BOOK EXCERPT: 'Hold My Life'

Pennywise Singer Jim Lindberg Talks 'Tim'

Jun 14, 2025

In June 1985, ramshackle Minneapolis quartet The Replacements entered the studio to record their break out album, Tim. To celebrate the upcoming 40th anniversary of this landmark release, we’re going all out with Tim love letters this week.

We’re wrapping things up with a book excerpt from Pennywise singer/songwriter, solo artist, and author Jim Lindberg. This is his essay from Go All The Way: A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop, a collection I co-edited with Paul Myers for Rare Bird Books in 2019.

“Hold My Life”

by Jim Lindberg

The first time I heard The Replacements song “Hold My Life” was during college in San Diego.

I lived alone in a tiny studio apartment off Fifty-Sixth Street in off-campus housing with students who were either too cool or too old for the dorms, drunkenly partying until all hours of the night. There were rows of two-story apartment buildings on either side of the street on a sloping hill, usually shaped like a horseshoe around an infrequently cleaned pool. I didn’t have many friends there, so most of the time I was catastrophically lonely. I couldn’t help thinking I existed in some kind of purgatory between two lives, even while surrounded by 20,000 faculty and students.

I bought the cassette tape of The Replacements album Tim one Saturday morning at a Blockbuster down the road from school. This was my idea of big weekend fun back then, perusing the bins of record stores for hours on end, looking for hidden gold, hoping that no annoying coed sales associate would appear over my shoulder to ask if they could help me find something. “Oh, yeah, sure. Could you just search my mind for all my secret hopes and dreams—my innermost desires and aspirations, my triumphs and defeats, my lost loves and silent yearnings—and suggest a perfectly empathetic seven-inch single that would go along with my plight in life? Maybe the soundtrack to a Jonathan Demme film? No? Well, then fuck off and let me shop in peace!”

I’d spend hours in the store looking around.

Not because I enjoyed it that much, but because it was really all I had to do other than go back to my wood-paneled apartment, make a bean and cheese burrito, and feel sorry for myself.

I’d read something in the school paper about a band called The Replacements and thought it was such a great name that they had to be good. (Although I found the album cover art to be particularly hideous and nearly put it back on that account alone.)

I remember struggling with the impenetrable shrink-wrap in the parking lot, yanking the cassette out of its plastic cage and popping it into the tape player. A few brief seconds of anticipation passed as the tiny pinwheels began to rotate and the delicate, thin, brown silicon reel-to-reel tape threaded itself into my crappy Radio Shack stereo.

Then the first song came roaring through my speakers, all raging distorted guitars and ill-timed drums. “Well, well, well, I….” the music and scratchy-voiced vocals filled the corners of my car with its cracked, imitation-leather upholstery. I have to be honest, I had no idea what the singer was saying for the first few lines. I just bobbed my head along with the disjointed tempo, my internal rhythm detector silently approving of the propulsive, swaggering gait and loose, lo-fi production—but then it came to the chorus and the words hit me right in the chest: “Hold my life…until I’m…ready to use it.”

Who are these Replacements? I must join them, and we will drink cheap beer and take shots of Maker’s Mark and scream ourselves raw until the sun comes up peeking through the houses as we stagger home through the rain-wet streets.

I stopped the car in the middle of the road and stared at the tape player while the song played on.

I immediately knew one thing for sure—this song was mine. It was written for no one but me and my fucked-up existence at school. I felt completely out of step with everyone around me, like a lost dog separated from his pack. Thank God a random bastard in Minnesota felt the same way I did because for some reason this made it all okay.

The song was like salve on a burn. It made the pain of loneliness feel good somehow, made it noble. Screw all the smiling, cocky frat boys and giggling sorority girls having such a great time outside my window, drinking and carrying on at all hours of the night while I sat alone in my apartment unable to sleep from all the noise.

They didn’t know pain. They didn’t know loneliness.

They also didn’t know that The Replacements were the best band in the world and the fact that they played sloppily and out of tune just made them that much better. They all listened to Wang Chung and The Outfield and shitty pop radio bullshit. Me and Paul Westerberg were tortured souls. We were drunken poets. We drank cheap red wine and rot-gut whiskey and quoted Baudelaire from the rooftops.

They’d never understand.

We could never play as good as The Beatles, could never write a song like ‘Norwegian Wood,’ and it’s likely at some point we might be brought up on drug charges.

Whether you just like The Replacements or you really fucking love The Replacements kind of depends on whether you’re a Rolling Stones or Beatles fan.

Yes, technically we’re all both, but if you had to pick a desert-island album—Rubber Soul or Let It Bleed—which one would you choose? The Beatles practically wrote the Bible on popular rock music; their wide-ranging stylistic output and evolution from “She Loves You” to “Helter Skelter” to “Let It Be” makes Elvis Presley’s musical kingship seem a lot less royal. Their matching suits, moppy haircuts, and bubblegum sweetness inspired legions of screaming, eardrum-shattering fangirls.

The Stones, on the other hand, with their wasted, rough-side-of-town swagger, provided a more dangerous, devilish antidote to all that pomp and pop. You listened to “Michelle My Belle” and “Yesterday” on commercial AM radio in the seventies, but Some Girls was an album made expressly for FM stereo on your dad’s giant speakers.

Listening to the stuttering, phased-out sound of a song like “Shattered” made you feel like you were doing something dirty. If The Beatles were Playboy magazine, the Stones were Hustler and Cheri—a lot smuttier and more scandalous. Both were revolutionary, but only one could get you sent to confessional.

The Replacements loved both, but were firmly rooted in the Stones tradition. The guitars sounded out of tune, the drummer didn’t really sound like he cared if he was keeping time or not, and the singer mumbled so much you didn’t know what he was saying in the verses all the time, but it didn’t matter.

You knew it was something sarcastic and cool.

In my opinion, good power pop is “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers, “What I Like About You” by The Romantics, and “My Sharona” by The Knack (definitely all in The Beatles tradition). Great power pop is “Hold My Life” by The Replacements, “Bittersweet” by The Hoodoo Gurus, and “Surrender” by Cheap Trick (in The Rolling Stones tradition).

You can hear Keith Richards’ loose, whiskey-fingered guitar chording all over The Replacements songs, tracks where you could practically smell the cigarette smoke in the reel-to-reel tape. Power pop as a genre came about because the bands were difficult to classify (Urge Overkill and Pegboy didn’t sound all that punk, but they sure as hell weren’t pop).

Bands who had the danger and shambolic delivery of the Stones were destined to be my soul mates. We could never play as good as The Beatles, could never write a song like “Norwegian Wood,” and it’s likely at some point we might be brought up on drug charges.

So, I listened to Tim from start to finish while staring at my cassette player, drinking in song after hooky song. “Bastards of Young,” “Waitress in the Sky,” “Left of the Dial,” “Little Mascara”—each one hitting every screwed-up, out-of-tune note perfectly; each lyric bending a different heartstring, a symphony for the out of luck, out of step, and out of time.

Until, at last, came “Here Comes A Regular.”

What the fuck is this? A song about drinking in some shitty dive bar where it’s so dark you can’t see anything except the little Christmas lights dangling sadly from the overhang above the barstools, relic from some soggy holiday years ago?

But then your eyes adjust and you see small groups of people scattered around, secretly slouching in booths, old guys sitting slumped over the bar (some alone, some in pairs), and the bartender is grumpy and cleaning glasses in the sink. They all turn and squint when you open the bar door and let in the forbidden sun, reminding them there still is a world outside. Then they see it’s you and they all yell out your name so loud it’s like you’ve come home from a long foreign war, when in fact you were just there yesterday.

It’s a song about drinking buddies feeling glorious and shitty in the same breath. You both stare into the golden richness of the frothy beer in your glass, complaining about how fucked the world is, but at the same time so perfectly wonderful in its raggedness, with so much heartache, and misery, and pain, and joy that the two of you should probably just punch each other in the face right now as hard as you can; then have a shot of something dark, hard, and strong, and laugh and cry and let out all the frustration and pain you’ve ever felt in your whole life, the shame and embarrassment and sheer joy of being human and alive, at the wood-paneled, blinking neon bars in any small town from here to anywhere.

‘Hold My Life’ was originally published in this collection from Rare Bird Books.

Are you kidding me? Who is this Paul Westerberg? Who are these Replacements?

I must join them, and we will drink cheap beer and take shots of Maker’s Mark and scream ourselves raw until the sun comes up peeking through the houses as we stagger home through the rain-wet streets.

And we’ll sleep on each other’s couches and make macaroni and cheese out of an old pot for breakfast, and then Bob will make a joke about how “It’s always happy hour somewhere!” before pulling the tab on a Schlitz. We’ll laugh and say he’s crazy, “It’s not even noon yet! We can’t possibly start drinking again this early.” Bob’s having none of it; he throws me a freezing cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon that hits me square in the chest and it hurts like hell, but I don’t care. I crack the beer and take a pull and it tastes really good, like it’s washing the hangover and the sins of the world right off of me.

Then Tommy says…well, you probably already know what Tommy says.

That’s why this music spoke to me on that Saturday, all alone in my shitty Datsun 210 with the leaky radiator. I sat there alone with the engine idling in front of Blockbuster, drumming along in time on the dashboard, smiling in resigned recognition. It told me that I was a Replacement, that I wasn’t friendless and alone as much as the world tried to convince me otherwise; that I had friends who thought exactly like I did and we would take on the world together.

The rest be damned.

Jim Lindberg is the lead singer and songwriter for veteran Hermosa Beach punk band Pennywise, a solo artist, the author of Punk Rock Dad, and the subject of the Showtime documentary The Other F Word.