Truly special bands, the ones that become a part of your life, almost always arrive as an unexpected gift. Sometimes it’s a random song on the radio that finds you at the perfect moment, pinning you in place until it’s over. Or maybe it’s a friend’s feverish and drunken sales job at 2 a.m., his breath reeking of whiskey as he rattles off a string of lyrics, almost giddy as he gives you exactly what you need: a favorite new band.
That’s how fans of The Hold Steady are made, through a contagious passion for music built on a foundation of every great bar band you never heard and filled with stories constructed out of exquisite detail, black humor and visceral, charged emotion.
Without half trying — literally — The Hold Steady has risen up out of Minneapolis via Brooklyn to claim a musical territory that few even knew existed, a place where Chuck Palahniuk is the singer in a Thin Lizzy cover band and old Springsteen 45s are used as coasters in every bar with a drink-and-drown happy hour.
The Hold Steady is one long story meant to be sung out loud with absolute abandon. It’s about the songs, of course, but it’s also about bonding with other, equally smitten, fans and the resulting kinship forged with the band.
In other words, The Hold Steady could be your life — or maybe The Hold Steady could even be you.
“I think that a lot of our fans see themselves in us,” said singer and lyricist Craig Finn. “I think we’re believable. The way I became a rock fan, the way I was obsessed with rock ’n’ roll, had something to do with when I went to see the Replacements as a kid in Minneapolis.
“Before that, I always considered rock ’n’ roll to be, like, Steve Tyler, and I certainly didn’t know anyone in my life that was like Steve Tyler — it was like he descended from some rock mountain, you know? Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson (of the Replacements) would just be out walking around in my neighborhood. So I think there’s something believable and something exciting to people about our band.”
There’s no big production here, no rock band pose.
“It’s five friends getting up there and having a good time and.….people are always going to root for that because they can identify with that,” said guitarist and band co-founder Tad Kubler. “That’s something that’s part of their life, too.”
Finn, Kubler, Galen Polivka, Bobby Drake and Franz Nicolay make their second trip to Louisville on Oct. 30 for a show at Coyote’s, the first night of a tour with the Drive-By Truckers that promises plenty of fist pumps and a harrowing amount of drinking. The tour brings together two bands of veteran musicians who have never forgotten what it means to be a fan, especially one in front-row center.
For Louisville songwriter John Whitaker, who has whispered his share of Finn’s lyrics into a few ears, finding The Hold Steady was like rediscovering the reasons he fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll. As a misfit kid, he needed something to which he could belong. As an adult, he hated realizing all the ways in which music was used as a dividing line between the cool and the uncool.
“The Hold Steady flew in the face of that, kind of like what the Replacements and Guided by Voices had done,” Whitaker said.
“You know, we’re all in this together so let’s rock out a second because that makes whatever sh---y thing going on in our lives a little more bearable, at least for a little bit. The Hold Steady celebrate inclusion. There is no cool crowd — I mean, look at them, and look at their fans, myself included.”
You always want to pronounce The Hold Steady by stressing that upper-case “The.” It’s like The Who. An upper-case “The” points toward something, a feeling or state of mind. With The Who, it’s a sense of dislocation and alienation, an issue of identity; “My Generation,” “I Can’t Explain,” “The Seeker.” There’s practically a question mark after The Who’s name.
With The Hold Steady, that feeling of feeling nowhere is already assumed. We’re on to the next phase here, which is a mix of comfort and complicity. It’s as if Finn is saying that he’s been there, looking for escape in crappy bars and a dimebag — and he knows that you’ve been there, too — but he’d prefer that you hang on and not end up a trainwreck. You know, you gotta hold steady.
“I’m not saying we could save you, but we could put you in a place where you could save yourself,” Finn sings in “Chicago Seemed Tired That Night.” “If you don’t get born again at least you’ll get high as hell.”
Well, yeah. That’s about all you can hope for some days, and it’s essentially the story of the band.
When The Hold Steady began it was an almost private attempt on the part of Finn and Kubler to regain something they’d lost, or maybe to give us something we didn’t know we needed. This was 2002, a couple of years after Finn and his wife had relocated to Brooklyn from Minneapolis, and shortly after Kubler had arrived at Finn’s urging.
Finn and Kubler had been in a Minneapolis band called Lifter Puller, which could sell out three consecutive nights in St. Paul but nowhere else. Finn started the band in 1994 and it lasted for nearly seven years, producing three albums, five singles and an EP. It was an arty version of the Hold Steady, the music more self-consciously indie, but Finn’s talk-singing and story songs were the same.
The Lifter Puller universe centered around the Twin Cities and the Nice Nice, a club where a cast of characters were on a never-ending nosedive. Nightclub Dwight, Eye Patch Guy and Jenny were the forerunners of The Hold Steady’s fallen Holly and her hoodrat friends, and when Lifter Puller ended — burned out and uncertain — Finn symbolically lit a match to the Nice Nice in a song.
The Twin Cities mourned, a collective tear falling into a Grain Belt draft.
By 2002, Finn was ready to play more music. When friends in the New York City comedy improv group The Upright Citizens Brigade asked him to come play “bumper” music between skits, he called Kubler. They recruited Polivka and drummer Judd Counsel (later replaced by Drake) and took on the fun but mindless task of playing snippets of “Back in Black” or “The Boys Are Back in Town” while the comics regrouped.
The powerful simplicity of the songs rekindled a desire to be in a real band, but since nearly everyone involved was past age 30, they were also past the point of dreaming about hit records and playing stadiums. It was a rare case of talented musicians performing without thinking about returns on their investment.
And thus The Hold Steady was born, not with a bang but with a beer buzz.
“There was very little ambition involved and very few expectations,” the speed-talking Kubler said of the band’s beginning. “It was one of those things where it was, ‘Well, sh--, we’re having so much fun doing this let’s write a couple of our own songs,’ and then pretty soon we had enough for a record.
“And then it was, ‘Well, I don’t want to tour, but if we’re going to play around New York, let’s have a CD so people can take it with them.’ So we made a record in six days and before you know it you’re on tour 250 days a year and then you’re in Dublin opening for the Rolling Stones.”
“Our managed expectations allowed us a ton of freedom,” Finn said. “We had freedom to obey the simple law of supply versus demand. If people demanded that we play a show, we would supply one. We would never demand to play a show and expect someone else to supply an audience.”
Finn picked up where he had left off with Lifter Puller, continuing his stories of street kids, girlfriends who are users and/or using, pimps and barflys, all of them looking for some kind of resolution or redemption and usually in the wrong places.
The band’s first two albums, “Almost Killed Me” (2004) and “Separation Sunday” (2005), are similar to the early street operas of Springsteen — a favorite of Finn’s — but without the romanticism. Where Janey sighs and accepts that Spanish Johnny is going out to pull a cheap hustle in Springsteen’s “New York City Serenade,” Finn’s Holly is destitute and wasted, a “real sweet girl who’s made some not sweet friends.”
While Finn writes with keen detail and commanding authority, his songs aren’t autobiographical. The characters are frequently composites of people he’s known or known of, as are many of the situations. The various narrators are detached but compassionate, although you can’t always trust them. One constant is a sense that nearly all of Finn’s characters are desperate people desperately in search of something better.
“You’re absolutely right that they’re desperate and in some bad places, but I hope that the songs are also hopeful and optimistic,” Finn said. “They’re really interested in redemption and forgiveness, and the people who are interested in redemption and forgiveness the most are people who are in really bad places.”
“Craig’s always said that his lyrics aren’t specifically about anyone he knows, but at the same time they’re also about everybody he knows,” Kubler said. “Often I’ll bust him. He’ll have a line in a song and I’ll be like, ‘Wait a minute, I remember that party.’
“The one thing that I didn’t ever see pointed out. … is that Kerouac, in ‘On the Road,’ is never really a part of what happened. He’s more a recordist and he’s just kind of making notes. Craig is kinda like that. Not only are his lyrics like that, but he really enjoys kind of just witnessing human behavior.”
Finn’s lyrics are frequently the focus of fans, especially those who are themselves writers.
Myke Hall is the bassist in the Edinburgh, Scotland, band the One Day Speakers. A Hold Steady wiki he set up last year as an online forum to discuss Finn’s lyrics has grown into a full-on fansite.
“I like how the vocals tell a story,” Hall said. “And how the story is continued from song to song, how every line is carefully planned, like poetry, not just the first thing they can think of that rhymes, like many other bands.”
For Whitaker, it goes deeper.
“You know that moment when some piece of art or popular culture uses the words and cultural touchstones you use every day when talking to your friends — and it’s not contrived sounding?” Whitaker said.
“That’s The Hold Steady. It was like a dirtier ‘Born to Run,’ with characters I either knew, wanted to know, was or wanted not to be. The ballet being fought out in the alley was now, at least in my head, less ‘West Side Story’ and more ‘Rocky Horror,’ you know what I mean?”
Kubler does. When asked if he would be a Hold Steady fan if he wasn’t in the band, he practically shouts his response.
“Yeah, of course! Absolutely,” he said. “I’m as big a Craig Finn fan as anybody is, and that goes for Franz and Bobby and Galen. Hell yes, I’d go see The Hold Steady. The audience always looks like a party’s out there, and there are more and more cute girls.”
Finn’s philosophy is jarringly obvious.
“We make music that we would want to listen to,” Finn said. “That’s all we do.”
The Hold Steady’s fourth album, “Stay Positive,” was released in July to typically ecstatic reviews, assuring the band yet another appearance on the annual best-of-the-year lists. It also reached No. 30 on the Billboard Top 200 charts and No. 15 on the UK Album Chart.
In the last 12 months or so, the band had that aforementioned gig opening for the Stones at Slane Castle in Ireland and Finn got to sing two verses of “Rosalita” with Springsteen at Carnegie Hall. There have also been a half-dozen television appearances and magazine covers. They even had a rock ’n’ roll hospitalization moment when Kubler came down with pancreatitis, which can be brought on by drinking lots of bourbon (he’s better now).
Their tour with the Drive-By Truckers, dubbed “Rock and Roll Means Well,” should be the highlight of the fall season. These are all true believers, making music out of sheer joy and a deep need. No one is a rock star, not in the typical sense, but they’ve claimed a piece of the rock ’n’ roll life as their own.
“I still kind of can’t believe it,” Kubler said. “It’s one of those things where I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’ll be, like, ‘Wait a minute, these guys are terrible!’ And then we’re back to playing to 20 people in Baltimore. Oh well, it’ll still be fun.”
