How The Hold Steady Used a Free Concert To Win More of My Money

The Hold Steady, the self-described bar band from Minneapolis, (note the Twins sticker on lead singer and lyricist Craig Finn’s guitar) has long used Ybor City as a recurring motif in its songs. I read once that the band has no special tie to Tampa’s party district. Finn just thinks it sounds cool in songs. Which, if you think about it, makes as good a reason as any for a recurring motif. [Literary term question: Are motifs, by definition recurring? Is the phrase recurring motif redundant? Just curious.]

So when Finn, guitarist Tad Kubler (the guy without the glasses above), and the rest of the five-man band rolled into Ybor’s Ritz Thursday night, it made for a sort of post modernly-local-boys-made-good vibe. Finn talked about the “special” feeling the band has for Ybor. They played a ton of Ybor-referencing songs – more than I thought they had – and closed the regular show with “Slapped Actress” and the encore with “Killer Parties”, both anthemic highlights replete with Ybor City talk.

It was free show, sponsored by Jim Beam, rescheduled from the original show set for Jannus Landing. And that made for an exceedingly weird online ticketing scheme, in which the Ritz and promoters announced the concert as sold out when it clearly wasn’t. This is apropos of nothing, I suppose, but processes interest me, and I don’t quite understand the economic or organizational model behind all of this.

But I digress.

The night began ominously, demonstrating, I fear, just how old I am. (37, in case you care.) The opening act, a two-guy power duo called Greymarket, was playing when my friend John and I walked in. At least I think they were. I’m still trying to decide if it was music, or some government test of an experimental new sonic crowd control weapon.

Look, I like loud music. My wife is always yelling at me to turn it down, and I am slowly demolishing my hearing with maxed out head phones. But I have to tell you, I have stood next to afterburning F-15s quieter than Greymarket. I thought for a second Busch Gardens was filming a remake of the Death Jockey Howl-o-Scream ad campaign. The speakers exploded in my chest and blew my nose hair back and forth. Greymarket literally chased John and me out of the music pit and reduced us to the indignity of asking the men’s room attendant to score us some of the earplugs the Ritz was giving out to women. Best $2 I ever spent in a bathroom. Believe it.

It was a shame, really, because somewhere within the force field of murderous sound, you could hear the hint of something quite good in what Greymarket played. But trying to describe Greymarket’s music would be like trying to describe a caveman buried under a 100 feet of ice. When their set finally ended, I asked one of the young bartenders, “Was that really loud, or am I just really old?” She smiled at me diplomatically and said it didn’t seem much out of the ordinary, adding quickly that she was working in a little booth so she might not have felt the full brunt. I was unconvinced and set about lowering my expectations of the Hold Steady show and working on my excuses for standing out in the hallway.

And therein lies my segue. Expectations. The key element to enjoying any concert. As it turns out, the Hold Steady came out playing with great intelligibility. Loud, but not actively painful. About the third or fourth song, “Sequestered in Memphis,” I think it was, I yanked out my silly earplugs, reproached myself for my lameness, and started moving toward the stage with the white man’s overbite in full effect.

This was my first Hold Steady show. I’ve known about the group since last year when they started touring with my favorite band, the Drive-By Truckers. While they can’t yet match the Truckers’ sprawling canvass of musical style and visceral lyrical insight and emotion, they write catchy, vibrant songs that are easy to love quickly. And Finn’s intricate lyrics, which he half-sings, half-speaks, dance all over the place almost in their own language – call it Singlish – like a really talented rapper’s. The Hold Steady’s songs have more great one-liners than just about any band I know.

Here’s the refrain to one of their best, “Stuck Between Stations:”

She was a really cool kisser, but she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian
She was a damn good dancer, but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend
He likes the warm feeling, but he’s tired of all the dehydration
Most nights are crystal clear, but tonight it’s like stuck between stations – on the radio

I don’t have much of clue what the hell all that means, but it sounds great, and the music underneath is infectious. “Stuck Between Stations” absolutely rocked at Thursday night’s show. Probably the highlight for me, along with “Slapped Actress” and “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.”

The band has great charisma live. Finn, who’s bald with glasses, never stops engaging the crowd with a twitchy, dishy grin, that to me suggests a cross between a nerd and a gossip columnist. He actually mouths words off microphone between lines, as if to say, “Can you believe this shit I’m singing about?”

The rest of the guys sort of play straight men, but they play hard. And the piano/organ player Thursday night rocked a porn stache and a golfer’s fedora to great effect.

Many of songs center on the trials of a coterie of “hoodrat” teens from Minneapolis. In fact, like locations, characters with names like Charlemagne and Hallelujah (Holly for short) recur throughout different songs and albums. The character driven tales, often told non-linearly, teem with sex, drugs, and religion. In a less fun and talented band, this might get tiresome and pretentious. But Finn is a genuine poet, with a tremendous sense of irony and an empathetic loyalty to the characters he creates. He clearly loves them. Thus his word play never seems to get stale, while also generating real emotion. And it’s impossible not to nod along the spare, in many ways classic, guitar-driven rock.

I have two half-complaints about the show. The first is, unfortunately, common to most concerts. The music tended to drown out the vocals, which is a shame because Finn’s such a skilled writer and stylized singer. It’s really worth hearing the band’s full package, and if you didn’t know the songs, I don’t think you could get it from the show. But that’s hardly unique to the Hold Steady and the Ritz.

You can get it from these two great recorded concerts on the NPR website.

Speaking of knowing songs, any concertgoer’s experience lies at the mercy of the set list. And while The Hold Steady played every song with real conviction and intensity – no mailing it in here – the set list they chose Thursday wasn’t the one I would have chosen. Again, not really a complaint. They played about 25 songs, which makes for a a pretty dense show. But they played a number of songs I like, but don’t love, while leaving off quite a few I love, notably: “You Can Make Him Like You,” “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” “Banging Camp”, “Chips Ahoy”, “Chill Out Tent”, and “Lord, I’m Discouraged.” Maybe next time, because I would definitely go back.

And in keeping with the Ybor theme, they played a number of older songs with Ybor references that I didn’t know – four or five, I would say. Each one of them sounded good enough to make me want to buy it. And I probably will go back and scour their older recordings on iTunes for songs I’ve missed.

So if you think about it, from The Hold Steady’s point-of-view, based on what’s best for their career, they had an awfully successful concert if I’m any indication. I left wanting more after 25 songs. I will likely own a few more of their songs by the end of the day, and I’ve done what I can to share them with any of you intrepid enough to read. Maybe complete satisfaction is overrated.