In the Spring of 1986 Bob Stinson asked Reipo (John Reipas) and I (Ray Reigstad) to stand up for him at his wedding. He was marrying a girl from Long Beach, California whom he’d met through our roommate Tom “TC” Cook. Up till then she’d been dating a guy name Earth who was playing in a band with TC, Go Great Guns.

Anyhow, Bob fell in love with “Bunny” (as he referred to her) and the wedding was held at the Blaisdel Manor on 25th and Blaisdel in South Minneapolis. Reipo and I wore white retro tux jackets we’d bought at Tatters on Lyndale, and black Southern Colonel Sanders ties. When everybody asked Bob who we were he shrugged and unwaveringly answered; “They’re fishing buddies from Florida.”

It was a freaky scene. The band he’d founded, The Replacements, were at the zenith of their popularity and about 400 people attended the ceremony. Standing up there under a stuffed elk head, looking out at the audience was hilarious, it felt and looked like a movie set. Lots of rockers (all dressed up) interspersed with family members, distant relatives, friends, fans and media people. I remember seeing Bob’s brother Tommy in the front row wearing an all red outfit with white shoes, hair coifed up as always. He looked like one of The Romantics.

About two seconds after the official “I do,” Bob, Paul Westerberg (singer for The Replacements) and I went into the men’s room. Somebody produced a packet and proceeded to draw out long rails of blow on the aluminum tray that ran the length of the mirror. Earlier Reipo and I briefly sparred over who was to sign the marriage certificate, neither of us wanted the responsibility. I ended up autographing it.

In the following years, we would often see Westerberg walking/staggering up Lyndale Avenue in Mpls. (he lived two blocks away from us) and Bob always asked us if he appeared to be drunk. “He looked pretty fucked up, yeah, of course he had an ammo box with ‘im too... .” At this, Stinson would laugh cheerfully and launch into “The Slider” by T-Rex or something equally as radical and somewhat obscure. They (The Replacements) always carried guitar strings and “wires” in those green army ammunition boxes.

Side note: When Prince released Sign of the Times in 1987 he printed the words to the title track on the back of The City Pages. One of the verses goes, “At home there are 17 year old boys and their idea of fun, is being in a gang called The Diciples, high on crack, and totin’ a machine gun... .” So we changed them to: “At home there are CC [Club] patrons and their idea of fun, is being in a band called the Replacements, high on coke, and totin’ a Gibson.”

The photos taken that day out on the front steps are classic. As soon as they were processed they already looked about thirty years old. Nine years later Bob died and many of the same guests showed up at his funeral. In January of 2000 and we finally got the Static Taxi CD Stinson Blvd. mixed and pressed. I will now put the liner notes here and hopefully that will fill in some of the gaps. Anybody who has a copy of Stinson Blvd. might want to skip this part.

June 1st, 1988, 1 AM. We’re sitting in my graffiti covered Monte Carlo at 24th and Blaisdel. We have two 1-gallon jugs of keg beer from a party sloshing around on the floor. I just ran a red and the cops have us pulled over. Me, John, Bob, and Chris.

The policeman comes back to my window to give me back my license. “You’re living on borrowed time, get lost.” He says and flips the plastic card at me. We had just picked up Chris “the Cub” Corbett moments earlier at MCAD. John knew him from art school and told Bob and I that this kid could play bass. We went into the basement of Uptown Pizza and played all night. Bob, John, and I had been hanging around together since ‘85, and had been jamming together since before his departure from The Replacements. Now we were four. Now we were Static Taxi.

The next few weeks were spent in the musician’s greenroom in the Minneapolis Art Institute. When that free ride expired we were forced to find a place of our own. John got a hold of a guy in the classifieds named Ed Larson. He had an old warehouse/grain elevator over by the University of Minnesota, behind Williams Arena.

We rented the office of the otherwise abandoned building. A rather spacious room that was carpeted and even had a bathroom. Along with the place came drinking buddies. Since the “Scarehouse” was located along the train tracks it had become a meeting place for transients, winos, Vietnam vets, drifters, dropouts and people with no other place to go.

A loose community galvanized by cheap vodka and beer, camaraderie and a general appreciation for freedom. A forgotten demographic constituting “The Compound,” Kerone was the one in charge with Charlie “Hillbilly” Buchanon right by his side. They were from Ireland and Corothers, Kentucky respectively. Honorable mentions: Brother John (WW II POW), Jim (lost kid from California) Cherokee Lee (the part-time repo man) Michael Target, King Ed of the Tramps, Packrat, Leo... We became friends with these guys. They were at most of our rehearsals. Our audience.

After we‘d unloaded a hundred rounds of .25 caliber bullets into one of the clothes bails that didn’t get sent to Africa, Ed’s wife Lorraine, insisted on booting us out. So Larson put us in one of the five boxcars he had outside on a piece of track that had been cut off from the rest. He often bragged that the aluminum inside the refrigerator cars made him seven times the money he had spent on acquiring them. “The boxcar Kids!” He’d say, laughing.

Throughout 1989, fueled by LSD and beer, we, as Bob put it “Forged our sound” in the boxcar. “Art blues!” He added enthusiastically. Some rehearsals went into the next day. Chris and I were both driving cabs for a living and many Blue and White drivers took breaks to have a cold one and listen to us practice. There would be taxis parked outside the huge safe-like sliding door. Inside there was red carpet that had been thrown out from the Radisson, colored lights and friendly conversation between assorted displaced persons. And always, music. Kerone screaming “Take a walk on the wild side!” We battled two cold winters in the boxcar with four kerosene heaters. Got it up to about 50. That was nice when it was -20 outside.

Then, in the summer of ‘90, in August, the warehouse burnt down. Along with it went our power supply and Static Taxi’s spirit. From that day on things unraveled. The party was over. We tried to hold the band together but nothing could stop the bleeding. We decided to fold in the summer of ‘91, Mike Laheka playing bass on the last few shows. As we watched our friend Bob kill himself we felt helpless and scared. We were always saying it would be a dream come true to kidnap Bob, bring him to an island to clean up, and then record the ultimate rock album. I guess this is as close as we’ll get, living on borrowed time.

And that’s pretty much the story of our band Static Taxi. Bob's old band, The Replacements, folded in July of 1991. He’d been replaced with Slim Dunlap, who happens to be a real stand-up guy. Since then their music and myth has achieved legendary proportions. Sort of like a flower that keeps blooming.

People are always asking me to tell them stories about Bob. The funny thing is, when I met him—when we met him—we weren’t big ‘Mats fans. At the time, that summer of 1985, we were more into The Suburbs and The Urban Guerrillas. Of course we had heard a lot of the albums that The Replacements had put out, but they really weren’t that huge back then.

The first time I laid eyes on Bob he was in Bunny’s red pickup truck, laying on the seat in our driveway at 1202 West 28th Street, in Uptown Mpls. and his face was gray. His face was actually gray. My first reaction was to call 911, if you want to know the truth. He looked awful. One of those three-day benders of his. Later that night, Reipo, Mike Josephson, Bob, and I walked to the Uptown Bar to get some beers. On the way there we cut through an alley and Bob kicked in a window and yelled “Run!” I guess that’s a fair way to describe his nature. He seemed to live for those existentially out-of-place, self inflicted/induced moments. Always doing the wrong thing. He was 25 and we were all 19.

The Replacements were recording their album Tim at the time for Reprise, a Warner Bros. subsidiary label, and Stinson spent a good deal of the time at our house when he wasn’t in the studio.

One evening in July, Reipo and I were sitting at the kitchen table reading The City Pages when we saw an ad for a Replacements show at First Avenue, downtown Minneapolis. It had started, or was supposed to, about twenty minutes ago. We woke up Bob who was passed out on the couch from an afternoon buzz, and drove him downtown.

The place was packed and the other guys were milling about onstage, probably wondering if their lead guitarist was going to not show up again or what. That was classic/typical Bobby Stinson behavior. Not telling us about the concert and arriving late. It was a great rock show, one of the best I’ve ever seen. As rock as it gets, really.

I believe the principal reasons Bob instantly took to us is because, one; we weren’t fans, didn’t want anything from him, and two; we all shared the same cavalier sense of humor, sort of a highly sophisticated silliness. That was consequential to the old boy. Standing at the podium speaking at his funeral in 1995, I laughed and cried at the same time.

As crazy as it sounds I always sort of thought of Bob Stinson as the older brother I never had. Some odd-ball connection I could never really define. Reipo and I called him Neil Winston. Sometimes Neil Lyndale. I’m not glamorizing him or anything, he could piss me off to no end sometimes. He didn’t try to, but he didn’t try not to either. It was just Neil Lyndal’s brain. Complex to the point of simplicity.

He always looked older than he was. The doctor who did the autopsy on him said he had the body of a seventy year old man. Just like Charlie “The Bird” Parker. They were both 35 at the time of death and they were both musical pioneers with their respective instruments. Puissant players. They both died broke and they both drank a lot. They both liked heroin toward the end too.

To Neil Lyndale, Static Taxi’s boxcar must have been the ultimate, as much as he loved trains and beer and amplifiers. There were nights when I’d think to myself, “I can’t fucking believe the wild sound in here.” It was utterly inestimable. Alchemic.

A lot of people try to sound like him but no one ever will. You have to realize how intensely complicated of a person he was to even begin to understand his playing. He was an eccentric in the truest form. At one point, I heard a writer sum up his style saying something like: Everything Stinson listened to as a child and in his early teens, all of his musical influences filter through that mind of his and come out as his own style/sound, the way he wants to hear it.

Saturday July 9th, 1989: Las Vegas, Nevada. Bob and I are sitting around our motel room. Room 19. I ask Bob stupid questions. He is flipping through free stripper newspapers. He really digs them. He collects them. He's got three. Looks at them constantly. The only time he looks up is to the race on TV.

“Anything in them things?” I ask.

“All it is is advertising, that’s all it is.” He informs me.

“All ads?” I question.

“Uh-hm.” Bob replies earnestly. He puts one down, picks up another, puts that down, picks up the first one again, puts down the first one just for a second, picks it up again, etc. Then sometimes he picks up the third one and appears to be making some kind of comparison with the first.

“Do you think you’re weird Bob?” I ask, laughing.

“Nuh-uh, but I don’t think I’m normal either.” He says.

Back in the late 80’s Bob and I used to go into The Knut Koupe Guitar Shop on 28th and Hennepin in Uptown Minneapolis. First we’d slam a few cans of cold beer down on the nearby railroad tracks in the afternoon sun. Anyhow, once inside the store he’d take down a Firebird or a new Les Paul, casually plug into a Marshall amplifier and start tweeking knobs. If you ever saw Stinson play guitar you know what I’m talking about. While jamming out “Mean Town Blues” by Johnny Winter (really f****ing loud mind you) he’d be twisting, turning, flipping switches, volume, bass, treb, mids, amp/guitar... running up and down the neck effortlessly. His face sort of gave the impression that he was after a particular tone and when he found it, it would be somewhat elusive. Almost like somebody trying to put their finger on something that keeps moving and changing shapes and disguising itself as something else.

By now, a substantially large crown has gathered and people are turning to one another, “Hey, that’s Bob from The Replacements!” or “Is that really him? No way, that guy looks like a bum!” Lots of pimply-faced wannbes looking for an amp, or the usual “Wedge” crowd of local musicians, all pushing to get a closer look. The guys working there let Stinson blast the Marshall as long as he wanted to, it was always about 10 or 20 minutes before Bob would unplug and carefully hang the guitar back up on the wall. If it was, say, $1,200.00 he’d turn to one of the employees and say, “You don’t think that’s a little steep for that guitar?” or something like, “Those necks are made in Russia, did you know that? I’m not kidding, those are Russian. You didn’t know that did you?”

Then we’d go down to Lake of the Isles and sit on the train bridge and have a couple more beers and look at the sunfish.