The Replacements - Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash (Deluxe Edition) (2021) Hi Res

Funny thing about The Replacements; after every album, a certain percentage of their fans could be counted on to complain that they'd changed for the worse, betraying the true spirit heard on their previous album. Their debut Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash reissued here in a 100 track, 5-disc version that includes many unreleased demos, outtakes, alternate takes and a complete live show, is where that dynamic began. This is as close to a punk rock album as the band ever made which means those who despise the later, poppier, work, like the penultimate Don't Tell a Soul, for example, and feel the real Replacements died when Bob Stinson left the band, consider Sorry Ma to be their grail. And yet, despite the band's rhythm section of drummer Chris Mars and 14-year-old bassist Tommy Stinson being supremely tight, and Bob Stinson's schizo-guitar thunder—the band's original foundation—casting chords and notes in every direction, Sorry Ma is also where singer/guitarist Paul Westerberg's songs and evolving vocals first become the star.

From the opening rush of "Takin' a Ride," Sorry Ma, recorded between 1980-81 at rudimentary Blackberry Way studios in Minneapolis for Peter Jesperson's Twin/Tone label, is riffy and raw. Based around Westerberg's guitar artifacts that emphasize volume and abandon, tunes like "Don't Ask Why," and "I'm in Trouble," are pure blasts of punk-leaning hard rock energy suffused with the band's insouciance and the irrepressible pugnacity they'd built up over years in their basement rehearsal space. The spark of the Replacements' bright future to come is also present, particularly in their first less-than-headlong-rush near-ballad, "Johnny's Gonna Die." Written for one of their earliest heroes Johnny Thunders—who was indeed doomed—this is where Westerberg dips his toe into pop songwriting for the first time. Thunders, who Westerberg has admitted was an early model for his songwriting, is alluded to in numerous musical gestures on the album like the grand reprise ending of "Rattlesnake."

In addition to a band coming into its own musically, Sorry Ma is also audible evidence of the determination among these four dogged, obsessive underdogs to succeed. In the liner notes by co-producer and journalist Bob Mehr, who won a Grammy for his notes for 2019's Dead Man's Pop, an earlier entry in this series of Replacements reissues, Tommy Stinson pegs the band's state of mind: "We basically became the gang of hoodlums that didn't have anything else to do. We weren't thieves and hoodlums per se. But we had a hoodlum mentality in terms of, let's go into the basement and make a bunch of racket." For Westerberg, however, there was a lot more to it than just creating a din: "…it took me a long time to find guys who had no other fucking options in life. I needed desperation. 'Cause that's where I was coming from." Sonically, the original album is heard here in a cleaner, more dynamically rich new remaster that still can't completely rescue the canned sound of "I Bought a Headache," which was recorded during a 1980 tryout concert for Twin/Tone co-owner, Paul Stark. The collection of demos on the second disc is unusually telling as Westerberg works on song ideas, gaining confidence, getting better even in shards that never made a Replacements album like the "She's Firm," "Get on the Stick" and "Raised in the City." There are also flashes of the band's infamous sense of humor like the shave-and-a-haircut coda to the demo of "I Hate Music." These early recordings even include a taste of the hours the band spent rehearsing in the basement of the Stinson house as Westerberg flips into lounge singer mode in "Basement Jam."

Confirmation that this band was growing in material and professionalism is provided by a muscular but surprisingly disciplined nearly 30-song live show taken from a radio broadcast recorded in January 1981 at Minneapolis club, The 7th Street Entry as the band was finishing Sorry Ma. Although they're famed for their unhinged live shows where the music often changed on the fly, this concert is audible evidence of how serious they could be when it counted. Even the covers of Slade's "My Town" and The Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night" are restrained. Throughout this pivotal, revealing package there's a sense of a band discovering itself, testing its powers, finding a method to the madness. As Chris Mars marvels in the liner notes: "We'd just kinda listen back and say, "Hey, that was great. How did we do that?"