By James, Philadelphia, PA

Some of the most important moments in your life are actually pretty mundane. Getting married, having a child, graduating college, etc. They seem so incredibly important, but if you think about it, these are things that happen to nearly everybody. That doesn’t make them less special to you though. Getting into The Replacements is like that. Any big Replacements fan probably has the same story of discovering them with only slight variations. That we were all losers in our teens/early twenties but also happy about it. I have never fallen in love with a band as fast as I did with The Replacements because they hit me at the exact perfect summer of my life. I was living with my grandmother in an old folks community called “Leisure Village.” My days were spent taking a cab (because my car was dead) to some small CD shop for work, and my nights were spent getting drunk on my friend Abbey’s trampoline. I’d just had a really rough semester at Temple, and I needed to blow off all my frustration. One day The Replacements double disk greatest hits collection, All For Nothing/Nothing for All, came into the used bin where I worked. I figured I’d give it a chance, hoping it wouldn’t disappoint. When I got home from work I popped it on and was floored by track one, “Left of the Dial”. By track two, “Kiss Me On the Bus”, I thought I was going to cry. One night I got so drunk I passed out in some guy’s garden, head first into my own vomit. I woke up alone, cold, and wet. The sun was just rising as I tried to stumble home. I put on my headphones to my Walkman and “Can’t Hardly Wait” came on. Things couldn’t have been more perfect, and I couldn’t have been happier.