Modern Rock Tracks No. 1s - The Replacements and "Merry Go Round"

The Replacements hit the top of the charts for the last time with another song that presages the work of bands who would come to provide an alternative to rough-edged grunge- or punk-rock

The Replacements - “Merry Go Round”

Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart: 4 total weeks (October 13 and November 3 to November 17, 1990)

Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:

• George Michael - “Praying For Time” (10/13/1990)

• Vanilla Ice - “Ice Ice Baby” (11/3/1990)

• Mariah Carey - “Love Takes Time” (11/10 and 11/17/1990)

One of the best things to come out of this project is a new appreciation for bands and songs I’d never taken the time to explore. Because of this series on MRT chart toppers, I took the time to listen to a bunch of great music, but landed on XTC and The Replacements as two bands I am so happy I got to dive into and learn more about. Indeed, when Spotify spat out its Wrapped playlist for 2023, two of my top 10 songs for the year were from XTC (“Mayor of Simpleton,” which is just so much fun and I had such a blast writing about) and The Replacements (“Alex Chilton,” which I featured briefly in my writeup about the band’s previous #1 hit, “I’ll Be You,” but wished I could have written about as a chart topper, because it’s fantastic.)

I like music across all times and genres, but I would not have guessed I would have a Jonas Brothers track in my top 10 in the year 2023. Song’s a banger, though.

If you’re into top-10 lists from others’ Spotify Wrapped presentations, I’ve embedded the list here for your listening pleasure:

At the end of 2022, I promise you wouldn’t have seen either of those bands in a top 1000 list, and even then, it would have been an incidental algorithmic pick I would have skipped. But I’m definitely sold on The Replacements, and while I was middle-of-the-road in my review of “I’ll Be You,” I think I’ll have a couple more rating points to add to the band’s final MRT chart topper, the 1990 hit “Merry Go Round.”

As we get closer to the emergence of the Seattle grunge movement, I keep looking for a sign that presages Nirvana’s first appearance on the chart, something that I wouldn’t have noted at the time but makes it obvious that we’re about to have an explosion of music that changes the landscape of the alt-rock zeitgeist forever. And there’s no way that The Replacements fit that bill, but what they DO provide is the future of what alt-rock would become in the 1990s post-grunge.

“Merry Go Round” is the lead single off “All Shook Down,” the album that would be the last studio effort from The Replacements as a band. The album garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album in 1991, but even with the critical praise, the band was already on its last legs, and indeed, the last time they would play together as a group in the 1990s was in Chicago in the summer of ‘91. Even though the band would go its separate ways, its parting album left a blueprint for bands like Gin Blossoms or Matchbox 20 to take alt-rock in a direction that veered toward a softer, polished sound, far different than the coming rough-around-the-edges rock that was percolating in the American Northwest.

The most edgy part of “Merry Go Round” comes when the band leads into the refrain, and the guitars and drums sync together into a massive outburst, only to fade back into a relatively mellow chord progression. Unlike their grunge- and punk-rock brethren, the drums don’t explode, the guitars don’t go into a loud screeching fit, and the singers are all easy to understand. It’s rock music that’s clearly an “alternative” to the mainstream pop of the time (hard to imagine The Replacements opening for Mariah Carey or Vanilla Ice), while also presenting itself as an alternative to more hard-edged guitar rock. Is there a “wholesome rock” genre? If not, it’d be easy to place Paul Westerberg and the band in the dictionary next to that phrase.

Of course that phrasing is somewhat illusory, as the song isn’t a wholesome song about an amusement park carousel, but rather a somewhat sad story about Westerberg’s sister Mary Lucia and the melancholy surrounding her childhood. It’s implicit in the lyrics that Lucia didn’t have the most fun growing up in a world where the most familiar word she knew was “hush,” presumably from being told to keep quiet all the time by the adults in her life.

Hush is the only word you know
And I stopped listening long ago
They ignored me with a smile
You as a child
But the trouble doll hears your heart pound
And your feet they say goodbye to the ground

While the idea of escaping the real world in dreams paints a beautiful lyrical picture, having it juxtaposed against the sadness of the situation makes Westerberg’s lyrical sweep in the refrain both exquisite and heartbreaking:

Merry go round in dreams
Writes 'em down, it seems
When she sleeps, she's free
Merry go round in dreams

As I wrote in my review of “I’ll Be You,” The Replacements form the template for what so many ‘90s and ‘00s alt-rock bands would become in the aftermath of the grunge explosion. Mainstream alt-rock acts like Goo Goo Dolls, Gin Blossoms, Hootie and the Blowfish, Collective Soul, The Nixons, Duncan Sheik, The Killers, Ben Folds Five, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire, and probably dozens more owe a huge debt to the success of The Replacements and their specific brand of rock and roll.

As for The Replacements, their existence is paradoxical: Without their influence, so many successful mainstream rock bands might not have ascended in the way that they did, and yet The Replacements themselves easily would have found amazing mainstream support if only they came along later. I feel like their contribution to what rock music would become for two decades and beyond gets lost because they weren’t as successful in their day as they could have been if they’d stuck around longer.

The band had a couple more modest hits off “All Shook Down,” which includes a top-five appearance in 1991, right around the time of their eventual breakup. They would stay separated for more than 20 years before reuniting for a brief time in the early to mid 2010s. As of this writing, the band is not performing together and have seemingly quashed any attempts to produce something new in the studio.

Since I won’t really be discussing The Replacements again in this space, I thought it best to conclude with a great quote from the band’s bassist, Tommy Stinson, in a terrific piece from Matt Mitchell of Paste Magazine earlier this year. The article was more or less an homage to the band’s album “Tim,” but strayed into many different areas, including Stinson reflecting on the band’s legacy:

“Part of our lure is that we stayed underground. We stayed underground, for the most part, because of our shortcomings. But that was also, somehow, our strong-suit—that we were so unable to conform to what would make us star-quality or what would catapult us.”

“We always felt like the music had to do it, that we couldn’t do something with the music to make us more popular. … For good or bad, awkwardly, we stayed true to ourselves—which was a good thing for the music in one way but bad in another. And you just gotta live with that. I wouldn’t change a fucking thing if I had a chance to, because it is what it is.”

—Tommy Stinson, The Replacements, for Paste Magazine, Sept. 19, 2023

Even if they never reached the heights of superstardom, the band stayed true to their music, and they continue to live on to this day. Sometimes the best music doesn’t reach the highest heights, and if I’ve learned anything from this project, it’s that there’s a lot of great music out there just waiting to be heard and shared. To that end, I wholeheartedly recommend The Replacements.

Rating: 8/10

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Chart Check: A look at other notable MRT chart songs from this time period

A handful of songs stand out in this week’s Chart Check. Lots of female participation this week, with Cocteau Twins and Kate Pierson of the B-52’s making big pushes into the top 10 of the alt-rock charts.

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“Iceblink Luck” by Cocteau Twins: I know very little about Cocteau Twins, the Scottish goth rock group who previously scored a #2 MRT chart hit with “Carolyn’s Fingers” in 1988. This type of music is not generally my jam, but kudos to the band for scoring their second top-five MRT hit with “Iceblink Luck,” a track I think is better than their previous effort, even though it peaked at #4 behind The Replacements.

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“Candy” by Iggy Pop with Kate Pierson: An interesting alt-rock nugget from this period comes thanks to an unusual collaboration between Iggy Pop and B-52’s frontwoman Kate Pierson, a fun back-and-forth rock jam that certainly took advantage of the B-52’s explosion in the late 1980s. This storybook song made it to #5 on the MRT chart behind “Merry Go Round.”

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“Crystal Clear” by The Darling Buds: The Darling Buds bring proto-indie rock to the forefront with this really solid rock track, fronted by the beautifully voiced Andrea Lewis Jarvis. “Crystal Clear” would be the high-water mark for this Welsh band in the U.S., peaking at #5 behind The Replacements. They broke up in 1992 but got back together in different formations and continue to make music.

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“Dig For Fire” by The Pixies: Much like The Replacements, The Pixies are one of those bands who have an outsized influence on artists that would follow them, but were too much a part of the underground to find a lot of daylight in terms of chart respect. They did find a home on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, though, and this one managed to hit #11, the band’s fourth consecutive single to chart in the top 11 on MRT.

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