How does a group that looks as ordinary as the Hold Steady make such extraordinary music? By introducing Joe Strummer to Joe Walsh, of course!
It’s been a bizarrely quick rise for the Hold Steady—just a few years from wiseass lyrics like “tramps like us and we like tramps” all the way to Craig Finn singing “Rosalita” with the Boss himself at Carnegie Hall last year. It’s safe to say that in 2004, the world’s biggest Hold Steady fan did not envision the band opening for the Stones at Slane Castle in Dublin or becoming Harry Potter’s favorite group. Like so many indie punks, the Hold Steady reveled in theoretical populism, making cracks about how they set out to be just another bar band—except their populism got even stranger as it got less theoretical. Nickelback they’re never going to be, but it’s profoundly weird how many people out there were jonesing for a band like this, and that it took no time at all for the band and the fans to find one another. I got my first hint in early 2004, right before their debut album, when I met a guy from Maine outside a sold-out show on the Lower East Side. He’d downloaded some of their live stuff, decided this was now his favorite band and driven across six state lines without even a ticket. He got in by waiting around, smiling at the bouncers and asking politely (nobody ever tries that in New York, but it worked). I thought,
Damn, if this guy has already heard of the Hold Steady, there’s no stopping them, because he’s exactly the fan they need.There’s a lot of This Guy at a Hold Steady show, and the band knows it. They’re the only group I’ve ever seen dedicate songs to the fans who had to hire babysitters, and the only group whose fans are so old-school they hold up lighters instead of phones. I’ve witnessed grown men get into fights at three different Hold Steady shows, not because there’s anything violent about the music, but because This Guy hasn’t been out drinking beer and rocking in a while, and he forgets he’s not as tough as he used to be.
Finn keeps getting compared to Bruce Springsteen, but he really reminds me of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, one of the only musicians out there who’s written as many of this century’s best songs. He’s another urban Irish blackguard obsessed with subcultures and their shared secrets, singing about how musical memories warp everything else in your life, especially when you’re a scenester outgrowing your scene. LCD Soundsystem play mix-and-match with ’90s dance styles the way the Hold Steady slop around with their retro rock riffs. “All My Friends,” Murphy’s elegiac ode to the giant Ecstasy comedown of the late ’90s, tells the same story as “Killer Parties”—it’s just a different bunch of friends, trying to hold their lives together when the music they share falls apart. But maybe I love both of these bands because they openly mock the idea that music is not the most important thing in life.
Where do the Hold Steady go now? Who knows? They’ve already made four terrific albums, with only a handful of weak tunes. My favorite is
The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, partly because it’s the first I heard, but mainly because it has the most guitar and the punchiest sound. Stay Positive is the first that doesn’t set out to shake up their game, a milestone in itself for guys who’ve always fantasized about being road-weary classic-rock journeymen, even before anybody heard of them. (“We set out to make a record a year,” Finn once told
The Village Voice. “Which keeps us from getting stuck or going off the rails, but it also means every one isn’t going to be your masterpiece.”) Yet even when they try to play it straight, they can’t stop compulsively celebrating punk rock as the dumb democratic yowl it was always meant to be.
For me, the one that sums up that celebration is “Sweet Payne,” from
The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me. “I always dream about a unified scene,” Finn announces over hilariously botched power chords. “There’s James King, and King James, and James Dean/At a table in the corner of my unified scene.” It’s a joke, but you can hear that the Hold Steady are mocking the dream because it’s theirs, or at least a dream they’ll occasionally admit to themselves. And you can hear that even though they should know better, they’re passionately in love with it.