Hold Steady: Dreaming of a Unified Scene

As the sun rose over the Arizona desert, with a line of Minutemen trailers to my right and unending rock and sand to my left, I yawned and turned up Separation Sunday — the second of the Hold Steady’s three albums — on my car stereo. Something about the Hold Steady, with their drugged-out characters, anthemic guitars and E-Street excitement, seemed appropriate to the sublime fatigue that comes from pushing oneself to the edge. The band’s music seemed to promise that the emotional exhaustion at some point leads to some semblance of truth.

At least my sleep-deprived mind thought so, driving through the desert at six in the morning. I had spent the past three nights following the Hold Steady down the California coast, catching shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. I was on the way to a fourth in Tempe, and keeping up with the band’s exhausting schedule required an all-night drive.

I hoped that by pushing myself like this, I’d find a way into the Hold Steady universe, which, of late, has been a very busy place. The band has put out three records in as many years, culminating with Boys and Girls in America in 2006, an album inspired in part by Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. (The band is currently recording their fourth album, to be released in the spring.) But the breakneck pace has not affected quality. Critics have heaped increasing praise on the Hold Steady’s work, with Boys and Girls ranking near the top of almost every best-of-2006 list. The Village Voice’s influential annual Pazz and Jop critics poll placed the album at No. 4.

But the Hold Steady is not just another indie darling. While the indie world is composed of a slough of sub-genres, each with its own particular conception of artistic purity, the Hold Steady is a rock group with a capital R. Direct descendents of Springsteen with a hint of the Replacements’ rowdy edge, the Hold Steady is a gregarious Midwest bar band in an indie world that has become aesthetically self-conscious. So in order to understand why the Hold Steady is unique, one must understand the fractured state of the indie world.

In rock’s glory days, artists like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Springsteen could transcend demographic boundaries and accumulate incredibly diverse fan bases. Musically, such bands would integrate blues, country, and R&B to produce a sound that was informed by sources as eclectic as their followers, if not more so. It isn’t reasonable to expect all of this from indie rock, which evolved in part from the punk movement. Punk’s rejection of commercialized corporate rock developed into something aesthetically broader, idiosyncratic but clearly rock-informed bands — think Pavement or Sonic Youth.

The latter is usually considered to have marked a transition to artsy rock in the underground, but as Michael Azzerrad notes in Our Band Could Be Your Life, “for all the artsiness, Sonic Youth’s appeal boiled down to one very basic thing: the perennial charms of whaling on a very loud electric guitar. They satisfied their rebellious instincts with lo-fi production and less structured melodies and choruses than mainstream artists, but they were still squarely in the rock vein, with all the accessibility and open sociability that entails.

Somewhere along the way, however, this changed. Musically and socially, indie has become segmented. Part of the story is racial, as Sasha Frere-Jones argued in this New Yorker article. from October 22, 2007. With the rise of rap and hip-hop, it became politically touchy for white bands to co-opt black influences.

Economic forces are also at work. As critic Carl Wilson argued in Slate, the growing wealth divide in America has stranded indie rock, always a staple of college campuses, among the bourgeoisie. High-tech workers and young professionals may indeed lead lives of quiet desperation, but they’re not the proletariat Springsteen was singing to with these words, from “Night”: “You get up every morning at the sound of the bell / You get to work late and the boss man’s giving you hell.” Instead, this hyperliterate niche is serviced by bands like the Decemberists, who seem more interested in sending their listeners scrambling to Wikipedia than rushing to the dance floor.

And third, technology has changed everything. Because the internet has replaced mainstream radio as a distribution medium, artists do not have to tailor their sound to a broad audience to get heard. The result is that artists no longer need to try to appeal to as broad a cross-section of fans through a broad range of influences. This has its benefits when it comes to artistic diversity. Many experimental indie bands have produced beautiful, aesthetically rich work. But what is lost is the unifying, social function of rock. As David Brooks wrote in this New York Times editorial from November 11, 2007, rock music used to serve as a “countervailing force” to commercial and social fragmentation.

But that’s no longer the case. Brooks notes that a lot of rock bands now have moderate followings, but few have the Rolling Stones or even U2’s mass appeal. And almost none cross demographic boundaries the way previous artists did. As a result, rock music has increasingly come to serve a more aesthetic than social function.

If the indie scene is segmented, the Hold Steady represents a reintegration. They aspire for a musical common ground, a sound that can appeal to a broad cross section of indie and mainstream fans. “I always dream about a unified scene,” lead singer Craig Finn cries on “Sweet Payne”, from Almost Killed Me. And as I find out in my travels with the band, a Hold Steady tour is a search for that scene, both musically and socially.

Attempting to unite egalitarian social values with a simple belief in the emotional power of music, the band fosters a sustained, mutual affection with their fans. They believe not only in the aesthetic beauty of popular music, but also in its social and redemptive potential, qualities, which are highlighted on tour. In short, they are on a crusade to put the “rock” back in indie rock. But that’s going to be easier said than done.

Lead singer Craig Finn’s lyrics tend toward the grandiose. But they are witty and literate, mixing biblical allusions with drug-slang. After reading about the great plagues in the Bible, one of his characters concludes that “if small-town cops are like swarms of flies, and if blackened foil is like boils and hail, then I’m pretty sure we’ve been through this before.”

But at the beginning of each show, Finn becomes a king of understatement. “We’re the Hold Steady,” he says with a grin as the band walks on stage in San Francisco. “Thanks for coming.” This humility is belied, however, by the sheer largeness of band’s sound. Opening with “Party Pit”, a fan favorite from Boys and Girls, the band introduces itself with Bobby Drake’s drum crescendo, culminating in a fierce, echoing chord that guitarist Tad Kubler and keyboardist Franz Nicolay strike in unison.

Finn is the anti-rock star. Short, bespectacled, and clad in a plaid shirt, jeans, and Nike sneakers, he has a voice more like a croak than a croon. He spends the show frantically miming with his hands the lyrics he spews into the mike, occasionally nudging his glasses back up his nose. This regular-guy look gives Finn a raw authenticity. His urgency brims into glee as he smiles at faces in the crowd and dances around Kubler during guitar solos. The band rollicks through its set, hitting most of the material from Boys and Girls, selected past favorites, and a few new songs in the works for the next album. The show is sweaty, loud, and frantic, and I quickly realize that I’m going to feel a little out of place in the front row unless I know every word Finn’s going to say next and am ready to mime enthusiastically along with him.

At the end of the San Francisco show, a failed stage rush opens a window into the unique relationship the band has with its fans. The stage rush is a Hold Steady pastime. The band invariably ends each set with an extended version of “Killer Parties”, the closing anthem from their first album, Almost Killed Me. Whenever possible, fans are invited up onto the stage to share in the celebration. At the Mezzanine in San Francisco, however, a high barrier separates the stage from the audience. Here, a stage rush would mean anarchy, and most likely someone would get hurt. When an eager fan, against Kubler’s silent admonition, tries to make the leap over, a security guard grabs him by the arm and jostles him to the ground. Finn stops singing and casts a stern glance at the guard. “Hey!” he mouths and shakes his head. The guard lets the fan up, and Finn resumes the encore. No one, it appears, messes with a Hold Steady fan.

The next morning’s drive to L.A. is dull. Interstate 5, which covers the length of California, is a drab stretch of freeway. I spend most of the ride pondering Finn’s lyrics, which reward repeated listening, to say the least. He’s fond of reusing certain turns of phrase, with the result being endless self-referencing and thematic patterns. (One of the band’s new songs, “Stay Positive”, features allusions to five of the band’s previous songs). The Hold Steady’s detractors find this tiresome. Writing in Stylus, Andrew Gaerig compared Finn’s lyrics to a “refrigerator magnet game”.

But Finn’s repetition can also be endearing: Once you are familiar with his tropes, it’s like belonging to a select club that knows a secret language. This gives the Hold Steady’s fans a sense of pride. It’s no wonder that the regulars on the band’s message board call themselves “the Unified Scene.” Members of the scene have gone so far as to distribute uniform-like shirts with their own personalized numbers on the back.

I arrive in L.A. just in time for the show. After checking into a dive motel a block from the venue, I take off down the street. West Hollywood, with its bars, novelty stores, and smoke shops, is suggestive of the Hold Steady scene: a little sketchy, but accentuated with elements of romance and adventure. Struggling to recapture the glory of previous years, Hollywood might be the geographical equivalent to the Hold Steady’s rock crusade.

The line outside the Music Box at the Fonda Center is a cross-section of fans. Single 40-year–old men wait beside college students, girls dressed for clubbing and the occasional timid but visibly excited 16-year-old. Yet as the security guard comes out to check IDs, it’s clear that they all — except the 16-year-olds, perhaps — have something in common. “Okay, who plans on drinking?” Hands shoot up. This is the Hold Steady: The band’s lyrics are a virtual bartender’s guide, with alcohol references ranging from “Ginger and Jack”, to “Black and Tans”, (the “kind from the can”) to “amber waves of grain”.

Alcohol is central to a Hold Steady show for the same reason it’s central to a Hold Steady song. Lyrically, booze inserts adventure into the most banal suburban landscape. In “Massive Nights,” teenagers head out for a liquor run before prom. “Everyone was funny and everyone was pretty / everyone was coming towards the center of the city / the dance floor was crowded, the bathrooms were worse / we kissed in your car and we drank from your purse.” The effect of this is to suggest drinking can be adventurous again, even if taken to extremes.

While other indie acts employ alcohol to connote alienation or depression — for example, these lyrics from en vogue band the National: “Karen, put me in a chair, fuck me and make me a drink / I’ve lost direction and I’m past my peak” — the Hold Steady restores alcohol’s rebellious nature. Kids drink to escape suburban boredom or to liven up a music festival. While songs like “Stuck Between Stations” present a sadder side of alcoholism — poet and alcoholic John Berryman takes a leap from the Washington Bridge — this is the exception that proves the rule: Finn makes the suicide seem romantic and epic, not depressing. In “Your Little Hoodrat Friend”, characters drink beneath a railroad bridge; “Stevie Nix” turns the ER into an “after bar” while yuppies are “up in your loft getting soft”. Drinking drives the emotional roller coaster of Finn’s narratives. There is no Hold Steady without it

The temptations and excesses of drug and alcohol abuse allow Finn to create an almost Biblical drama in the suburban lives of his characters, giving them their own peculiar dignity. In fact, all his tropes have this function: Minneapolis malls, bus stops, and fabric stores become the backdrop for death, drugs, love, and religious salvation. While Finn’s lyrics center on drinking, drugs, and partying, underlying all the debauchery is a search for redemption and hope.

This dichotomy is best summarized in “Citrus,” a sparse, acoustic song from Boys and Girls. “Hey barroom, hey tavern, I find hope in all the souls you gather,” Finn sings. At the same time, he acknowledges the dangers of excess: “Hey whiskey, hey ginger, I come to you with rigid fingers.” In other words, alcohol can be a crutch, but it also serves an adventurous and social function.

Indeed, the promise — or perhaps, the premise — of the Hold Steady is that rock music itself can be a means to such redemption. Like drugs, alcohol, and sex, rock music is used to maintain emotional highs and lows, and in these extremes, Finn’s lyrics suggest, one can find truth. The best example of this is the plight of Holly (short for Hallelujah), the protagonist around whom Separation Sunday‘s narrative is shaped. Holly runs away from home only to find that the parties, drugs, and love she was chasing are dangerous illusions. She turns tricks, shoots up, and finally hits rock bottom in “Crucifixion Cruise” but is born again and returns home, wearily but triumphantly, in the album’s closing track.

Finn suggests that her emotional journey gives her a wisdom far greater than those who never took such risks: “She crashed into the Easter mass with her hair done up in broken glass / she was limping left on broken heels when she said, Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?”

It follows that rock, which helps one reach such emotional extremes, has a similarly redemptive quality. “I’m not saying we could save you / but we could put you in a place where you could save yourself,” Finn sings on “Chicago Seems Tired Last Night”.

Thus, part of a Hold Steady show is capturing for oneself the same sense of adventure and dignity that Finn gives his characters. In part, this may account for the specific nature of the band’s indie fan base. The same yuppie Finn describes in “Stevie Nix” can rebel against his own “softness” by coming out to a show. And for a burgeoning music fan who never grew up with Zeppelin, Springsteen, or the Replacements, the Hold Steady’s celebration of alcohol, partying, and adventure is something fresh.

A reporter for the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages asked Finn if he’d ever met a kid who seemed like he’d stepped out of a Hold Steady song. Finn replied, “Not really, but I meet a lot of kids who are fascinated and want to get into one.”

Halfway through the L.A. show, this all hits home, and I realize that a Hold Steady show is not so much a performance as a party. While many indie performers find passion and inspiration in brooding emotional catharsis, the Hold Steady seems to have exhumed a simple but powerful relic of rock’s past: fun. (The album cover for Boys and Girls shows an ecstatic crowd of teenagers, hands in the air as confetti rains down from above.)

At the end of each show, Finn thanks the crowd with the same refrain: “There is so much JOY in what we do up here!” he growls. Championing this redemptive spirit of rock ‘n’ roll might seem a little more authentic if the band weren’t so obviously straining for it, but at the L.A. show, Finn’s joy seems genuine. In fact, his enthusiasm borders on manic. At one point, the fervor with which he’s crying out his lyrics results in a six-inch string of spit hanging from the microphone. No one seems to mind, and Finn’s swats it away between swigs from his third or fourth Budweiser. It’s clear the band plans to continue the party after the show. Taped next to the set list on the stage is a schedule which reads “Bus Last Call: 5 A.M.”

If all of this seems to cut against the artistic and cultural grain of indie music, which has tended to sacrifice accessibility for artistic purity, that’s because the Hold Steady really isn’t indie at all. Finn and Kubler, former band mates in Lifter Puller, started the Hold Steady with classic rock squarely in mind. The band began after a friend who was a member of an improv comedy group asked Finn to gather some friends to play songs between sketches. “We learned ‘Back in Black’ and ‘The Boys Are Back in Town,’ ” Finn recalled to the Minneapolis City Pages in December 2007. “We were doing this ’70s rock thing and thinking, This sounds pretty cool!”

The band’s first album shows clear traces of this inspiration. Much of Almost Killed Me is a meditation on the status of the contemporary rock scene. Finn name-drops Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson of the Band and wonders about the feasibility of retro-rock in an indie age: “half the crowd is calling out for ‘Born to Run’ / The other half is calling out for ‘Born to Lose’ / Baby we were born to choose.” A saxophone reminiscent of Clarence Clemons accentuates the anthem “Hostile, Mass,” and “Certain Songs” romanticizes about the emotional power of jukebox rock in teenage summers (“B-1 is for the good girls / it’s ‘Only the Good Die Young.’”).

But the band’s throwback, classic-rock-informed sound has not been universally praised. The Washington Post called Boys and Girls a self-parody and complained that the band was “trying too hard to make a Hold Steady album”. Gaerig, the Stylus critic, complained that the rock harmonies of the album depended on “power chords smoothed into unrecognizable melodic mush”, which is the inevitable result of a “sonic vision that begins with ‘Left of the Dial’ and ends with ‘Alex Chilton'”. The Hold Steady’s retro sound leaves the band open to the accusation that it’s simply reveling in the past, forsaking artistic progress for a nostalgia trip.

A few hours of sleep and a couple cups of coffee later, I’m waiting in the front row at Cane’s, a beachside club in San Diego. The club is cozy, no more than a small dance floor surrounded by barstools and tables. The show will be an intimate one: There is no barrier between the crowd and the stage, which is just a few feet off the ground. The fans in the front row are going to have to contain themselves. An adrenaline-driven fist pump might put a dent in Kubler’s guitar. As the show commences, Finn remains faithful to his normal quirks, thanking friends during extended instrumentals in the middle of songs, while winking, laughing, and miming his way through lyrics.

Finn incorporates front-row fans into his narratives by pointing and glancing at them as he sings. (Envy the girl who was “a really cool kisser,” look with ambiguity upon she who “wasn’t all that strict of a Christian”.) During an instrumental section of “Your Little Hoodrat Friend”, Finn thanks the audience for being his home away from home. “We’ve been on the road so much that sometimes people feel more like home than geographical places,” he says.

By the time “Killer Parties” rolls around, I’m finally engulfed in a Hold Steady stage rush. An eager fan jumps onto the stage, followed by another and another. Soon, Kubler is helping others up, and half the crowd is jumping, screaming, and drinking side-by-side with the band. As the last chords are struck, Finn takes off his guitar, places the strap around a beaming fan and grins widely as he lets out the last words of the show slowly and deliberately: “We’re all the Hold Steady.”

Concertgoers at a Hold Steady show are not meant to be passive patrons but active participants in the scene Finn and company are trying to create. Each show is an opportunity to recreate the unity and camaraderie that the indie-rock scene is sorely missing. In “Joke About Jamaica”, one of the new songs the band tried out on tour, Finn reminisces about days of rock past: “the scene back then was unified / the punks, the skins the greaser guys / everyone was 21, and everyone could still get high / man we had some massive nights / making out and making eyes / now we’re 39.” It is telling that what Finn reminisces about is the social scene surrounding rock music, not the music itself.

The fragmentation of the indie scene is at least partly responsible for this shift away from social emphasis. As Carl Wilson argues in Slate, rather than being “body-centered,” the new, upper-class indie music “is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire.” Easier to admire from a distance, perhaps, but harder to dance, drink, sweat or sing to.

For instance, Panda Bear released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2007, Person Pitch. It is lush, instrumentally complex, and, at times, majestic. But there is hardly a discernable melody anywhere to be found. The vocals are a faint, almost inhuman echo. The result is an album best appreciated in solitude and through headphones rather than in a packed concert hall.

Writing in the New Yorker Sasha Frere-Jones praises Separation Sunday, but admits that the Hold Steady seems like “a mathematically derived average of dozens of ’70s and ’80s hard-rock bands”. But as indie rock has evolved and proliferated, it has been easy to forget where the rock part came from. The bands have charged ahead down their own flagrantly idiosyncratic paths, leaving a void at the core. The Hold Steady is trying to rediscover that core for a generation who has never known it.

Part of what has always separated rock from high art is its social function, its ability to unite a scene around an accessible and fun aesthetic. The bar is often close to the stage, and the audience is even closer to the performers. And in a general admission concert, social interaction is not only encouraged but demanded, as audience members jostle for better spaces while dancing, sweating, and singing amongst strangers. All of which explains the Hold Steady’s appeal to a certain, intense indie fan who is longing for something a little louder than Feist and a little more melodic than Panda Bear.

But it might not be enough. Two of the Hold Steady shows I saw were moved to smaller venues after ticket sales slumped. Despite the intensity of the band’s fan base and the camaraderie of their shows, Finn and company have not established a “unified scene” in the broader indie world. Boys and Girls reached 124 on the Billboard Top 200. Not bad for an indie act, but not near the No. 2 spots reached by Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and the Shins’ Wincing the Night Away.

Perhaps Finn’s voice is just too abrasive for the pop charts. It’s certainly hard to imagine his verbosity translating well to radio, yet those very lyrics are what critics most often mention in glowing reviews. The paradox between the Hold Steady’s critical acclaim and failure to “unify the scene” might be resolved by their lyrical-musical dichotomy: too verbose for mainstream, too old-school to truly unify the indie fanbase.

The trip comes to an end as I pull up to the Marquee Theater in Tempe. The audience here is different from the trendy scene in San Francisco and Los Angeles or the tanned faces in San Diego. The crowd has a distinctly suburban feel. But the strength of the Hold Steady’s arena rock is that it has the potential to appeal to this crowd as well as the hipsters in the metropolises. Such a sound can unite a larger audience than, say, the Decemberists’ archaic sea-shanty tales or the Arcade Fire’s apocalyptic triumphalism.

But so far, it’s just potential. The band has not reached the audience that either of these other indie darlings has. Maybe classic rock’s day is done. But the Hold Steady doesn’t think so. As they strive to remind the indie scene that rock is not a four-letter word, the band’s true goal might be best summarized by the drunken shout of a fan from the back of the Tempe show: “Save rock ‘n‘ roll!”