The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn is the Poet Laureate of America’s post-teenage wasteland. He also happens to be the second coming of Bruce Springsteen. Oh, and I’m betting he owns the bigger collection of classic rock albums in his neighborhood. And on 2016’s Boys and Girls in America Finn does what he does best–sings about fucked-up kids doing fucked-up things while fucked up. They get fucked up at proms, killer parties and all-ages hardcore shows, and sometimes they get so fucked up they end up in hospitals and the chillout tents at rock festivals.
The Hold Steady’s oversized hard rock gives you the impression punk never happened–never mind the Sex Pistols, here come The Hold Steady. The band’s big sound dates back to Springsteen’s“Born to Run,” and The Hold Steady don’t try to hide his influence. Springsteen is also the obvious comparison when it comes to subject matter, but while the Boss of Born to Run went in for mythopoeic anthems about symbolic characters attempting to escape the swampland of New Jersey, The Hold Steady offer up detailed and anything but inspirational tales about real kids with real names (many of whom show up from song to song) looking less to escape their hometowns (Minneapolis Minnesota being the most often mentioned) but themselves. No myths and anthems for these guys.
The Hold Steady spell out the album’s theme on opening track “Stuck Between Stations,” which begins with the lines “There are nights when I think Sal Paradise [Jack Kerouac’s alter ego in On the Road] was right/Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” “Stuck Between Station” sets the LP’s musical tone as well, what with its big sound, megaton guitar riff and Franz Nicolay’s keyboards, which bring to mind the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan. And over it all you get Finn’s gruff and blustery talk-sing; he sounds like a big guy who can push you around, but in real life he wears glasses.
“Stuck Between Stations” is a template for what follows. “Chips Ahoy” is ostensibly about a woman who knows how to pick her horses, but its real subject is unbridgeable emotional distance: “How am I supposed to know that you’re high,” sings Finn, “if you won’t let me touch you?” The very Thin Lizzy “Hot Soft Light” is about a guy in an unstated legal predicament who lays out one very unconvincing alibi; he couldn’t have done it, it seems, because “I’ve been straight since the Cinco de Mayo/But before that I was blotto/I was blacked out/I was cracked out/I was caved in/You should have seen all these portals that I’ve powered up in.”
“Same Kooks” goes from drugalogue (“They found me in a florist/I was fried and out of focus/I was kicking it with chemists”) before taking a yearning spiritual turn (“She said it’s hard to feel holy when you can’t get clean/Now she’s bumping up against the washing machine”). “First Night” is a moving tale about chasing the dragon; “Holly’s inconsolable/Unhinged and uncontrollable/Because we can’t get as high as we got/On that first night.” Finn hammers home what he means by being stuck between stations when he repeats the line “When they kiss they spit white noise.” In Finn’s universe you can’t say it with a kiss–all you get is a hiss.
“Party Pit” is about a girl and a boy who “sail away on such separate trips”–she gets “pinned down at the party pit,” he has no idea what to do beyond “walk around and drink some more,” a point Finn drives home by repeating the line some twenty times. “Massive Nights” describes the goings on at a senior prom; the kids get blotto (“We were all powered up on some new upper drug”) while sharing memories of high school crushes and all-ages hardcore matinee shows, and you get the sense they’re only graduating from one narcotic blur to another. In the poignant acoustic number “Citrus,” Finn echoes Kerouac’s Beat philosophy; his kids may be “Lost in fog and love and faithless fear” but they all carry a divine spark. “I see Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers,” sings Finn, and Sal Paradise couldn’t have said it better.
“Chillout Tent” tells the tale of two kids who hook up (kind of) in the chillout tent of a rock festival in western Massachusetts. Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner plays the guy who takes four when he should have taken just one, the Reputation’s Elizabeth Elmore the girl who overdoes it on the mushrooms. Returned to a semblance of sanity by IV drips, charcoal, oranges and cigarettes they end up making out, then split and never see one another again. “Southtown Girls” spells out the binary choice most young American males (and females) face: “Southtown girls won’t blow you away,” sings Finn, “But you know that they’ll stay.”
Some argue Finn has milked the Young and the Wasted bit dry, and if 2021’s superb Open Door Policy is any indication, he has. But the fact remains that his body of work captures the amped-up, high-volume desperation of his late teens/early twenties characters as adroitly as John Cheever did the quiet desperation of his middle-aged characters living in the affluent bedroom communities outside New York City. Finn’s topical landscape may be a narrow one, but he covers the ground with fully realized and carefully detailed stories that ring true. His characters bang around like pinballs in a machine made of dope and booze while yearning for spiritual transcendence, but you can’t help but suspect some of them are headed for the drain.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
