Songfacts®:

• "Take Me Down To The Hospital" recounts the night The Replacements' frontman Paul Westerberg spent in an emergency room after taking pharmaceutical-grade amphetamine. It also explains why The Replacements' dressing rooms smelled like Ben-Gay from 1983 onwards.
  
  The incident happened after the band played a show at the St. Croix Boom Company, a refurbished historic site in Stillwater, Minnesota, where many local acts performed and recorded. In a scene detailed in Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, the band were driving home when Westerberg began writhing around and hyperventilating in the backseat. His bandmates thought Westerberg was going to die, but he eased the tension a bit by croaking, "If I die... don't let Bob sing," referring to guitarist Bob Stinson. But concerns were still grave.
  
  After initially trying to walk Westerberg into the wrong building, his bandmates got him to Hennepin County General's emergency room. The doctor leveled Westerberg out with a sedative and diagnosed him with pleurisy, an inflammation of the membrane around the lungs. While the drugs definitely played their part, the doctor and Westerberg determined that a trigger for the event was the strain of his singing style.
  
  The doctor advised Westerberg to put Ben-Gay on his chest before performing to prevent the problem from recurring. Westerberg followed that advice, leading to The Replacements' leaving a Ben-Gay aroma in dressing rooms forever afterward.
• "Take Me Down To The Hospital" appears on The Replacements' second studio album, Hootenanny, the album immediately preceding the band's classic Let It Be and their peak in sales and popularity. Hootenanny was the end of the band's beginning, the farewell to their wild, irreverent start. After this, Westerberg's songwriting became more mature, focused, and serious. Whether or not the "Take Me Down To The Hospital" brush with death played any part in Westerberg wanting to get more serious about his career and his legacy, we cannot know, but it's an intriguing possibility.