INTO THE BLACK:
the final days of Bob Stinson
by Joseph Hart
Last week it seemed that everyone had a Bob Stinson story to tell. Some of the snapshots were happier than others; Bob with his little boy, Bob with his guitar, Bob giving a big, no-hands-barred hug to a suffering friend. But in most of the stories the suffering friend was Bob Stinson. Like the party he'd gone to back in 1991 or 1992, Bob was in the bathroom getting ready to shoot up. A friend of his had brought a camera that night, and the man started snapping pictures of Stinson cooking a fix, injecting himself, breaking off the tip of his rig. Oliver Stone's movie about the Doors had come out not long before, and the friend had a thought, "I said, Bob, do a Jim Morrison for me. And he got in the bathtub and put his head way back and his arms up on the side of the bathtub and I snapped his picture."

It seemed like a funny idea at the time. Lots of people, friends and perhaps especially strangers, did that sort of thing all the time: Coax Bob to get fucked up, to do something stupid, to be a wild man. Buy him beers, give him drugs if you had them. It was the least a person could do for Bob Stinson From The Replacements. Sitting in a bar a couple of days after Stinson's funeral, the man who got Bob to play the Lizard King hung his head over his drink. "His fans killed him, man. I really think they did." For Bob Stinson, part of the peril was that his fans in many cases became his friends.

Paul Westerberg, Chris Mars, and Bob's brother Tommy kicked Stinson out of the Replacements in 1986. According to Westerberg, the band by that time had paid to put Stinson through treatment only to see him cop some heroin and shoot up on the day he was released. But Bob's ex-wife, Carleen, told a different story to Charles Aaron of Spin. During Bob's last stint with the band, a five-night run at the 7th Street Entry, "Paul came over with a bottle of champaign," she said, "and he said to Bob, and I'll never forget this, he said, 'Either take a drink, motherfucker, or get off my stage.' It was the first time I'd seen Bob cry. He came home that night in tears, he didn't know what to do. He'd been completely dry for the 30 day program and the three weeks following. But after that night, Bob felt that no one liked him unless he was drunk."

For the beginning, the Replacements were known for their reckless and unusually drunken musical abandon; on stage, they pushed at limits in more ways than one. Among a growing contingent of fans, it came to be viewed as a major disappointment if the Mats weren't completely fucked up when they played. They seldom disappointed. And even if Westerberg was the front man, Bob was the focal point of the wild-man energies the band evoked- the guitar player who on a good night sounded like a force of nature, the man who might do anything. The guy who, once he got started, couldn't stop himself.

Few of his long-time friends expressed surprise when the 35-year-old Stinson's body was discovered by his girlfriend in a Lake Street apartment on Saturday, February 18. According to preliminary reports from the medical examiner, he had been dead for up to two days, and a syringe was found nearby. The popular conclusion was that he'd overdosed, intentionally or not. But among friends, that speculation seemed beside the point. "I don't know how to say this," says the Replacements' first manager, Peter Jesperson. "There were times I'd say, 'I don't want to come home and find you dead.' But I guess Bob was just going to do what Bob was going to do. It's not like you could talk sense into him."

"In life you deal with probabilities," says another friend. "Sooner or later something like this was going to happen."

An old friend from the Replacements days remembers the last time he saw Stinson. "I was working downtown, last November or so," he says, "and I'd just parked the van when I looked up and there's Bob. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. I asked him what was going on. "Oh," he said, 'Paul's got his deal and Tommy's got his deal. Geffen's got me. I've got an album almost finished, but they're calling me almost every day about reworking this one song...' And on he went. I knew he didn't have a deal with Geffen, and I wondered whether he knew I knew. I really couldn't tell. But I listened. It was sad- as if it just wasn't enough to tell me how he was doing."

Another friend, Ed Hoover, remembers a night when Bob started bragging about all the guitars he owned. He began describing each of them in detail. The odd thing was, at the time, Stinson lived in Hoover's house- Ed and Lori Hoover had let him move in to their basement in June 1994 - and he had hardly any possessions. He certainly didn't have a dozen expensive guitars, and Hoover knew it and Bob had to know he knew it.
Everybody knew Stinson drank and drugged too much, but toward the end of of his life, it was becoming apparent that this problems ran deeper. Friends say he had episodes of delusional thinking. Sometimes they were free-associative; he could switch in mid-sentence from the song he was working on to the tree outside the window and back again. Last June it got so bad that Stinson finally landed in the hospital. Over a period of about a week, Hoover watched Bob lose it. Once, at the beach, Stinson confided to Hoover that the lifeguards were in love with him. Another time he was at lunch with a friend when he began insisting that the waitress was crazy about him. He could get the woman into bed, he just knew it. He wouldn't let it go.

"He claimed that he knew Kurt Cobain," says Hoover, "He said they were going to get in on a record deal. But you don't know how to take something like that. You don't know whether to believe it or not. That was the thing about Bob, you just never knew." But the most telling sign, says Hoover, was Stinson's chess jones. Bob got obsessed with the game and made Hoover play constantly, even though he almost always lost. Even in the midst of losing, he would gloat over his every move, boasting that it had set him up for a decisive victory. Finally, Hoover convinced Stinson to check himself into Hennepin County Medical Center; where six months before he'd been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder- what used to be called manic depression.

Stinson also exhibited some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, though it isn't clear whether that was part of his diagnosis. As Susan Sheehan, whose textbook study of a severe schizophrenic first appeared as a four-part series in The New Yorker, writes, "Schizophrenia, which afflicts 1 percent of the population, is the world's most serious mental illness. Its symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, bizarre behavior, emotional withdrawal, and lack of motivation. The prevailing view of schizophrenia is that it is a variety of illnesses, many of which have a genetic factor that causes a chemical imbalance in the brain. Childhood environment that includes stress may, however, help to trigger the illness." It is recognized as a progressive illness, one that often does not appear until a person has reached his or her 20s or 30s and grows worse over time.

For a while after his June hospitalization, Stinson seemed to take his condition seriously. He took his medication, and his delusional behavior waned. One night Hoover rented Mr. Jones, the movie where Richard Gere plays a man with bi-polar depression, and watched it with Bob. "It was very painful for him," Hoover remembers, "It was extremely painful. He kept saying 'Yup, yup. That's what it's like. That's what I'm like.' "

But his meds didn't seem to have any effect on his drastic mood swings, and his drinking bouts, which increased in frequency and severity, only aggravated the condition. In as little as a week's time, he could move from a manic state into fits of depression that kept him holed up in his room for days at a time. "After he'd wake up from that he'd be really good for about a day," Hoover recalls. "He'd get up here and he'd be lucid, intelligent, funny, witty, he'd laugh. He was a pleasure to be with." But then he's start drinking again.

Along with the depression came an obsession with Kurt Cobain. Even since the Nirvana lead man's suicide last year, Bob had expressed a feeling of kinship to Cobain. Both were manic depressive, romanced the needle, and felt trapped in their image. He told some of his friends that he admired Cobain's choice to end his own life, and he envied his freedom from mental illness and addiction. "We talked in November about Kurt," says former roommate and bandmate Chris Corbett, who recently started taking lithium to combat his own bi-polar disorder. "He really, really looked up to him and portrayed who he was in glowing terms, including his death. I didn't get the impression that he was being morbid or tossing out hints. But I think he was drawing a parallel."

In 1992, Stinson and Ray Reigstad, a former bandmate in a unit called Static Taxi, got in the habit of tossing ideas for songs back and forth. Bob would write one verse, and Ray would write the second. Once Stinson brought this rhyme to the table:
I'd usually sit around
And drink up all my dreams
Then ask for yours
I go to bed
But not to sleep
I'm just one of those things
Life can't keep

Through the years a lot of people moved in and out of Stinson's life. Many were only drinking and drugging buddies in the first place; some were closer than that. But the plain fact was that Bob tended to wear people out. One night while he was living with the Hooves, for instance, he went out with his friend Mary Johnson, a on-again, off-again sweetheart he'd met in 1981. The two spent the evening at First Avenue. Bob would have Mary buy him a beer, then disappear for a while. Then he would come back to cadge another beer, and disappear again. At one point an hour passed with no sign of Bob. She eventually left the bar and went back to the Hoovers' house, where she found Bob. He had drawn a loopy sketch on the white concrete wall of his basement bedroom- a portrait of van Gogh in a chef's togue, his ear floating next to his head, surrounded by scrawled phrases like "Me ass you" and "I am Love" and "U got big feet girl"-- and passed out on the bed. She went home.

When she came back the next day to check on him, he screamed at her for waking him up, so she went home again. An hour later the phone rang. It was Bob. "I need you to come and get me," he said. "She's coming to take me to practice, and I don't want to go." Who's she? Johnson wanted to know. "Carleen," said Stinson, referring to his ex-wife. So Johnson went over to get him. When she pulled up, he came out to the car with his guitar case.

"What's going on?" she asked.
"You're going to buy me some beer and take me to practice, he informed her.
"And of course all I could do was yell," she remembers now. "Then, by that night, he didn't even remember seeing me that day."

Carleen Stinson was intimately familiar with the mood swings. She was in a band at the time, and they were trying out Carleen's ex-husband as a guitar player. It didn't work out; there were musical differences. And there was Bob's condition. "He'd come in one night and he'd be ready to play," she explains. "He'd come in the next night and he'd be sick, not feeling good, wanting to go home. Or he'd drink all the beer and want to get out of there. When Bob decided it was time to go, it was like the white flash. And the next time he came in his medications bothered him and he was shaking and sweating. It just wasn't a stable environment to create anything in."

Carleen was sensitive to Bob's mental condition, but most people were not. The more charitable souls figured that he was a sort of idiot savant, a man-child who had never quite grown up; there were those, too, who thought he was just and idiot. "I really resent the fact that people made him out as stupid," says Pete Jesperson. "He was a voracious reader. Especially music publications. I remember him doing that on the road when we traveled." Stinson always loved rock & roll lore; friends remember him as a virtual encyclopedia of musical history from the 1950s and the '90s.

It's predictable enough that Stinson would know a lot about rock & roll, but his capacity for obsessive attention to detail went further. "He knew every detail about every airplane that passed overhead," one friend remembers. "He could tell you how much gas it could hold, the seating capacity, he knew how they were usually routed. He knew details maybe only an engineer would know." He convinced more than one friend to drive out to the airport to catalog the planes as they flew past.

But those times were getting scarcer. "He'd say, 'I've been like this my whole life. There's nothing they can do,' "according to Hoover. "But he was barking up the wrong tree around here because I've got a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law on the other side of the family [with bi-polar disorder] and yeah, there is something you can do. You can quit drinking and go on lithium."

By the time he moved in with the Hoovers, Bob had been more or less homeless for at least a year. His marriage to Carleen Stinson, which resulted in the birth of their child, Joey, ended about five years ago. He was always welcome at his mother's house-- as long as he didn't drink or do drugs. He'd simply been bouncing around from couch to couch when a mutual friend asked Ed Hoover to rent Stinson a room so he could prepare for his upcoming tour with a band led by local musician Sonny Vincent. Bob didn't have a guitar or an amp, so Hoover let him use his as part of the deal. His little room in the Hoovers' house held a box-spring mattress on the floor and was heated with a pair of space heaters. It wasn't much, but he loved the room and didn't want to leave.

The Hoovers were different from a lot of Stinson's acquaintances. "I was probably the only guy he knew who didn't want him to play in my band," Hoover says. But Ed and Lori didn't really know what they were getting into when they let Stinson move in. The Hoovers already had their hands full with two children. Stinson was like a third. "We spent so many hours sitting talking on this couch," says Lori Hoover. "He needed to be able to talk in a non-judgmental environment. His mouth was just connected to his brain and he needed other people to interpret it for him, and for that to be okay. And for him to be okay. He used to say, 'You know what I mean, you know what I mean?' All the time. And there were times when you had to say, 'No.' "

"He really wasn't that bad to live with," according to Ed Hoover. "But the main thing was I just couldn't stand watching it anymore. I just could not stand watching it. He had no direction in his life. He drank too much. He drank and drank and drank. It was depressing. Ultimately, I couldn't stand watching it anymore. He could still play, but only once in a while. You can't play guitar when you're that drunk." Hoover eventually got tired of trying to convince Stinson to clean up his act. "You could not get through his defense mechanisms. Believe me, I tried, He was like watching a kid. He really was. We all liked him a lot, but he was real hard to take."

Finally, Hoover gave Stinson an ultimatum: Go into treatment or move out. During the first week of January, Bob moved out.

Around town he was never simply Bob Stinson; he was Bob Stinson From The Replacements. The title earned him free food, free liquor, free shelter, and free drugs. He could walk into any one of the several familiar bars and there would be a friend or a fan to buy him a drink. This was no small thing. Stinson had fought for and won royalties on his recordings with the Replacements, but after child support and debts, the semi-annual checks left little to live on. (According to one source, half of each check, or about $2,000, went into a trust fund for his son, Joey.) He worked occasional odd jobs through the years, including a stint as a cook, but his primary means of survival was his name.

There was always someone with room on the couch for Bob Stinson, someone to slip him a $5 bill. Sometimes they were fans he didn't even know. Back when he was still playing in bands, college kids would buy him drinks between sets and ply him for stories about the Replacements. "He'd sit there and talk to them," remembers former Static Taxi singer Ray Reigstad. "But he wouldn't really talk about the Replacements." It seemed oddly fitting when, on the day of his funeral, four teenagers who'd skipped last period at Breck to attend the services showed up at Carleen Stinson's home for the post-funeral reception. They stood outside until someone took pity and invited them in, and then they hovered quietly as friends and family shared what Stinson's mother, Anita Stinson Kurth, called "Bobby stories." Occasionally they huddled to whisper among themselves.

Stinson took advantage of his fame. One friend remembers joshing Bob for mooching beers. "Geez, Bob, don't you have any money?" the friend had quipped. "I expect you to buy me drinks because I'm Bob Stinson," he snapped.

But if Bob Stinson From The Replacements reveled in the small-time perks he could command, he seemed ambivalent at the same time. Whenever Ed Hoover played the Replacements, Stinson would threaten to smash the tape. Once he actually did. "You know, he had a whole sack of fan mail back at Twin Tone he'd never opened," says Ray Reigstad. "We're talking from 1981 to the late '80s. 'I don't want to bring you down,' he'd say to us, 'but I have a lot of fans.'"

Chris Corbett, Static Taxi's bass player and Bob's roommate for a while in 1991, says Stinson had a dual identity. "He could be really caring and emotional one-to-one, but in front of an audience I think he felt the need to be a spectacle," he remarks. "He couldn't just be himself. And I think he was damned by this image of Bob the fuck-up."

Spin published a sad and unflattering article about him in June, 1993. In the story, writer Charles Aaron quoted him offering to buy heroin so they could shoot up. Afterward, Stinson laughed off the story in public. ("It's all true," he told Jim, Walsh of the Pioneer Press.) But some of his friends say he was devastated. "Of course he's going to laugh it off," in the words of one. "If Spin was a girlfriend and some macho dude's like, 'Hey man, look what Spin did to you,' [you'd say] 'Aww, I don't give a shit about that bitch.' Which is natural. But with the people he was close to, he said that it hurt him."

"If you said anything against him," Hoover explained, "he would say, 'You don't love me.' And in a pretty genuine way. If I yelled at him for something, he'd say, 'You don't love me,' and he'd disappear for a couple days."

"He needed a lot of strokes," adds Lori Hoover. "He would sit me down and say, 'Do you think Ed likes me?'"

But the more he played the part of Bob Stinson From The Replacements, the more strokes he got. And the more strokes he got for that, the less he trusted anyone. Booze and drugs were the leveler: Loaded, he could enjoy being Crazy Bob.

When Stinson moved out of Ed and Lori Hoover's house, he began bouncing between his mother's and friends' houses, but spent most of his time at the Uptown apartment of his last girlfriend, who asked not to be named. Friends say he was trying hard to get his act together. He'd quit shooting up, as far as the Hoovers knew, as a condition of living in their basement and because he had no money to buy drugs. And recently he hadn't been drinking as much. He'd quit hanging out at Lee's, the northside bar where he'd taken to spending his evenings. On the other hand, others say he approached them in the last month of his life trying to score heroin.

But his behavior had spun out of control during the week before his death, and his girlfriend decided to move out. Bob had become increasingly demanding of her attention: Once he got mad because she was talking on the phone, so he smashed the phone. Another time he kicked the other phone and broke it because it was ringing. He threw a can of paint through a window.

"It wasn't like he was aiming toward me," she says, "but he was frustrated. And his way to express his frustration was to throw things. I didn't want to be part of that being-thrown-around scenario. So for myself I said 'Bob, I love you very much, but I need a little peace.' I didn't break up with him. What I did was I moved out. But he didn't understand that. He thought we were breaking up."

That week he overdosed on sleeping pills, and his girlfriend brought him to the hospital. A friend who spoke to her about it got the impression he was threatening to kill himself if she moved out. Hennepin County Medical Center released him and he returned to the apartment on Lake Street.

On Sunday, February 12, Ed Hoover got a call from someone who knew Bob's girlfriend. She told him to come over- they were calling the police. By the time he got there Stinson, who had been drinking, was subdued. But before that he'd been holding a knife up to his chest, threatening suicide. Hoover thought he may have been suffering another delusional episode. Before the police took Bob Stinson away, Ed and the others explained that he was more than drunk, that he was manic depressive and suicidal. Assuming Stinson would be held for 72 hours in detox or the psych ward, Hoover called Stinson's mom, who agreed that the crisis called for some kind of action. His girlfriend continued to pack her things in preparation for the move.
But on Monday afternoon Ed's phone and it was Bob. "This was a scary phone call," says Hoover. "He said, 'Hi Ed, this is Bob. I'm back with my woman. Everything's fine.'"

"I had told [Bob's girlfriend] they were going to put him on a 72-hour hold," Hoover continues. "I mean, really. They certainly had enough information. A guy holding a knife up to himself, and a week before he was taking sleeping pills? If that wasn't good enough for a 72-hour hold, I don't know what is."

Earlier that day, Stinson's girlfriend had brought Bob back to HCMC, where they refilled his prescriptions and sent him home. But Ed was worried. He drove over to the apartment and banged on the door. Bob's girlfriend answered. "She said, 'Everything's fine.' And I should go away, Bob didn't want me, or something," Hoover says.

That night at 9:45, police booked Stinson for 5th degree domestic assault, a misdemeanor. The incident report notes only that "[t]he defendant was arrested after assaulting his ex-girlfriend. The defendant was transported to HCJ and was booked." He was held overnight and arraigned on Valentine's Day. He pleaded not guilty. And then, once again, he was released.

Bob Stinson spent the last days of his life in the Lake Street apartment while his girlfriend stayed with friends across town. After he was released, he wandered over to the Uptown Bar and sought out a friend who was working the sound board that night. They talked for a while, and Stinson left. On Wednesday morning he went to Carleen's house. He was deeply depressed, and he asked her to help him find a normal life. "You have to start with what's inside you and take it from there," she told him. "If you don't like what you see when you look inside, find someone to help you fix that and get over it and move on," she said.

He talked for a half an hour about everyone else in his life-- his girlfriend, his family, friends, his son. He ran down the list, stopped before he got to himself. At Carleen's prompting, he finally told her he was scared to death of being alone, and scared of losing his girlfriend. Carleen says the conversation gave her hope that he was facing his problems. "I felt really good all day Wednesday," she said. "I felt like Bob and I had really made some progress. He was communicating on a different level finally. He was listening. He wasn't defensive."

Nightfall found him back at the Uptown. Thursday, he walked over to the Twin Tone Records office on Nicollet to borrow money against his next royalty check. Peter Jesperson, who had gone out to lunch, just missed him. But another employee gave him a small sum of money. After that, he dropped out of sight. His girlfriend found his body Saturday night after passing the apartment a few times and noticing that the same lights had been on for a couple of days.

"He called me [Wednesday night]," says a friend, "at 11 o'clock or so. And I talked to him a little while about courage and getting his act together. But I think that maybe he went out for a walk or went up to the Uptown. Somewhere along that line," she speculates, "Thursday or whatever, I believe that he probably just ran into someone who-" She can't find the words for what came next. "You know," she says. "He just had to be the old Bob."