The hardest thing for me to face on my new home, I think, forgetting for a moment my traditional distrust of heat, sand, and palm trees, and assuming there would be ample supplies of canned ravioli, Point Beer, and the Voice, would be the loneliness. There would be no visits to record or book stores loudly making fun of Madonna's latest release or snickering at the blurbs on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. My Sunday afternoons would certainly be restructured.

The problem is that most of the albums I really like, the albums I always listen to, are far too bitter and/or sad to bring on a lonely desert island. No Van Morrison could join me on the island, nor could any Fairport Convention. Richard Thompson's songs of reneged love and inevitable death would lead me to become crab bait.

The Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed could almost come along, with the drunken jolliness of "Country Honk" and the vicious rock of "Midnight Rambler", but in the end, every time I heard "You Can't Always Get What You Want" I would, no doubt, scream the chorus, only to hear it bounce off the palm trees and be echoed by the chattering monkeys whose dancing would begin more and more to emulate Mick prancing on the stage at Altamont. It would drive me insane.

To keep me sane, I could take the loud independent feeling that the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks always gives me, and which kept me from killing myself (or most of my class, more likely) in high school. But it wouldn't mean as much to me when I threw my head back and forth to Steve Jones playing ripsaw guitar chords and Johnny Rotten screaming "I am the antichrist/I am an anarchist/Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it/I wanna destroy passerby." Who would get it, I would think, and then feel foolish for being so silly all by myself.

The Beatles would seem an obvious choice, but I would leave them behind. The raucous shouts ("onetwothreeFOUR") and happy exuberance of the earliest albums would leave me feeling like an old and tired man at the end of a day gathering coconuts for dinner. The worldweariness and sorrowed realization present in the records from Rubber Soul on would just make me want to be back home.

I've listened to the Kinks for most of my natural life, and they were the first rock band I ever saw live, but I would have to leave them behind as well. How many times could I listen to the young lovers running away in "Waterloo Sunset" or the wistful chorus of "This Time Tomorrow" before I took off my shirt and began swimming for the mainland? Probably once. Even when Ray Davies sings of contentment, I feel like he's wanting something, and I would gladly visit Davy Jones' locker to find it.

Instead, the record I picked would be by a band that listened to all of these records, perhaps in the same frame of mind in which I do. The Replacements' Let It Be was my favorite record in high school, something I listened to each morning at the bus stop to anesthetize myself for the hell of numbing boredom which lay ahead.

The Replacements grew up in my hometown of Minneapolis, hung around the same places I did, experienced the same frustrations I did ("...anyway I got no place else ta go," mumbles Paul in "Hangin' Downtown", from their first album Sorry, Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash).

Their career started when Tommy was only 13 (a peer of mine!), Paul the eldest at 18. They played typical loud'n'fast'n'stoopid thrash music, and were notable only for the unusual insight of some of Paul's lyrics ("Customer", a ode to a 7-11 clerk whom he loves from afar and makes needless purchases simply to be near) and a tendency for drunken shows which ended in chaos.

They continued in the wildly active Minneapolis underground scene, playing with such other local (soon to be national) stalwarts as Hüsker Dü, the Suburbs and the Suicide Commandos, playing as often as they could, gleefully covering the songs which they (and I) grew up on. Everything was fun, and they were so young it couldn't help but being that way.

Their next pair of records were uneventful, but as strong as the first. The Replacements Stink, an EP, was the first, loud and tight hardcore with such sadly predictable titles as "Fuck School", "White and Lazy", "Dope Smokin' Moron" and "Godamn Job" ("I need a godamn job/ I need a godamn job/ really need a godamn job/ gotta find a godamn job"). The only break from stereotypical hardcore was a song that Twin/Tone Records, their label, chose to promote as being chock full of "hoarse desperation". It wasn't quite that, but it was close, with Paul screaming "Go/while you still can" as the band caterwauled behind him. It was just enough for me not to lose my faith.

Hootenanny, a full-length album, was next, and it was the strongest they had produced so far. Covering a wide gamut of musical styles, from blues and country to hardcore and surf, some reviewers mistakenly thought it was a compilation album. The best part of it was that Paul's songwriting was maturing and showing that the band wasn't strictly a hardcore band. "It ain't gonna last" sang Paul of his career in "Heyday", continuing to disbelieve that anyone would like such a bunch of drunken fools. Their live shows began to deteriorate into a mess of drunken covers and half-finished originals. It was all in good fun, though.

When the next album came out, it was with surrounded with an air of disappointment. The band had tried to shop it around to a major label on the strength of their press clippings and growing reputation. No one even nibbled. Disheartened, they returned to Minneapolis and began to tour. That album was Let It Be. Released in 1984 amidst a year of great music from many other independent labels (Double Nickels on the Dime from the San Pedro, California trio, the Minutemen, Zen Arcade from fellow Minnesotans Hüsker Dü, and Meat Puppets II, all on SST Records, were among the bumper crop from that year), it was insanely popular in Twin Cities record stores that year. I first heard it from a friend of mine who sang along with it one Sunday afternoon as I was shopping. That moment remains encased in my mind like it was in Lucite, the restrained roar of guitars and wrenching vocals of "Sixteen Blue".

"Sixteen Blue" was the most surprising song on the album. Behind the loosely countryish guitars of he and Bob, Paul sings a tale of adolescent woe second to none ("Drive yourself right up the wall/no one hears, no one

calls...Brag about things you don't understand..."). No sentence can convey the pathos that Paul's growl does on the record. It was this song, hearing my friend sing it with the same meaning that Paul sang it with, the same meaning I attached to it, that made me buy the record.

The record itself kicks off with a pop song, for chrissakes. With furiously strummed acoustic guitars and a mandolin (mandolin? Yes, mandolin!) solo, "I Will Dare" shows that things are much different from the last record. It was suggested that this would be the Replacements big single, and Twin/Tone pushed it as such, putting it out as a 12-inch single backed with live versions of songs by Hank Williams and T.Rex.

"Favorite Thing" follows, a raunchier song with the hilarious chorus of "... and I don't give a single shit!", Tommy singing harmony and dragging out the final word each time. Who (or what) I would sing this song to on a desert island, I don't know, but it would be nice to have anyway.

The best song on the album though, and one I wouldn't dare play much on the island (or perhaps all of the time) is "Unsatisfied". Within the wide-open sounding guitars and the weeping steel I found solace through a thousand hellish bus rides to high school. I would repeat the words between classes as I walked through the halls. Only one or two other people in the school knew what I was singing, and it was us against them. "Look me in the eye/and tell me that I'm satisfied/Are you satisfied?" I repeated over and over again, trying for that hint of desperation and resignation that Paul put so effortlessly into his voice. Maybe it was his answer to the Stones and "(I Can't Get No)Satisfaction" and maybe it was his own little joke about the whining, self-pitying singer-songwriter types that pervaded the sixties and seventies. ("Remember the great folk

music scare of the fifties?" said Martin Mull once.) Anyway, it was great.

Other songs on the album, from the laughable hard rock of "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" and "Gary's Got A Boner" to the odd eighties post-bomb disillusionment and technological-alienation love song "Answering Machine" would help me make it during my stay on the island. The part where Paul transforms himself into Van Morrison circa "Moondance" in "We're Coming Out" (replete with fingersnapping and distorted guitar switching to echoing piano) would allow me a little macho swagger even on an island where there were never any dates to be had. There's even a Kiss song on the album ("Black Diamond", in a version which rocks much harder than that by the now laughable boys in makeup). It almost seems bearable.