Paul Westerberg

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History is written by the winners. Just ask Paul Westerberg.

The former Replacements front-man swung through central Pennsylvania late last month for a stop on his brief tour to promote Stereo (Vagrant, 2002), the two-CD set that some are calling a return to form for the alternative rock icon.

For nearly two hours, a healthy looking Westerberg -- armed only with a battery of acoustic and electric guitars -- performed a hair-raising set, heavy on Replacements favorites, but still sprinkled with favorites from his decade-long solo career.

For those of us who know better, Paul really never went away. There was no form (the comments of critics notwithstanding) to which he had to return. Over the course of three solo records in the 1990s, he mined a vein only hinted at on the final Replacements records.

But the ballads that made up the bulk of 1993's solo debut 14 Songs, and its follow-up, 1996's Eventually, with its book-ended encomiums to the late 'Mats guitarist Bob Stinson, were a betrayal for some Westerberg purists. They still wanted Paul, now into his forties, to be the same glorious, fucked-up mess he was before college rock got turned into a marketing segment.

And to be sure, fewer bands were more gloriously fucked-up than The Replacements. The stories about dumping master tapes into the Missouri River and tales of their drunken on-stage antics have now passed into legend. They'll no doubt make great campfire tales when my generation of indie kids has passed well into its dotage.

But I never really bought the legend. It seems too cheap, too easy.

Could the Replacements rock with the best of them? Absolutely. Could they careen between the shambolic and the transcendent -- even in the course of the same set? Definitely.

But for every thrashed-out rocker like "Tommy Got His Tonsils Out", or "Johnny's Got a Boner", there's the weary beauty of "Here Comes a Regular", "Swinging Party", or even "Runaway Wind", and "Love Untold".

Underneath it all, Westerberg was a songwriter, perhaps one of the best of his generation. But, for whatever reason, many of his fans didn't want it, and the three solo records that should have put him into the upper echelon of American songwriters could now pass easily out of print.

They still wanted the same, fucked-up mess. No matter what the cost.

So it broke my heart just a little bit a few weeks ago to watch Westerberg play this intimate show to a small group of devoted fans, knowing full well that there are imitators out there who have copped his act and used it to fill rooms that the Replacements could only drive past in their heyday.

Which brings us to Ryan Adams and the Goo Goo Dolls.

Just a few nights after Westerberg's show, I was flipping around MTV, and happened upon a show featuring Adams, the former lead singer for alt.country darlings Whiskeytown and now solo smash, performing from the beach in Kingston, Jamaica.

There he was, replete with tousled hair, weary smile, and tattered shirt, looking every inch the Westerberg most of us knew as teenagers.

Ironic wasn't the word for it.

A day later, I stopped off at the Top 20 Countdown on VH-1, just in time to catch los Goos -- those top-flight Replacements imitators -- strutting their stuff for the masses.

Both Adams and Goo Goos singer Johnny Rzeznik owe Westerberg a huge debt -- one that Rzeznik, at least, was willing to acknowledge by penning a song with Westerberg on an early Goos platter.

Last year, Adams released Gold, a sprawling, sometimes unfocused collection, which veers between Westerberg-inspired balladry, the folky stylings of The Band, and bluesy, Stones-inflected stomps.

The record, to be sure, is a catalogue of Adams' influences. And while I respect his gifts as a songwriter, I am not sure that he has been as upfront in acknowledging his debt to Westerberg.

In interviews, he's also attempted to distance himself from his days in Whiskeytown, whose shows could also run the same 'Mats-style gamut of disastrous and inspired.

But there they were, Adams and Rzeznik, on MTV and VH-1 respectively, with album sales that Westerberg, who got there first, and showed them how to do it, can only dream about.

So as I watched those two late-comers go through their paces, I flashed back to that Westerberg show, far from the glitz and glam of MTV and the heavy rotation on adult contemporary radio, doing the thing he's been doing so well for more than 20 years now, and felt that same mixture of affection and sadness I'd felt that night.