Irreplaceable Experience

It’s easy to suspect that Paul Westerberg, one of the most acclaimed figures in rock over the last two decades, is all but gritting his teeth as he walks across the lobby of the fashionable Four Seasons Hotel on his way to an interview.

Unlike the many pop artists who enjoy talking about their music, Westerberg, who came to national attention in the ‘80s as the leader of the Replacements, is notorious for sidestepping the meaning of his songs and questions about his personal life.

After all the years of interviews, you wonder why he keeps going through the ordeal, because none of the interviews have helped him get very high on the sales charts.

And the odds against Westerberg breaking through to mass acceptance seem greater than ever in this age of novelty hits, a time when Jewel is about as deep as most of the pop audience wants to get.

But it’s quickly clear during the interview that Westerberg is a man on a mission, so driven by what he feels is a creative rebirth that he catches you off guard with the candor of his remarks about his new music and his personal struggles.

“I came home from the last [1996] tour clinically depressed, realizing that performing the same numbers for an audience night after night no longer made me happy,” he says without any prompting, sitting on the hotel patio. “I always said I’d quit if it was no fun and it was no longer fun--touring at least.

“So I didn’t know what was next. I was back to being a teenager, not knowing what to do, not knowing where I fit in. . . . Music had been my life, my whole identity for 20 years or whatever, and suddenly I felt all that slipping away. I had to find myself all over again. Where I once just sat in my room with my guitar, this time it was a piano and I was a grown man. And a different kind of song started coming out.”

The result is an album that is likely to be one of the most heralded works of the year--maybe 1999’s equivalent of last year’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” which brought longtime cult artist Lucinda Williams a wider following and two Grammy nominations.

“I know some people are going to listen to this album and ask, ‘Whatever happened to the Paul Westerberg with the Replacements? Where’s the guitar?’ ” he says during the patio interview. “But there are other people who will see the thread from Day One with the Replacements to this very moment . . . that it’s the same guy, a guy who has finally been able to move down the road.”

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Most of the songs on the new album, titled “Suicaine Gratifaction” and due Feb. 23 from Capitol Records, were written long before Bob Dylan’s Grammy-winning “Time Out of Mind” collection was released in the fall of 1997.

But there’s so such much of the same spirit of fearless self-examination to the two works that it’s easy to imagine Westerberg having been inspired by the Dylan CD.

In “Time Out of Mind,” the voice of ‘60s idealism looked around the social landscape again, this time with the sensibilities of a man who knows that the end is nearing for him and his generation. And he’s not sure what to make of it all.

In Westerberg’s album, too, he is at a turning point in his life--a time when he is looking back and trying to put things in perspective so that he can move forward.

In his case, he was trying to find his adult voice after feeling trapped even after he left the Replacements in 1993 by his obsession with chronicling the insecurities and desires of youth.

One of the attractions of the Replacements was the group’s irreverence. Though lead singer and songwriter Westerberg sometimes showed the vulnerability that lurks beneath most youthful bravado, the band members acted on stage as if every show were a lark, and many were boozy, almost incoherent affairs.

If the band (whose original lineup also featured brothers Bob and Tommy Stinson on guitar and bass, respectively, and Chris Mars on drums) never connected with a mass audience, the Replacements’ influence has been immense--an approach echoed to varying degrees by such ‘90s bands as Nirvana, the Verve and Semisonic.

But Westerberg had trouble moving into the ‘90s himself. Even though he stopped drinking and embarked on a solo career in 1993, his music, in a pair of solo albums, continued to be characterized by the themes he’d explored in the Replacements--as if anything outwardly adult would be a violation of his original ideals. In other words, he refused to grow up as an artist.

Until now.

He doesn’t use the term “grown up” himself, but it’s clear in the music and in his comments that he has turned a dramatic corner in his life.

Accompanied at times on the album just by his own guitar or piano, Westerberg, who turns 40 in December, looks back over his life to see which character traits--including allegiance to the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” mythology that is alluded to in the album’s title--were useful to him and which were simply deceptions.

The title of the opening song, “It’s a Wonderful Lie,” is a playful twist on the title of Frank Capra’s classic feel-good film.

“I’m past my prime, or was that just a pose?” he asks at one point in the song. “It’s a wonderful lie and I still get by on those.”

On one level, he acts surprised that the songs are even being released on record.

“There’s utter danger in the way I made this record. . . . The decision to keep things deathly simple and not use the kind of ear candy that kind of guarantees radio play,” says Westerberg, who recorded much of the album at home on a 16-track machine.

“To me, this album makes some of our earlier work [with the Replacements] seem bogus and timid. There is no hiding behind volume here. I actually included the lyrics on some of these things. I never did that before. I was afraid to. . . . I didn’t necessarily want attention drawn to that [more vulnerable] side of me. There’s still fear in these songs, and there’s loneliness and darkness, but there’s not cowardice on this record.”

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Westerberg, who turned to therapy and medication to help combat the depression that hit him after coming off the road in 1996, was uncertain about his new musical direction because it was so devoid of the exuberance and guitar dynamics that were his signatures with the Replacements.

After years with the Warner Bros. Records music group, Westerberg felt it was time to find a new label, which led him to Gary Gersh, then president of Capitol Records. Gersh is now a partner in the management firm that represents Westerberg.

Gersh, who over the years has worked with such artists as Nirvana and David Bowie, was a fan of the Replacements, but he was underwhelmed by much of Westerberg’s solo work.

“I felt Paul was in a place where he was having trouble getting out of . . . being Mr. Replacement,” Gersh says in a separate interview. “I felt it was time for him to let himself grow, . . . and then he reached into his pocket and handed me a tape of some of the new songs and I was amazed. I knew we were on the same page.”

Encouraged by Gersh’s response, Westerberg continued writing and recording in the more reflective style, exploring everything from troubled relationships to tarnished dreams. He then entered the studio with producer Don Was, whose credits range from Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt to the Rolling Stones.

Was is a longtime fan--he had played Westerberg’s 1993 solo album, “14 Songs,” every morning before going into the studio with the Stones to make “Voodoo Lounge.” The album, he says, had the feel he wanted the Stones to have.

About working with Westerberg, he says, “Gary sent me a third-generation cassette of the songs and I was knocked out by the writing. He’s miles ahead of anyone else in his generation.

“To me, the songs were about dealing with the dilemma of being the leader of the Replacements and thinking it’s incumbent to vomit on stage and play too loud all the time. . . . Someone trying to live up to that legacy and yet be an adult. After I started talking to him, I realized the songs are about more than that, but that’s what struck me about them initially.”

In the new album, you know it’s Westerberg speaking because there is still his trademark mix of protective sarcasm and heartfelt sentimentality. But there’s a new, more mature perspective and a relentless questioning. While the music is generally understated, the tone ranges from achingly beautiful to occasionally hopeful.

With the album about to be shipped to the stores, Westerberg--who lives in Minneapolis with his 7-month-old son, Johnny Paul, and the child’s mother--is now wrestling with the issue of live shows. He knows the importance of touring to promote the album, but he didn’t enjoy his last tour, and he worries that an entire evening of the material might be too demanding.

“I love rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “I never wanted to go on stage and be a balladeer. To me, it’s always been . . . someone pays their money and they want to be entertained. I used to even write some songs with just that in mind, but that’s not what this music is about. To write them, I had to get into a special mind-set--make myself believe that these songs were just for me.

“This is the kind of music [that happens] when your back is against the wall, and mine was. The only [song ideas] available to me came out of how I was feeling.

“Take a song like ‘Self Defense,’ ” he says, citing a lyric that touches on the anguish that leads to suicide. “Do you think I made that up? . . . It’s what I was feeling. You think about suicide and you either dwell on it or you exorcise the demon by writing about it, and that’s what I did in this album.” *

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.