotty edge of “Johnny’s Gonna Die”: those “nah nah nahs,” like a schoolyard taunt, or the kiss-off in its closing “Bye bye.” Affection? Self-protection? I don’t know. Those lips were curled, but if you looked close, you could see them quiver.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.