Brendan O'Brien may be good enough for Pearl Jam and Neil Young, but as far as Paul Westerberg is concerned, he just doesn't cut it. Westerberg recently spent two weeks with O'Brien in an Atlanta recording studio, laying down tracks for a solo album due out early next year. The trouble was that Westerberg liked very little of what was recorded during the sessions. So he fired O'Brien, complaining to intimates that "if I wanted the record to sound like a Replacements' record I would have hired the Replacements to play on it." What did survive the aborted sessions is a track entitled "Stain Yer Blood" that will be on the soundtrack for the NBC TV show, Friends. Westerberg went back to Minneapolis, and back to the drawing board, hiring Husker Du and Goo Goo Dolls engineer Lou Giorando to help him finish the record, his follow-up to the excellent 14 Songs that was released in 1993.

Meanwhile, BAM Editor Bill Holdship ran into Tommy Stinson, the former bass player in the Replacements the other day, and asked him why the Replacements just don't get back together, and tour--and make all the money that they didn't earn the first time around. Stinson laughed and said, "How lame would that be. We'd loose all the respect we ever gained. On top of that we both hate Chris' fucking guts." Stinson also told Holdship that he could see getting together with Westerberg again, but not under the rubric of The Replacements. The two still remain friendly. Westerberg contributed backing vocals on Stinson's solo album Bash On Pop a couple of years back, and he just asked Stinson to play some bass on the new record.