Myths hover around the Replacements, but they always have. Back when the group stumbled across America in the ’80s their reputation preceded them, as fans found it equally enticing that the band could either be amazing or awful, depending on the night. Some lucky fans saw the ‘Mats at both extremes, some — like Joe Henry — never were lucky enough to see one good night. No matter what kind of concert you saw, the shows you didn’t see loomed as large as the ones you did, so it’s no surprise that there are generation of Replacements diehards that worship the band without ever seeing them live: even at their peak, they were loved for what their fans didn’t experience. The Replacements are romanticized once again in Jim Walsh’s new oral history All Over But the Shouting, the first book ever published on the ‘Mats.

Walsh is a longtime friend of Paul Westerberg — not a close one, by his own admission — and a Minneapolis rock fixture, which lets him get close to the band’s story, yet that chumminess can come across like a self-congratulatory club in print, especially as the book kicks off with a jaw-dropping forty pages of testimonials before getting to the heart of the story. Some of these are entertaining, most are variations on the old theme of “how rock & roll changed my life,” and the sheer number of stories tends to underscore how ‘Mats fans occasionally are a wee bit self-satisfied in their love of the band (it’s the perennial Replacements paradox of how the fans are shocked that a band this good was never bigger, yet they never want anybody to join their club). It’d be easier to complain about the lackadaisical beginning if the book ever gained real momentum or produced some real revelations, but this slow-rolling intro sets the stage for a read that ambles along amiably, offering up the standard big events without digging much deeper. As Paul and Tommy Stinson didn’t cooperate directly, and Chris Mars only offered a few comments, their contributions are all pieced together from old interviews, sometimes sitting along ancient articles pasted in wholesale. All the sources are credited in the footnotes, but the sudden switches between eras can make for jarring reading, as there is no transition between the past and present reflections. Also distancing is Walsh’s habit of only crediting contributors in the appendix instead of when they’re introduced in the oral history — sure, it’s possible to flip to the back of the book to figure out who is speaking, but local scenesters are name-dropped with the expectation that the reader knows who they are, a practice that only enhances the members-only feel of the book.

Nevertheless, the sense that All Over But the Shouting is an opportunity for the in-crowd to tell their tale does enhance the nostalgic undertow of the book, which is one of its chief attributes. Having a closely-knit scene relate how things were way back when winds up capturing how the underground rock of the ’80s was tied together by record stores, mix tapes, college radio, music magazines, crash pads and all-ages shows. This re-creation of a time and place is the best thing about All Over But the Shouting: it captures the essence of the ’80s underground and how the Replacements fit within that, even if it doesn’t offer much analysis of either the band’s music or their personalities, favoring rose-tinted recollections of reckless rowdiness. If anything, all the hero worship gets in the way of a group whose bad behavior was excused as simply rock & roll, but as the stories pile up, the guys kind of come across like a bunch of pricks. Westerberg ruining a demo that a fan gave him merely minutes before while the guy stands in front of him isn’t rebellious rock & roll, it’s just a guy being a dick. There are many similar stories here and Slim Dunlap — the Minneapolis staple who replaced a dismissed Bob Stinson — hints at this unpleasantness throughout his frank, forthright reminiscences of how joined during the group’s third act. Becoming part of a band so beloved by so many — including his own teenage daughter at the time — was clearly a trying experience for him and it’s hard not to empathize with him as he recounts just how unlike a gang the group was toward the end of their run. Toward the conclusion of the book, there’s a story of how he ducked out of a Minneapolis scene concert before the group got around to playing ‘Mats songs, saying he’s heard them enough in his life. He understood the tension of the band, what they meant. Compare that to Steve Foley, Mars’ replacement who is just happy to be there and bewildered that the guys aren’t having more fun.

If one thing is clear from this oral history, it’s that despite all the drunken shenanigans, being in the Replacements wasn’t a lot of fun after Let It Be — there’s a sense that Westerberg’s demons can’t be named but he’ll gleefully let them bring him down every time, and take out as many others as he can with him. Compared to his idols the Faces — an early concert provided Paul a pivotal revelation about what rock & roll can be — where everybody was part of the constant party, the Replacements eventually got to the point where they were alienating everybody, from friends and family to fans, leaving Westerberg as a party of one. As this book stops cold after Bob’s death — no mention of Paul’s solo career or his family, no mention of Tommy becoming Axl Rose’s kept man, no word even of their tentative reunion for last year’s greatest hits album — that impression of that destructive, lonesome loner is what All Over But the Shouting leaves behind, which is an odd way to end a book that begins with so much celebration.