With celebrity culture now a rabid disease in America, we’ll soon need Geiger counters to measure shifts in popularity and degrees of fame these days. Careers crash and burn as quickly as they’re spawned. An artist’s credibility is much more suspect now, held hostage to the media’s manipulative grasp.

Consider Ryan Adams as a case in point: here’s a guy who has been simultaneously toasted and roasted by every music mag from London to L.A. for the last five years or more. One month he’s hailed as yet another “new Dylan,” meaning brilliant and prolific, and the next month he’s downgraded to being just another hack in a long line of poseurs.

The comparison that sticks to Adams the most, however, is the one made with Paul Westerberg, the oft-reputed godfather of both grunge and alt-country. And this analogy digs deeper than most other hype. Adams is an admitted Replacements fan and has been quoted as calling Westerberg one of his heroes.

You don’t have to put both ears to the ground to hear the ‘Mats’ rowdy scamp of a shadow skipping over every Whiskeytown record or every drunken Adams antic either. Westerbergian has become an easy adjective for critics to use as shorthand; like Beatlesque or Dylanesque, it brings to mind specific traits of that artist. In this case, it spells out gritty, ramshackle romanticism, alcohol-fueled chaos, rebels without a clue, and doomed integrity—not to mention a Titanic-sized cache of classic fucking songs.

Does Westerberg’s legacy fit Adams and his own impressive output? To a small degree, it does. Though Whiskeytown was rooted more in country twang than the ‘Mats ever were, they generated a similar reckless energy and wrote about the teen-angst years of vulnerability, lust, love, and heartache with empathy and nerve.

Stranger’s Almanac, which put Whiskeytown on the map in 1998, was not only their career peak, but also their closest approximation of the patented Replacements sound. “Losering” or “Waiting to Derail” could be buried B-side nuggets on Let It Be or Tim. It’s obvious that Adams was inspired by Westerberg’s bourbon-wracked yowl of a voice, his punk ethos, and his yin-yang songwriting genius, the way he could write a gutter ballad that tore at your heart and then an anthemic rocker that clawed at your throat in equal measures.

But unlike the ‘Mats, Whiskeytown were very much a one-man band, besides Caitlin Cary’s stirring fiddle on the side. Adams, the little dynamo that could, ran roughshod over the band, and regularly kicked out members while inviting others in. The Replacements were a gifted gang of misfits from the streets of Minneapolis, and though Paul wrote and sang the songs, there was a swashbucklers’ camaraderie at their core, a magical sum greater than its parts—at least during the peak before their inevitable ruin.

Though under-sung at the time and never within shouting distance of commercial success in the ‘80s, the Replacements are heralded in hindsight as one of the Great American Bands, indie or otherwise. And if you ever saw them play live during that decade, whether they were drunk, drugged, or straight, you know that to be true. Their glorious, garage blueprint of hall-of-fame songs, barstool poetry, and heart-on-the-flannel-sleeve integrity influenced a generation of bands, from Nirvana to Whiskeytown to Wilco.

How could Adams compete with the Replacements’ pioneer legacy? Well, he couldn’t, so he stopped trying and set out on his own, since he’d always been there anyway. And from his great debut, Heartbreaker, released in 2000, to the present, he has spewed out a landslide of records that sometimes make you stop in your tracks and other times make you keep walking past. Either way, he’s prolific as hell and averages at least a record each year. It’s also true that he could use an editor, which would eliminate much of the filler that mars every release.

But more than his music, Adams’ persona seems to have charmed the public. That rough and ready guise, bratty and defiant, nonchalant but casually artful, characterizes him on the good days, and there’s no doubt he co-opted much of that from Westerberg, who, in turn, adapted it from Keith Richards and/or Dylan—these roots of lineage plunge oak-deep. And on the bad days, well, Adams can come off as a petulant poseur who flits from project to project, ingratiating himself to the powers that be as much as possible.

For all of his off-the-cuff behavior, Adams still lacks Westerberg’s raw authenticity and cutting sense of humor. I often get the sense that Ryan takes himself a little too seriously at times—I mean, if you can’t handle a heckler requesting Bryan Adams songs at your show, then it’s time to unload some of that self-importance. Color me impressed, man. But he is only 32, and still learning, while Paul stands stranded in middle-age now.

Compared to Adams’ glare in the spotlight, Westerberg’s post-‘Mats career has been reported MIA more often than not. Beginning with his first solo release, 14 Songs, (unless you count the ‘Mats’ last one, All Shook Down) way back in 1993, each successive record has underwhelmed, critically and commercially. Fighting depression and the diminishing expectations of others, Paul became an almost reclusive figure in his beloved Minneapolis and on the national scene.

While Adams is a deceptively canny and ambitious character, Westerberg has always had a strong self-destructive streak goosing him along. From his Replacements heyday onward, he has sabotaged his own career more than a few times. But it must be tough to always see so many lesser talents soak up your rightful rewards.

It’s absurdly ironic, though, because each of Paul’s solo records contains a clutch of classics that most songwriters could never hope to touch. Sometimes I would read the negative reviews, still buy the records, and wonder if we were even listening to the same music. It’s a tired truism, but many fans and critics alike have never forgiven Westerberg for burying the Replacements, going sober, and writing maturely about adulthood in all its complexities. In other words, who wants to hear about a husband’s happiness from the unsatisfied man who once roared, “I hate your answering machine”?

Like Paul McCartney or Johnny Rotten (that’s a juxtaposition), he will be forever measured against his former band’s glories. Not quite fair, but no surprise. Yet there came a point in Westerberg’s solo career around the release of Suicaine Gratification in 1999 when you could tell that he’d stopped worrying about his past or his cult of fans haunting him, and began loosening up on record and off.

If Westerberg was no longer writing the desperate anthems of yore that defined a generation, he still wrote movingly about himself with passion. Besides Tom Waits and few others, no one writes such bittersweet blues and sings them with such divine shots of bravado and yearning grace.

The old restless swagger is back, cocked and loaded. Paul found an alter-ego project, Grandpaboy, that embodied the ‘Mats’ wildest impulses, and fired out four or five fine records within a two-year period earlier this decade. Suddenly, he was as prolific as Adams, but with half the fanfare. Come Feel Me Tremble, released in 2003, is one of his best collections of songs since the 1980s. With shambling strides, he’s also touring again.

Westerberg’s voice, still scuffed, still broken, still can take your breath away with a life’s worth of stunning self-knowledge: “Every time I didn’t follow my dreams, I lost the map / I live my fantasy instead / Till I found it was a trap / Gave a life, got a living / Hey, that’s all right / All is forgiven” (“All That I Had”).

P.S. Ironically enough, Westerberg and Adams feuded a few years ago through the press. Baited by a reporter, Paul mockingly dissed Adams as a pretender, though he did it with a few chuckles, tongue-in-cheek, according to him. Adams was stung that one of his idols would criticize him, and so he fired back at Paul with a few choice words when he later played a concert in Minneapolis. Territorial pissings and all that.

Watch: Paul Westerberg “Can’t Hardly Wait“  [at youtube.com]

Watch: Ryan Adams “Oh My Sweet Caroline“  [at youtube.com]

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