The Hold Steady: The Body and Blood
Craig Finn likes his audience to be a little sloppy, and maybe even unhinged.
“It’s hard to feel validated unless you have people throwing beer up in the air,” he says. Finn, the singer and lyricist of The Hold Steady, is joking—kind of. He’s describing the sense of rightness he felt about returning to focus on the band after doing quieter solo acoustic shows. As Finn sang on “Positive Jam,” the opening song on 2004’s Almost Killed Me, the band’s first record, “I got bored when I didn’t have a band, man.”
Finn and Hold Steady guitarist and songwriting collaborator Tad Kubler are coming off a busy South By Southwest and prepping for the late-March release of Teeth Dreams, their sixth studio record. The previous day, Finn and Kubler fielded a barrage of “tweet chat” questions during an #asktheholdsteady event hosted by @iTunes. The Twitterverse had a lot of queries: Would The Hold Steady play any festivals in the U.K. this summer? Where do they go for slices in Brooklyn? What basketball teams do they root for? What kind of amps do they use? Will there be a vinyl reissue of earlier records? Beyond that, fans asked if characters in some songs relate to those in others, how those personalities all tie together, and if Finn would consider a book-length exposition of some of the stories in his songs?
Those aren’t idle questions. The opening line on “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You,” the first song on their new record, is: “I heard the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again,” which is a reworking of a line from “Sweet Payne” off of the band’s debut album. “The Ambassador,” another track on the new release, refers to a guy who can “move things with his mind,”which evokes the paranormal elements of songs like “Chips Ahoy!,” one of the band’s best-known tunes, which is about a woman who can predict the future and uses her gift to win money on horse races and then party in grand fashion. Hold Steady fans expect these subtle lyrical ripples and reiterations.
“You want the continuity,” says Finn, whose songwriting style emerged from his own experience as an attentive young music buff. “It rewards the obsessive listener.”
It’s true that Hold Steady fans are enthusiastic, and maybe even fanatical. But the band’s lyrics withstand prolonged scrutiny. Imagine the fervor of the college-basketball obsessed fused with soap-opera devotees or Trekkies, all transposed to the world of the rock club or the record store and you get an idea about the Hold Steady audience. There’s a boozy tent-revival vibe to a Hold Steady show. From the stage, Finn barks out the lyrics, hissing certain syllables, emphatically mouthing a few choice end lines off-mic, as if singing them once wasn’t enough—a one-man call-and-response machine. He has the zeal of a nerdy, amped-up, hardcore altar boy, backed by a muscular classic-rock outfit playing dual-guitar riffs that can singe the ends of your feathered bangs. And, fittingly, the fans like to sling some brews around, anointing the faithful, shouting along with the wordy choruses—hard-luck litanies.
Finn is a practicing Catholic and a regular churchgoer. (He gave up drinking for Lent this year.) And so an element of faith is never far from Hold Steady songs. He’s certainly not the only “devout” Catholic playing in a rock band, but he’s probably the first that comes to mind. The singer’s lyrics chronicle a world of interwoven characters: self-destructive partiers, played-out scenesters, small-time dealers, redemption-seekers, muddle-headed lovers, damaged Catholics and recovering searchers ping-ponging in an orbit between evening Mass and crappy bars. There’s religion in The Hold Steady’s music, but you never know if the body and blood are spiritual metaphors or real- life stuff. Fans pore over Finn’s lyrical tea leaves trying to figure out the fates of recurring people like Holly, Charlemagne and Gideon.
The Hold Steady’s music has the big-rock combustion, the driving energy and the arcing solos to incite fist-pumping and kinetic frenzy. It’s a sacred and profane throw-down. The almost-over-the-top swagger of the guitars, the workmanlike drive of Galen Polivka on bass and the drumming of Bobby Drake are the right counterweight to the narrative heft and density of the lyrics. The combination allows for listeners to appreciate the songs on multiple levels—as elaborate, literate narratives or as elemental, cathartic rock.
Many people start rock bands thinking that they’re going to do something new—to create a groundbreaking sound, to tap into some uncharted zone of feeling or to embody the spirit of the time in unexpected ways. Most bands recycle rock and pop tropes, even rummaging through the wardrobes and amp collections of previous eras—and that’s not a bad thing. Nostalgia is baked into popular music.
The Hold Steady can harness rock’s signs and lingo with the best of them—they got started by wryly mining the core of classic rock, and doing what Kubler describes as “live rock-and- roll karaoke” with a comedy troupe. And yet, the band has never worked to create sonic wax-museum replicas of a vintage sound from rock’s golden age. But The Hold Steady offer something unprecedented— at least outside of the world of Broadway and musical theater or rock opera. Finn’s songs tell stories about individuals who reappear and interact in other songs, sometimes told from other perspectives.
“It’s flattering that people care so much and want to know these things,” says Finn about fan interest in the details of his songs. “The narratives and the interconnected characters come from my own music fandom,” which he describes as “obsessive.”
As a kid listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run,” he was curious about the stars of that epic. “I thought, ‘Who the hell is Wendy? I wanna know more about her.’”
Then he poses the question that launched him on his way, and that seems like it could unlock all kinds of possibilities for other songwriters: “If there’s going to be characters, why isn’t there character development?”
Throughout The Hold Steady’s songs, certain settings, details and phrases are also repeated, echoed and twisted around on multiple tunes. Those include, “the camps along the banks of the Mississippi River,” “Penetration Park,” “the Party Pit,” lovers being tethered together, guys recalling the ‘80s, characters who admit that what they’re saying is only partly true and socks stuffed with people’s drugs. One thing’s virtually certain: There are more parking lots in Hold Steady songs than in any other group’s songs.
The themes of self-destruction and salvation, drug-induced oblivion and grace are threaded throughout. Bloody violence and paranormal visions abound as well. As Finn sings on “Spinners,” off the new record, “There might be a fight/ there might be a miracle.” That ambiguity is key: Fervent rock and roll and partying can serve as stand-ins for religious devotion, but are they adequate substitutes? In The Hold Steady songs, the answer is “Maybe” or “For a time.”
But those ideas are teased out incrementally, among numerous personalities, over a half-dozen albums. It’s long-form storytelling set in the compressed short-form world of the rock song. And somehow, it doesn’t unwind into a tangled mess. Deploying a partier’s vernacular, Finn’s songs create a contemporary American universe—one that spills out from the Twin Cities and headwaters of the Mississippi River and on to shitty prairie towns, to colleges in the Northeast, to fern bars and party stores to strip clubs in Ybor City and to weird spots in the woods where university students get wasted with townies. It’s its own beer-soaked Yoknapatawpha County of power chords and heroic guitar solos.
Finn may be wisely making the trail of lyrical bread crumbs more difficult to follow on the new record and its predecessor, 2010’s Heaven Is Whenever, by dropping fewer blatant references to names from older songs, loosening the narrative net a little and introducing new characters who may reappear in future tunes. But even if you ignore the characters, Hold Steady tunes are made for detail-fixated music buffs. The songs exist in a world that makes sense to itself by referencing rock and punk and pop history or trivia, or just by name- dropping. Finn isn’t shy about folding in literary references as well. And he’s said that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest had a lot to do with some of the themes on the new record.
To many, The Hold Steady represent the culture of Minneapolis and St. Paul—and of the Midwest in general. They’re the music-nerd’s Lake Wobegon. It’s a surprise to some that the band formed in Brooklyn. And though they’ve been living in New York City for more than 10 years, you won’t find any songs about the L train or the Lower East Side. “Craig is almost obsessed with making sure that he’s not pretending to be something or somebody that he’s not,” says Kubler. “He’s really self-aware. I think he’s always wanted to make sure that he’s writing from a place or a voice that he knows.”
Finn sees the subject of New York as almost being off limits, at least for now. “I’m scared to write about New York,” he says. “I feel like that’s Lou Reed’s territory. I still feel like I’m visiting New York.”
Prior to forming The Hold Steady, Kubler and Finn drew on their insights into the Twin Cities while playing in the Minneapolis- based Lifter Puller—a band that featured Finn’s signature literary- tinged storytelling style but with a more abrasive, lumbering ‘90s sound. When Lifter Puller broke up in 2000, Finn moved to
New York. Kubler relocated to Los Angeles, and then back to Minneapolis, joining, recording and touring Europe with another group. Kubler and Finn stayed in touch and talked often, but it was an opportunity to make music for the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe in New York that really brought them back together. At first, it was classic tunes by Cheap Trick, AC/DC and David Bowie. But they also wrote a song for the show and, based on that re-sparked chemistry, the two decided to form a new band.
“I flew back to Minneapolis. I packed a bag, I grabbed guitars and I never went home,” says Kubler.
The band quickly earned a reputation for its relentless touring and its ecstatic shows. Plus, there was a steady amount of song- writing and recording after The Hold Steady formed in 2004. By 2006, the band’s third studio album, Boys and Girls in America, was named record of the year by The Onion’s AV Club.
The Hold Steady equation is one that balances the Springsteen- esque of-the-people mythology in Finn’s lyrics with just the right flourish of muscle-car, rock-and-roll bombast tempered with a punk-ish rambunctiousness in Kubler’s riffs, the band’s dramatic stops and its epic choruses. This is a band that is as steeped in Joe Walsh, Cheap Trick, Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy as they are in the Replacements and Husker Du.
Teeth Dreams is both a departure and a continuation of The Hold Steady sound. It’s a big rock record. But it’s also got a more dynamic range—subtle dips in volume and force—than any of their previous albums. As with the band’s last album, 2010’s Heaven Is Whenever, Finn steered clear of established characters from older Hold Steady songs. And this is the first album recorded with guitarist Steve Selvidge, who joined the band in 2011, following the departure of longtime Hold Steady keyboardist Franz Nicolay. For the first time, the group worked with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who previously presided over Foo Fighters sessions. His emotionally candid appearance in the Sound City documentary caught Kubler’s attention. If Finn obsesses over singing about things that feel authentic, then the band prizes honesty and truth as exalted and slippery as those may seem.
A story about how they ended up pairing with Raskulinecz is revealing. As Kubler tells it, Raskulinecz hadn’t heard The Hold Steady’s music before they began discussions about working together, which is something many prospective producers, eager to click with future collaborators, wouldn’t acknowledge.
“One of the first things [Raskulinecz] said was: ‘I’ve heard of you guys, but I’ve never really heard your band before,’” says Kubler. “I thought, ‘This is perfect.’ To me, that was an indication of several things—the biggest one being he’s not someone whose going to bullshit me. Here’s someone who I can really trust to be totally honest, no matter how uncomfortable it will be.”
For Teeth Dreams, Kubler and the band recorded versions of several of the tracks before Finn—who was busy touring behind his solo record, Clear Heart Full Eyes—had even heard them.
“When [Finn] came back to the band, I really wanted to try to come up with songs that inspired him,” says Kubler. “There’s a tremendous amount of trust there. We don’t really talk about the creative process a lot, in terms of what we both bring to the band. It just exists. I really wanted to surprise him almost or inspire him—both for myself and for the band.”
Finn was definitely inspired by what the group had done, but the new sound—heavier and more dense with “the push and pull of two guitars”—created challenges for the lyricist as well.
“This record was different. Usually, the music comes first, but also usually, I’m around while it’s created,” says Finn. This time, seven songs were nearly completed and fully fledged before Finn stepped in. “We changed ‘em around when we all got together. But they were more realized than anything on other records. In that sense, I think the music influenced the lyrics.”
The music nudged Finn. It was beefier and more thoroughly crosshatched. At first, he wasn’t sure where his voice would fit in, or if he could find space for himself. “I said, ‘Why don’t I think about that claustrophobia?’”
A repeated line from “The Only Thing,” a steady chugging track off the new record, goes: “For a while, I couldn’t breathe.” The song anchors some of the album’s themes.
“I started thinking about anxiety and whether we live in anxious times,” says Finn.
Finn says that he meditated on a particularly American kind of anguish—the stress that comes with always trying to acquire material possessions or be on top (“Waking up with that American sadness,” as he sings on “On With the Business”). The hustlers and searchers in Hold Steady songs don’t realize that their boozing and spiritual yearning might express a desire to escape from something bigger than boredom.
“I keep thinking about people trying to screw people over, getting ahead by hook or by crook,” says Finn.
Fear and anxiety, dark dreams and broken hearts populate Teeth Dreams, and there are numerous mentions of blood and a sense of looming assault as well. The opening track, “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You,” conjures skinheads and other unsavory types caught up in some kind of paranoid, doomsday bunker scenario. On the otherwise funny “Big Cig”—a tune about appreciating a woman who smokes silly-looking 120s, the big cig of the title—Finn howls out that “we all have our anxieties,” just before Kubler launches into a heroic solo of Ace Frehley proportions.
Teeth Dreams wraps up with the brooding “Oaks,” a nine-minute epic filled with premonitions and visions. It’s on par with other Hold Steady monoliths like “First Night” off Boys and Girls in America or the near-perfect, soaring “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” from 2008’s Stay Positive. But “Oaks” is tailored for the end of a record— a haunting multi-part construction with a narcotized waltz conclusion and a cascading guitar part that points the whole song toward the sky. For the music, Kubler says that he had a specific goal in mind.
In hashing out the demo, he says he was “trying to figure out how to construct a song that gave you the impression of loss,” says Kubler.
That sense of loss, for Kubler, related to losing friends to drugs.
“I’ve had conversations with people, where when they say, ‘See you later,’ I say, ‘I know that’s going to be the last time I see that person,’” says Kubler. “I wanted to try to come up with something that had the feel of that sense of dread.”
The Hold Steady’s songs have always involved stories about getting wasted, life’s excesses and all types of loss. This isn’t Bon Jovi or Journey, where everything generally ends up all right. Although, plenty of the riffs are arena-ready.
“I write a lot about drugs and alcohol and partying,” says Finn, who is 42. “When you’re 25, it’s pretty awesome to drink beer and smoke weed and go crazy with your friends and wake up and try to go through a day at work. That’s just American. But when you’re 35, some people are stopping doing that because they have family or a job, but some people are still doing it—maybe they can’t stop. The behavior that used to be awesome is suddenly not that awesome.”
The invulnerability of youth gives way to something else, and impaired judgment, coupled with the effects of time, can make for startling new perspectives.
“You realize some of us are going to go down. Some are going to sort of not make it—maybe not die, but not make it as we expected to,” adds Finn.
Those realities are partly why The Hold Steady are celebrating 10 years as a band, and still making meaningful music. If there’s ample loss and suffering in Hold Steady songs, then there’s also mystical rebirth, ecstatic communion, visions of saints, salvation and deliverance. It’s not all death and anxiety and parking lots. Finn’s Catholic worldview still comes through pretty strong in the songs. Other songwriters trot out dime store theology, but you get the sense that Finn could hold his own talking catechism with seminary students. And, beyond the notion of religion, Finn says that he tries to make room for episodes of the paranormal—tele- kinesis and clairvoyance—in his songwriting. It’s a strange aspect of The Hold Steady’s numbers that elevates them out of their other- wise rigorously mundane settings and details.
“It’s important to me to do that because I think that growing up…there were always these rumors you heard, something that was an unknown,” says Finn. “I want to sometimes tap into this sort of magic.”
