Outside Counsel

To The Hold Steady at Thursdays at Canalside, a venue that I like more every time I go. It had rained hard all day, and the skies did not look promising, but we cowboyed up and caught the show that the rest of this summer's concerts will have to live up to.

Of course, it helps that Craig Finn and the boys have been a band that I've loved for a while now. As I said to Captain X last night, even though their songs aren't really about my life, or what my life was ever like, much, they sound as though they might be. The imaginary philosopher-punk that sometimes appears in my mind as my fictional alter-ego would be the kind of guy that would hang out with the guy whose girlfriend had a gift for the horses, and I've often wished I represented the cat who didn't get his phone call in "Sequestered in Memphis." There is a sincerity to The Hold Steady's songs that surpasses that of Bruce Springsteen, Finn's obvious influence. Their characters-- for the most part-- sound like people that they actually know or knew. With the Boss you don't get that as much. He sings a lot about lovable losers and romantic hoodlums and otherwise doomed characters, but you always get the feeling that Springsteen's pimps, whores and gangsters were really just people he saw at the bars his band was playing in-- he wouldn't have hung with those guys, because he was a musician*. Finn is too, but his characters aren't larger than life folk figures: they are mostly sad people whose anger and disapointment more or less sustains them as they careen from one stupid, bad choice after another, mostly on a nightly basis. "She was a damn good dancer, but she wasn't that great of a girlfriend"-- how do you resist that kind of writing? And oh yeah, they rock. "Literature with power chords," Christgau says, and I'll buy that. Seeing The Hold Steady is like an affirmation: they seem to love what they do, and they seem kindly disposed to their hoodrat audience.

* And then he turned into John Steinbeck. I don't want to exalt Craig Finn at Springsteen's expense-- but around the time Springsteen wrote, "And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat," I pretty much gave up on the idea of believing he was doing anything other than trying to make stuff scan. Nothing wrong with that-- I'll still turn up Thunder Road when it comes on, but we should really stop pretending that he is writing real-life, gritty stuff because it isn't the case, and hasn't been for years.