The Hold Steady
Rock ‘n’ roll was born when adult songwriters learned to credibly imitate teenagers. Sure, there were other factors at play: by the late 50s Ike Turner, Wynonie Harris, and countless others had years of experience playing R & B, jump blues, or whatever else listeners called the licks, beats, and attitudes that were later commodified as the sound of young white America. And it took an otherworldly lust object like Elvis to crystallize teens’ desires so perfectly. But it was only when teenagers recognized themselves in the crafty simulations of adolescence created by Chuck Berry, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and the journeyman tunesmiths of the Brill Building that rock evolved from a commercial fad to a seismic cultural shift.
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Those 50s songwriters weren’t far removed from their teen years, though–Leiber and Stoller were both 25 when “Yakety Yak,” which they wrote for the Coasters, hit number one in 1958, and Chuck Berry was all of 27 when he wrote “Maybelline.” Craig Finn and John Darnielle, the sharpest storytellers currently working in any pop music subgenre, aren’t quite so youthful. Finn, the 33-year-old leader of the Hold Steady, already has a career behind him as the front man of the posthumously lauded Minneapolis band Lifter Puller; Darnielle, five years Finn’s senior, spent the bulk of the 90s bellowing into his boom box to his own strummed accompaniment and peddling his solo work as the Mountain Goats. But as comparatively ancient as they are, on their newest discs both successfully reestablish contact with their teen selves. In the process they uncover the same lesson implicit in the birth of rock ‘n’ roll: adulthood and adolescence can only be understood in relation to each other.
Not that Separation Sunday doesn’t end with a bang. Tired of bad drugs and worse sex, Holly wants a happy ending, and Finn kindly obliges her: she strolls haggardly into an Easter mass and pleads her case to the congregation. If that feels abrupt and arbitrary, well, it is. Finn gives this story no more weight than any of the others he’s sprinkled throughout the album: half-remembered Bible tales, urban legends about Rod Stewart, apocrypha about Holly’s acquaintances’ exploits. But he’s up-front about the storytelling conventions he’s playing with, and about how these stories are arranged. “Do you want me to tell it like boy meets girl and the rest is history? / Or do you want it like a murder mystery?” he asks near the beginning of the album in “Charlemagne in Sweatpants,” then decides, “I’m gonna tell it like a comeback story.”
When: Thu 6/2, 9:30 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Steven Dewall.
