The Replacements: Let It Be Reissue

Rhino

4LPs | 3 CDs available here

Out October 24 2025

With another release of the Replacements classic Let It Be, Steve John just wishes they would.

A biopic of one of the most live for the moment bands imaginable is currently in development. Time will tell whether this does them justice but that the source material is a book called Trouble Boys, fills you in on their reputation. Dishevelled but impossibly cool, the stories of the Replacements refusing to play the game, central to the legend. Sabotaging gigs when record industry types turned up, making the most lo-fi two fingered videos for a major label during MTV’s peak years and stealing what they thought to be their master tapes, before throwing them in the Mississippi.

Perhaps indicating that the incongruous reissuing of yet another lightning in a beer bottle Replacements album, is the time to question it. Does the antithesis of all this really need another half arsed excuse to have another album remastered? With numerous versions of the same songs and a couple of outtakes for the trainspotters, that you can immediately tell why they didn’t survive the cut in the first place, probably not.

Let It Be was magnificent in 1984 and remains so untouched and intact today. From the calling card of I Will Dare to the desperate Answering Machine and all points in between. The band’s gradual shift from brilliant but pretty straight ahead punk, to injecting that spirit into a variety of styles, providing a template for Nirvana style alt rock and Americana to follow. Their devil-may-care attitude to all this perfectly encapsulated by the front and back cover shots.

And years later does anybody think it would be a good idea to give a Francis Bacon a bit of a touch up? Or perhaps they do, as by writing in the liner notes to this reissue Elizabeth Nelson manages to nail it and miss the point by association, describing Let It Be as, ‘the blueprint for what so many of us wanted and needed rock and roll to be: a refuge, a provocation, and in the end, a way out.’ Music doesn’t need to be sacred but it should never be neutered and this seems purely about the heritage rock industry following the business plan and milking it for all its worth. Wrapped up in pages of adverts for rereleases and tours where bands play an entire album in order, with any essential spontaneity the victim of endless repetition.

I was fortunate enough to see the Replacements twice or three times depending on how I’m feeling. The first a beautifully chaotic seat of their pants high, the third a tepid trudge through the back catalogue that the band themselves acknowledged. Their comeback tour seeing front man Paul Westerberg wearing a tee shirt with a different letter on each night, that when put together at the end, spelled out, ‘I have always loved you. Now I must whore my past.’ All meaning I prefer to stick my fingers in my ears and hope the band have little input into this release, or if they do, it’s for something like the medical bills that America’s so called health system, wouldn’t pay for a former and now sadly departed guitarist.

If this were just about people having that much money they were prepared to pay upwards of £100 (yes, you read that right) for the vinyl you could argue so what. Indeed the record companies themselves may say reissues is what they need to survive but eventually the whole system is going to ossify completely. Pressing plants clogged up with the musical equivalent of a root around Grandad’s attic. Blocking out the sun with nostalgia, while young bands and dead end kids like the Replacements once were, get pushed to the sidelines.

I don’t expect the band members to remain the same but as you will have gathered by now, I don’t want a copy, as I’m that old, I’ve already got it. Nonetheless if you haven’t heard it buy the much more reasonably priced CD of a band who didn’t have half as many fans then as now and prepare for a treat. Otherwise, everybody else maybe go mad and get something you haven’t listened to before, it might just be reminiscent of the thrill when you first heard Let It Be.

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All words by Steve John – Author profile here. You can also find Steve online at his website & Facebook