Bob “Slim” Dunlap, who joined the Replacements as lead guitarist within the late Eighties after the pioneering rock band fired founder Bob Stinson, died Wednesday at his house in Minneapolis. He was 73.
His dying was introduced in an announcement from his household to the Minnesota Star Tribune, which stated the trigger was issues from a stroke he’d suffered in 2012.
Nicknamed Slim by Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg to keep away from confusion with the man he was changing, the tall and gangly Dunlap performed guitar on the Replacements’ closing two studio albums, 1989’s “Don’t Tell a Soul,” which spawned a No. 1 alternative-rock radio hit within the chugging “I’ll Be You,” and its 1990 follow-up, “All Shook Down,” which earned a Grammy nomination for various music efficiency. Dunlap’s type drew out the rootsy influences in Westerberg’s songwriting, as within the twangy “Achin’ to Be.”
“I wanted someone bluesier, who was hip to country music, ’cause that’s where I envisioned the band going,” Westerberg advised writer Bob Mehr in Mehr’s 2015 biography, “Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.”
The son of a Minnesota state senator, Dunlap was born in 1951 and grew up within the farming group of Plainview within the state’s southeastern nook. His older sisters uncovered him to rock ’n’ roll, and he moved to Minneapolis in his late teenagers to pursue music.
“I played in every little band I could play in, every band that would have me,” Dunlap advised The Instances in 1993, not lengthy after he’d launched into a solo profession following the Replacements’ breakup in 1991. “Slowly but surely, I got this reputation as a guy who could play anything. One night you’d see me play bluegrass in a little pizza shop, the next night it would be hard rock.”
Along with his gigs as a musician, Dunlap labored as a cab driver and as a janitor at Minneapolis’ storied First Avenue nightclub, the place the Replacements performed through the band’s famously rowdy come-up and the place Dunlap met his spouse, Chrissie, who was a expertise booker on the membership. In 1987, the Replacements booted Stinson — the band’s different founding members had been drummer Chris Mars and Stinson’s youthful brother Tommy on bass — because of the guitarist’s consuming and drug use. (Bob Stinson died in 1995 at age 35.)
Dunlap’s audition for the Replacements “consisted of an afternoon of drinking beer,” Spin journal wrote in a narrative in 1987. “Slim is more like a fourth member of the band than a hired gun,” Westerberg advised Spin. “We originally thought that it would be a good idea to get a hot guitar player and be the Replacements and … Joe Blow. As it is now, it’s like the Replacements with a new guy who isn’t a great guitar player, isn’t a great singer, just as we are not great at what we do, and he fits in perfectly.” Dunlap joined the band in time to tour behind 1987’s “Pleased to Meet Me.”
After the Replacements break up, Dunlap toured with Dan Baird of the Georgia Satellites and made a pair of solo albums that drew the admiration of Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, amongst others. The primary LP, 1993’s “The Old New Me,” featured a tune known as “The Ballad of the Opening Band,” which he primarily based on his reminiscences of grinding it out on the membership circuit in relative anonymity earlier than he was tapped for the Replacements.
“People see [the scenario in ‘Opening Band’] as a sad thing, but the guy in the song gets to play,” he advised The Instances when “The Old New Me” got here out. “There are so many great musicians in America who didn’t get attention. They haven’t gotten any acclaim, but there’s a specific thing they do that nobody can touch. No one gives them the time of day, but they’re still out there doing it. That’s what I love. This business is all about the little eccentrics out there who get lost in the shuffle.
“That’s the sad thing about so many young bands now. They become players after they see Nirvana or the Replacements, because they think, ‘If we’re lucky, that could happen to us.’ You’re better off buying lottery tickets than trying to make it in the music business. I’m not a person who’s made or broken by [my] status in the business. That’s a big joke, because all the wrong people make it.”
In 2012, Westerberg and Tommy Stinson reunited for a tour underneath the Replacements identify that included a efficiency with Inexperienced Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong on the Coachella competition; in 2013, artists together with Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, Frank Black and Jakob Dylan teamed as much as document a tribute album to Dunlap, whose stroke had left him unable to play music. Dunlap launched a stay album in 2020 that documented a 2002 efficiency at St. Paul’s Turf Membership. In keeping with the Star Tribune, Dunlap’s survivors embrace his spouse, their three kids, six grandchildren and Dunlap’s three sisters.
