We’re an American Band

It’s awfully easy (and somewhat fun) to get tangled up in The Hold Steady’s Midwestern mythos— the band’s aesthetic is straightforward (brews, devil horns, guitars, good times) but not simplistic (Finn’s lyrics are near-prophetic), and they’ve cultivated, however inadvertently, a certain working-class appeal (see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, The Hold Steady’s most obvious predecessor). They’re the band you go see when you feel like getting drunk on PBR, dancing and then loitering outside the venue, eating crappy pizza on the curb; they embody the half-tragic, half-ecstatic American adolescence every 33-year-old with a desk job wants desperately to re-live.

In some ways, their appeal is as much about escapism—a return to teen-dom, to making out with a friend and hunting down parties in the woods—as anything else. I hold up a stack of press clippings and tell Finn I’m tempted to highlight every instance of the word “beer.” Finn grins, surveys the drained mugs littering our table, and raises his eyebrows. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he deadpans. The members of The Hold Steady are clearly comfortable with their easygoing, pints-and-riffs rep, but still: Does “bar band” (and all its attendant connotations) ever start to feel like a pejorative or, worse, a burden?

“Yeah,” Kubler laughs, “at 9 a.m.”

“If you don’t like our band, you can use ‘bar band’ as a pejorative. If you do, it’s a compliment,” keyboardist Franz Nicolay says with a shrug.

“I just always go back to The Replacements,” Finn says. “They were obviously drunk. But when you listen to their records, it’s not what you’re thinking about. You’re thinking about the songs. Now when [you’d] go see them play, [it’d be] hard to miss that they were drunk. The one thing I will say is that over the last two years, I’ve had so many people say ‘Oh, so-and-so saw you, and you were really drunk,’ and more often than not, I wasn’t drunk. So that’s the bad thing about having that reputation. Just because I’m there, doesn’t mean I’m drunk.”

Unsurprisingly, Finn is equally accustomed to listeners conflating the pill-addled anti-heroes of his songs with his own, tamer lifestyle. “People make assumptions about me, but I’m not surprised that it happens. Someone will be like, ‘Dude, you wanna go smoke some crack?’ and I’ll be like ‘No, no, that sounds completely unappealing. Why would you think I would want to smoke crack?’”

Regardless, The Hold Steady still boasts a glorious history of booze-addled onstage antics, most of which involve some kind of inadvertent physical comedy—at a recent show in Sheffield, England, a gently inebriated Finn plunged through a hole onstage, despite his bandmates’ best efforts at prevention. “I very much pay attention to him when he’s onstage,” Kubler explains. “Because once he’s feeling it, he’ll go anywhere, so I try to keep crap out of his way. And when we were loading-in in Sheffield, I almost said, ‘Dude, watch that hole.’” Kubler shakes his head.

“I saw it. I should have known,” Finn moans.

“He cruised past me, and I almost reached out and grabbed him,” Kubler continues. “And then I was like, ‘He’s hurt.’ He wasn’t, but he went f---ing down!”

The Hold Steady, like all good rock bands, are teeming with these sorts of road stories: rich, giggly anecdotes about having drinks chucked in their faces in Seattle; taking accidental drum-dives in Orlando; and attempting to hurdle a railing in Bowling Green, only to sprawl ass-over-teakettle backward, finishing the now-out-of-tune guitar solo with legs draped over the other side. If they’re selling their fans a second adolescence, they’re also living one, in every major American city. Finn admits that the trappings and iconography and exhaustion of near-constant touring—highways and rest stops, strip malls and gas stations—occasionally seep into his songs.

“There’s a little bit of a feedback loop. You see things, a sign or something—I get a lot of inspiration, lyrically, from driving down the road, watching everything fly past,” Finn explains. “There are places you wouldn’t go at home, but you’re suddenly there because that’s where the rock club is.”

The Hold Steady has managed to release three full-length records in three consecutive years, although the success of Boys and Girls in America—along with its subsequent tour and new promotional schedule—has dealt a temporary blow to the band’s prolificacy. “That was the pace we were on, but that’s not going to work this year,” Finn shrugs. “Three in three was pretty good. But the success of this one, in particular, makes it almost impossible to keep going.”

But Kubler says that, even though it’s become more difficult, the band is still committed to writing: “The first thing I do after we load in and wait around for mics to get set up and cables to get run is grab my acoustic guitar and start playing. I’ve been trying to come up with more ideas on the road because, as a band, we like to keep a quick work pace. I want to make sure that I maintain some sort of creative focus. We’re on the road so much now that if we weren’t writing on the road, we wouldn’t be writing at all.”

Considering their recent success, it’s inevitable that the band has witnessed some key changes in demographics. “A lot of the people who listen to our music see themselves in us. So when we first started playing small clubs, it skewed older, and male. But as we expanded, we started having younger fans and more female fans. It was all pissed-off girlfriends at first. I would see them from the stage, and they were mad at me and their boyfriends,” Finn says.

“One time we were in L.A., and we were setting up our stuff,” bassist Galen Polivka says, grinning. “And we hear this guy and his girlfriend or his date or whatever, and he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m so glad we’re at this show, it’s gonna be so kick-ass!’ So we’re three songs into the set, and they’re front and center, and the guy gestures to his girlfriend, like ‘What do you think?’ and she’s like ‘Eh,’” Polivka laughs, tipping his palm back and forth to illustrate apathy. The band guffaws.

“In England, where the set times are earlier, we see a lot more older fans, groups of guys who are 55 years old,” Finn says.

“It’s like A Hard Day’s Night,” concludes Polivka. “Only instead of teenaged girls chasing us, it’s 50-year-old, mustachioed men.”