The Hold Steady

10 years later, I think we can all agree that the Hold Steady were a bit maddeningly just okay. - XMASTIME

I never loved The Hold Steady; they were unwatchable live as Craig Finn would just lunge around the stage sputtering and waving frantically with his maybe-plugged-in? Telecaster flailing all around him. But somehow, they are a bit of a memory benchmark for my 2000s Brooklyn years. Instantaneously they were THE hipster Williamsburg media darling; I'm sure someone could trace it back to Finn seemingly being best friends with everyone in the music industry thank to his previous band, Lifter Puller, which was another of those bands that everyone seems to have heard of without anybody actually listening to. And I think the guitar player in my band roomed for a while with their bass player Gaven, although I don't remember hanging out or anything.

So while I don't care about them musically they do bring back a tinge of Brooklyn nostalgia for me, including going to the Separation Sunday release party and Robert fucking Christgau himself showing up to nudge me & Op out of the nice corner we'd buried ourselves into. So I couldn't help but read this writeup on their 20th anniversary show:

It was a fittingly rowdy birthday bash for these guys. The Hold Steady might have started as Brooklyn’s finest bar band, dabbling in Last Waltz cosplay when they were barely into their thirties. But by now, they’ve been doing it even longer than The Band circa The Last Waltz. This band loves to revel in rock & roll rituals and fetishize the details, so they did this occasion right. It was exactly two decades after their first show, in the same room—Northsix back then, now Music Hall of Williamsburg. The Hold Steady started up in the early-2000s New York scene of the Meet Me in the Bathroom era, Midwest boys in the big city. They cleverly styled themselves as old-school rockers, flying the flannel to contrast with their skinny-tie dance-punk peers. They were jailbreaking with Thin Lizzy and junglelanding with Bruce when everyone else wanted to reinvent the Gang of Four wheel.

BROOKLYN FOREVER.