 Last Night a Bar Band Saved My Life
by STEVE MCPHERSON
Simulacra are idealized representations of things that never really existed in the first place. A good example is the quaint notion of the ‘50s in this country as a time of innocence where all was right and moral with the world. To an extent, they’re what any writer of fiction (and by extension, songwriter) is dealing in, pulling together characters and situations that ring true without necessarily being true to life. What shows vision and determination is when an entire band can give itself over to the cause, creating, say, the band you always wished was holding down the corner of your favorite wood-paneled dive bar.
 The
first time you hear the Hold Steady, you might not know exactly what to make
of them, especially if you’re familiar with founding members Craig Finn
(vocals/guitar) and Tad Kubler’s (guitar) last band, the near legendary
lake country luminaries Lifter Puller. The Hold Steady’s 2003 debut, Almost
Killed Me, featured the same brand of characters that populated Finn’s
narratives in Lifter Puller: addicts, skaters, bartenders, drunks and punks.
They were maybe a hair older, like the bandmembers themselves, and maybe the
shine was off the dissolute lifestyles they’d chosen to live, but Finn
was still Finn. What had changed was the setting, and when one barfly says to
the narrator (presumably Finn himself) of “Barfruit Blues, “It’s
good to see you back in a bar band, baby,” she isn’t cracking wise.
The Hold Steady are firmly a bar band, laying down tracks that sound a little
like Springsteen, a little like Foghat and a lot like the best bar band you’ve
ever heard. That’s because for most bands knocking it out in the local
watering holes across the country, lyrics come second to the music. Well, maybe
for the Hold Steady they’re still second, but not a distant second.
“We’ll flesh out the songs in our practice space,” says Kubler
by phone from New York City, the band’s adopted hometown, “and Craig
will sometimes have lyrics and sometimes not. Sometimes you can’t tell
because we’re so loud and the P.A. that we have in our space is not that
hot. So you can kind of hear that he’s—you can kind of get the cadence
down, but you can’t actually hear what he’s saying. And then you
rehearse and rehearse and rehearse ‘em and then you go into the studio
and you record and you track and you track and you track and you’re just
like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t want to hear this fucking song again.’
And then we get all the basic tracks down: just one guitar, bass, maybe a piano
track and get the drums fine-tuned and then Craig’ll go in and start to
do lyrics and it kind of breathes a new life back into the song. Because you’ve
heard the riff over and over again and to hear what Craig’s saying and
to hear that narrative thread that flows through the song and how it works with
the music it’s like, you kind of hear it for the first time again, which
is really exciting.”
The sharp angle at which the lyrics were jammed into the music was blindingly
appparent on Almost Killed Me, at times seeming to coast by on the admittedly
great formula of hyper-literate lyrics plus dirty greasy rock, but their most
recent effort, Separation Sunday, is an entirely different affair. The
novelty of their sound has worn in a bit and in its place we find big themes.
It’s a tale of redemption and salvation, full-on born-again style, all
laid out over a near-concept album.
The record is thick with allusions to the Bible, but twisted into Finn’s
inimitable worldview alongside plenty of self-referencing. After album opener
“Hornets! Hornets!” you get the story of Adam and Eve in “The
Cattle and the Creeping Things” (“I heard the dude blamed the chick/
and the chick blamed the snake/ And I heard they were naked when they got busted/
And I heard things ain’t been the same since”) and in the same song
an insider’s reference to “Certain Songs,” the best track
from their last album. What’s fascinating about it, though, is how Finn
makes the reference “And hard drugs are for bartenders” and then
immediately follows with, “I think I might have mentioned that before.”
Conflating references to their own songs with the omnipresence of the Bible
throughout Western society is not just a bold move, it creates a contiguous
world that Finn populates with his characters, lending them depth and resonance.
Finn’s never been one for much interior monologue; most of his tracks
are dialogic, like a good Platonic argument, and here the spotlight is shifted
even more heavily onto the cast around him. This is the first hint you get that
the band is not being ironic when they start peddling their brand of Grain Belt
rock and Finn and Co.’s honest-to-god belief in rock and roll as a positive
force becomes apparent when I ask Finn about a concert which will have occurred
the day before this article comes out.
If all has gone as planned, they’ll have just played during seventh period
at Littleton High School in Littleton, Colo., at the behest of a teacher who’s
been using the Hold Steady’s music in a class for ESL, Special Education
and at-risk teens. “Pretty crazy, right?” says Finn, also from New
York.  “The
guy e-mailed and it was kind of a touching e-mail. And I do read all our e-mail;
I don’t always return everything. But I was pretty impressed and I thought
it was really cool, because I do think that rock and roll is often seen as rebel,
teenage, James Dean or worse: Sid Vicious. And there are a lot of really positive
things that—speaking from experience—meant [a lot] to me at a young
age and [it was] where I turned to for comfort or at the very least escape and
I think that it’s healthy. I think it’s something that can help
kids and at-risk kids especially. And I think that this guy sort of saw that
and was using our music to teach his class and I thought it was really cool.
He was like, ‘Would you ever come here? These kids would really be freaked
out.’”
Expect the band themselves to be freaked out by another aspect of the appearance:
a Hold Steady lookalike contest. Woe betide the kid who looks like Craig Finn
now at the tender age of 17, is what I thought, but Finn had another scary scenario.
“I’ll tell you what: I don’t know if you’ve seen us
with Franz [Nicolay], our piano player, but he has a handlebar moustache and
I predict a lot of Franzs. He’d probably be the easiest to do.”
Kubler adds: “We’re just gonna go in during seventh period and kind
of do—well, over the last two years for a lot of the radio stuff, for
webcasts and stuff like that, where they want you to play live—we’ve
kind of done a stripped down thing. You know, Bobby [Drake] just has a snare
and a ride cymbal, I play acoustic guitar, Craig sings, Franz has his accordion
and a piano, and then [bassist] Galen [Polivka] plays other percussion stuff.
 And
it’s been really fun for us to kind of, as a loud rock band, to figure
out how we’re going to maintain the integrity of the songs and have a
good time and make it kind of interesting, yet, kind of more mobile.”
I had a chance to catch this set-up at CMJ back in September, and it’s
strikingly successful for a band predicated on the sonic conflict between the
music and the lyrics. The highlight was, naturally, “Certain Songs,”
which laid a lot of the groundwork for Separation Sunday, spinning a yarn about
kids from both coasts and everywhere in between finding salvation in the jukebox.
They return in force along with alcoholics, some anonymous, some not, born-agains,
a dude in sweatpants named Charlemagne (a reference to Steely Dan’s Kid
Charlemagne, perhaps?) and the character who gradually becomes the protagonist
of Separation Sunday, a girl named Hallelujah, called Holly, who was name-checked
at least as far back as “Barfruit Blues.” Sticking by one character
through her ups and downs is a bit of a tactic change for Finn, who most recently
had a thing for characters called one thing who wanted to be called something
else. Where before he used characters as self-contained object lessons, Holly’s
story is a little messier and harder to pack into a three-minute song. Could
this interest in a broader brush be a symptom of getting older and wiser himself?
 “Well,
I’m not sure I’ve done either,” says Finn. “There’s
a little more of a long-term vision for it even with touring. For instance,
you might not push it that hard drinking or partying or whatever, because you
know that you’re going to be out for a long time. It becomes somewhat
more like a job. Even if you’re not getting paid very well [laughs], your
job is to perform every night and that’s very important. If nothing else,
you don’t want to let people down. My voice is definitely something that
is more of a concern than it was because the more touring we do—if you
have five shows in a row, it can get rough. I guess you’re just not as
resilient on one level, and number two, you’re just trying to take it
more—professional is a weird word, but that’s it, though. Just do
whatever you can to make a great show. And you just keep thinking of ways to
do it.”
As regards touring and live performance, Kubler maintains the level that the
whole band is playing at is key to his enjoyment. “One of the main parts
that I really enjoy about the band is that everybody’s really kind of
paying attention to what everybody else is doing. We’re listening to eachother.
As opposed to just plugging your shit in and playing your part and you kind
of regurgitate whatever you wrote and you’re rolling through it. Live,
to keep stuff interesting, maybe we’ll do a bridge for four bars, and
maybe we’ll do it for eight. Or 12. And that’s just listening to
everybody and communicating with everybody on stage. It’s also helped
a lot in the writing process, too.
“Writing for us happens really quickly,” he continues, “and
it’s generally a really really good time. Let’s be honest: we’re
not reinventing the wheel here. I mean, we’re a rock and roll band. People
have been doing it for a long time. But I think that what we do is a little
bit different from how we approach being a band and, obviously, Craig has such
an original mind as far as his lyrics and the narrative thread of the song goes.
And his voice is so distinct. He’s always gonna be Craig Finn.”
Moment to moment and line to line, Finn’s got to be one of the most entertaining
singers to hear, but that effort to come up with new ways of making it interesting
is paying dividends in making the songs thicker and more interesting on more
levels when it’s coupled with Finn’s evocative use of geography.
And if you think that just because he split for New York he’s forgotten
about the Twin Cities, you’d be mistaken. References to 66th and Nicollet,
Mary Tyler Moore and suburban Saint Paul malls all crop up, giving the denizens
of his song concrete wayfinders through their troubled times.
 His
infamous vocal style has also been finding its way onto plenty of local records,
from appearances on Friends Like These’s “Seventh St. Queen”
to his most recent on Doomtree/Rhymesayers wunderkind P.O.S.’s soon to
be released Audition. Finn got up on stage with P.O.S. at the Rhymesayers
showcase at Irving Plaza during CMJ, and he was effusive with his praise. “It’s
funny because [guesting on a hip-hop album] is something I’ve always wanted
to do because I think there’s a lot of things about hip-hop that are done
better than rock. And one of those things is introducing new people or other
people through cameos. I was sort of always interested in that concept because
my voice, I think, is fairly distinctive. And then P.O.S. is someone who I’ve
known for a long time and I really got into his record. We actually brought
him out to play with us because I just became such a fan. So we just started
writing. He actually approached me with his record—you know, he knew Lifter
Puller—so he approached me, but right away, I wanted to do it and pushed
it. So we’ve done something really cool with that. I think that that was
a really cool experience for me and I’m excited because it was so much
fun to play with him that night [at CMJ].
“He’s gonna be really big; he’s so charismatic,” continues
Finn. “It’s the same thing I felt when I saw Sean [Daley], in that
he’s so charismatic that he just feels like a star. But at the same time,
that whole label’s insane, because [Brother] Ali, I think, is the most
gifted lyricist in all of America and so the whole show was just so exciting
to watch because how good everyone is, but [also because of] how they’re
succeeding on a national level. I think that’s something that those guys
should be really proud of and Minneapolis should be really proud of.”
Asked about his favorite bands, Kubler quickly makes his own way back to the
local talent. “The Plastic Constellations: it was such a fucking privilege
to play with those guys out here [at CMJ]. Their enthusiasm is just above and
beyond anybody else’s, and aside from being great players and great songwriters,
just to watch how much fun those guys have together is really really a joyous
thing.”
That kind of heartfelt love and respect for their peers is what really comes
through as you dig your way into Separation Sunday and, again, you get
the sense that they’re not out to mock anyone, really.  The
evangelical ethos mandates conversion, and those who belittle the true-believers
propose little to take faith’s place, but the Hold Steady are forging
a middle ground, recognizing the power of faith when it comes to saving those
who are at the end of their rope, but not without turning a skeptical eye to
the absolute belief demanded by the born-again movement. No matter how arch
and smartassed his lyrics get, you never get the sense that Finn is looking
down on his creations and now, with the Hold Steady, he’s positively lifting
them up, especially on tracks like “How A Resurrection Really Feels,”
the album’s closer, which ends with a background chorus repeating, “Welcome
back” over and over again.
What’s changed from Lifter Puller is that now the music is part of that
process in a very parallel way. Real-life bar bands slugging it out in the trenches
rarely provide real musical or lyrical excitement, but those who belittle rhythm
and blues and arena rock deny those genres’ ability to connect with a
truly broad swath of the listening public. And again, the Hold Steady toes that
line, lifting up the barroom rocker and bringing lyrical revelation to the masses.
But in the end, as they admit, they’re not reinventing the wheel. Sometimes,
all it takes are small shifts to produce something truly new and exciting.  For
someone who’s so verbose, I had wondered if Finn ever struggled with writer’s
block and if he had any advice for others who might find themselves at a creative
dead end. “You know, before Separation Sunday, I asked Sean Daley
if he ever had writer’s block and he said he did,” replies Finn.
“He said, ‘I just got a laptop and I started typing, rather than
writing,’ and I was already on a laptop for my lyrics, so I flipped it
up and that worked. I’d say change the way you write; I went back to composition
books and that’s my advice. Change the way you write.” ||
The Hold Steady plays on Sun., Oct. 30 at First Avenue with the Constantines.
8 p.m. $13/$15. 21+. 701 First Avenue North. For further information visit the
band’s website at TheHoldSteady.com.
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