The Alternative Number Ones: Soul Asylum’s “Somebody To Shove”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In January 1982, the Replacements played at a Minneapolis house party, and the police arrived to bust it up. The Replacements used a live recording of that moment as the intro to their possible U2 diss track "Kids Don't Follow," the opener from their 1982 EP Stink. The Minneapolis cop immortalized on that track almost sounds like a parody of a gumpy Midwestern authority figure -- like the voice that Homer Simpson uses when he's trying to do someone else's voice. When he says that the party is over, you hear scattered boos, a bit of feedback, and one distinctly Jimbo Jones-esque voice bellowing back, "Hey, fuck you, man!" Legend has it that the "fuck you, man" man is Dave Pirner, already on his way to becoming the frontman of Soul Asylum.

It's hard to verify that kind of claim, and the guy who actually recorded that show isn't sure whether it was really Pirner telling the cop to fuck himself. But we'd all prefer to believe that it's really him, right? It's way more fun if it's Dave Pirner than if it's some other random drunk Minneapolis punk kid. And if it is Pirner, then that means he's not just a Replacements fan. It means he's the Replacements fan, the Replacements fan by which all other Replacements fans must be judged. Nothing in Soul Asylum's decades-long discography really disproves that hypothesis.