Bob “Slim” Dunlap, who joined the Replacements as lead guitarist in the late 1980s after the pioneering rock band fired founder Bob Stinson, died Wednesday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 73.
His death was announced in a statement from his family to the Minnesota Star Tribune, which said the cause was complications from a stroke he’d suffered in 2012.
Nicknamed Slim by Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg to avoid confusion with the guy he was replacing, the tall and gangly Dunlap played guitar on the Replacements’ final two studio albums, 1989’s “Don’t Tell a Soul,” which spawned a No. 1 alternative-rock radio hit in the chugging “I’ll Be You,” and its 1990 follow-up, “All Shook Down,” which earned a Grammy nomination for alternative music performance. Dunlap’s style drew out the rootsy influences in Westerberg’s songwriting, as in the twangy “Achin’ to Be.”
“I wanted someone bluesier, who was hip to country music, ’cause that’s where I envisioned the band going,” Westerberg told author Bob Mehr in Mehr’s 2015 biography, “Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.”
The son of a Minnesota state senator, Dunlap was born in 1951 and grew up in the farming community of Plainview in the state’s southeastern corner. His older sisters exposed him to rock ’n’ roll, and he moved to Minneapolis in his late teens to pursue music.
“I played in every little band I could play in, every band that would have me,” Dunlap told The Times in 1993, not long after he’d embarked on a solo career following the Replacements’ breakup in 1991. “Slowly but surely, I got this reputation as a guy who could play anything. One night you’d see me play bluegrass in a little pizza shop, the next night it would be hard rock.”
In addition to his gigs as a musician, Dunlap worked as a cab driver and as a janitor at Minneapolis’ storied First Avenue nightclub, where the Replacements played during the band’s famously rowdy come-up and where Dunlap met his wife, Chrissie, who was a talent booker at the club. In 1987, the Replacements booted Stinson — the band’s other founding members were drummer Chris Mars and Stinson’s younger brother Tommy on bass — as a result of the guitarist’s drinking and drug use. (Bob Stinson died in 1995 at age 35.)
Dunlap’s audition for the Replacements “consisted of an afternoon of drinking beer,” Spin magazine wrote in a story in 1987. “Slim is more like a fourth member of the band than a hired gun,” Westerberg told Spin. “We originally thought that it would be a good idea to get a hot guitar player and be the Replacements and … Joe Blow. As it is now, it’s like the Replacements with a new guy who isn’t a great guitar player, isn’t a great singer, just as we are not great at what we do, and he fits in perfectly.” Dunlap joined the band in time to tour behind 1987’s “Pleased to Meet Me.”
After the Replacements split, Dunlap toured with Dan Baird of the Georgia Satellites and made a pair of solo albums that drew the admiration of Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, among others. The first LP, 1993’s “The Old New Me,” featured a song called “The Ballad of the Opening Band,” which he based on his memories of grinding it out on the club circuit in relative anonymity before he was tapped for the Replacements.
“People see [the scenario in ‘Opening Band’] as a sad thing, but the guy in the song gets to play,” he told The Times when “The Old New Me” came out. “There are so many great musicians in America who didn’t get attention. They haven’t gotten any acclaim, but there’s a specific thing they do that nobody can touch. No one gives them the time of day, but they’re still out there doing it. That’s what I love. This business is all about the little eccentrics out there who get lost in the shuffle.
“That’s the sad thing about so many young bands now. They become players after they see Nirvana or the Replacements, because they think, ‘If we’re lucky, that could happen to us.’ You’re better off buying lottery tickets than trying to make it in the music business. I’m not a person who’s made or broken by [my] status in the business. That’s a big joke, because all the wrong people make it.”
In 2012, Westerberg and Tommy Stinson reunited for a tour under the Replacements name that included a performance with Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong at the Coachella festival; in 2013, artists including Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, Frank Black and Jakob Dylan teamed up to record a tribute album to Dunlap, whose stroke had left him unable to play music. Dunlap released a live album in 2020 that documented a 2002 performance at St. Paul’s Turf Club. According to the Star Tribune, Dunlap’s survivors include his wife, their three children, six grandchildren and Dunlap’s three sisters.
