Stay Positive: The Pennypacker Perspective

No further review of the Hold Steady can really say anything enlightening after Mike Conklin's piece in the L Magazine a couple of weeks ago:

The amount of tolerance you’ve built up for the Hold Steady is most likely directly proportional to the amount of tolerance you still have left for the archetype of the Rock Nerd as it came of age in the 90s: male, college educated and a little bit bumbling — the obsessive record collector with an encyclopedic knowledge of rock history, the guy with all the band shirts, the guy who labored over mixtapes in lieu of being able to express emotions like a regular person, the guy who could never quite get the girl because he’d already become her best friend; the college radio DJ, the tireless booster of vinyl as the preferred audio format.

Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn has been courting that guy for the duration of his band’s career, with four full-lengths that have as their primary subject matter what is essentially a series of coming-of-age stories about teenagers in the throes of the punk rock scene — for many, including Finn’s characters and Finn himself, a brief but important stop on the road to what they will later become — set in suburbs and cities that may as well be nameless, even though they never are. He preys on nostalgia for something which has only been gone for a few years, but which, in the wake of the internet, seems like a relict of a long gone era. It’s an approach that’s fraught with problems, from the appearance of being a one-trick pony to the ongoing bout with gooey sentimentality. Unless, of course, you’re “that guy.”

That's it. That's there all there is to it. It's the reason why as of last night, the David Letterman show, one of the last places left on television to regularly hear good contemporary music, declared the Hold Steady the "best rock band in America". The Hold Steady, and their ascendancy to the critical and somewhat popular consensus, are the latest in a line of revenge-of-the-nerd bands (to steal and paraphrase a line from Mick Collins in a recent radio interview). The squares, the losers, the regular joes, the geeks, all those guys (and some gals too for sure) - who first found refuge in the Ramones all those years ago and later on in an assortment of punk and bar bands, ranging from the credible underground to the laughably mainstream (as well as the laughable underground and the credible mainstream) - are reveling and relishing in the triumph of the Hold Steady.

That being said, there is a definite incongruity going on in the gears and the works. Not many of the fans can empathize with the seemingly endless litany of stories involving massive intakes of drugs and criminal behavior (and if Finn himself ever did lead this life he couldn't be any further away from it than he is now). Not many of the fans, probably none of the fans, can say they are or know someone like Hallelujah, the chief protagonist of Separation Sunday (except me of course - I know a Holly). And among the secular sophisticates within the fan base, doesn't all the Catholic imagery go a little overboard?

Then there is the Springsteen factor. At the end of the day, despite all the inheritance from Finn's Minnesotan ancestors in the Replacements, and his references to Youth of Today and 7 Seconds, there is no question that the Hold Steady are essentially the second coming of the E Street Band, just with fewer members and a lot less soul (which isn't as much of a slight as that reads). And that's the Hold Steady in a nutshell. If Bruce is/was Dylan in a bar band, then the Hold Steady are Bruce wishing he was more punk than he actually is (again, that's not as much of a slight as it reads).

So either you love this stuff or you don't. You're either in it for the lyrics or you're not. Either you're OK with Craig invoking Billy Joel ("you catholic girls start much too late") or you're not. Either you love the "gooey" (damn Conklin stole my word for it) guitar solos from Tad Kubler or you don't. Either you love the very pop keyboards of Franz Nicolay or you don't. Either you take the time to learn the names of the bass player and drummer or you don't (Galen and Bobby).

Yours truly will make no bones about it. A ton of bands that sound like the Hold Steady, that exist either in the ether of American dives or existed on the radio through the 80's and 90's, would no way appeal to me these days. But these guys do. The occasional odes to 70's arena rock, which make me cringe on some recent records that shall go nameless, sound perfectly OK to me when coming out of this band. What makes the Hold Steady the exception are Finn's stories, his lyrics, which we've already established aren't really always that relatable. So if you run the spectrum from Dylan's ambiguous poetry to Springsteen's blue collar stories, Finn holds a strange middle where it sounds like Sprinsteen but appeals like Dylan (or is it the other way around?) and that's what makes it work for someone like me.

Stay Positive is a worthy follow-up to Boys and Girls in America and Separation Sunday (and by-and-large surpasses the Franz-less first stab Almost Killed Me). It doesn't hold the consistent punch of the last two records but that's in part because the band does try to expand its sound and they more or less succeed at each turn. The standouts are indeed the sing-a-long anthems - "Constructive Summer", "Sequestered in Memphis", the title track. They are equal in measure to "Stuck Between Stations", "Hot Soft Light", "Your Little Hoodrat Friend", "Banging Camp", and "The Swish". Songs like "Magazines and "Yeah Sapphire" are almost up to snuff of the previous secondary winners like "Massive Nights", "You Can Make Him Like You", "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night" and so on and so forth. As an album to simply enjoy listening to, Stay Positive is certainly one of the best records of the year.

One more thing about the title track and the Conklin piece. He's right. No one can relate to that one. In fact, the song breaks a golden rule I wanted to establish in a piece I cannot finish called "The Things I Don't Want To Hear In Rock n' Roll Ever Again": the topic of being famous. I hate when artists sing about their careers. It's self-indulgent to the worst possible extent. I wanted to yell at Jack White for that b-side late last year, "It's My Fault For Being Famous" (despite it's undeniably catchy country hook). But if anything, "Stay Positive" makes for a nice companion piece to that song. Whereas the former is a bitter resentment towards the media and maybe some of the unruly, obsessive fans, the latter is a love letter to the fans (probably including a few of those unruly and obsessive ones too). And while I sympathize with the former's rage, I am warmed by the sentiment in the latter, and while that still doesn't make it possible to be empathetic, it harks back to the same good feelings that the Hold Steady supply over and over. And while most of us cannot relate to that song in particular, the vibe and emotion of the song and the overall album, the message of staying positive and who is saying it and why it is being said, it not only makes us feel good to be listening to music, it makes us specifically feel good to be back into a bar band.