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The Hold Steady / The Oranges Band, Friday, April 9, 7 p.m., Eleanor Rigby’s (603 Route 6, Racqueteers Plaza, Jermyn). Tickets: $16 Info: theholdsteady.net
Being a fan of The Hold Steady is like being a fan of series like “Lost” and “24” — kind of impossible to do it casually. Songs are set in specific places like St. Paul and Ybor City, characters like Charlemagne and “your little hoodrat friend” pop in and out, and there are so many references to other bands and songs that if you played a corresponding drinking game, you’d end up in the ER.
There’s a lot to keep track of. But if you pay attention, you just might’ve found your new favorite band.
You can argue that The Hold Steady — which will release its fifth album “Heaven Is Whenever” on May 3 — is the best straight-ahead rock band in America. You could also argue that Craig Finn is the premier lyricist to emerge in the past 10 years. But one thing that’s not up for debate is that people that like The Hold Steady love The Hold Steady.
And as far as Finn is concerned, it’s all one big party and everyone’s invited. No hipster snobbiness, please. That marks a philosophical shift from Finn’s early days in the punk scene. The turning point for Finn, who was born in Boston before growing up in a Minneapolis suburb and graduating from Boston College, came after his band Lifter Puller broke up and he watched “The Last Waltz,” the Martin Scorsese film about The Band’s final show.
“There’s a couple things,” Finn said in a recent phone interview from his New York City home. “One was — and the most important one — the joy they seemed to be having playing music for kind of the right reasons. They were really good players, and they seemed to, like, really enjoy themselves when they were playing, and I think that was the biggest thing. They looked like they were having fun when they played. If you read the biographies and all that, maybe they weren’t having as much fun as it looked like, but it struck me that they were having a lot of fun.
“But also, coming out of a punk-rock background, it made me want to play with really good musicians. I realized in watching that how much further it could go. Coming out of punk rock I was always sort of suspicious of really good musicianship.”
‘The singalong songs will be our scriptures’
After four critically acclaimed records — 2008’s “Stay Positive” made Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly’s year-end best-of lists and hit No. 30 on the U.S. charts — “Heaven Is Wherever” finds the band further streamlining its The Replacements-meet-Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band sound. The opening track, “The Sweet Part of the City,” has the lilt and stomp of a Led Zeppelin ballad; “The Weekenders” starts light before crushing chords and trademark barroom harmony vocals.
In a word, reaching fifth-album status is “weird,” Finn said.
“It’s all gone by so fast,” he said of the band he formed with former Lifter Puller bandmate Tad Kubler 2003. “I was down at South By Southwest, and I was talking to Patterson Hood from the Drive-By Truckers, and I’m like, God, all of a sudden you feel like the establishment, and you don’t have as much of a chip on your shoulder, ya know? You don’t have as much to prove. It’s more like, what do we still have to say? It sort of changes your approach a little bit, the way you’re thinking, because there’s not much left to prove. But you still have a love for rock ’n’ roll and it just makes you think of things a bit differently.
“In that sense, I think (‘Heaven Is Whenever’) is something that comes off as, I hate to use the word ‘mature,’ but ya know, just more sort of, I guess from a different perspective."
Along with Finn on lead vocals and guitar and Kubler on lead guitar, The Hold Steady includes Bobby Drake on drums and Galen Polivka on bass. Noticeably absent is mustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay who left on good terms to pursue his other musical interests before the recording of “Heaven Is Whenever.” On the album, Kubler and Dan Neustadt handled keys; Neustadt has joined the touring lineup of the band, as has third guitarist Steve Selvidge, Finn said.
Asked how many songs the band will play from “Heaven Is Whenever” at Friday’s show at Eleanor Rigby’s in Jermyn, Finn said “probably all of them.” Most of the songs will be new to the fans, but Finn pointed out that the band plays long shows and two of the songs, “Hurricane J” and “Rock Problems,” have recently been premiered by Pitchfork and New York Magazine, respectively, and MTV.com posted “The Weekenders” last week. So those songs will be familiar to showgoers.
Like on previous albums, religious imagery — like a Hare Krishna handing out pamphlets or making the sign of the cross — is woven into the fabric of the stories Finn wrote on “Heaven Is Whenever.” Recurring characters in The Hold Steady canon Holly (short for Hallelujah) and Gideon (Gideon’s Bible) weren’t named coincidentally, and references to a “wicked-strict Christian” family, the crucifixion and the sacrament of Holy Communion are commonplace.
“There’s always these concepts of forgiveness and redemption that I come back to,” Finn explained. “No matter what you believe, whether it’s Catholicism or Judaism or atheism, redemption and forgiveness are pretty wonderful concepts. I was just talking to someone who said that forgiveness is the greatest thing in the world, except for maybe love. Those are huge things, and I think very important to everyone.”
‘If she asks, just tell her we opened for the Stones/ It’s our favorite band except for the Ramones’
Hold Steady songs are often about songs and bands, and it’s been like that from the beginning. In “The Swish,” from the band’s 2004 debut “Almost Killed Me,” Finn sings about Patty Smythe, The Band’s Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson, ginger and jack (maybe the drink, maybe Cream’s Baker and Bruce, probably both), Steve Perry and Neil Schon of Journey, Nina Simone, Prince bassist Andre Cymone and the Rush album “Moving Pictures.”
“It kind of comes from my love of rock ’n’ roll and how I think about things and how I experience the world,” said Finn. “So I might go to a party, and I might come home and my memory of that party might always be the song they were playing when I walked in the room.”
The Hold Steady’s penchant for old-school, fun, beer-commercial anthems — you can almost picture the fictional Eddie and the Cruisers from the movie of the same name when you listen to the Hold Steady — earned it a reputation as “the best bar band in America.” And while the group aspires to wider acceptance, Finn said he still considers the description flattering.
“I’ve always taken that as a compliment,” he said. “To me, it means you kind of come up there with no bullshit and no hype; it’s something very real. … Essentially with the Internet, it’s so easy to come out as a flash in the pan, but to build something really organic that’s not based on a look or Internet hype or all this, just being real and putting people in a room that are excited to hear rock ’n’ roll music, it seems like a really simple and obvious thing, but in this day and age, it’s not. I think that’s where we’ve been successful.”
“Heaven is whenever we can get together, sit down on your floor and listen to your records,” Finn sings in “We Can Get Together” on the forthcoming album, and it’s an expression of true love for music in an indie scene increasingly dominated by blog snark and fashionable trends. If there were any doubts that The Hold Steady wasn’t afraid of the mainstream, they were erased when it signed on to open some Dave Matthews Band shows last summer. The Hold Steady also played support slots for Counting Crows in Europe and opened for the Rolling Stones in Ireland.
Finn, who lived out one of his dreams a few years ago when he got to sing “Rosalita” with Springsteen, still talks like a fan, saying he’d love to play with Tom Petty or The White Stripes.
And if he ever does it, you can bet he’ll write a song about it. w
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