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It’s no exaggeration to say that The Hold Steady make me want to go to America.
Their rock’n’roll mythologies dramatise and glorify the experiences of young characters on the periphery of the American narrative at the turn of the 21st century. It’s a seductive sound. Often described as America’s premier bar band, The Hold Steady build on a long history of American rock’n’roll and literature to create fun, witty and self-aware rock music. Specifically, their songs and characters typically inhabit the city and suburbs of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area in the USA’s Midwest, often known as the Twin Cities. Somehow, though, the stories contained (or, perhaps more accurately, hinted at) in their music have managed to transcend the referenced Twin Cities locations.

Led by nasal vocalist and lively lyricist Craig Finn, The Hold Steady rose from the ashes of the Minneapolis-based outfit Lifter Puller. But despite their near-constant references to streets, nightspots and Twin Cities landmarks, the band is actually based in Brooklyn, New York. What does this mean for the rhetoric of locality used when discussing The Hold Steady’s music?

John Street writes that “locality [is] a familiar feature of the rhetoric of pop” and indeed, it’s difficult to argue that proposition with regards to critical discussion of the band’s output. Indeed, discussions of “where the band come from and where they are deemed to have arrived” are inevitable (Street 1995 p255).

Street identifies several different discourses deployed by rock critics, musicians and fans. ‘Locality as social experience’ is easily applied to The Hold Steady’s lyrics (if not quite so directly applied to the music). Lyrics to Hornets! Hornets!, the first track from the band’s second album, reference streets, city blocks and high schools in the suburb of Minneapolis where Craig Finn grew up. He says of the song: "When you say 'Nicollet and 66th', 'drove the wrong way down 169/almost died up by Edina High', the guy who went to Edina High, or drives down 169 to go to work every day, or lives on Nicollet and 66th might say, 'Fuck yeah, I know what you're talking about, I understand where you're coming from, I know those kids. Whoa, they're singing about us!'" (Patrin 2005).

In this sense “place here signifies ‘rootedness’ as authenticity” (Street 1995 p256). In 2007 The Hold Steady were even approached by the Minnesota Twins baseball team to record a version of the classic baseball song, Take Me Out To The Ball Game with Twin Cities-centric lyrics (“Hey Minneapolis/ Hey St Paul/ we don’t even care if we don’t get the call!”) (Montgomery 2007).

Despite all this, and the fact that all but one of the band’s members has lived in Minneapolis, the band is from Brooklyn – “the home they never write about” (Gruntzel 2007). It’s significant that The Hold Steady cannot straightforwardly or authentically claim an identity as a Twin Cities band; rather, they’re a Brooklyn band that sings about the Twin Cities. It even seems debateable whether they could sing so effusively about the place if they lived there – surely writing about Minneapolis as they were still observing it would be overwhelming and inaccurate. What becomes immortalised is the Twin Cities of Craig Finn’s memory.
Street writes that locality as social experience is “a discourse used by rock stars like Bruce Springsteen, both to authenticate their music and to act as a theme within it, to create the juxtaposition of present and past lives” (Street 1995 p256). This ‘juxtaposition of present and past lives’ is a device frequently used by The Hold Steady. The rambling stories of Craig Finn’s lyrics are nearly always told in past tense, as if remembering past adventures, or recalling a scene or time that no longer exists. Indeed, Finn has stated:
“As far as writing songs about Minneapolis, I do think that being in New York and being outside of Minneapolis and looking in allowed me, lyrically at least, to see the forest from the trees and really figure out what was so special and unique about Minneapolis; and reflect a lot on my teenage years. A lot of the reason Minneapolis comes up so much is that a lot of it is based on being a teenager, as most good rock songs are. And this is where I was a teenager.” (Spacelab interview 2005, 01:26)


And so, while other American geographical references do pop up throughout the band’s lyrics – Ybor City, Florida (“That’s enough about me, tell me how you got down here to Ybor City”); Tennessee and Texas (“Subpoenaed in Texas/Sequestered In Memphis”), not to mention New York, Massachusetts, etc. – it is the Twin Cities that are written about in loving, glamorous and dirty detail. Individual streets are explored, as on Sweet Payne from the Almost Killed Me album: “Payne Avenue lives up to its name/ Some nights it's painful and strange. The whole city seemed sane in the day/ but some nights it seems distressed and deranged”.
Southtown Girls, the title of which is itself a reference to a Minneapolis suburb, reads like a road map, distances and directions poetically swollen and stretched to signify the protagonists’ growing frustration as they traverse the city to find drug deals:

Take Lyndale to the horizon
Take Nicollet out to the ocean
Take Penn Ave out to the 494
And meet me right in front of the fabric store.

And later:

Take Lyndale back to the Southside
Take Nicollet up to the Vietnamese
Take Penn Ave up to the Northside
Take Lowry east to the quarry
Meet me right in front of the Rainbow Foods.
I got a brown paper bag and black buckle shoes
If anything seems weird then just cruise.

So infused with geography is the band’s output that there are not one but two customised Google Maps posted by fans and music journalists on the internet that collate Twin Cities references from Hold Steady albums and plot their location, providing appropriate photographs and quotes from the lyrics. In this way you can participate in a virtual tour of, say, the locales of Party Pit from The Hold Steady’s third album, from when the protagonist sees an old flame (or partner in crime) “walkin’ through the Crystal Court / She made a scene by the revolving doors / she’s gonna walk around and drink some more” to when they walk “across that Grain Belt Bridge into a bright new Minneapolis”.

Finn has been known to write on a larger scale than the local as social experience. His lyrics are dense with intertextual references, recurring motifs and self-reference. How many other bands have had online wiki sites created by fans to annotate every lyrical twist and turn, to profile the characters that populate the songs, to illuminate the semi-literary universe created in their albums? The notations supplied for this universe by fans cover Bible stories, advertising jingles, drug slang, minor celebrities, and hardcore punk oral histories. For those who have immersed themselves in the band’s universe, a single phrase is enough to tie a lyric back to a previous story or concept, adding new layers of meaning to every album. Characters crop up across different songs and records (most notably the characters named Holly and Charlemagne, who drive the ‘straying Catholics’ storyline of concept album Separation Sunday). Endlessly quotable lyrics are indeed re-quoted in other songs. The band is noted for its quasi-literary influences including Jack Kerouac (The title of the album Boys and Girls in America is taken from On The Road), Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Minneapolis punks Husker Du and The Replacements, and the eloquent classic emo band Jawbreaker.
Positive Jam, the first cut on their debut LP, The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, begins with an earnest meta-narrative of American youth (and by extension, America itself) throughout the last 80 years from when ‘we woke up in the twenties’ to the noughties. Finn manages to deftly sketch the zeitgeist of the US in each of the intervening decades with just a few words:

We woke up in the 20s, and there were flappers and fruits in white suits.
It was right before the crash.
We got thrashed throughout the 30s, queuing up for soup in scabby sores.
And they sent us off to war.
We came back in the 40s, there were wheelchairs, guns and tickertape.
We poured it on the floor and made love to the interstates.
We got shiftless in the 50s, holding hands and going steady,
Twisting into the dark parts of large Midwestern cities.
Tripped right through the 60s with some blissful little hippie.
Some Kennedys got shot while you were screwing San Francisco.
The 70s got heavy, we woke up on bloody carpets,
Got tangled up in gaslines and I guess that's where it started.
The 80s almost killed me, let's not recall them quite so fondly.
Some Kennedy OD’d while we watched on MTV.
In the 90s we were wired and well connected,
We put it all down on technology and lost everything we invested.

The song then crashes into life as a joyous statement of intent from which the band takes its name:

All the sniffling indie kids, hold steady!
All the clustered-up clever kids, hold steady!
I got really bored when I didn’t have a band
So I started a band
We’ve gotta start it off with a positive jam
Hold steady!

Here The Hold Steady is explicitly aiming at a (larger scale) locality as community – “a receptacle of the shared values and perspectives that shape the artists” (Street 1997). Finn’s use of common historical reference points for most Americans builds a notion of shared national identity – not in any patriotic sense, but rather as a wide subculture of people who are young or at least were once. He returns to this in Sweet Payne: “I always dream of a unified scene/ there's James King and King James and James Dean at a table in the corner of my unified scene/they want a double order of love and respect.” This ‘unified scene’ has been adopted as a name for the band’s acutely self-aware fan-base. The Hold Steady Wiki, maintained by members of this loose network, defines the Unified Scene thus:
The Unified Scene is anyone who:
• understands what Craig means when he points out that we're all the Hold Steady.
• loves rock and roll.
• understands the importance of high-fiving a stranger.
• aren't afraid to have a genuinely fun time in public.
• stays positive.
The idea is that rock and roll has unifying and redemptive power. And The Hold Steady speak to indie kids, punks, teachers, dudes, graduate students, old guys who think no good music has been made since Led Zeppelin, and pretty much everyone else.
Basically, if you're a Boy or Girl in America (or elsewhere) and are down with the Hold Steady, you're in the Unified Scene.

We can see that what has emerged from the hyper-text The Hold Steady has become is a ‘scene’ that has transcended locality almost entirely.

Clearly “Finn is in love with locality--the details of specific parts of the city and the way they pull at people” (Patrin 2005). However, The Hold Steady’s music and lyrics are widely appreciated outside the Twin Cities, even if we don’t all get the references. “It is a prank of rock lyricism,” writes Jeff Gruntzel for the Minneapolis City Pages, “that crowds from Seattle to Zagreb sing along with songs that name-check the Crystal Court, the Thunderbird, the Grain Belt Bridge, and Osseo” (2007). The way in which Finn manages to make the specificities of his settings and characters so disarmingly emblematic of bigger, looser stories seems to embody a strong synthesis of the two opposing arguments Street refers to as being deployed in “debates about the impact of the local” (1997 p257). That is, homogenisation and globalisation are happening, but it means that an 18-year-old girl in northwest New South Wales (or, as Gruntzel suggests, Zagreb) can relate to a song that may be rooted in a specific shopping mall in Minneapolis. Gruntzel goes as far as to say of Craig Finn: “He's disguised universal themes in hyper-local scenes”.
It is tempting to agree that the themes of regret, indulgence, boredom and the redemptive powers of a really good party are indeed ‘universal’ for anyone who has been a teenager. However one should be wary of describing as ‘universal’ themes that are essentially relevant to hard-drinking whites in lower middle-class suburbs. It is difficult to imagine anyone who doesn’t drink ‘fully’ appreciating The Hold Steady. Likewise, those with less of a connection to Anglo-American ‘classic rock’ bands will miss out on the significance of the band’s post-ironic (that is, grinningly sincere) pastiche of almost-cheesy guitar riffs, echoing artists like Meatloafand AC/DC. In fact, The Hold Steady was initially cast as a reaction to the irony and limp retro of the New York dance-punk scene circa 2004-2005, a characterisation that was not discouraged by the band’s usual ‘About us’ on their Myspace site, which simply read “The Hold Steady kills dance punk. Or whatever that soulless shit is.” Perhaps the music itself is the strongest projection of The Hold Steady as a band from Brooklyn, New York City, even if it began as a reaction to “the whole dance-punk thing”. Finn recalls that “when we started playing it sounded really sweet because we were going out to the bars and hearing House Of Jealous Lovers [a yelpy cowbell-driven dance-punk hit by New York band The Rapture] every night” (Breihan 2006). John Street’s category of ‘locality as scene’ seems to fit here: “place-as-identity deriving from a sense of local scene… ‘[bands] might feel a particular sense of rivalry or comradeship towards other bands from the same area’” (Cohen cited in Street 1997 p 257). The Hold Steady's modus operandi came about because of their location in the scene of Brooklyn, New York. The band was conceived of and evolved in isolation from the Minneapolis scene, or even Minneapolis itself. There is no easy pigeonholing to be done here.

In so strongly evoking the localities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, The Hold Steady anchor themes common to many ‘boys and girls in America’ (and the world) to settings rich enough in detail to render them alive and full of vitality. But their identity as a band from New York City and their skilful use of classic-rock touchstones and teenage tales lets the band’s songs transcend the actual streets of the Twin Cities. And yet, as a fan, filling in their blank spaces with my own local colour is not quite enough. My desire to go there and wallow in The Hold Steady’s mythologies at the source is, somehow, undiminished.






The Hold Steady discography:
(2004) Almost Killed Me, Frenchkiss Records.
(2005) Separation Sunday, Frenchkiss Records.
(2006) Boys And Girls In America, Vagrant Records.
(2008) Stay Positive, Vagrant Records/Rough Trade Records.

Breihan, T. (2006) ‘Interview: The Hold Steady’, Pitchfork, posted 04/12/06 to http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/39762/Interview_Interview_The_Hold_Steady

Deeds, M. (2007) ‘The Hold Steady hoist a beer to the art of rock 'n' roll storytelling’, PopMatters, posted 06/06/07 to http://www.popmatters.com

Gross, J. (2005), ‘The Gospel According to The Hold Steady”, Village Voice, posted 26/04/2005 to
http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-04-26/music/the-gospel-according-to-the-hold-steady/

Guntzel, J. S. (2007) ‘Home for the Holidays with the Hold Steady’, Minneapolis City Pages, posted 04/12/07 to http://www.citypages.com/2007-12-05/news/the-hold-steady/1

The Hold Steady Wiki, (2006-2008) maintained and updated by various members of the Unified Scene, accessed at http://holdsteady.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Keefe, M. (2006), ‘Review – The Hold Steady: Boys And Girls In America’, PopMatters, posted 03/10/06 to http://www.popmatters.com

Matterson, K. (2007), The Hold Steady Guide to The Twin Cities, accessed at http://www.morecowbell.net/theholdsteady/

Montgomery, J. (2007), ‘Hold Steady Pinch-Hitting For Twins As Baseball Season Opens’, MTV News, posted 02/04/07 to http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1556150/20070402/hold_steady.jhtml

Patrin, N. (2005) ‘Going Mobile’, Minneapolis City Pages, posted 25/05/05 to http://www.citypages.com/2005-05-25/arts/going-mobile/1

Street, J. (1995), ‘(Dis)located? Rhetoric, politics, meaning and the locality’ in Will Straw (ed), Popular Music – Style and Identity, Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Identities.

Tate, C. (2005), ‘The Hold Steady interview 10/03/05’, Spacelab, posted 02/07/06 to http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=q1CgbWjrmMQ

Zimmerman, E. (2008), ‘Hold Steady: Dreaming of a Unified Scene’, PopMatters, posted 31/03/08 to http://www.popmatters.com