Track #16: “I Will Dare” by The Replacements (1984)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music.

Aaron: With this entry we jump across the pond for our first look at an American contribution to the 1980s scenes we’ve been discussing – that seminal, rag-tag, punk/power-pop band from Minneapolis, The Replacements. And we’ve got a very special treat this time around – joining us for the discussion is my old friend Chris Dall, himself a resident of Minneapolis. More importantly, it was Chris more than anybody else who switched me on to the great indie music that had been coming out in the 1980s. And it was Chris, most definitely, who turned me into the ‘Mats fan that I remain today.

Lew and I will both take part in the conversation, but since Chris is our guest, we’ve asked him to choose the track up for discussion and to give it a brief introduction. So, Chris, what can you tell us about the song we’ll be talking about?

Chris: For my contribution to this blog and its examination of ‘80s musical genres, I’ve chosen the song “I Will Dare” by The Replacements, the band that, along with REM, introduced me to what was at the time called “Indie Rock.” I first became aware of The Replacements in 1986, when they released their first major label album, “Tim,” made a drunken appearance on Saturday Night Live, and by some accounts had already sold out. Knowing nothing about them but what was on that album, I immediately fell in love with their music. By the end of 1986 my cassette of “Tim” was pretty well worn, and I wanted to explore what had come before.

“I Will Dare” is a song from The Replacements’ 1984 album Let It Be, the third full album by the band’s original lineup: lead singer and songwriter Paul Westerberg, guitarist Bob Stinson, bassist Tommy Stinson, and drummer Chris Mars. Let It Be was the band’s last album on Twin/Tone records, a Minneapolis-based label that helped launch the Twin Cities music scene to national prominence. Many ‘Mats fans will tell you this is their best album, not simply because of the great songs it contains, but because it captures everything that their fans loved about them: their attitude, their sense of humor (they named the album Let It Be for gods sake), their sloppiness, and their ragged imperfection. Whether or not it’s their best album is a question for another day, but to me it is the album that truly encapsulates them. It’s a ragged, glorious, shambling mess, a musical stew of rockabilly, Clash-inspired punk, hardcore, metal, piano balladry, and even folk rock. It’s the sound of a band that had imbibed more than 30 years of American and English pop music history was hurling it back in the face of the MTV generation.  It’s kind of like a Replacements show, minus the alcohol.

That fact that Let It Be has no one song that really captures its essence makes it hard to select one song to write about, but I ultimately decided on the one that begins the album. What strikes me about “I Will Dare” is that on an album marked by shambling, unfocused sprawl, it is perhaps the most concise and complete song ever written by Paul Westerberg. At its core it’s really a simple song. There’s no bridge, just verses and chorus interrupted by a guitar solo (and a slightly off-key mandolin solo by none other than Peter Buck of REM), with a great shuffle beat driven by the drumming of Chris Mars and the bassline of Tommy Stinson. On first listen, the song sounds deceptively upbeat and jangly, but what comes through on repeated listens is the hard, punk edge of the bass and drums, with the driving overlay of the lead guitar mimicking the bass line. It’s punk rockabilly, raw and pure and vibrant. And lyrically, it has all the classic Westerberg themes: inadequacy masked by bravado. “How smart are you?/How dumb am I?/Don’t count any/of my advice.” And what makes this song great is that it sounds just as fresh today as it did when I first heard it.



But now to the question that this blog is taking up: where does it fit on the musical spectrum? It’s raw yet not completely unrefined, stripped down but not primitive, rough-edged but melodic. It’s not punk, nor is it New Wave. The Replacements were never either of those things, but they incorporated elements of those genres into their sound, both stylistically and attitudinally, and essentially grafted them onto what was a “classic rock” template. And to me that’s what Indie rock was essentially all about. Taking a lot of the musical influences of the past and creating something new by stripping the music down to guitar, bass, and drums and then layering on melody, spirit, and emotion. And it seemed then, as it still does today, to be a reaction to the musical excess of the MTV era.

So I’ll toss it now to Aaron and Lew: what do you guys make of “I Will Dare”?

Track #15: "Wrathchild" by Iron Maiden (1981)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music.

Lew: Iron Maiden released their second album, Killers, in February of 1981. In the spirit of Aaron’s observations about his musical taste at the time The Cure released “A Forest,” I should say that I was not aware of Iron Maiden at the time, or even aware that rock music could sound like Iron Maiden. My family was essentially radio-centered – it wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that we would join Columbia House  and start listening to more albums as a family – so my experience of music was pretty well limited to the kind of light rock that one could hear on the radio in Washington County in 1981. I think the heaviest contemporary song that I knew of was probably “Start Me Up” by The Rolling Stones. Also like Aaron, I was a pretty big fan of “Take It on the Run,” which, along with “Kiss On My List” by Hall & Oates, was probably my favorite song. So, with that said, it’s probably unnecessary to note that the New Wave of British Heavy Metal would have been a very unfamiliar concept to me at the time.

As a brief introduction, The New Wave of British Heavy Metal (or NWOBHM, as it’s often abbreviated) was a movement that formed in reaction to two conditions: One, the seminal metal bands of the 1970s, such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, had generally abandoned their original sound or deteriorated in other ways. Two, the punk movement, which had dominated British rock in the mid-late ‘70s had declined and begun to give way to New Wave and post-punk. NWOBHM bands looked to the original metal bands for inspiration, but filtered those influences through the faster, more urban sounding punk. Where Zeppelin and Sabbath looked to the blues for the foundation of their early sound, NWOBHM bands found a more rock-centered urgency to draw on.

Killers was Iron Maiden’s second album, and their last with original singer, Paul Di’Anno. While Maiden is much better known for their work with Di’Anno’s replacement, Bruce Dickinson, it’s worth noting that the Di’Anno-fronted iteration of the band has several qualities to recommend it. Killers is a rawer conception of the band, and is more related to the punk bands that preceded it, than the band that would record Dickinson’s debut, Number of the Beast, two years later. At the same time, the hallmark Maiden qualifiers were already in place – namely, aggressive bass playing, dual guitar solos, and songs based on literary works and historical figures. The song we’ll be discussing for this entry, “Wrathchild,” sounds distinctively like Iron Maiden, but is a fairly aggressive, concise statement by their standards.




Aaron, a good deal has been made of Iron Maiden’s original incarnation with Di’Anno as being “punkier” than the Dickinson years. As someone who has listened to a fair amount of punk music, how do you feel about that? Do you see any alignment between “Wrathchild” and the punk music of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, or is that comparison exaggerated?