Songfacts®:

• Air rage goes back a while.
  
  Waitress In The Sky" is about Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg's big sister, Julie, who was a flight attendant. The song comes from the perspective of an abusive passenger who demands top-flight treatment while condescendingly declaring in the chorus, "You ain't nothin' but a waitress in the sky."
  
  In Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements by Bob Mehr, Westerberg is quoted as saying, "I was playing the character of the creep who demands to be treated like a king. I'd heard all the stories from my sister about how [passengers] would yell at the flight attendants and how then they'd 'accidentally' spill something on them."
• The Westerberg clan had five children. Julie was the second oldest. Paul was the second youngest.
• According to Trouble Boys, the rhythm for this song comes from "Mountain of Love" by Johnny Rivers and "Hot Love" by T. Rex.
• A listener introduced to "Waitress In The Sky" might never guess that the Replacements had started out with raunchy, grit-and-gristle punk attitude. Yet only two albums earlier, the band were still tearing it up with irreverent, often incoherent lyrics and wild instrumentation. Echoes of those origins are still apparent on the band's third album, Let It Be. By the time of their fourth effort, Tim (which includes "Waitress In The Sky"), Westerberg had fully asserted creative control and taken the band's music to the melodic-yet-raw sound that would become their legacy. Many credit the sound as a bridge between '80s punk and '90s alternative.