You can lead a horse to water and make it drink easier than you can get Paul Westerberg to do something that might benefit his career. So it’s a bit of a surprise that he cooperated with Bob Mehr on “Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements,’’ Mehr’s finely told, if somewhat frustrating book about the band fronted by Westerberg.

“I said to Paul and Tommy [Stinson] I want your involvement and participation because too often the story of the Replacements has been told from the outside looking in,’’ said Mehr, whose day job is writing about music for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. “They understood and said OK.’’

Tuesday, Mehr will be at Berklee’s Cafe 939, talking about the book with guitarist Dave Minehan, who knows a thing or two about the Replacements. A member of Boston’s own the Neighborhoods, Minehan was enlisted by Westerberg to join the reunited Replacements when the band hit the road a few years ago. (The band’s original guitarist Bob Stinson died in 1995 and his successor, Slim Dunlap, is in poor health these days.)

That Boston is a stop on Mehr’s book tour is no surprise. The city was something of a proving ground for the misfits from Minneapolis. When they finally began playing outside the Midwest in the early ’80s, Boston was among the first stops. (Lilli Dennison, who waitressed at the Rat and went on to manage the Del Fuegos, makes an appearance in Mehr’s book, as does onetime Rat booker Julie Farman.)

“Boston was kind of nirvana for the Replacements. People got them, maybe in a way even people in Minneapolis didn’t get them,’’ says Mehr. “The song ‘Sixteen Blue’ was written, or at least finished off in Boston. It was sort of batten down the hatches when they came to Boston. [Pixies frontman] Frank Black talks about how he found the Replacements’s fearlessness to be liberating. You didn’t have to be boxed in by the orthodoxy of punk or hardcore.’’

The book makes clear that the ’Mats — short for “Placemats,’’ a sobriquet used by some fans — were more than the “lovable losers’’ portrayed by the media, and their failure to achieve fame was not only their fault, though the lengths to which Westerberg sabotaged himself and the band is alarming. (Mehr writes that the band sometimes set fire to the modest per diem given to them by their record label, and they didn’t do themselves any favors by alienating Lorne Michaels with their volatile performance on “Saturday Night Live.’’)

“Failing or succeeding never comes down to one thing. Really what the story is about is limitations. There wasn’t a driver’s license or a high school diploma between the four of them,’’ says Mehr. “They came from backgrounds that were troubled and they were still able to create something in spite of themselves. That actually makes me like them more.’’