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The Hold Steady.
 Is it acceptable behaviour to go to Melbourne to see a band that you will also be seeing in Adelaide four days later? Maybe. What about text messaging a band's lyrics to your friends all night? Probably not. Should I stop with the confessions? Yes. To be honest, though, it's hard not to get caught up with a band like The Hold Steady. If the late-night bar-room rock'n'roll doesn't get you, the lyrics will. Craig Finn tells amazing stories in his songs and it's difficult not to get caught up in the world in which they dwell: drugs, alcohol (the sweet stuff), girls (hoodrats), religion (often showing a good knowledge of the Bible) and people who seem to get born again on a regular basis. Yes, I'm a fan.
I catch up with guitarist Tad Kubler as he's on his way to a bar. It's about 8pm in New York and I can hear the sounds around him as he heads to his destination. The Hold Steady grew out of the ashes of Lifter Puller, in which Kubler used to play bass. They were based in Minneapolis, so how did he end up playing with Finn in New York City?
"After Lifter Puller split up we sort of parted ways for a little bit," Kubler begins. "My girlfriend lives in New York so I'd been coming out a lot to see her, and Craig and I had been hanging out and reconnecting again. I came into his house one day and he told me that he had an idea for a new band, so we sat down over some beers and talked about it one night. I was like 'Alright, I'm going to fly back to Minneapolis and pack my bags and I'll be back here in two weeks'.
"It all happened pretty quickly: I got here and he'd been jamming with the rest of the guys for a while. We wrote a bunch of songs really fast, and within six months we were in the studio and we recorded our first record 'Almost Killed Me' in less than a week." When I voice my surprise at the length of time they took I'm promptly informed that it was done with "Tons of brews and lots of big rock riffs." It doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Lyrics are extremely important to The Hold Steady's sound. Finn's vocals sometimes come across as a sort of a cross between early Springsteen and some sort of passionate but rambling spoken word.
"The thing is that the P.A. in out rehearsal space is so shitty that you can never hear what Craig's actually saying," Kubler laughs, "so it isn't until you get into the studio and he starts to do vocals that you are like 'Did he just say what I thought he just said?' So it's fun as well because you write the song and then you rehearse it over and over again and then you record it and do take after take and you eventually become tired of fucking hearing it, and then Craig goes in and starts to do his vocals and it breathes this whole new life back into the song because you hear a story line and you hear about the characters. The way he constructs stuff as a lyricist is just so amazing; it's a bit like starting the song over again."
The stories that are told in The Hold Steady's songs speak about a seedy underbelly of society, usually with a bit of light and semi-redemption at the end of the tunnel. How much of it is true?
"Without divulging any Craig Finn secrets or mythology, a lot of the stories are fictional," Kubler reveals. "There are bits and pieces that are true: he'll spin a story about a character and I'll be like 'wait a minute, I know who that happened to'. Obviously Craig's got a tremendous amount of mystique. I think that as a lyricist and a writer, Craig is leaps and bounds from anything that's going on in rock music today. He's got a very original mind and to have a partnership with him is fascinating and is a real privilege."
Kubler pauses, laughs and then tells me that if I thought he was talking shit now, I should speak to him at about 2am when he's really full of it. That's not what I was thinking at all.
Sam Vinall
 | dB Magazine proudly presents The Hold Steady at Jive on Thurs 2 March with Les Savy Fav and Thunderbirds Are Now!. |
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