I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #54:

Seen your video. Heard your record.

One more chance to get it all wrong
One more time to do it all wrong
One more night to get it half right
One more warning
One more warning sound
We're comin' out
We're comin' out.

“Fingernails and a cigarette's a lousy dinner,” indeed. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the title and album cover of the Replacements' 1984 classic Let It Be — a photo of the bed-head boys, yawning and bedraggled, sitting on a suburban Minneapolis rooftop — at least gives me a better perspective of the group than when I had seen them live at an L.A. club. Or more accurately, when I had seen some of them some of the time, since they performed part of the show flat on their backs drunkenly covering such bubblegum fare as the Ohio Express’ “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I Got Love In My Tummy).”

Thanks folks and I hope they passed the audition, anyway. But whether lying down or sitting, the ’Mats were stand-up musicians able to draw on the solid song craft of Paul Westerberg, who with this fourth release found his abilities and talents traversing a critical crossroads as his strengths emerged with greater breadth and depth, resonance and mordant humor. There’s also such pigeonhole-proof rollicking rousers as the feel-good ode to love-interests everywhere, “Favorite Thing”: “You're my favorite thing / Bar nothing!” Things are slowed down for “Androgynous,” yet relationships still get tweaked when you're “Closer than you know, love each other so / Androgynous.” The technology of modern life also comes in for a skewering in “Answering Machine” as the singer poignantly ponders “How do you say I'm lonely to / An answering machine? / The message is very plain / Oh, I hate your answering machine.”

In any case, accept no substitutes. The Replacements' glorious mess o’ Let It Be is a roarin’ little record I want my turntable to play and play again, and “I Will Dare” — as the tuneful attitudinal opener challenges — paves the way for a long player steeped in ever more youthful readiness, in the earnestness of the ‘Mats being newly important (beyond the novel tension-breaking fun of the punk-addled “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out,” or “Gary’s Got A Boner”): “Meet me anyplace or anywhere or anytime / Now, I don't care, meet me tonight / If you will dare, I will dare.”