The Hold Steady

At the Black Cat in Washington, DC, on the first night of their current tour, CMG’s own Peter Hepburn caught up with the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. The occasional Minnesotan and current indie darling talked about the explosion of interest over the CMG-maligned Separation Sunday, the joys of touring, and how to get rid of your apartment in New York City. He used his inside shout.

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CMG’s Peter Hepburn (CMG): Why get rid of your place in New York? You’re only going out for a couple of months, right?

Craig Finn (CF): Yeah, but the rent’s so much there that I didn’t want to pat rent for those two months.

CMG: Finding an apartment in Brooklyn’s gotta be pretty tough, though...

CF: Yeah, but my lease was up and all that and my roommate situation, uh, changed. Well, what happened was that because I have all this stuff—and we’re gonna go out on tour and then go make a record and then God knows what—so my wife went back to Minneapolis and she’s been living there since January 1st.

CMG: Where’s she living in the city?

CF: 24th & Lyndale, right above Muddy Waters. She’s got her own little apartment there. She decided she wanted to do that, which I supported, ‘cause it’s hard for her to be alone in Brooklyn all the time if I’m gone. I gave up our place and then I’ve just got a bedroom rented, but I don’t get it 'til March 1st.

CMG: Are you gonna move back to Minneapolis?

CF: No, but I’d like to be able to spend more time there. I only come back for tour really, and I did come back for the first time since moving to New York five years ago on a non-tour thing for seven days, which was a lot of fun. I really like it there. Even after living in New York… I find it very inspiring creatively.

CMG: I was gonna ask you a little about the Minneapolis scene. Do people outside of the Midwest really perceive it as an artistic city?

CF: Certainly with music fans when you start to list the bands that are from there people start to take notice. I mean, I’ve lived in New York for five years now and I still feel like Sean Daley (Slug) from Atmosphere is the most famous guy I’ve met. I met him long ago. And the same thing with Har Mar Superstar. The Replacements, really.

CMG: To what degree do you still see yourself as part of that scene?

CF: A lot, to be honest. I’m on the new P.O.S. record and we just went back through. First Avenue just had their 35th anniversary and we went back and did a 20-minute set there and then I played with Mike Watt and with P.O.S. too. The Mike Watt thing was really fun ‘cause it was all these old school Minneapolis guys like Gary Louris from the Jayhawks and the main guy was Craig Johnson from Run Rusty Run. Grant Park played piano. Ed Ackerson, who’s been in a number of cool bands. All these guys who are like one step older than me, so it was really exciting for me ‘cause I grew up looking up to these guys. That was really fun. I’m sort of in awe of the musical history of the city. I started going to shows when I was 13, so about 1984. The bands were like the Replacements and Husker Du. One of the first shows I went to, Husker Du was an opening band. The Replacements I would go see at the 7th St. Entry, which is a lot smaller than this room, it’s more like 250 [person capacity]. Those were exciting things to see, but at the time I didn’t know that what I was seeing was unusual.

My parents had moved from Boston to Minneapolis and I always thought, “God, I wouldn’t have seen this.” Boston might be a more cosmopolitan place to live, I dunno, but I wouldn’t have seen that.

CMG: You said you moved to New York five years ago?

CF: Yeah.

CMG: You were living in Minneapolis before that, right?

CF: Yeah.

CMG: Between 1984 and when you left Minneapolis, the scene changed a fair bit.

CF: Yeah, and at the same time it made Minneapolis a city that was very aware of music and very proud of it. It continued to support everything from the bands that came after Soul Asylum and then the Ryhmesaysers thing which I very much saw the genesis of and was very excited to watch.

CMG: Certainly, my experience growing up in Minneapolis in the ‘90s was one of a lot less all-ages shows.

CF: Yeah. For awhile there was the Foxfire, and that was a big thing. That’s the scene with Plastic Constellations came out of. I met them when they were 13. There’s always younger things coming up. It doesn’t look quite the same. I remember meeting Slug and being blown away by the number of cassettes they were selling out of the Electric Fetus. It was a lot. One thing that never changes is that the bands get support.

CMG: Do you miss that?

CF: Not really. I mean, our first show in New York, as the Hold Steady, it was really well attended. It’s a lot harder than living in a city like Minneapolis or any of those slacker rock’n’roll towns. I mean, you spend a lot more time getting good at something. There’re a lot of people that do these things [in New York] and aren’t that good ‘cause they don’t spend enough time on it.

CMG: So, this current tour...

CF: Yeah, we’re going out to LA and then we go to Australia. And then we come back to LA and then it’s getting fuzzy. Eventually we get back to New York and then I’m gonna go to SXSW just to hang out. And then we’re gonna start our new record in April.

CMG: When do you expect that to come out?

CF: This fall.

CMG: Have you ever toured Australia before?

CF: No. No one in the band has ever been to Australia before. It’s gonna be great.

CMG: Do you still look forward to touring?

CF: Yeah, I really like it. The thing is, I’m 34. I like touring now more than I ever did before. It’s also because we’re able to do it at a little higher level than when I was in Lifter-Puller. There’re some comforts—just having cheap motel rooms every night is so much better than trying to find a floor to crash on. It takes a lot of the anxiety out of it. We can always afford to eat and sleep in a situation that doesn’t hurt.

CMG: So you playing new material on the tour?

CF: Yeah, we’ll probably do two or three new ones tonight. Trying to play them for a few weeks before we go to figure out the record.

CMG: How many of the new songs feature the same characters?

CF: There are a couple where the characters are the same, yeah. I think it’ll be less of a concept, less of a straight story than it will be songs under an overarching theme. I think the theme is a lot more about relationships, boys and girls, things like that.

CMG: More religion, less religion?

CF: Less religion. I think I’ve covered that part. It’s still a part of it ‘cause it’s a part of me. Separation Sunday was a story that took place that involved very religious people. Songs with those characters, it seems to always be coming up. That was very much a story album, and I’d like to see it continue, at least in threads, but it’s hard to go back in.

CMG: Have you been surprised at how positive the reaction has been to Separation Sunday?

CF: Yeah, a little bit. I mean, Pazz & Jop came out yesterday and we were #8. Insane. It’s been really flattering. I mean, I wouldn’t put the record out if I didn’t think it was really good. None of us would. At the same time, it’s exciting and flattering and a little bit surprising how people react. At the same time, critical acclaim is one thing. I mean, on Pazz & Jop, there’s no way any of those records didn’t sell a ton more than us. We’re trying to find other things to work on—“okay, we’ve got good press, let’s concentrate on selling.”

CMG: Do you get tired of people pointing out that you don’t sing but rather sort of shout your lyrics?

CF: I understand it. I mean, you have to write something. The one thing I would say, in my defense, is that in popular music today guys like Dave Matthews or John Mayer don’t really use their own voices. When they sing it sounds like they’re imitating someone. What I do is just use my own voice, loudly. Which I hope gives it some artistry.

CMG: Ok, but at the same time I came into this interview half-expecting you to be yelling your responses at me.

It seems tht in rock music, mythology is limited to the area below the Mason-Dixon Line. Did you approach the whole Hold Steady project with the idea to create a Midwestern mythology?

CF: Well, have you ever heard Southern Rock Opera by the Drive-by Truckers? One of the things I was thinking a lot about was…well... There were two big things that changed rock’n’roll in my lifetime: one was Kurt Cobain and the alt-rock revolution and number two was the internet. Kurt Cobain… there’s something that came along that before that people in punk rock and indie rock were a little more outcasts and it was a little more of a statement to be involved in something like that. You were saying, “I’m definitely not a jock. I’m voting myself into this thing.”

The internet it changed rock in a lot of ways. Things before that were sort of unverifiable. For instance, when I would go to shows I remember I would see a flyer. It was like the only information I could get: “The Descendents are playing First Ave.” It was like a missive from God. I didn’t even know bands toured, like that the night before the were in Milwaukee and the next night they’d be in Omaha. I just knew that if I went to these coordinates, this street, this address, four o’clock on Sunday, July 28th I could see the Descendents play. There’s a world of imagination that erupted around that I think doesn’t quite exist because of the internet. There’s all this information out there. Like Led Zeppelin. The only thing you could get off Led Zeppelin, and they didn’t even do interviews, was album covers. And it’d be naked kids lying on rocks. “Wow, what does that mean?” I went to see the Dead Kennedys ‘cause I wanted to see what they looked like. They weren’t on MTV, they weren’t on the radio, they weren’t in magazines. I wanted to capture some of those urban myths and some of that mythology and mystery around rock’n’roll as I experienced it when I was a teenager.