Tommy Stinson Talks 'No Rules' Music Industry Ahead of Cleveland Show

Tommy Stinson has something on his mind these days: how to make money on tour while not using the Ticketmaster/Live Nation infrastructure.

The 59-year-old musician—the bassist for defunct Minneapolis alternative rock heroes The Replacements who created his own respectable career out of that band’s shadow—is still traversing North America each year in recent years, something he’s comfortable doing because “I do better traveling than I do sitting at home.”

However, he’s resolved to hit cities and venues that are off the well-traveled path for touring acts. An artist of his stature, he said, can make three times as much doing that than if he went through the mega-promoters and played the larger clubs they control.

“I’m lucky enough I can go off the grid and play shows in weird places and still make it work for me and have fun,” Stinson said in a recent interview from his home base of Hudson, New York. “And that’s my modus operandi right now.”

“I want to have fun doing what I’m doing and make enough to pay the bills and call it good. I’m not looking to be a pop star or any of that crap.”

Stinson will bring his brand of rock to Cleveland—which is still very well-traveled by touring musicians—on June 18 to play The Treelawn on Waterloo Road in the North Collinwood neighborhood. He promises “a little bit of everything” from throughout his career, as well as playing with opener and “mate” Karla Rose and rockers backed by Austin, Texas band English Teeth.

He’s been to Cleveland multiple times in recent years—including a 2021 show at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with his country-inflected project Cowboys in the Campfire that included a donation of a Wurlitzer organ owned by his late brother and Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson.

The show is on the early end of a busy summer for Stinson. He plans to expand the tour and add acts to create an affordable traveling festival of sorts.

There’s also the matter of releasing a new solo record, featuring collaborators from his myriad projects like Bash & Pop and Cowboys in the Campfire.

Of course it’ll be pressed on wax, he said, calling the ongoing vinyl record boom “a really good thing.” Listeners can hear the music in a different way, he said, drawing a distinction between his preferences and some modern acts.

“With the digital age, since the mid-2000s, people have really oversaturated recordings to a place where it’s not even human sounding anymore,” Stinson said.

All of this is being done as artists like himself work to figure out how to operate in an ever-changing music industry. But there’s at least one thing Stinson said he figured out.

“The best thing is to try and go direct to consumer and skip all the other crap, because you’re going to get on Spotify one way or the other and they’re going to get you anyway,” he said.

“But to just come out of the gate and try and set up your own thing, there’s a lot of ways to do it now, and there are no rules.”

The show starts at 7 pm. Prices range from $28.52 for a general-admission ticket to more than $100 that allows the attendee to “hang with Tommy.” Tickets can be bought here.

Eric Heisig is a freelance writer in Cleveland. He can be reached at eheisig@gmail.com.