From this weekend's New York Times. Might want to print it out and take it to the crapper - it's a long one, but worth the read.
A Guide to the Hold Steady States of America
By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: October 1, 2006
THE HOLD STEADY was supposed to be a local band, and in a sense that??s what it is. The members mainly live in New York, and Sunday night they??re coming to Manhattan, to Irving Plaza, to celebrate their great new album, ??Boys and Girls in America.?
But the Hold Steady might also be one of the least local bands around. As you might have guessed from the album title, the members are intrigued with the idea of being an American band. And they have found an intriguing way to be one.
Their story starts with a couple of guys, Craig Finn and Tad Kubler, who played together in a beloved Minneapolis band, Lifter Puller. (Lifter Puller was huge, if only in the minds of a small number of fans.) Mr. Finn and Mr. Kubler left the Twin Cities for Brooklyn, where they started the Hold Steady. A bar band, they called it. And Mr. Finn, the singer (ranter, more like) and lyricist, had the good sense to avoid writing about his new hometown.
Instead he wrote about his old one. He wrote about a sketchy fellow named St. Paul, about a wasted hero ??swishing through City Center.? He wrote about Payne Avenue and about the ??war going down in the Middle Western states.?
He wrote about the rest of the country too, as if he were compiling a guide to the country??s wasted wayward youth. ??The kids out on the West Coast are taking off their clothes,? he reported. Also: ??Pensacola parties hard with poppers, pills and Pepsi.? And: ??We got so high some nights Michigan looked just like a mitten.? More ominous: ??I looked deep in his eyes I saw Lynn, Massachusetts.?
The Hold Steady made an album, ??The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me? (Frenchkiss), and started to tour. Mr. Finn was an unlikely lead singer: small and rumpled, with glasses that always needed adjusting and a guitar that rarely, it seemed, needed playing. No matter: it turned out that Mr. Kubler??s beery guitar riffs went well with Mr. Finn??s beery stories; both went better than well with actual beer.
It turned out too that those lyrics had been pretty prescient: as the band members traveled the country, drinking and meeting weirdos and prowling shady neighborhoods and drinking some more, their lives got downright Hold Steady-ish: ??I guess we just needed space/We heard about this place/They called the United States.? They toured, getting sucked into their own songs.
Since the release of that first album, in 2004, the band has become much less of a well-kept secret. The 2005 follow-up, ??Separation Sunday? (Frenchkiss), was even better: it told the overlapping stories of three characters (Charlemagne, Gideon and Holly) drifting in and out of punk shows, Catholic Masses and scary parties. Assessing that album now, Mr. Finn admits, ??It was never as fun as I wanted it to be.? Maybe not for him. But it was one of last year??s best albums.
Mr. Finn and his mainly Midwestern group ?? the drummer Bobby Drake, from Minneapolis; the bassist Galen Polivka, from Milwaukee; and the keyboard player Franz Nicolay, from Center Sandwich, N.H. ?? keep finding ways to prove that ??bar band? isn??t an insult. ??Boys and Girls in America? is to be released by a bigger label, Vagrant. And it was produced by the alt-rock veteran John Agnello, who helped make Mr. Finn sound more like a band member and less like some liquored-up Twin Cities street-corner bard.
Which means that a few die-hard fans may prefer the old stuff. There are, in any case, some bumps in the road. ??Chillout Tent,? an excursion to western Massachusetts, has guest vocals by Elizabeth Elmore (from the Reputation) and Dave Pirner (from Soul Asylum); if there??s one thing the Hold Steady doesn??t need, it??s help. Another, ??You Can Make Him Like You,? sounds uncharacteristically heavy-handed. But over all the CD sounds strong and streamlined, and if anything, Mr. Finn??s lyrics are pithier than ever. In ??Massive Night? he evokes prom night with a pungent couplet: ??The dance floor was crowded, the bathroom was worse/We kissed in the car and we drank from your purse.?
About that title: it??s playfully misleading. (It comes from Jack Kerouac??s ??On the Road,? which Mr. Finn quotes in the first couplet: ??Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.?) The first Hold Steady CD was a call to arms, and the second one was a concept album; this new one is more modest. It starts and ends in Minneapolis, and nearly all the songs in between seem to take place there too.
It sounds as if Mr. Finn and his gang are heading back home. But surely it can??t be a coincidence that, just as the Hold Steady is starting to reach a few more of the boys and girls in America, Mr. Finn has refocused on Minneapolis. He??s clearly obsessed with the link between small stories and big ones, between local favorites and national successes, between punk-club stages and dive-bar jukeboxes, between bands no one??s heard of and songs everybody knows.
This, maybe, is his idea of what it means to be an American band: singing about Minneapolis, and all the Minneapolises across the country. A dull street corner gets transformed into a rousing refrain; a fictionalized town inspires its real-life counterpart. That album title, ??Boys and Girls in America,? really isn??t so misleading; it??s a salute to the neighborhood kids in the songs, and outside them too. The Hold Steady??s made-up map of the country is looking a little bit less imaginary.
Here??s what their America looks like.
BROOKLYN Mr. Finn put it plainly in one early song. ??I got bored when I didn??t have a band/So I started a band, man.? In a city full of ambitious transplants, he was happy to play the part of the unassuming local guy. Mr. Finn said he warned the label that the band wouldn??t be touring; there was a modest practice space, but no van. But a local show led to a booking in Baltimore, and before long the Brooklyn bar band was crammed into a borrowed van, off to see the place they sang about.
YBOR CITY, TAMPA, FLA. Mr. Finn saw the name somewhere and thought it was ??fun to say.? He heard it was a hard-partying part of Tampa, and so a Hold Steady tradition was born: three separate Hold Steady songs pay tribute to Ybor City??s alleged decadence. (??Ybor City is trés speedy but they throw such killer parties/Killer parties almost killed me.?) When the band finally played Tampa, some fans traveled down from New York, eager to see if the real Ybor City would be as wild as the one in the lyrics. For one night, anyway, it was.
NEW ORLEANS In one old song, Mr. Finn sings about avoiding this city: ??He said, ??What about New Orleans???/She said, ??I don??t think you understand what that means/All those hangers-on, the girls lifting up their shirts when the cameras come on.?? ? Did he consider changing the lyric after Hurricane Katrina? ??No, I think it got better,? he says. The lyric, that is, not the city.
(A stickier situation: ??Hot Fries,? which includes the lines, ??All your favorite songs wouldn??t seem so sad/If you weren??t so depressed/Elliott Smith seems like a mess to me.? After Mr. Smith??s death, those words line sounded even meaner, but Mr. Finn decided to keep it. ??I felt weird for a second, but then I thought, even as a casual fan, you knew he was a mess.?)
New Orleans is also the adopted hometown of Dave Pirner, who submitted his backing vocals for ??Chillout Tent? via courier. As it happens, Mr. Finn still hasn??t met Mr. Pirner in person, even though he??s been a fan since the 1980??s, when Mr. Pirner helped put Minneapolis rock on the map. When you??re talking about the Hold Steady, all roads lead back to the Twin Cities.
MODESTO, CALIF. This town made it into a Hold Steady song ?? ??Modesto Is Not That Sweet? ?? only because Mr. Finn used to see the name on envelopes when he worked in an American Express office. It??s a great nonalbum track about dashed expectations (find it on iTunes or eMusic), although Mr. Finn sounds a little bit sheepish when he talks about it. ??You learn about geography on tour,? he says. ??And one thing I learned was, Modesto is not where I thought it was.?
HOSTILE, MASS. As you may have noticed, this town doesn??t actually exist. But so what? Besides the Twin Cities, this is probably the most important place in the Hold Steady universe. Mr. Finn went to Boston College, though he seems to have spent a good chunk of his time enjoying the city??s famously knuckleheaded punk scene.
??You know what Boston shows are like,? he said. ??You can??t even have an indie-rock show without a fight.? He remembers seeing a local hardcore band ?? Eye for an Eye, perhaps ?? during his first week on campus: ??They don??t play two songs before the whole crowd goes nuts. I jumped behind the bar. I knew, like, one guy there; he lost a tooth.? You can hear that scene reflected in his affectionate odes to punk-rock violence, and also in ??Hostile, Mass.,? one of two Hold Steady songs that mentions this mythical town: ??He woke up deep in Hostile, Massachusetts, reaching out to try to touch the special effects/He had no shoes and no pants/They dressed him in a shirt with a collar and called him Porky Pig.? Considering the locale, this partygoer probably got off easy.
LITTLETON, COLO. It??s the town made famous by the massacre at Columbine High School. It??s also the site of the Freshman Academy, a program within Littleton High School, established after the killings for at-risk students. A teacher there, Thom Uhl, fell in love with the Hold Steady, and helped his students fall in love too, by using the band to help structure the curriculum. The band??s lyrics were a starting point for discussions of religion (??Separation Sunday? is in part an album about Catholicism) and the band??s touring schedule helped organize a study of American geography. When the members finally arrived for a special seventh-period concert, they were greeted by one student playing a heavy metal version of their song ??Your Little Hoodrat Friend? on guitar. The Hold Steady??s core audience tends to be well above the legal drinking age (for some reason this band attracts more than its fair share of 30-something ex-punks), but at this show, ??the kids? were exactly that.
BRUNSWICK, ME. A tip for rabid Hold Steady fans everywhere: Don??t be shy. If you hear the band is coming to your town, go ahead and throw a pre-concert warm-up party. Encourage your friends to write their favorite lyrics all over their bodies. Share an expensive bottle of Scotch with Mr. Finn. Do all that, as some students at Bowdoin College did, and you may win the ultimate prize: a salute in song. A line from the new album originally went, ??She drove down from Colgate with a carload of girlfriends.? But after the frenzy in Brunswick, Mr. Finn rewrote the line: now it??s Bowdoin, not Colgate.
HOBOKEN, N.J. The home of Water Music, the studio where the band recorded much of the new album. Mr. Kubler says it was helpful to have a strong outside voice like Mr. Agnello, someone who was ??really good at saying, ??This song isn??t going to make the record.?? ? And though Mr. Kubler experimented with some extra guitar tracks, he erased almost all of them, which was probably wise. Part of what makes this band work is the rude sound of an elementary guitar riff, and the space around it. The first single, ??Chips Ahoy!,? starts at a racetrack (the title is the name of a horse) and quickly moves to a bar, or maybe an apartment, as Mr. Finn poses an unanswerable question: ??How??m I supposed to know that you??re high if you won??t even dance?? Elsewhere ??Same Kooks? is classic rock, only more frantic, and ??First Night? is one of those piano ballads this band is unaccountably good at. Even better, the song brings back the hero of the last album, though she??s not in great shape: ??Holly??s not invincible/In fact she??s in the hospital/Not from that bar where we met on that first night.?
MINNEAPOLIS: It??s where the album starts and ends. In ??Stuck Between Stations? Mr. Finn sings about the poet John Berryman, who committed suicide in Minneapolis (by flinging himself into the Mississippi). But he might also, teasingly, be singing about himself: ??He was drunk and exhausted, 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.? The album ends with ??Southtown Girls,? a tribute both to Cheap Trick??s ??Southern Girls? and to a Twin Cities species slightly less exotic than its name: ??Southtown Girls? are the type one might find at the Southtown Shopping Center in Bloomington, Minn.; it is, Mr. Finn is proud to note, ??a really lame mall.? Yet the song has a great, swaggering guitar riff, and a refrain that balances sweetness and sarcasm: ??Southtown girls won??t blow you away/But you know that they??ll stay.?
So maybe the song is also about how even the most mundane place can seem exciting, if you sing about it right. After the first chorus Mr. Finn reels off some whimsical directions. ??Take Lyndale to the horizon,? he sings. ??Take Nicollet out to the ocean.? And that??s the Hold Steady??s hometown: a singular city that goes on forever.
