TEAM LAST CALL

The Hold Steady, as you can see, are not much to look at.
Singer Craig Finn is balding and has a beer gut from chugging a six-pack onstage every night. Guitarist Tad Kubler looks like your Uncle Shlomo. Keyboardist Franz Nicolay has a waxed mustache.
No, The Hold Steady aren’t going to be supplanting Fall Out Boy in the looks category anytime soon. And they couldn’t give less of a shit.
Because despite their age, their figures and their flagrant lack of eyeliner, The Hold Steady are one of the hottest bands on the planet. Their combination of beat-poet vocals and Bud Light-commercial guitar riffs has every music mag in America drooling like a dog at dinnertime. The band has released three albums in the last three years, all of which ended up on best-of lists from Blender, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Spin …
In the wake of its most recent offering, Boys and Girls in America (October 2006), the New York five-piece is heading out on the road for the next stretch of a tour that started in 2004 and is likely to last until hell freezes over or they’re dead, whichever comes first.
In mid-February, Team Last Call tracked down Nicolay, who was in a cab working his way to the airport for another round of touring in Europe.
“What’s more boring than hearing some dude in a band complain about the road? So I’m not going to do that,” Nicolay says. “You can get away from your real life and live in a little tour-van bubble, when the only thing you’re responsible for is playing a 45-to-90-minute show every night.”
And making sure that your mustache looks good.
“That’s easy!” he laughs. “Shit, man, that takes care of itself.”
You can run into all sorts of characters at a Hold Steady show – the bohemian with a copy of “On the Road” in his hand, the drunk guy you saw pissing in the alley on your way into the club, the hot girl in your pottery class, the music journalist with the messenger bag covered in band buttons, the kid with the eyebrow rings that stole your girlfriend during the opening band’s set. These are also the characters you’ll hear about in The Hold Steady’s songs – tales of love, drugs, heartbreak and redemption (usually followed by more heartbreak) told through lyrics as thick as Dylan and as frank as Sandra Bernhard – all delivered through Finn’s nasal, scattershot talk-singing. They’ve got the same characteristic as a Drive-By Truckers song; these are stories of waste and woe told over music that doesn’t bow to the tragedy. When the story ends in the disaster, the music ends in triumph.
“Our songs are not all about the parties. They’re also about the aftermath and the consequences. There is regret and there’s nostalgia. We’re saying you can have those things and still experience a catharsis,” Nicolay explains. “It’s the same theory of the Irish wake – you do lose things and you feel blackness in life, but there’s a humanist way to approach that. Instead of bemoaning your fate, you say, ‘This is part of life. Life is loss as well as happiness, but it’s part of the celebration.’”
In a turn of irony, The Hold Steady’s greatest asset is also the element that’s been the hardest for new listeners to swallow: Finn’s voice. It ranges from a pinched, sarcastic growl to a machine-gun shout, from slightly abrasive to thoroughly distracting. Which is all part of what makes it so extraordinary.
But on Boys and Girls in America, the band offers up just the right combination of ear-candy barroom rock and punchy vocals. It’s by far the most accessible of the band’s albums, like a party in a can, simultaneously sweet and unnerving like a Sour Patch Kid. Finn adapts to the new flood of melodies offered up by Kubler and Nicolay, softening his voice when necessary and delivering the kind of sing-along choruses that were few and far between on the band’s fantastic 2005 album, Separation Sunday.
“So many people – Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Gordon Gano from the Violent Femmes – there’s a whole history of people whose voices take some getting used to,” Nicolay says. “One of the phrases Craig has been using for this record is, ‘You gotta give them a little sugar with their medicine.’ If you couch [his voice] in this really comfortable music, then people are more likely to be receptive to what he has to say.”
For three years running, The Hold Steady have gotten such across-the-board praise – “Band of the Year” from Blender, “Best Bar Band in America” from NPR – that it’s amazing the members can even function. And that was before Boys and Girls in America even came out.
“It’s kind of important for us to register it and appreciate it, but at the same time, not get too caught up in it,” Nicolay says of the chatter. “You can’t go around life thinking, ‘We’re the greatest rock and roll band in the country! What would the greatest band in the country be doing right now? Is this new song worthy of the greatest rock and roll band?’ or you’d never write a song!”
The Hold Steady with writer’s block? Somehow I don’t see that happening.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine