Tad Kubler tosses his guitar over his shoulder. He’s in the middle of a solo. The instrument spins around his body like a helicopter blade before coming right back to his hands. The solo keeps going; he doesn’t miss a beat. It’s a beautiful summer day in 2005, and Kubler and his band the Hold Steady are up onstage in front of what might be the biggest crowd that they’ve ever had. This is the Intonation Music Festival, the Chicago one-off that, one year later, will return as the Pitchfork Music Festival. It’s a magical weekend because it represents something new — the internet intruding on real life, a bunch of blog-friendly indie bands who are used to playing tiny dive bars getting the chance to play for actual crowds. Maybe this is nothing new for some of them. Maybe they’ve been playing festivals like this in Europe for a while. But for those of us in the crowd, it feels like something entirely new is happening. When the Hold Steady hold down that mid-afternoon slot, these veteran weekend warriors don’t necessarily seem like they’re playing around with the signifiers of old-school arena rock stardom. They start to look something like rock stars.
On this beautiful Sunday afternoon, the guys in the Hold Steady are all in their mid-thirties, and I’m pretty sure they all have day jobs. They probably don’t have any aspirations at real-deal rock stardom, but that’s starting to seem like something within reach, especially now that the internet is so readily butting in on real life. A decade earlier, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn was the leader of Lifter Puller, a math-damaged Minneapolis post-hardcore band that made some great records but never found anything like a mass audience, arguably except for the one time they randomly got booked as musical guests on a Jenny Jones talk-show episode about good strippers vs. bad strippers. Tad Kubler played bass in Lifter Puller, too, but he didn’t join up until 1998 or so. Lifter Puller released one true masterpiece, the 2000 dirtbag-life concept album Fiestas And Fiascos, while they were in the process of breaking up. After that, Finn and Kubler both found themselves living in New York, working office jobs. They got bored when they didn’t have a band, so they started a band, man. Now, that band is going places.
Tad Kubler is a dad now. This is new. He wrote the jaggedly juicy riffs and most of the rest of the music from Separation Sunday, the Hold Steady’s sophomore album, in the moments just before his infant arrived. The new-parent moment is the moment that people generally stop playing in bands, man, but things are happening with the Hold Steady. Maybe Tad Kubler was really meant to do this. Up onstage in Chicago, he looks like he’s never considered the possibility that he wasn’t meant to do this. When he flips that guitar around his body, his face never changes. It’s a theatrical gesture, executed with the most casual swagger. The crowd whoops with joy, and Craig Finn, gesturing at the old friend next to him, says something about how Tad Kubler is the coolest man in the world. Right now, in this moment, Finn doesn’t seem like he’s exaggerating one bit.
The Hold Steady started off as a lark, a fun thing to do on the weekend. Their first show was an all-covers set at a comedy variety show at the New York bar Arlene’s Grocery. It was fun — so much fun, in fact, that the Hold Steady started writing their own songs. There were only so many ways that a guy like Craig Finn could sing or write, and the Hold Steady sounded enough like Lifter Puller that the connection felt obvious. He didn’t sing, as such. Instead, he ranted out intricately written, mythically fucked-up short stories about pimps and skinheads and little hoodrat friends — the same kinds of stories that ran so deep on Fiestas And Fiascos. But the Hold Steady weren’t trying to make the same music that some of them had made with Lifter Puller. Instead, they’d embraced the power of the big riff, the hammered piano, the hardbitten grandeur of the bar band, baby. It changed everything.
On the one level, the Hold Steady were a classic example of counter-programming. The band came together at the peak of disco-punk, the mythic moment when the indie kids learned to dance. If they’d stuck around a few more years, Lifter Puller could’ve perhaps been a minor part of that dance-punk boom. Les Savy Fav, the New York band who released Fiestas And Fiascos on their Frenchkiss label, weren’t skinny young guys with complicated haircuts, but they still got a big boost when their angular art-punk lined up just right with the zeitgeist. The Hold Steady went the other direction, embracing bar-band sounds that hadn’t been considered cool for years. A while later, Craig Finn admitted to me that he didn’t actually hate “House Of Jealous Lovers.” There was some strategy at work: “I think taking a contrarian position is kind of like selling short in the stock market; you’re like, ‘I bet people are going to really like this, if we play some loose rock ‘n’ roll.'”
The Hold Steady were really, really great at playing some loose rock ‘n’ roll. Part of the reason they were great at it was that they were still basically making angular art-punk. Even with Tad Kubler blazing and shredding, the early Hold Steady didn’t sound like a classic rock ‘n’ roll band. You can’t become Bruce Springsteen or Meat Loaf when your very voice insists that you’re really Mark E. Smith. I saw the Hold Steady lots of times in their early years, and the inherent internal tension of their style was part of the joy. I was about a decade younger than almost anyone in the band, but I still recognized them as guys like me, guys who loved rap and hardcore and splattery indie-punk but who were discovering the joyous power of classic rock. It wasn’t going to make them rich or cool anytime soon, but those sounds unlocked something in those guys. At the early shows, the Hold Steady seemed dizzy with joy. The underground-band life, the thing that they thought they were giving up, wasn’t done with them yet. At every Hold Steady show in Baltimore, you could always find those guys at the bar after their set, and they were always down to party.
The counter-programming worked, even if it worked slowly. In 2004, the Hold Steady released their fucking awesome debut album …Almost Killed Me. It came out on Frenchkiss, and it had the same dry, spartan production style as the stuff that Finn and Kubler made with Lifter Puller, but you could hear something bigger bursting out of them. The Hold Steady played a lot of the smaller dive-type venues that Lifter Puller would’ve hit, and they usually weren’t even headlining. It was hard to find a CD copy of …Almost Killed Me in a record store. But critics loved the Hold Steady, and I guess I was one of those critics. On the Pitchfork staff message board, I kept insisting that …Almost Killed Me should get Best New Music. That didn’t happen, but it did get a great review from Amanda Petrusich. America’s alt-weekly writers were on board, too. In the 2004 Pazz & Jop polls, American critics voted …Almost Killed Me as the year’s #31 album — one spot behind the Libertines’ self-titled debut and one spot ahead of Ghostface Killah’s The Pretty Toney Album. I probably helped out with that chart positioning slightly; I think it was the first year that they let me vote.
That Pazz & Jop placement wasn’t enough to set the world on fire, and I don’t think the Hold Steady were suddenly besieged with label offers. It was still a major triumph for a DIY band with a jagged classic-rock record that you couldn’t even find in most record stores. A year later, Craig Finn told The Village Voice, “It was like being nominated for an Oscar or something.” The Hold Steady insisted that their band was still a part-time thing, but they had momentum, and they knew it. They recruited Franz Nicolay, the mustachioed keyboardist who’d played on one …Almost Killed Me track, as a full-time member, but they told him that it wasn’t going to be that big of a time commitment. After all, they still had day jobs.
They must’ve known, at least on some level, that they were fooling themselves. The Hold Steady barely took one year to write and record their sophomore album Separation Sunday. That album turns 20 on Saturday, and the Hold Steady are celebrating with a weekend of Minneapolis shows. Separation Sunday, like …Almost Killed Me before it, came out on Frenchkiss, and it’s got the cranked-up intensity that animated their debut. Craig Finn still belted out his lyrics in tangled peals of wordplay, and his voice still spluttered on top of his band’s churn. This time around, the Hold Steady had two producers, but neither of them were strangers to the band — it was Dean Baltulonis, who did …Almost Killed Me, and Dave Gardner, who did Fiestas And Fiascos. But the sound is thicker and heavier. Franz Nicolay’s keyboard adds a whole new dynamic layer, and a few guest singers and musicians come in to sweeten up the mix. Drummer Judd Counsell left the band halfway through the sessions, even though he loved the Hold Steady, because he knew that the band would demand more time that his adult life could allow. His replacement Bobby Drake worked as a mechanic, which was handy for whenever their tour van broke down.
Mostly, I think the Hold Steady knew they were onto something big because they wrote a big fucking epic. Where …Almost Killed Me was a collection of fuckup-underground vignettes, Separation Sunday went widescreen with it. With …Almost Killed Me and the Lifter Puller records that preceded it, Craig Finn started to outline a mythology of Midwestern burnouts and seekers and wastrels and lowlifes. He wrote about his characters with such verve and detail that some people were disappointed to learn that he was basically a normal Midwestern baseball-fan type. On Separation Sunday, he took some of his characters — the sketchy pimp Charlemagne, the skinhead Gideon, the girl named Hallelujah who everyone calls Holly — and uses them to tell an epic story about life and death and rebirth and redemption.
The storyline of Separation Sunday is intentionally obtuse, but it has everything to do with drugs and Catholicism. It’s the tale of Holly, who drifts from one American party city to the next. She camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River, encounters unsavory characters, and longs for transcendence. In the end, she maybe dies and maybe comes back to life like Jesus Christ. It’s not clear because it’s not supposed to be clear. Craig Finn finds a strange resonance between the biblical oral tradition and the cloud of rumor and lore than hung over every punk scene: “We gather our gospels from gossip and bar talk, and then we declare them the truth/ We salvage our sermons from messageboards and scene reports, and we sic them on the youth.” The music works the same way, catching glimpses of the divine in puddles of blood and beer. When Franz Nicolay plays the organ, he calls back to every soulful rock band of the ’70s, but you just know that Craig Finn hears that sound and thinks of Sunday mass.
Separation Sunday doesn’t necessarily announce itself as a novelistic concept album at first. Instead, it mostly plays out as one squalid scene after another. Characters and themes reappear, but the language is too dizzily joyous to hear beyond the allusions and internal rhymes. Craig Finn sings about meeting Saint Paul at some suburban St. Paul mall, about drinking beneath the railroad bridge where sometimes the bus won’t stop because there’s just too many kids, about the heavy stuff that ain’t quite at its heaviest by the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis. You can always hear the danger in the stories, but the danger makes the euphoria that much more euphoric. Finn even has fun describing violence: “When they say great white sharks, they mean the kind in big black cars! When they say killer whales, they mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in Penetration Park!” These characters are high as hell and shivering and smashed, but tragedy never seems like that much of a threat: “You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar, and the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an afterbar!” I must’ve missed that episode of The Pitt.
All throughout, though, we hear about Holly, the sweet kid who breaks hearts without meaning to and whose higher aspirations take the form of a tramp stamp: “She’s got blue-black ink, and it’s scratched into her lower back! Says ‘Damn right, He’ll rise again!'” Tramps like us and we like tramps, and Charlemagne’s got something in his sweatpants. Eventually, Holly slips away. She’s an RIP mural, a marked-up tag, but then she reappears in a confession booth, infested with infection and smiling on an abscessed tooth. I can’t even tell you quite why the album’s climactic moment hits me so hard, but it really, really does: “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?'” A resurrection means something else when you have to go to hell first.
There’s nothing conventional about Separation Sunday, but Craig Finn tells Holly’s story with such an electric charge, so much life, that it sweeps you right up. On the album, we hear the Hold Steady getting more and more confident with their big-rock gestures. They even try something new: A big, repeating chorus on a song called “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.” For the first time, the crowds at Hold Steady shows had a memorable fists-up part. Before long, all the Hold Steady’s songs would be singalong songs. They wrote some great singalong songs, but they also lost something when they finally worked all the freeform post-punk skronk out of their systems. Separation Sunday catches them in the magical in-between moment.
Separation Sunday came out while the conversation around …Almost Killed Me was still building, and people were ready to hear it. This time around, I successfully convinced the Pitchfork editors that Separation Sunday should get Best New Music, and I wrote the review. I made the case for the album, and I referred to Craig Finn as “the poet laureate of the loading dock behind the mall where the runaway kids get together to sniff cheap coke at 5AM.” (I’ve been pretty good at this shit for a long time.) A few days after the album came out, I saw the Hold Steady play at a Baltimore art gallery; I think it was an exhibit of old photos from the LA punk scene. After the show, Finn smoked me up with some shit that I could not handle, and I had to wonder if there really was all that much distance between Finn and his characters. Finn might’ve looked like an accountant on Friday, but the man could party.
Separation Sunday was not just a Pitchfork sensation. The Hold Steady were a critics’ band from the very beginning, and critics flipped their shit for that album. The Hold Steady appeared on the cover of The Village Voice, a newspaper that was not in the habit of putting rock bands on its cover. Craig Finn and John Darnielle, whose band the Mountain Goats had just released their own masterpiece The Sunset Tree a week earlier, posed for a New Yorker photo spread together. On the 2005 Pazz & Jop poll, Separation Sunday came in at #8 — a 23-place jump in the space of one year.
It took a while before any segment of the general public came around to that immediate critical consensus. I moved to New York a few months after Separation Sunday came out, and I saw the Hold Steady gradually headlining bigger and bigger venues — Bowery Ballroom to Warsaw to Webster Hall to Irving Plaza. (I saw the Hold Steady many times. It’s been more than a decade since my last Hold Steady show, and they’re still probably the band I’ve seen the most in my life.) Eventually, a friend told me that he didn’t like going to Hold Steady shows anymore because someone always dumped a beer on him during the climactic moment of some song. This guy was a spilled-beer magnet, though. He was always getting beer dumped on him. Bit by bit, people figured out that the Hold Steady didn’t just write arty songs about partying. They made party songs about partying, too. You could go out to a Hold Steady show and have a great time dumping beer on my friend’s head.
Two decades after Separation Sunday, the Hold Steady are no longer a critics’ band. They never became mainstream-level huge, but they found their demographic. Most of the people in that demographic, like the people in the band itself, seem to be middle-aged white guys who love to party. Band and crowd found each other and formed a unified scene. It’s a beautiful thing. Nobody is surprised when Tad Kubler flips his guitar around now. Everyone in the room understands that, at least for that one moment, he really is the coolest man in the world. In 2005, people would make fun of online critics like me for heaping breathless praise on baby bands who weren’t ready for that attention. Maybe some of that mockery was warranted, but we sometimes got that shit right. We got it right with Separation Sunday.
