Happy 30th Anniversary to The Replacements’ seventh & final studio album All Shook Down, originally released September 25, 1990.

Longing, I wrote to a friend in a text chain stretching some three thousand miles between our homes. Is a very underrated emotion. Most people will do anything not to ever feel it, but the romantics among us, the artists, really know how to savor it.

Longing has always been a core tenet of The Replacements’ catalogue, from “I Will Dare” to “Achin’ To Be,” but even more so on All Shook Down. It’s an album beset with cravings and addictions and the sheer soulful neediness that is left when the world falls apart. Even if you knew nothing of The Replacements, if All Shook Down was the first album of theirs you picked up (charmed by the dogs on the album cover, surely), you wouldn’t need to know their long sordid backstory to know that this was the end of the line for Paul, Chris, Tommy and Slim.

“I didn’t want to hear big loud guitars,” Westerberg said, as quoted in Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements. “I wanted to make an eclectic, spooky little farewell record that wasn’t a pretend rock record.”

If Let It Be (1984) is an ode to a young man’s antics, All Shook Down is the morning after, when the room is trashed and everyone else has gone home and all you have left are your own thoughts kicking against the side of your skull. It’s an album like a Dear John letter or a suicide note, a miserable end to a life that had stopped being happy too long before.

Though the album was originally supposed to be Paul Westerberg’s solo project, management convinced him otherwise, and brought in drummer Chris Mars, bass player Tommy Stinson and guitarist Slim Dunlap, each playing on secret songs, with no specific credits as to who plays where. Most notably, all four appear on “When It Began” and in the accompanying claymation video, marking Mars’ last appearance with Paul and Tommy since they started Dogbreath in the basement all those years ago.

The fabric of their infamous raucousness is still there in the opening, but it’s pretty threadbare. “Merry Go Round” functions, in part, as a recasting of the 1989 LP Don’t Tell A Soul’s underperforming single, “Achin’ To Be,” amping up the melodic energy in a tale about a little girl lost (supposedly inspired by his sister, Mary). Although Paul gives it all he’s got, there’s nothing left to give. His drinking had gone from excessive partying to crippling alcoholism, but worse, he and Stinson had started smoking speedballs. That none of them dropped dead in the studio remains nothing short of a miracle.

The real rockers are stacked on the back half of the B-side with “Attitude” and the duet with Concrete Blonde frontwoman Johnette Napolitano on “My Little Problem.” And more than any other ‘Mats album, All Shook Down returns to the band’s blue-collar roots, with bluesy Americana guitars on songs like “Nobody” and John Cale’s mournful viola on “Sadly Beautiful.” Artists from the late Justin Townes Earle to the Gaslight Anthem have cited Westerberg and Company as an influence.

But overall, it’s an unflinchingly bleak album; according to Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys, Westerberg rolled into the studio so hungover that he recorded his vocals on the title track lying underneath the piano, reading surreal scribbles from a notebook, his whispers and breath like the tail end of an endlessly dark night.

None of this is to suggest the album falls flat. Far from it. Even at their lowest, the miracle of the Replacements was that they were able to deliver something so stunning, so raw, that “Beautiful” and “Began” and even “Bent” could be as much about the breakup of the band as a love affair. It’s a long goodbye to a band that blew every chance they had at a hello.

The album was nominated for the Best Alternative Album GRAMMY and ranked as the #3 best album of the year by Rolling Stone. But it was all too little too late, and after a white-knuckle tour, The Replacements were no more.

In the end, most of the ‘Mats survived to the other side. Original guitarist Bob Stinson died in 1995, and Dunlap had a stroke in 2012, allowing for a brief reunion of Paul and Tommy on the Songs for Slim benefit EP. Though a tour in 2015 had given hope for a possible reunion and new album, it never materialized.

The ‘Mats recognized the importance of longing, of late nights and empty hearts, and All Shook Down pays homage to that more than any previous effort. It’s an album for rainy days and pandemic-fueled angst, not to be taken lightly, but not to shy away from either.

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