Killer Parties

Craig Finn looks like a cartoon character whose eyes take up all of their glasses. The glass isn’t clear, but white with a little pupil in the middle. His eyebrows sit and dance, perched comfortably above each frame, expressing every word he sings. He sings with a head cold about people who are hooked on this or heartbroken over that, looking to find a place. 

Craig Finn is the lead singer of The Hold Steady, a band that is, technically, not cool. They and their fans are highly inoffensive, though, and not that young. Over 20 years of a career, they’ve managed to secure some real acclaim. For the past eight years, beginning in November of 2016, they’ve played at Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg for “Four Massive Nights,” a reference to one of their best songs from 2006’s Boys and Girls in America. They seemed to know they had a good thing going, because they even took the stage in 2020, playing in front of an empty room.

Brooklyn Bowl hosts some quality acts, most of which I’ve seen at festivals. Twice, Andy Frasco and the UN have played on a weekend when I was in town, but each time I felt unmoved to change my plans. In October, I went to see an act from Bonnaroo, Christone Kingfish Ingram, the best blues guitarist of his generation. Kingfish plays face melting guitar, and he happens to be a member with Mr. Finn of the expressive eyebrows club.

In my time, I’ve read enough rock star profiles and biographies to understand that, early in their careers, these people play the Lions Club, the local bowling alley, and a handful of high school proms. Bruce Springsteen even played lots of the Sea Bright beach clubs, something that felt meaningful when I saw an E Street cover band at a friend’s club in Westchester a few year’s back. Brooklyn Bowl is not like the Rose Bowl but is in fact a bowling alley in a handful of former Williamsburg warehouses, where the rafters are still wooden, and you can almost smell the salt pork or the widgets they stored there. 

If I were 52, and my band had been together for 20 years, I would have serious reservations about playing a bowling alley for one, much less four, of my precious 365 annual nights, eight years in a row. They’ve played 32 shows during which some of the men right off stage left have mansplained to their girlfriends the best technique to avoid a gutter ball. I wonder if anybody’s ever bowled a perfect game during one of these shows. 

Kingfish is a 24 year old guy from Mississippi, so born to play the blues that his name is Christone, the musically inflected version of Chris. I don’t think his hometown is in the delta per se, but it’s not far from the river. He’s gifted and the type of performer who deserves to be listened to, not bowled over. Every time the ball hit the pins, I felt that there was something disrespectful happening.

Craig Finn, however, lives up the street in Greenpoint. Plausibly, he walked from home to the show last night. He had his thick-rimmed glasses, and he wore a blue short sleeved button down that had, with my prescriptions, no discernible pattern. One guy in the band wore a black shirt and a white suit, while Franz, the keyboardist and the nearest John Cale to Finn’s Lou Reed, the most talented and best trained musician (I’m told) in the bunch, wore a passé black suit and skinny tie with a fedora. And they all had so much fun. 

Unlike Kingfish, Finn was not destined to have a cool nickname and a feature in a Jack Daniels ad. Finn grew up in Edina, the Twin Cities equivalent of Rye or Chicago’s North Shore. People there may be within commuting distance of the Minneapolis of Prince and the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, but they’re very far away over in Every Day I Need Attention. 

The guy looks like he could be a Managing Director at a bank, or a member of the Geek Squad. In fact, he worked in some finance-adjacent job right before he moved here from the Twin Cities around 2001, and yet he’s playing bowling alleys, wearing the same shirt he otherwise would wear on a Saturday evening, and standing up there with his close-cropped hair, his power alleys, and his middling height expressing himself.

Between lyrics, he mouths things at the audience, and I’m pretty sure most of them know what he’s saying. He uses his hands to express feelings he can’t express with his Telecaster, and he plays a Telecaster like most of the other Springsteen-inspired front men in the market. Sometimes, when the lyrics call for it, he puts his hands up next to his cheeks and moves his head back and forth like he’s in a number about a slumber party in Hairspray. 

While this may come off as disparaging, I walked into the concert stag, familiar with only one or two of the band’s albums, and none of their early work. It was the type of thing I was curious about seeing but unwilling to tell others about, much less ask for company. On the way over, I realized that Kiss was playing their second night in a row at the Garden, which they allege will be their last live show over. I still don't really know what the deal is with Kiss, but I had a smidge of buyer’s remorse. 

This evaporated during the last couple of songs by the opener, Real Young and Lazy Horse. Even after a hard charging cover of “Ohio” it didn’t click that they were a Neil Young cover band. 

The Hold Steady took the stage, and I knew that I was in the right place. Easily two thirds of the crowd were wearing merch, and some 20% by applause had attended all four nights. A roughly equivalent contingent had inexplicably come over from England. About 2/3rds of the way through, seemingly everybody in the crowd threw up a handful of confetti, totally in sync.

The people love the Hold Steady. I don’t know if it’s because they didn’t get together until sometime approaching 30, if it’s because they seem so normal, or because the music really does hit. 

Finn tells stories. Lots of people think words are secondary to music, which they might be, but good words with good music feel better than vapid words with pretentious music, at least to me. Plus, they call their small horn section the Horn Steady, and I love a horn section. The stuff is great, and the people are warm and open, stay in their space, and don’t comprise such a bad ratio as one might think for “dad rock.” 

Toward the beginning of the fourth quarter, Finn shouted out a couple of women near the front who are longtime fans of the band. They’d both been to most if not all of the Four Massive Nights in Brooklyn over the years, but Finn mentioned how he’d worried they wouldn’t make it this year, as each had just recently had their first kid, coincidently right around the same time about six months ago. Earlier in the homestead, they brought their kids to soundcheck. He didn’t mention, but I assume they wore those big industrial headphones. Tonight, each baby was stored safely somewhere else, with their respective fathers. Concluding the anecdote, Finn thanked them for coming from out of town and for their loyalty. He declared, with ambiguous irony, that everybody knows The Hold Steady is for the ladies. The crowd loved it. 

Before the encore, the good folks from the Brooklyn Bowl came out and passed out shots of Grand Marnier  in honor of somebody whose first name was allegedly Knowledge. Must be spelled differently. Can’t find it online. But we did a toast to Knowledge, as he had recently passed away, and the band missed him, and the Brooklyn Bowl said that the band’s continued business is important to them as an independent live music venue. 

The band's name misuses "The" before a command to prepare for something, which helps it stick in the mind exactly unlike how people forget it’s just Talking Heads. The National are doing something similar, looking average, but they're bigger and sadder. The Hold Steady play good music, with loud guitars and some strong grooves, and they don’t make any gestures at being something they’re not. 

During the show, Finn introduced a song and mentioned, without self deprecation, how he was from Edina and one of the only musicians willing to admit this on stage. I wondered whether growing up in a posh suburb made Finn feel like, no matter how good his music and writing got, hometown heroes like the Replacements would always reject him as phony. After all, there are admittedly a non-negligible number of assholes from Edina.

But, there are assholes everywhere, and there are phonies everywhere. Kiss has been wearing makeup and platform heels for years and years, albeit with a thirteen year hiatus. I’m sure their show would have kicked ass, but so did this one, and this one had no fireworks and no blood spitting. The only schtick was an appearance from Steady Freddie the Confetti Yeti and a malfunctioning piñata during the encore. 

These people tell third-person stories about others because they know who they are. They play to a room of people who like them, some of whom also like bowling. These people could have bowled anywhere, but they came here to see the Hold Steady, because that’s how they spend four nights every year. 

During the last song of the encore, after I’d taken my Grand Marnier shot and joined the cult, I noticed this time the little baggies of confetti being passed out. A woman nearby had been swaying along the forward-backward drunk axis, rather than the left-right music axis. As soon as she got her handful, she cracked a smile and threw it into the air. 

Twelve seconds later, nobody bothered to look around and check, but they knew their role. It looked like New Year’s. What a gift it must be to play this bowling alley.