In print journalism's biggest act of provocation since Hearst and Pulitzer yellowed up the Spanish-American War, Los Angeles Daily News "writer" Josh Kleinbaum has criticized this site's extensive scholarship of The Hold Steady:
After spending too much time analyzing [lead singer Craig] Finn's love of places, one blogger determined that "nothing good happens in California," at least in The Hold Steady's world. Thursday night, Finn and company proved him wrong - the Brooklyn band can put on a hell of a show, even in California.
Mr. Kleinbaum, your enthusiastic words for America's greatest band nearly redeem your anti-intellectual jeremiad against Cole Slaw Blog's groundbreaking research. For shame.
For a partial sampling of our analysis about the band, click here.
One of my rules of thumb is that a band that employs an accordion has something up its sleeve that I won't much care for. I rolled my eyes when I read that the new five-song Hold Steady CD, "Live at Fingerprints," would include a cameo appearance from an accordion.
It's not that I don't appreciate it when bands tweak and reconfigure their songs. Volume 5 of Bob Dylan's Bootleg series, from his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, is spectacular in the way it reimagines his canon. Dylan's a little like a jazzman in the way that he takes the cores of his masterpieces and spins his variations. This annoys some of his concertgoers to no end, but in my mind it's part of why his performances never have the flavor of a nostalgia tour.
"Live at Fingerprints" appropriates The Hold Steady's throttlings and turns them into love taps. This is fine, and the instrumentation is perfectly lovely, kind of like of Colin Melloy had been asked to produce a Hold Steady album. The track list is short (Cattle and the Creeping Things; Chips Ahoy; You Can Make Him Like You; Citrus; and You Gotta Dance With Who You Came to the Dance With) and the only song that feels full at home is "Citrus" -- which was already an acoustic, bittersweet reflection on decadence and salvation.
One of the qualities that sticks out is how rough Craig Finn's voice is when accompanied by acoustic instrumentation. His shouts don't feel out of place (at least not to me) when the band is at full force, but in this context it's a blunt instrument.
Still, Live at Fingerprints-- recorded at a Long Beach in-store performance-- underscores something that's easily missed in the Hold Steady's recorded output: It's not the performances that make the band so special, it's the songs.
Well, this is true only if you've never quite listened to the songs. (iTunes leads me to estimate that I've listened to the band's songs more than 2,000 times, a number that, even in light of my copious writings, is unnerving.) Craig Finn gets compared to a lot of people, but one of his peers might be Quentin Tarantino. They're both genre-obsessed and draw from a pretty broad tapestry of the culture.
If anything, the version of "Chips Ahoy" underscores how lyrically weak it is (yes, it rocks, but the story and the refrain grate on me a little) and "Cattle and the Creeping Things" loses most of its dark power when Tad Kubler's pounding guitar is supplanted by an accordion.
"You Can Make Him Like You" seems to work out fine. It's a song that I've never been able to decode -- is it mocking the girls it depicts or celebrating them? -- but here, it sounds sympathetic and lonely. In this respect, it's kind of a hint at what can happen when a band reimagines a song and pulls it off. An acoustic version of "Stuck Between Stations" made the rounds on the internet in the months before the release of "Boys and Girls in America." It heightened the song's poignancy while soft-pedaling its pyrotechnics.
There's nothing wrong with "Live at Fingerprints," even if it isn't quite "Live at Leeds" (and the band probably does have a "Live at Leeds" in them), and as I twiddle my thumbs waiting for whatever skull-knocking epic they release next, it's nice to get this short postcard to hear what they've been up to.
A little while ago I noted plans to put together a full guide to the people and places mentioned in The Hold Steady's lyrics. With the help of Google Spreadsheets, I've put together the first installment. In addition to the basic details, I've added lyric excerpts, limited background about some of the more obscure places, some occasional analysis of the lyrics, and, where relevant, some background on the band's relationship to a particular place.
Volume 2 will break down the people (bands, writers, Catholic saints and pop culture figures) mentioned in the band's lyrics. Volume 3 will be dedicated to recurring characters in the band's work.
A small part of my admiration for The Hold Steady stems from the realization that Craig Finn and I share the same dorky love of specific place names. I'm pretty sure Finn would never pen a short story or a novel which included places like Haddam, N.J.; East Egg, N.Y.; or St. Jude, Mo. I don't think I would either. Although I've seen it denigrated by snotty reviewers, I think all the references to specific places, people and things add to the Hold Steady's overall bitchin'-ness.
As such, I present a list of future proper nouns I would not be at all startled by if they were to appear somewhere in The Hold Steady oeuvre.
1. Kirby Puckett 2. Garrison Kiellor 3. The Little Brown Jug* 4. Spoonbridge and Cherry 5. The Miracle on Ice 6. Northwest Orient 7. Prince 8. Gump Worsley
Not receiving votes: Fred Smoot, Andrei Zyuzin, 3M, Land O' Lakes, Nicollet Mall, those glassed-in bridges between buildings in downtown, Asad Abdul-Khaliq, Mall of America, the merger between the Cleveland Barons and Minnesota North Stars, Brett Hull, Gordon Lundegaard. * Not that Minneapolitans would ever have really had any reason to know what this is.
I'm attempting to analyze and annotate every specific location and person referenced in The Hold Steady's three albums.
Mock me if you want, but I consider this my obligation to future scholars.
Below is an alphabetical list of places and people. Going through the lyrics, I've noticed certain trends: nothing good happens in California; Florida is the situs of ultimate decadence; everyone always comes back to Minneapolis.
If I can figure out a way to properly export a spreadsheet layout into blogger, I'll publish a complete account. I've omitted site-specific references to Minneapolis because they're so copious, and because I don't recognize many of them. The Hold Steady Guide to the Twin Cities is a brilliant resource on that front.
I'm taking advantage of CrimeNotes' sleepiness to write our blog's review of Thursday night's The Hold Steady concert. No, seriously. I'll keep it well under 3,000 words. If I leave out something my co-blogger considers important, well, that's his problem for choosing to dream about ... whatever it is he dreams about. One assume's it's a letter from Michiko Kakutani thanking him for being the only one who understands what it's like to be her. (Enclosure: a photo of her ta-tas.)
So anyway, the concert. And the part I'll remember the rest of my life: I was on stage at the end of the concert. No shit. I was on the fucking stage. With a couple dozen other people. It was amazing. That's one more thing I can cross off my list of "stupid shit to do before I turn 30 and it becomes borderline juvenile." I was on the stage at the end of a rock and/or roll show. During the last song of the second and final encore (right after the much-requested "Knuckles") Craig Finn invited people in front to join him on stage. I pushed CrimeNotes forward and said "Dude, you have to do that?" He (being over 30) demurred. So I tucked the T-shirt I'd bought for Effervescent Shorty (at the request of her fiancee, Crunk Raconteur) into my back pocket, and told CrimeNotes to hold my coat. Then I clambered gracelessly onto the stage, where I could "Woooo!" my heart out as Finn declared that we all were, in fact, The Hold Steady.
It's tough to beat that, but as as for the rest of the show. The venue was Northsix in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was tiny, intimate and absolutely awesome. There were maybe 400 other people in the place. I can't think of a better place to see this band than some bar off I-94 between Madison, Wis., and St. Paul, Minn. And speaking of Williamsburg, I just have to mention that yes, on the walk back from the show, I actually saw someone wearing a Pabst Blue Ribbon trucker hat. I assume it was meta irony, because otherwise, that's just a bit too on the nose, isn't it?
But enough with that shit _ the show was at a tiny, 400-person venue. CrimeNotes and I were probably 25 feet or so from the stage, if that. The show was pretty much incredible start to finish. They started with a Positive Jam, and then like 10 minutes later, they were already leaving the stage before their first encore. Actually, it was well over an hour, more lik 70-80 minutes, but it felt like no time at all had gone by. The songs that stood out to me afterward were a particularly blistering version of "Chips Ahoy!" which included the entire crowd singing backing vocals, and an excellent "Stuck Between Stations." I think the second song was "The Swish" and yes, I recall bellowing out the line about skirts, tights, and shaking it up in Shaker Heights. In fact, I probably screamed half the lyrics to all the songs along with the band. Actually, half is a conservative estimate. I can't recall a recent show I've gone more bonkers for. I can't recall a show I've gone more bonkers for even in high school or college, actually.
But I'll refrain from further giddy babble. The only point left I want to make is this: I've always understood on some level why CrimeNotes sways back and forth during The Hold Steady concerts as if he's listening to some charismatic preacher, but now I get it completely.
Living With War, by Neil Young. It was a sledgehammer protest album released at the key moment in the zeitgeist, an anti-Bush, anti-war wolf whistle that happened to rock hard. Neil's dreary 2005 release "Prairie Wind" sounded like the twilight of a great artist content to fade away. In its ragged glory, "Living With War" showed an angry legend rage against the dying of the light. It brought his career, politics, and music full circle.
And for those who considered it too blunt: fuck subtlety. Sometimes, metaphor can sound like an apology. This was Neil's year to thrash.
Best Reason to Go to Minor League Ballparks
Because they're Bob Dylan's summer tour venues of choice. As I wrote at the time, there's something irreplaceable about "watching him in an infield the size of Webster Hall, looking up during 'It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding,' and seeing the Big Dipper overhead."
Best Show that Has Zero Gimmicks But Nails it Completely
Friday Night Lights.
If you don't love this show, we have less in common than I thought.
Best Show that Nobody Watched
Sons & Daughters on ABC was the heir to Arrested Development. The show died an early death, and now all I have are episodes saved on Tivo that I watch once a month and refuse to delete.
Best Show Ever
The Thick of It on BBC America. Angry bureaucrats who want to kill each other shout expletives behind closed doors. Sabotage and betrayal are ways of life. In these respects, it depicts the workplace more authentically than either version of The Office.
Best Movie that Nobody Wanted to See
United 93. Not to kill the mood or anything, but in addition to being a damn fine piece of filmmaking, it was a major cultural moment to see the events of that day depicted without kitsch or sloganeering or sentimentality. Less exploitative than anything you'll see on network news or the History Channel. Makes you want to be a better person and an angrier person and to care deeply about things. It is superb and grueling and indispensible.
Best Novel of 2006
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. At some point in junior high I started reading Stephen King. Ever since, I've been waiting for a book that kept me up until 3 a.m., leaving me with nightmares, causing me to wake the next day feeling bleak and tired and just a little bit scared. The Road did that, and then left me reeling for entirely different reasons. It's a book about the end of the world, as cross-bred with The Old Man and the Sea, As I Lay Dying, and The Plague. Man against nature? Check. Questions about civilization? Yes. Poignant depiction of a father and son? Yes. That, and starvation and cannibalism, mercy and cruelty, and a landscape so deftly described that I believed it in full.
It freaked out my inner thirteen-year-old and then gave me one of my best reading workouts since college.
Best Novel of 2006 That I Didn't Want to Read
The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud. A book with a terrible title, a plot that sounds like a weak Jay McInerney imitation, written with too many adverbs and adjectives, about people that are intensely unlikeable. But like Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, Claire Messud's novel draws a panorama of ambitious writers, thinkers, socialites and businessmen, letting their clashing agendas and egos leisurely burn themselves out in a series of social gatherings and romantic indiscretions. Powell's characters became a part of the world with World War II, and Messud uses 9/11 to similar effect. Her portrayal of September 11 isn't totally persuasive, but it's serviceable, which is better than any other novelist has so far mustered.
Best Novel of 2006 That Was Cruelly Overrated, Thus Setting Up the Writer to Be Later Condemned as a Disappointment
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. Sometimes talented young writers publish good first novels. Anxious for hope in the future of literature, critics and readers hype the book's quality beyond reason. Rather than being lauded as talented authors with potential, the young writers instead are compared to Pynchon and Nabokov and Salinger. They publish subsequent novels, which are received as disappointments and cannibalized. The young writers never had a prayer.
This year's victim was Marisha Pessl, who gave us a perfectly entertaining and thoughtful novel that overexcitable critics have tried to ruin through overpraise. Nabokov? Not even close. An ambitious mixed success written by a likeable and promising voice? Yes, and that's good enough.
Best Working Band Since the Stones Released Sticky Fingers
The Hold Steady burned itself so deep into my brain that on a recent night stumbling out of a bar, I blurted lyrics ad naseum and continued sputtering them for blocks.
Sure, I think that their fall release Boys and Girls in America fell just a tad below the standards that the band set in Separation Sunday and Almost Killed Me, but it still creates a lyrical epic of lost love, moments of clarity and all the flashpoints where everything simultaneously goes so right, so wrong, and so drunk. Over three albums, they've assembled a singular and persuasive cast of characters and drawn a roadmap to the United States -- comparable to Bob giving us Desolation Row, the story of Highway 61, and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.
Best Description of The Hold Steady by a More Objective Observer
The Hold Steady are a cult. Like Scientology. Or Kaballah. Or Cory Kennedy (No Vincent Gallo). Except that they don't want your money, your time, or your ability to make Cobrasnake's site traffic spike. They just want you to have a good time. That's all. They offer everything you could want. Boozy anthems for the frat-boys, introspective lyrics for the ladies, relateable tales for the teens, literary leanings for the book dorks and enough substance abuse references to satisfy Mel Gibson. Boys and Girls is the Hold Steady's best album yet, a complex and articulate collection of 11 short stories of growing up in America. Inspired by a Kerouac quote about "boys and girls in America having such a sad time together," they too will live on like the deceased novelist. People will always need things to make them a little less sad.
The Hold Steady's 2006 shows at Warsaw and Irving Plaza.
I think you're old enough to know that if you're lucky, once in a decade you'll experience a show where the performers and the crowd are synchronized, and your arms go sore and your voice gives, and there's a flash of intensity and comeraderie usually limited to a stadium at the moment of your team's biggest triumph. This year we got two of these.
In summary, I consider this band enjoyable.
Best Reasons Not to Throw in the Towel
Ohio: For once, not ruining the country.
Senators-elect Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Sherrod Brown, Claire McCaskill and John Tester.
Never happy with New York's two senators, for the last few years I've thought of Barbara Boxer and Patrick Leahy as my own two. But in addition to restoring my faith in the Republic, this fall brought a crop of tough, no-nonsense, populist progressives to the U.S. Senate. Any one of them alone would be enough to celebrate.
Sure, some may turn out to be disappointments, but for the first time in my adult life, candidates that I love won.
Three More People You Should Try to Meet in Heaven* (2006 ed.)
Best Unexpected Side-Effect of Attending the Michigan-Vandy Game
Accompanying a five-month-old baby to her first college football game. Because there's nothing like watching LaMarr Woodley flatten some prissy Southern- awwwwwww...
If you've never experienced it, going to a game with 110,000 of your best friends and enjoying four hours of pageantry and ass-kicking is a pretty visceral experience, and - awwwwwwww...
Best Use of Numbers
Michigan 47, Notre Dame 21.
Worst Unexpected Side-Effect of Whupping Notre Dame
Getting so drunk that you believe you're in Ann Arbor even though you're in a bar on Second Avenue. Hectoring friends about how you want to go hang out in a dorm that nobody liked in the first place, and then licking their faces when they decline.
Waking up the next day surprised that you managed to walk home without getting in a fight or getting arrested.
Best Sports Photo of 2006
Best Way to Work Through the Pain of Losing to Ohio State
Hold a ladies' arm-wrestling tournament in the kitchen.
High-Concept Posting Series that Failed: Excitable Young New Yorker. I entertained myself, but confused and/or pissed off the rest of you. A pompous, vulgar, needy, self-absorbed, moderately racist, clumsy, overemotional twentysomething? Yeah, I guess she wasn't as far-fetched as I thought. Sorry for the confusion.
Anticipated Fanboy Political Crush of 2007: Al Gore.
Mea Culpa: Duke Lacrosse. Yeah, I was pretty wrong. I guess I should have learned by now always to assume the worst of people in power. Is it possible that I should be even more cynical?
Most Surprisingly Successful Experiment with Live-Blogging: Hoot!
Best Trend in Late-Night Noisemaking
Hooting. Elegant in its simplicity, a little rooftop hooting cleans the soul. With a beer in hand, look up at surrounding towers and unloose a long, steady, "Hoot!"
Awesome.
Best Trend in Late-Night Aggression
Tie: head-butting; face-licking.
Second place: headlock.
Third place: punching in the forearm.
Best Excuse to Hold an Impromptu College Reunion
Turning 30.
For an immature asshole, I get to have a lot of friends.
If you're reading this sentence -- if you've been reading anything I've written lately -- you probably know that The Hold Steady's "Boys and Girls in America" went on sale today.
Yes, it's been a long wait, and yes, after the band's euphoric Sunday night show it's a little anticlimactic. Not to mention that I've had the album long enough that I've now listened to it about 20 times.
Tad Kubler and his badass new guitar.Sunday night at Irving Plaza, via rogo2000's photo stream.
Good News: "Boys and Girls in America" is clearly their most accessible album, packed with catchy hooks and choruses and vocals sufficiently close to singing that one of the most persistent gripes about the band may be slightly alleviated.
I'm not holding my breath. This is a polarizing band, and I understand that. The biggest reason I love them is a body of lyrics that speaks to me in a way that Springsteen speaks to some of my friends and Billy Joel speaks to others and Bob Seger speaks to a few. I've never loved those guys because I find them unrelatable. The Hold Steady's stories, I find hugely relatable, and they somehow came along at the right time in my life to work. In college I would have talked about Dante, in high school I would have talked about Dylan, in junior high I would have talked about the Detroit Tigers -- but right now it's a little embarrassing that the two things that thrill me most are a rock band and a college football team.
Notwithstanding, it's a peppy album -- at times a cheerful album -- even though one too familiar with hangovers and hospitals to be uplifting. It's their most listenable album. It doesn't wear you down and it wants you at the party.
The slightly less good news. It's no "Separation Sunday." It doesn't swing for the fences in the same way and it doesn't move in the same way. Craig Finn isn't drawing from the Old Testament or the Resurrection; he isn't telling a virtuoso multicharacter story about a fall and a redemption. As catchy as the songs are, none knocks me to the floor the way "Stevie Nix" and "How a Resurrection Really Feels" still do.
But expecting that would be unreasonable. "Blood on the Tracks" is still "Blood on the Tracks," and if you spend your whole time comparing "Desire" to the masterwork you're going to end up frustrated. A near-great album is nothing to scoff at.
But for one stretch, the album is great. In the middle of the album is a trio of perfectly aligned songs.
First is the graceful, beautiful "First Nights." We catch up with old friends from "Separation Sunday," and they've seen better days. After a brief melody from Franz Nicolay's piano, we're told that "Charlemagne shakes in the streets. Gideon makes love to the sweets. Holly's not invincible. In fact she's in the hospital, not far from that bar where we met on that first night."
What's the first night? The first high, and the first night they met. It's a mournful, beautiful songs about regrets, nostalgia, and separation. "Holly's insatiable. She still looks incredible, but she don't look like that same girl we met on that first night. She was golden with barlight and beer. She slept like she's never been scared."
Golden with barlight and beer: if that phrase doesn't evoke an image for you, this is not a band you want to know and you're not someone I want to drink with.
The piano-heavy tune evokes everything, drinking alone in a bar in the rain, thinking about what's missing and what you've missed. And after all of that beautiful bittersweet reminiscing, what do you learn? That's Holly's inconsolable because she can't get as high as she got on that first night. Is she talking about drugs (probably) or the ineffible (optimistically)? It's sad either way.
We get a slow crescendo starting with the album's title -- the phrase "boys and girls in America" repeated in a half-whisper -- that builds into a guitar boomlet and lyrics that allude to an ealier song on the album -- "don't bother with the guys with the hot soft eyes" -- and then the refrain "when they kiss they spit white noise." And those white-noise kisses contrast with the Twin Cities kisses from the first track, "Stuck Between Stations," where they "sound like clicks and hisses."
The lyrical self-references continue in the next track, "The Party Pit," which to my ears is a straight-out party song. The last time we were in the party pit, it was in "Separation Sunday's" song "Banging Camp," where we saw Holly shaking but still trying to shake it. It's the story about a lost girlfriend that the narrator met at the party pit. They "sailed away on such separate trips, and she got pimped out at the party pit" once the narrator was away at college.
In an e-mail, our occasional guest-blogger and commentator Crunk Raconteur indicated that he thought this was an extremely dark song. I don't hear it that way. I think that "pimped" is used in the colloquial sense, not a literal one. She thinks that all those things she did were just momentum from the party pit; our two main characters are speculating while they walk into a euphoria-inducing "brand new Minneapolis."
These aren't exactly good times, but like so much in this band's body of lyrics, they're times when the best and worst naturally coexist. The narrator is "pretty sure we kissed," but then he's left with no option but to "walk around and drink some more."
More ambiguous is the next song, "You Can Make Him Like You." The Sunday Times just ran an interesting article on this band that varied between the insightful and the vacuous, but one of the mysteries of it was a description of this song as "uncharacteristically heavy-handed."
The song is not heavy-handed. I'm not sure what exactly it is -- whether it's a bitter ex-boyfriend declaiming the recklessness of an ex-girlfriend, whether it's an oddly encouraging song about a spoiled girl who waltzes through whatever she likes, whether it's a depressed girl trying to encourage herself. It's a song packed with memorable lines: "You don't have to know inspiring people, let your boyfriend know inspiring people. You can hang out in the kitchen, talk about the stars and the upcoming sequel. ... You don't have to go to the right kind of schools, let your boyfriend come from the right kind of schools. You can wear his old sweatshirt and cover yourself like a bruise."
I don't know what exactly Craig Finn is trying to say, but with great specificity it conjures up all kinds of names, faces, incidents and disruptions from high school. Some of those girls turned out to have great lives and some did not, but we definitely knew them.
Mutual crowd-band love on display Sunday night at Irving Plaza, from rogo2000's photostream.
This three-song stretch is particularly strong, but scattered elsewhere on the album are some other small triumphs.
The strange and beautiful acoustic song "Citrus" is a paean to booze and Christianity: "Hey citrus, hey liquor, I love it when you touch each other ... I see Judas in the hard eyes of the boys working the corners. I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers." Like "Stuck Between Stations" and "First Nights," it's a genuinely moving piece of work.
The album's first single "Chips Ahoy!" and its companion piece "Hot Soft Light" are two of the hardest rocking, most straightforward songs on the album. "Chips Ahoy!" features a man who dates a woman with the psychic gift to predict the winners of horseraces. "Hot Soft Light" is a chronicle about addiction ("it started recreational / and it ended kind of medical / it came on hot and soft and then it tightened up its tentacles."). They're the band flexing its "Back in Black" muscles and giving the introspection a rest.
But then the album gets slightly clumsy. Another guitar-heavy song called "Same Kooks" is fine, but not particularly memorable. It abstains from the same lyrical pyrotechnics of earlier rockers like "Knuckles" or "The Swish."
"Massive Night" and "Southtown Girls" I found slightly annoying until I saw them played live, when they proved to be great sing-along anthems. "Massive Night," about antics at a school dance, comes across as a parody of Hold Steady lyrics, culminating with the lines, "She had a gun in her mouth and she was shooting up in her dreams when the chaperone said that we'd been crowned the king and the queen."
I classify that as trying too hard.
"Southtown Girls" sounds a little syrupy. If the phrase "Southtown girls won't blow you away, but you know that they'll stay" sounds potentially tiresome, you're right -- except when at a live show with several hundred of your best friends, screaming the words repeatedly.
Lastly, there's an abysmal song called "Chillout Tent." It's a song I'd rather forget. It's the story of two hugely unlikeable kids who show up at a rock festival, overindulge on psychedlics, detox in "the chillout tent," hook up, and never see one another again. Craig Finn serves as narrator, and two guest vocalists play the part of the boy and girl. The song sounds like a horrendous misfire from a Broadway musical that aspires to edginess; the guest vocals, so annoying that they're unbearable.
This band is nothing if not generous with thanks and lavish with praise to other musicians. I imagine that someone recognized this was a clunker, but, not wanting to offend the two guest vocalists (who have bands and careers of their own) they decided to include it anyway.
"Chillout Tent" poisoned my first listen of this album, which I've since grown to love. With the exception of "Chillout Tent," even the clumsy songs are better than 95 percent of other bands' output.
I previously made some Dylan allusions. Blasphemous, yes, and not particularly meaningful, but it's time to expand on the heresy.
I'm not speaking in terms of greatness.
But the best lyrics of The Hold Steady have created a wholly authentic and credible world of their own. Like "Desolation Row." Like "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts." Like "Queen Jane Approximately" and "Like a Rolling Stone" and "One More Cup of Coffee." The Hold Steady has produced a near-great album and a kick-ass party, but have also established discrete worlds of their own, as universal as they are specific.
Reveling at tonight's Hold Steady show in Irving Plaza, about six months after the band's April barnburner at Warsaw, I reached some conclusions about crowds at Hold Steady shows. What I saw last April was not an outlier.
These are not the standard New York concertgoing crowds. People do not stand hugging themselves, nod indifferently, and chat between songs. There is hardly a hipster in sight -- the sniffling indie kids and the clustered up clubber kids are called out at the start of the encore set when, inevitably, Craig Finn starts it off with a positive jam. The median age is somewhere in the early 30s. A solid contingent of exiles from the Upper Midwest make up the crowd, as is made clear when Craig Finn references Minneapolis or the region during his segues between songs.
In this city, only at a Hold Steady show do you see middle-aged professional greybeards jumping -- jumping -- next to a trio of hot 25-year-old girls shouting about how Mackenzie Phillips doesn't live here anymore. Most nights you see a band perform to a crowd that roundly could not give a shit.
So The Hold Steady sings about how they always dream of a unified scene, and at their shows they somehow pull it off. My voice hoarse and fist in the air, I turned back to say something to a friend and caught the eye of a woman standing next to me. She and I didn't say anything, just smiled -- beamed -- in a moment of collective triumph that I've rarely experienced anywhere other than Michigan Stadium.
The rapport between band and audience is incomparable. For all the gripes about Craig Finn not having a melodic singing voice, it's his rhythmic half-shouting that makes a great live show. Anyone can sing along, and everyone seems to. When they broke into "Southtown Girls," a song from an album that isn't even released yet, instead of an unaccompanied a capella voice beginning the song's opening anthem, all of Irving Plaza was singing: Southtown girls won't blow you away, but you know that they'll stay. This appeared to take the band completely by surprise.
This intensity and affection goes both ways: When guitarist Tad Kubler stepped to the microphone and said, "We can't thank you guys enough," there wasn't a drop of cynicism.
Tonight's penultimate song was "Most People Are DJs." Craig Finn opened up his arms like he was hugging the entire crowd, repeatedly mouthing the words 'Thank you." Tad drank from a bottle of Jack Daniels and passed it down to the crowd. Crowd surfing ensued. Every hand in the house was in the air. By then, my arms were hurting. My voice had run out.
Somewhere in the ether, there is an ideal platonic Bruce Springsteen song, and somewhere else, there is an ideal platonic Billy Joel song, neither of which exist in real life. On their new album, The Hold Steady will have a song called "Stuck Between Stations" that is those songs -- the Springsteen and Billy Joel that never existed, but should. It's a story about the poet John Berryman. Any song that pays tribute to On the Road, the Golden Gophers, and a celebrated American poet is going to be intriguing; what I can't do justice is the sweep and the sweetness of the sound. You can find an mp3 of "Stuck Between Stations" played acoustically on Bows Plus Arrows. It's a nice version, but it doesn't give you a glimpse of the song's grandeur; it's a pencil sketch of a Rembrandt, but for now, it'll do. I'm giddy right now so I don't trust myself; I want to call it one of the great songs of our lifetime, but in retrospect, I'm sure that judgment will embarrass me.
The album is not as dark, smart or literate as The Hold Steady's two prior releases, "Almost Killed Me" and "Separation Sunday." It aims its sights a little lower than a Biblical epic about disgrace and redemption, drawing instead from the band's threads that connect to the Meatloaf and the Billy Joel, about teenage boys and girls and the romances that crash down around them.
It's a very good album. I plan to write more about it, but for now I just want to address the first track, "Stuck Between Stations." It's in a class apart.
According to the Oxford Book of American Poetry, the song's hero, John Berryman, was born in MacAlester, Oklahoma. "When he was eleven, his father (whose restaurant business had gone under) was found shot to death." The death was determined to be a suicide, a theme that appears in many of Berryman's poems: "Berryman felt that the 'artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.' On 7 January 1972, he jumped to his death off the Washington Avenue bridge between St. Paul and Minneapolis."
It's natural material for Craig Finn, whose lyrics drip Twin Cities lore and a two-books-a-week erudition. Like the early Martin Scorsese movies, he's preoccupied with Catholic suffering and redemption. (The released version of this song actually omits a great couplet that made it into the acoustic version -- "he was petulant and spastic / but he ended up a crazy cool Catholic.") Spending a little time looking over Berryman's poems, I think Finn was consciously mirroring Berryman's structure and word choice.
Berryman's 1948 poem "The Traveler" includes the following passage:
I took the same train that the others took, To the same place. Were it not for that look And those words, we were all of us the same. I studied merely maps. I tried to name The effects of motion on the travelers, I watched the couple I could see, the curse And blessings of that couple, their destination, The deception practiced on them at the station, Their courage. When the trained stopped and they knew The end of their journey, I descended too.
Here's a passage of Craig Finn's lyrics from "Stuck Between Stations":
The Devil and John Berryman, they took a walk together, and they ended up on Washington, talking to the river. He said, "I surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers, but big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers."
There was that night that we thought that John Berryman could fly. But he didn't so he died.
She said, "You're pretty good with words but words won't change your life." And they didn't so he died.
And he was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected. He loved the golden gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters. He likes the warm feeling but he's tired of all the dehydration. Most nights are kind of fuzzy but that last night he had total retention.
These Twin Cities kisses, they sound like clicks and hisses. We all fell down and drowned in the Mississippi River.
I don't know if Finn was consciously mimicking "The Traveler" or if portions of the structure and rhyme scheme -- lyrics that revolve around a rhyme with "station" and culminate in a descent -- sound similar by coincidence. Finn certainly knows the poem, but whether he had it in front of him or it just burrowed into his mind is anyone's guess.
The power of these lyrics might get subsumed in the song's opening quotation of Jack Kerouac ("There are nights when I think Sal Paradise is right: boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.") and its framing around the narrator's girlfriend, who also likes the warm feeling but is tired of the dehydration. The individual lines in these lyrics have real force. Words won't change your life; big brains and soft bodies make for lousy lovers. At once, Finn romanticizes and dreads a writer's life, and Berryman's.
This song also rocks as much as any other Hold Steady song. Finn's lyrics could have been about guinea pigs or his humps and the song would be a minor classic. This is essential to the song's success. With maudlin music, it would be Tori Amos for dudes. As it is, you can hate poets but love the song, which is fine by me.
I'll write later about my ambivalence with other portions of the album, where the lyrics don't live up to the band's quirky sophistication -- forget Humbert Humbert and Mackenzie Phillips, because some stretches are Laguna Beach material. Whatever my other small misgivings, this song compensates.
Lastly, I think Finn and Berryman look a little bit alike. Even if it's just in the glasses.
"Chips Ahoy," the title track off The Hold Steady's forthcoming "Boys and Girls in America," is available for mp3 download here.
The accompanying review states:
Pitchfork's been rocking our hyper-protected copy of The Hold Steady's highly anticipated forthcoming long-player Boys and Girls in America for a few weeks now, mulling over more clever ways to say "outstanding," "surefire year-end list banger", and "future classic" before it arrives on October 3.
Having played the song several times today, I have a few additional thoughts. First, when I heard the song played live a few months ago, it sounded like resurrected AC/DC. As recorded, it's no Celine Dion, but there's certainly a more melodic, chipper undertone. Craig Finn's voice approximates singing -- a contrast to the raspy, half-dead but born-again shouts that I've grown to love. Likewise, the lyrics don't aspire to synthesize pop culture with the Old Testament. I expect that the album will be less of a challenge and more of a party.
Whenever I post about The Hold Steady, I do it knowing that not many people who come here are that interested in the group.
I don't write about them because I'm trying to prove a point; I write about them because I can't help it.
I also know that when I write about them, I repeat every superlative in the dictionary and compare them to every band in the history of rock. I can't help that, either.
Last night was something like a rapture. It was the fourth time I've seen them, and by far the best. Craig Finn was more sober than in previous appearance. Hate to sound prudish, but it showed, in a good way. The lyrics were totally clear, lucid, and in sync with the band. I love the hard-drinking, unselfconscious bar band persona, but what I saw last night was more poised and professional. It was a show to convert the skeptics. Warsaw was crowded and the front third of the audience was berzerk. Forty-year-olds who looked like they could be your boss slam danced with NYU kids. I didn't see a single dumbass pull out a camera phone or a digital camera. It was the crowd of my dreams.
The Hold Steady came home to New York after a tour of the South and of Australia. Whatever happened in these legs, the band seemed cockier, more polished, and more energized. I may have spent my credibility by repeatedly declaring their greatness, but last night they were even greater.
Sprinkled between the high points from "Separation Sunday" and "Almost Killed Me," they tested out some songs from a planned fall release. Their new songs are, in a word, spectacular. The Book of Revelations undertones from "Separation Sunday" have been traded in for tones that are less fire and brimstone.
I'm going to talk about one song in particular. Somewhere in the ether, there is an ideal platonic Bruce Springsteen song, and somewhere else, there is an ideal platonic Billy Joel song, neither of which exist in real life. On their new album, The Hold Steady will have a song called "Stuck Between Stations" that is those songs -- the Springsteen and Billy Joel that never existed, but should. It's a story about the poet John Berryman. Any song that pays tribute to On the Road, the Golden Gophers, and a celebrated American poet is going to be intriguing; what I can't do justice is the sweep and the sweetness of the sound. You can find an mp3 of "Stuck Between Stations" played acoustically on Bows Plus Arrows. It's a nice version, but it doesn't give you a glimpse of the song's grandeur; it's a pencil sketch of a Rembrandt, but for now, it'll do. I'm giddy right now so I don't trust myself; I want to call it one of the great songs of our lifetime, but in retrospect, I'm sure that judgment will embarrass me.
Here's an interesting post about the group's use of religious themes. As loyal commentor Crunk Raconteur mentioned in response to my previous post, Boston College's alumni magazine printed an excellent article about Craig Finn. (Why can't my alumni magazine be that good?) And their new album is supposed to be out in the fall. You'll be hearing more about this from me, but I'm only doing it out of love.
Craig Finn, February 2006, from WEiR's photostream.Posting of this picture is not an endorsement of snapping pics at concerts, which is lame and rude.
Postscript: After I posted, I found the following description of the show on a myspace blog. In substance and tone, I couldn't agree more:
So: yes. Last night's Hold Steady show at Warsaw was one of the most mindblowing music experiences I've ever had. I have photos, snapped wildly over the flailing hands of everyone around me. Some of them may show the edge of the mosh pit that formed or perhaps some of the crowd-surfing. Mostly they show Craig Finn screaming, jumping up and down, dancing wildly, and generally electrified into the realm of what can only really be called rock ecstasy. There is no way to adequately describe the charisma of Craig Finn. It is awesomely beyond description. It was a joy to watch him, a joy to watch him completely feeling the joy of the audience watching him, just joy all around.
... It was great to be a part of this massive live crowd of people chanting out the lyrics to the Separation Sunday songs; it was equally great to let the raucous semi-coherence of the new material wash over me.
This is less of a write-up than an attempt to commit some of the experience to a lasting medium.
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