Teenage wasteland
Can a band channel the Who and T.S. Eliot? Just ask The Hold Steady
John Kendle



Remember the feeling you got when you heard Arcade Fire were playing here? Or the Pixies?

Maybe you recall how The Killers played the West End last September, before they’d really taken off in North America?

The upcoming Winnipeg gig by The Hold Steady will be one of those shows — a relatively small, intimate performance by a fivesome who are already considered indie rock heroes and whose work may well break on through.

Never heard of The Hold Steady?

Well, step right up…

The quintet of singer/guitarist Craig Finn, guitarist Tad Kubler, bassist Galen Polivka, drummer Bobby Drake and keyboardist Franz Nicolay is based in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is where the group signed its record deal with indie label French Kiss, which has released last year’s Almost Killed Me and this spring’s Separation Sunday, a pair of exceptional recordings.

New York is also the city which first really grasped the group’s blend of early American indie-rock (think Let it Be-era Replacements or New Day Rising Hüsker Dü) with Darkness-era Springsteen. At this year’s CMJ conference in Manhattan, The Hold Steady’s shows featured round-the-block lineups and serious buzz.

THS isn’t exactly a New York band, though. Its roots are in Minneapolis, where Finn and Kubler were bandmates in local favourites Lifter Puller in the last half of the 1990s. Finn, who was born in Boston, says growing up in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina informs his songwriting, but he strives for universal themes.

“A lot of people have made a lot about (Separation Sunday) having a lot of Minneapolis references, which it does — and my home in my heart is certainly the Twin Cities — but one thing I have found is that in American and possibly Canadian suburbs, there’s this sort of universal feeling, so I think the record is more of a suburban thing than a Minneapolis thing, so I think that’s why people who have never been to Minneapolis have been able to relate so well,” Finn says from his home in Brooklyn.

“A lot of this record was influenced by being 16 or 17 in the suburbs of Minneapolis and getting your first car. In Edina, with a car, you were just 15 minutes away from some real trouble if you wanted, so you start to explore these things. Yet when you do, there’s this conservative voice in your head telling you that what you’re doing is wrong — like an angel on your shoulder.”

Separation Sunday is something of a concept record — 11 songs which follow the story of a girl called Hallelujah (Holly for short) and her fall from grace as a teen, when she discovers drugs and leaves behind, yet is haunted by, her strict religious upbringing.

While Almost Killed Me, the band’s 2004 album, recalls the hopes and dreams and reckless partying that come with suburban adolescence, Sunday grapples with the issues of faith and moral behaviour that accompany discovering all the temptations of that nether world between teendom and full-blown adulthood.

Sure, it’s heady stuff, but The Hold Steady delivers it with a loose, rollicking vibe that perfectly suits Finn’s awkward, sung/spoken/growled vocals. His lyrics are infused with the hot sweat of romanticism and conflict and his songs are so dense with references (literary, cultural, Biblical and otherwise) that the National Public Radio website has actually written footnotes for three of them.

“I was thinking a lot about extremes when I was writing this record. I had an acquaintance growing up who had just an insane drug problem,” Finn says. “He went into a 30-day program where you got clean but you also got born again and he came out and he was on the corner preaching the word of Jesus Christ …

“And our country seems to be extreme right now. People are either all the way in one direction or the other and that’s sort of the genesis of the record, no pun intended — just thinking about how people go from wild partying to Catholic conversion and also how people use their faith and religion the way other people use substances, drugs or alcohol. As a crutch.”

Separation Sunday is a song cycle that plays out as a sort-of surreal road trip in which Holly and various other characters confront all the issues Finn touches upon. At just 42 minutes, it’s one helluva ride.

“I wanted it to be somewhere between being on the road and on the lam, the idea of being on the run from something but not really knowing what and so just keeping moving,” he says.

The band has performed the album in sequence just three times and Finn says it’s unlikely they’ll try to do so again.

“I think, somehow, that songs work better when you don’t know they’re coming,” he says.

All the bands songs will be heard during a typical Hold Steady set, though, since the group is bound and determined to make an impression.

“We are definitely trying to do the 90-minute, two-hour, play-everything-you-can and get shut down kind of thing,” Finn affirms.

Asked what he makes of all the media hype that surrounds his group as he’s about to embark on a tour which includes stops such as Winnipeg, Duluth and Fargo, the 34-year-old is matter-of-fact.

“I was re-reading Michael Azerrad’s book, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and I was struck how, in every chapter, every band had their critically acclaimed record but they were all still really struggling and had day jobs, y’know,” he says.

“Historically, I can look at that and say that this is just something you go through. At the same time, I think that people in Duluth, to use that town as an example, really don’t care all that much about what someone in Spin says, whereas in New York, while it’s really cool, there’s also a lotta sheep.

“What that all means is that there’s a lotta places where you’ve just gotta go and show ’em.”