It was Friday, August 7, and we were packed like happy little sardines at Mississippi Studios. As the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn began to sing “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” local sticker artist Jane McDonald held out a handful of smuggled confetti for me to take.
At some point after 2014 (the last time the Hold Steady played a “traditional” tour stop in Portland), the Hold Steady became the kind of band that not only demands a shower of rogue confetti—it also became the kind of band where everyone knows exactly what to do with that confetti, and when.
They became the kind of band whose cult-like fanbase knows which songs garner what rituals, like a mutant strain of Rocky Horror Picture Show audience participation. They know when to make twinkly fingers at keyboardist Franz Nicolay as he plays a solo, they know how to shout “BODIES! BODIES! BODIES!” during Almost Killed Me album closer “Killer Parties,” and—most importantly—they know what part of “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” is the trigger for the confetti downpour.
Let’s pretend, though, that you aren’t already part of the cult of the killer party. A little bit of history: a few years after the demise of Minneapolis rock legends Lifter Puller, the band’s principal sing-talker/songwriter, Craig Finn, got bored with not having a band. After recruiting a few friends (including Lifter Puller shredder Tad Kubler), they formed the Hold Steady, the perfect answer to the question, “What if that band that’s always playing the shitty bar around the corner from your apartment was fronted by one of the best storytellers around?” It wasn’t until their sophomore album, Separation Sunday, that the world’s best bar band came into their own, birthing an album-long story about messed-up barflies and junkies living on the fringes of the Twin Cities.
Storytellers like Finn are hard to come by, and sadly, it’s even rarer for those kinds of storytellers to front bands capable of producing sing-along belters at will. It’s a combination difficult enough to find, and even tougher to find done this well, making them the type of band that gets anyone hungry for that flavor in a headlock, sucked into songs that sound like parties, but depict the people who should really have skipped the party.
Over the past decade or so, they stopped being a band that tours incessantly. Instead of long slogs, they started playing “weekenders,” where they’d visit a city, play a few nights in a row, and head home to their families. Fans bought plane tickets, booked hotels, and made new friends in far-flung cities, chasing that high across the country.
Something changes inside of you when you become the kind of person who gets on a plane to see a band, and pretty soon, all of their fanatics became members of a rock cult, treating every weekender like a mini-festival; imagine a multi-night Phish extravaganza, but with fewer independently wealthy yuppies on acid benders, and more outbursts of pure, unbridled love. The crowd’s energy feels like a reunion, full of people who only see each other in different cities, but always for the same reason.
When I first started seeing the band in 2007, the experience was markedly different. They were already a beloved band, featured on the cover of Paste magazine due to the strength of their sordid tales of society’s outcast over-partiers, which filled a gap in the softer, more starry-eyed indie rock scene. Back then, though, it was just a fanbase, not a cult who treated their shows like a traveling revival tent. They’d stopped in Portland on tour for their third record, Boys and Girls in America, the album that introduced them to people who weren’t already fans of Finn and guitarist Tad Kubler’s old band, Lifter Puller. It was my very first concert alone, and my very first in Portland. I begged my mom for money to buy the ticket, which she happily did. Would she have reacted so positively if she’d known that, with that $25, she’d unknowingly sent me off to join a cult that I’d still be in at 36?
The palpable joy of seeing the Hold Steady live felt the same years ago as it did at Mississippi Studios last week. Though it was billed as such, this show didn’t end up being a full-album playthrough of Boys and Girls. They saved that trick for the following night, when they co-headlined Pioneer Courthouse Square with their longtime friends, the Mountain Goats. Instead, we got a mammoth, career-spanning set, with the Boys and Girls representation relegated to the fan favorites you’d be mad if they didn’t play (“Stuck Between Stations,” “Chips Ahoy!”).
It was, however, the kind of night for the oldheads to get deep cuts and hidden gems. It was only fitting; Mississippi Studios is a tenth of the size of Pioneer Square, the venue packed exclusively with dorks who needed to see the mighty Hold Steady back in a bar, fully committed to the bar-band vibes, blasting their way through “Barfruit Blues” and “Banging Camp,” and trotting out “Sweet Payne” to the ecstatic joy of longtime fans who held the song as a white whale track. Midway through, Finn asked how many people were there from out of town, and every corner of the room erupted with cheers—a reminder that if you really want to see your favorite band play that deep cut you’ve been obsessed with for years, sometimes you need to get on an airplane.
It’s a blessing that the Hold Steady decided to skip hiring an opener, allowing the evening to feel like a love letter not just to the band, but to the people who make up the so-called Unified Scene—real fans, unlike the following night at Pioneer Courthouse Square, where the crowd would be full of people who only knew hits like “Stuck Between Stations” and “Sequestered in Memphis.” But on this night, every single person was there because they physically needed to be. There were no fairweather looky-loos, nobody trying to seem cool by being seen at a big band’s small show. This show sold out lightning fast, and it seemed like every single person had been listening since Boys and Girls, singing along to songs about the seediest characters this side of a Drive-By Truckers album.
Their set lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of two hours and barrelled through 25 songs, a sprint that allowed songs like “Killer Parties, “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” and “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” to sprawl out. After 20 years of obsession with the band, watching them try to cram their rockstar histrionics onto the postage-stamp-sized stage at Mississippi Studios underscored how drastically the bar band has outgrown their bar enclosure. It’s hard not to be thankful to get to shout about how there is (in Finn’s words) “SO! MUCH! JOY! IN WHAT WE DO HERE!” while crammed together, surrounded by friends, just waiting for the chance to be baptized in a sea of confetti, ready for the next massive night to come along.
