Don’t You Hate These Clever People (The Hold Steady, Bowery Ballroom)

(photo from www.theholdsteady.com)

The Hold Steady are only as good as they are because they can’t not be.

A self-proclaimed “bar band” fronted by ex-Lifter Puller hoistman Craig Finn, they’re never less than two things at once.  Symbiosis or psychosis, oil-and-vinegar or Valdez-and-Alaska*, two great tastes that just might grate together... That’s for the listener to decide, because as tight as the group might be, they’re never going to get their act together.  They’re fueled on combustion, not cohesion; compulsion, not compromise.

The instruments play pure comfort food.  Anyone who grew up listening to big-market classic rock radio is going to recognize every note, even if they can’t exactly place them.  There’s a good chunk of E-Street sound – the over-mic’d snares, the piano pounding over rich Hammond whole notes, the low-register horn blasts.  Guitar theatrics tend toward simple meat and potato riffs.  Sometimes there’s room on the side for a Bruce Hornsby solo.  It’s déjà vu on repeat.

Against that, vocalist Finn whines and barks and wheezes out stories of punks and pushers and hope and redemption.  The words are relentlessly quotable and often rhythmically palatable, but the frontman’s nasal speak-singing can be abrasive.  He sounds a little like a cross between Greg Proops and Rex Harrison, or your high school shop teacher and Eminem.  “They’d be great,” someone said the first time I saw them, “if that guy’d just shut up.”  But power to the people making money with their mouths:  The more you listen, the more it works:  For some reason, it sounds like the most natural odd combo since Kerouac shurrouruuruuruuruuruuruurkdiei’d along with Steve Allen.

While Finn’s presence actively pushes against the music – he’s narrating, more than anything – he’s also drawing from it.  The tunes in the background are in the backstory, as well:  He namechecks everyone from Beverly Sills to Prince Bassist André Cymone.  He evokes Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” by singing “Ellen Foley gives them hope,” he answers Springsteen’s “Tramps like us” with “We like tramps!,” he sprinkles in song titles from Kate Bush and the Pogues, lines from Bob Marley.  He drops nods to both Lolita and Star Wars.  While it might feel a bit second generation, it never feels secondhand. 

It also makes it a little easy for music critics to overpraise it.

The lyrics are clever, often funny -- not wacky, funny -- but can start to feel redundant.  Finn has a cast of specific characters and a few obsessions to which he repeatedly returns.  He wrote “Knuckles,” about wanting a cool nickname (“I’ve been trying to get people to call me Sunny D, ‘cause I’ve got the good stuff kids go for”), but the same idea and phrasing pops up again and again in other songs, some from his Lifter Puller days:  “My name’s Steve Perry but people call me circuit city, I’m so well-connected/My name’s Neil Schon but some people call me Nina Simone” (“The Swish”); “My name is Corey, I’m really into hardcore, people call me Hard Corey” (“Hostile, Mass.”); “One night Dwight got all goofy on the roofies now they all call him the fiddler on the roof.” (“Nice, Nice”); “My name’s Juanita but the guys they call me LL Cool J ‘cause I been here for years and you can’t call it a comeback if you never even been away and I ain’t never been no place.” (“Cruised and Accused of Cruising”)

If you wanted to get overly analytical, you could say that what the Hold Steady is doing is establishing an iconography, relying on recurrent phrasing, names and imagery to define its world.  It seems more likely, though, that Finn’s simply doomed to continually repaint the same canvas, to include every last bit of brainstorm that flashes across his synapses  (Lord help us should we ever hear him sing, “My name is William, people call me Bill.”).

Whichever the case, a concept album/rock opera was probably inevitable, and it comes on the Steady’s second CD, Separation Sunday.  With down-on-their-luck women named Halleluiah and ne’er-do-wells named Charlemagne, it’s a “comeback story” about some kids figuring out sex and love and drugs and religion.  Heavily praised – it earned the group a Village Voice cover story – I don’t find it as compelling as the group’s last CD, The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, mostly because it is front-loaded.

The first three songs on Sunday are knockouts, especially the bouncy Bible School rehab of “Cattle and the Creeping Things:”  

I guess I’ve heard about original sin

I heard the dude blamed the chick

I heard the chick blamed the snake

I heard they were naked when they got busted.

I heard things ain’t been the same since...

The loud-soft-loud “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” with revved-up riffage, female back-up vocals and lyrics that are actually sung, may score the band some play, but it comes too early on the album.  While there are memorable lines sprinkled throughout the CD, the tempo and tone remain too consistent and the music too anonymous to shake things up. 

So I wasn’t exactly amped when it became apparent at the Steady’s Thursday night show that they were going to play Sunday all the way through, in order, start to finish.  As far as concept albums go, it’s no Dark Side of the Moon.  But the show was better than the CD, and not only because music is better live.

It was a bit of a celebration, this sold out Bowery gig.  Officially a CD-release party, Finn’s parents and wife were there, and he was thanking folks like an award-show reject.  But he was also glowing, and bouncing; at his best, he’s – like his lyrics – somewhat delirious, his short arms flapping at his sides like a spastic two year-old’s, beaming a smile that seems less emotional than gastrointestinal.  Tourette’s are for kids, and he can’t stop jabbering, so where his words are supposed to stop he steps away from the microphone and keeps mouthing out to the audience.  This storytelling seems to be a biological urge, a disease, something he can’t stop; it has to get out, and that urgency sells the song. 

The crowd danced along, managed to scream along with a good many lines, and stood still and worshipped at the end:  The penultimate song on the CD (and of the set), the rock-bottom church organ ballad “Crucifixion Cruise,” finally felt more revelation than rest stop.

The Hold Steady was what it am, and be’d all it could.

Their popularity is an asterisk, here, the exception to whatever’s currently ruling.  They mock the scenesters, decry the “sniffling indie kids” and “clustered-up clever kids” (and lest you think me a finger-pointing hypocrite, Finn proclaimed “Bars, not blogs!” last night... which could leave a recovering alcoholic crying into his bottled water).  But by slapping together the double negative of their ‘70s sound and some smart-rock, by actually doing its own thing, Finn’s bunch has reclaimed some of the snifflers, some of the clustered, some of the bloggers from the land of the cool and the damned.

Brooklyn Vegan has concert photos.

Tour dates are here.   They’re also playing a free show at Sound Fix Records in Williamsburg on Saturday, 5/28 at 3PM.

They performed a new song during their encore, something based on some law firm’s subway ads, called “212-MARGARITA.”  And yes, Charlemagne was in it.

I missed first act Brother Ali (of Rhymesayers fame), but found opener Need New Body needing a lot more than that.  While you certainly can’t accuse the noise-rock band of doing anything other than its own thing, here it was often to the exclusion of the audience.  More nonsense- than art-rock, they gave off the aura of five really stoned total strangers trying to improvise with each other.  Unlike fellow Philadelphians Man Man, they exhibited no precision, no world-view, no musical talent.  It was just the flailing about of someone who doesn’t know how to swim, and no paying assembly wants to watch that.

NNB pulled out some unusual instrumentation – a banjo, a panpipe and some toy horns... but no gong, which is the only thing the crowd was calling for.

I actually used to work with one of the keyboard players; I’m so happy he couldn’t see me.  I’d hate to tell him how awful his band is.

*Yes, I’m well aware that Valdez is, in addition to the infamous tanker, a city in Alaska.  But work with me here.  I’m on fumes.

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