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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The Hold Steady
Wednesday 10 March @ 15:12:06 |
 Ex-Lifter Puller Members Return from NYC Exile as the Hold Steady
by Kate Silver
At last count, Craig Finn had dropped the phrase “Hold steady” five times. An assurance for all the sniffling indie kids, the late nightclub crawlers and Page Six stalkers. Memo to the City Center buskers, just take it easy. Hold steady. Add to the list all of the cult Lifter Puller fans with LFTR PLLR knuckle tattoos snapping photos in front of 15th & Franklin. More than a rock band; hold steady is a mantra, and a warning.
The Hold Steady: (R-L) Tad Kubler, Galen Polivka, Craig Finn, Judd Counsel
The Hold Steady’s Almost Killed Me (French Kiss), the Brooklyn-based group’s debut, is rife with choice words for the Williamsburg glitterati and message board-brats in the ‘burbs. Not to mention everyone waiting with bated breath back home in Minnesota, anxious for the latest from the wry-and-tonic voice of Finn, a cult hero in his own right. Onetime chronicler of seedy nightlife like Jimmy Breslin-turned-blogger, Finn, along with Lifter Puller bassist Tad Kubler, drummer Judd Counsell, and bassist Galen Polivka (also former Minneapolitans and members of Punchdrunk), still trolls the bar scene, this time from the stage.
The Hold Steady is the PBR stop on the way to the nightclub. The coolest damn bar band that just might one day make the jukebox queue. Bridging Ashbury Park with Paisley Park, The Hold Steady can feel at home anywhere, from the industrial Midwest to industrious and frenetic New York City boroughs. At the same time Finn bridges puns and snippets of dialogue together like found poetry constructed from the back of US Weekly and a Sunday Times circular (“Last night we spent the night in Newport news,” “It was a Blockbuster summer”). “It’s always entertaining when you’re hanging out with entertainers,” he muses with casual aplomb—whether riffing on a chick in Beverly Hills who looks like Beverly Sills or a babe in Shaker heights who looks like Patty Smythe (“The Swish”), or even young Corey who’s into hardcore (“Hostile, Mass”). People call him “Hardcorey.” Nightclub Dwight is history. Meet the new class.
Currently Finn represents a handful of record labels via the download service emusic.com, and is also developing the emusic offshoot Crisp Songs, which produces exclusive tracks, including those by a few local artists like Rob Skoro, Monarques, and Mark Mallman. He is also at work with an unnamed DC-based project also featuring hip hopper Cex and former members of The Dismemberment Plan. By phone from Brooklyn, Finn chatted with Pulse about DJs, would-be saviors of rock, the internet, and the crossed circuits of logic that bind them. The revolution may not be televised, but you can look for it on http://gawker.com. Just hold steady.
Lifter Puller (R)
Pulse: When did you move out to New York?
Craig Finn: I moved out to New York in the Fall of 2000. It wasn’t really that high concept. When Lifter Puller broke up, it seemed like if my wife and I wanted to make a change, try something new, it seemed like the time to do it. Among other things, it’s an exciting city and I’ve always kind of been fascinated by it. Maybe more importantly, this was where we knew the second most people outside of Minneapolis.
Pulse: You’d spent a fair amount of time out there before moving?
Finn: From tour and all that, and going to college in Boston (at Boston College), I had a lot of friends who I’d see on weekends. We don’t look at it necessarily as a permanent move. This is a good place to be now. With both of our families in Minneapolis it’s likely that we’ll come back before too long. Tad [Kubler] moved out here about two years ago.
Pulse: Did you know right away that you wanted to start a new band?
Finn: The way it kinda came up is I thought it might be fun to do some music and with Tad around — he came into Lifter Puller as a replacement for [bassist] Tom Roach but his skills as a guitar player have always been really amazing to me. I’d gotten on my feet a little bit by that time, and was feeling a little bored, a little restless, wanted to play music with some people. Some friends of mine had a comedy group and they were doing stuff at the Upright Citizens Brigade theatre. They wanted to do this kind of rock and roll variety show live and they wanted us to play in and out of what would be commercial breaks or set changes—just kinda classic or hard rock covers. And Tad is the guy who’s king of knowing every classic rock and hard rock song. So I said, “Tad, you’ve gotta play this with us!” And once we learned about twenty covers—stuff like AC/DC and Thin Lizzy, and Van Halen—we were thinking this stuff is really fun to play, and then we started writing songs. Getting together and playing covers was really sort of instrumental in forming the band.
Pulse: Tell me about the other band members.
Finn: I met them in Minneapolis. They moved to New York in ’96 or ’97. They came out here and broke up. Galen and Judd have been playing together in bands since before high school. I originally started playing with Galen and he brought in Judd and as a rhythm section they’re obviously pretty familiar with each other. And so that’s been really fun, to play behind those guys.
Pulse: There are still so many references to the Midwest on the record, were the songs written after you moved to New York?
Finn: Yeah, all of them. Some of them were written after I moved to New York and before I started playing with a band. It’s something that I feel like I know about. A lot of stuff—regardless of being in New York—I still have a lot of the same feelings about.
Pulse: You point out in your press release that, “While The Hold Steady is a band based in new York City, it would be extremely misleading to call them a New York City band.”
Finn: After moving out here in 2000 when The Strokes, Liars, The Rapture, and all that dance punk stuff started to come up, was great for a while—it was fun for the first few shows or the first few bands that you saw playing this energetic music and people were dancing. But after a while there was so much of it, and like anything it gets overdone and I think it seems like ska or swing dancing—it’s really hot, and then you start to see it in commercials. [Similarly]
My wife and I went out to a restaurant, and it was a small restaurant and they had a DJ. And I thought, why the hell do I need a DJ, while I’m coming to eat food? You know? What is this asshole doing? So, it could be out of homesickness, but my favorite band has always been The Replacements, and I just started to get really into how powerful and cool they could be, even simply. You know, there’s nothing high concept, its just good guitars, good lyrics—it’s rock and roll.
Rock and roll that doesn’t need to be electronic or disco-fied, and I guess [The Hold Steady] was sort of a reaction. Thinking, this sounds really good, somehow we’ve gotten so far from this, but maybe this can sound new and fresh.
Pulse: What’s happening in New York now? Is it similar?
Finn: I don’t go out nearly as much as I used to. The other thing—sort of our concept for the band—at the same time that dance punk seemed really tight to me and kind of oppressive after a while, you have the saviors of rock and roll which requires that you dress up in a costume to rock. I was thinking, no, no, no! Why can’t there just be loud guitars but you don’t have a ‘schtick’. [Just] something that’s timeless rather than retro.
Pulse: Is the song structure similar to that of Lifter Puller?
Finn: I definitely think that when people hear the record, there’s gonna be a certain population of people who say, “What’s different about this?” I think that that’s valid because I can only sing one way and that’s going to be a defining point of both bands, despite equal contributions by everyone. People will recognize and identify with the voice. I don’t change my delivery very much. The songs are looser and they are written to give us a little more room to bend. Not exactly improvisation, but a little looser and making us different from night to night.
Pulse: Guitar solos!
Finn: The guitar solos are certainly a huge thing and Tad’s guitar playing is a featured element. He’s certainly the loudest when we play live. I also think that Lifter Puller’s music was maybe meant to be more challenging. The Hold Steady may be a little less likely to do something weird or unexpected. Without going to retro, I do think that there’s some aspect that we’re shooting for of familiarity.
Pulse: Sounds timeless to me.
Finn: It’s not an AC/DC riff but it makes you think of driving rock.
Pulse: Lyrically, have you changed much?
Finn: Yes and no. I am trying—in everything I do—to put more positivity into the whole thing. I think it’s [lyrically] still very story-based and it can be based around seedy characters and situations. But I guess in the long run, I’d like to see in The Hold Steady, lyrically, something that imparts a more coherent, positive message. One of the questions that I get regarding Lifter Puller is, like, “do you think you’re glamorizing some sort of partying lifestyle?” The answer is no, you’re seeing what happens. But I can understand how maybe that wasn’t made clear.
Pulse: Was that a lifestyle you were just really curious about?
Finn: Half or more of the people I know in Minneapolis have at least had times where they’ve been partying. The music scene is always kind of caught up; it happens a lot in bars. Things like that. I mean, it’s more about hearing stories from other people. I think that happens when someone has a certain fascination with people in the underworld.
Pulse: I’m curious as to where your ideas come from. Do you read quite a bit?
Finn: I read whatever I can. I didn’t when I lived in Minneapolis nearly as much. When I started riding the subway and depending on public transportation, then I started reading a ton. Pretty much I always have a book in my pocket now. I do get ideas from books.
Right now I’m reading this Miles Davis biography and I’ll probably get some ideas from that. At the same time, as far as the actual lyrics [are concerned], I always try to write something that I could hear someone saying. Preferably me. Something that feels natural, or how I would say it, because I feel like that’s the only way I can sing it.
Pulse: Your delivery must be of importance. It’s what makes you so unique as a vocalist.
Finn: Any lyrics look pretty weak on paper, most of the time. Blake Schwarzenbach from Jets to Brazil is one of my favorite lyricists. And again, once you hear him say it, it takes on so much. The way he reads it, it might sound angry or more resigned, and that makes all the difference in the world.
Pulse: Do you carry a notebook with you?
Finn: No, I write on scraps. You know how in an average pair of jeans, like the wallet goes into my back right pocket? I have these little scraps in the back left pocket. And when I change pants in the morning, I’ll empty out my back left pocket and put the scraps into the back left pocket of my new pair of pants. Until I clean ‘em out, I’m always carrying around these little scraps of paper. And then I try to compile them. Once we get a full song, I can go back to all these little things and see what’s there. I can get like four lines at a time out, but until I hear the actual song it’s hard for me to get any kind of full idea.
Finn is an avid reader of Internet sites, and relayed a fascinating story found on the record collecting and DJ culture site soulstrut.com.
Finn: This guy went to an estate sale and found this load of records that are obviously from the same guy—someone’s storage space got foreclosed, they didn’t pay the rent and he bought all these records. Well, within those records were these handmade record covers for these albums that didn’t exist. But the artist went so far as to create cardboard vinyl cylinder circles so they felt just like a real record, and he decorated like 20 or 30. And they were all by an artist called Mingering Mike. They were very intense, from the early ’70s, obviously someone who wanted to be a musician or wanted to make records. He even had soundtracks for movies that didn’t exist. Through the records you could kind of learn about this guy, like an African American twentysomething. I mean, you could just kind of speculate. He’d probably been to Vietnam because there were a couple of records that showed him in Army clothing. He’s probably having a lot of problems, either himself or friends with drugs, and all of this other stuff. It blew my mind to see all this stuff. The guys who found it tracked him down.
He’s just a guy who’d done this as an art project and had no idea that people would be interested in this. This could be in a folk art museum. This became a thing that people were forwarding around the internet, and actually the New York Times just did an article about it.
This is the kind of story that ends up on a scrap of paper in the back pocket. Only in New York.
The Hold Steady play Sat., March 13 at the Triple Rock Social Club with the Monarques and The Washington Social Club. 10 p.m. $8. 21 +. 629 Cedar Avenue South, Mpls. 612-333-7399.
They play again on Mon., March 15 at the Triple Rock Social Club with The Voltz abd Anueretical. 6 p.m. $8 All Ages.
They will also be making a guest appearance on Radio K 770 AM's "The Music Lovers Club" on Sun., March 14, at 12 p.m.
Click to download an mp3 of the Hold Steady Song, Most People Are DJs.
To find out more about the Hold Steady visit their official website.
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