(Okay — a couple of caveats and a thank you before I hit POST:
1) This is long, and unapologetically so, but if you're reading it on the feed… sorry about the bandwidth.
2) This was written largely between 3 and 4 am on November 25, early in the pre-dawn of my birthday. Partially as a result of that, the piece is… different… from what I had originally envisioned. But that's probably all right — if you wanted a straight review of
a couple of concerts, you've probably already found them elsewhere.
3) Thanks to Amber, aka musicentropy, for letting me use some of her photos from Seattle. My memories of that show are a little… ah… fuzzy — her photos aren't.
All right. Let it rock.)
“Rock and roll means well, but it can’t help telling young boys lies” — The Drive-By Truckers
I’ve been mulling over this post for the last couple of days, in those seemingly endless interstate hours, trying to figure out… well, “Why?”, frankly.
What is it that compells an almost middle-aged man to leave home and hearth and venture out into a different country, armed only with concert tickets and duty-free whiskey, to see two bands two nights in a row, in cities in two different states? What is it that inspires me to spend hours standing in the throng (and if you don’t know how I feel about crowds, well, there’s a reason I’m virtually a hermit) for the privilege of being jammed against a railing (or an innocent bystander) the moment the music starts? Considering that I wouldn’t go the four blocks to see Bob Dylan the last couple of times he played in my city, why spend 1100 kilometres and three days to see two bands that, a couple of years ago, I didn’t even know existed?
“I aint ever been with your little hood-rat friend.
What makes you think I’m gettin with your little hood-rat friend?” — The Hold Steady
The Rock And Roll Means Well Tour.
A month of dates pairing The Drive-By Truckers with The Hold Steady, alternating headlining slots night after night.
On the face of it, it’s an odd pairing, musically-speaking. The Truckers are boozy Southern rock, self-consciously inhabiting the shadow cast by Lynyrd Skynyrd and tilting at its legacy, while The Hold Steady are a poppy post-punk, highly literate combo from Minneapolis. The pairing, however, was sublime…
Make no mistake, though – despite my admiration for the DBT (and the fact that I’ve been listening to nothing else over the last few days), this tour was all about The Hold Steady, for both me and Colin.
(Colin will be familiar to readers of these pages, but to re-cap — we work together at the store, he’s one of the first readers for my fiction, he was one of the people who built my site, and he’s a good guy to have guarding your back, and making sure the cabbie gets you back to the hotel…)
Why the Hold Steady?
That’s a good question, and one I’ve been pondering for the last while. Sure, I’m a fan of earnest, well-written pop. I like literate lyrics, and some dense mythologizing. And Craig Finn can turn a phrase like nobody’s business.
But that’s not enough (see above remark about not seeing Dylan of late). So what is it?
“This is a song about how rock and roll saved my life when I was a teenager. It’s still saving it now.” — Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers, on-stage in Portland November 22, 2008
The above might be a para-phrase, but the sentiment is there. And that’s the truth of it, in a nutshell.
Hood said the above as part of the introduction to Let There Be Rock, the (seemingly) autobiographical track from Southern Rock Opera, and the words ring true to me.
Rock and roll did save my life as a kid.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I was a nerdy outsider as a kid. I wasn’t good at sports in a town that seemed to revolve around them. I didn’t follow hockey, which was, in those days, almost a death-sentence north of the 49th. I liked books. I liked reading, and I liked writing. I was smart. (And, for the record, probably insufferable — thankfully, some things do change…). I hit puberty earlier than everyone else, which made everything worse (I still have gym class nightmares)… The combination of those factors meant I was a consummate outsider, lucky to have a few friends (and blessed that a couple of them have stuck with me all these years).
Rock and roll, though — rock and roll saved my life. Literally and figuratively.
Literally, first.
Puberty and early adolescance were not a happy time for me. The social isolation I felt ramped up when everyone’s hormones hit all at once. I went from being ignored to being tormented, from being ostracized to being bullied.
There were nights when it all seemed too much. 13 years old was too old to be crying, too old to feel as small as I spent my days feeling. There were nights I tried to convince myself that a razor up the wrist probably wouldn’t hurt that much, and if it did, it would stop soon enough.
There were nights that I actually touched the razor to the skin, not sure of whether I was willing myself into pushing it in, or trying to talk myself into pulling it away.
It was music that saved me.
I was thirteen, it was the eighties — it was either fey British new romantics, or heavy metal.
Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath saved my life. Iron Maiden saved my life.
There is nothing like heavy metal for the consummate outsider — it’s a way to feel a sense of belonging despite your isolation. A way of gaining power from being an outsider.
I went full-on, all-in — long hair, concert shirts. Within a few weeks, the older kids were calling me Ozzy. A few of them even stood up for me when the bullies started to circle. I had a place, even if it was just as the heavy metal kid.
And then the summer of 84 happened.
With the release of Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen was everywhere. But it wasn’t Dancing in the Dark that drew me in — it was Mtv repeatedly playing the grainy video of Rosalita from 1978 that did it. That sense of wild abandon, that sense of community on the stage, that presence…
That did it.
Almost simultaneously, I discovered U2, that messianic performance of Sunday, Bloody Sunday from Red Rocks, white flag and mullet.
And from there, it was Bob Dylan. The Band. Neil Young.
I grew my hair longer. I tried to learn to play the harmonica. I started writing really bad poetry.
But back to Bruce Springsteen.
The thing with Springsteen (distinct from everyone else) is that I felt like I connected to him: to his work, to his experiences, to his lyrics.
It was the strangest thing: on the one hand, I was relating to the heroic and tragic figures of the early songs, the Magic Rats and Spanish Johnnys (in my head, I was sure I had “skin like leather, and the diamond hard look of a cobra”, and I spent a long time “tryin to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be”), and on the other hand I could relate to the realistic people in the later songs (I WAS that kid on his father’s knee in My Hometown). Mostly, though, I related to the idealism, and the hope for escape — when I thought about getting out of the small town I grew up in, it was with all the windows rolled down, wind blowin’ back the hair of the pretty girl at my side (for the record, when I did finally escape, it was to be dropped off at a UVic dorm with a handful of books and fourteen new pair of underwear that my mother had bought for me).
Springsteen has stuck with me (or is it the other way around?) — I can’t think of the day of Xander’s birth without the opening lines of Living Proof going through my head. And the live version of Jesus Was an Only Son (from the Devils & Dust solo tour) resonates through me in an unsettling way.
But that’s Springsteen. And, really, there’s been no one else who I connect with in quite the same way. I’m a big Pearl Jam fan, but the music doesn’t hit me direct in the heart the way Springsteen does. I would describe myself as a Deadhead, but nothing the Dead did resonates with me in the same way.
Sure, occasional songs will get to me when the mood is right: Hallelujah will always bring a tear to my eye, no matter who performs it. And this year, Soul Singing by the Black Crowes hit me at the right time. As did The Return of Pan by the Waterboys. And anything that Leonard Cohen did in concert in June – pow, right there.
But as far as lingering connections go, there’s been nothing for a long, long time. Long enough that I had forgotten what it was like to let a band get into your head, get into your soul. Long enough to think that it was something that only happened to kids, that once you grew up, you grew out of it…
And then along came The Hold Steady.
I was a fan of the band’s last album, Boys and Girls in America (how can a book geek like me resist an album whose opening line is “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right // Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together”?) — it was solid, fun, well-written post-punk pop. Great songs, great mood. It was a favourite (to the point that I bought an additional ep for two bonus tracks).
I bought their new album, Stay Positive, on the day it was released back in July. I played it a few times — solid, but unremarkable. Good songs, but nothing to match up to the headlong pitch of B&GiA. I put it to one side.
And then, in early August, I put it on again, and it was like putting on a new album. Every song seemed to speak to me. Every song seemed to connect.
So I played it again.
And every song still connected. And the new listening revealed more than the previous one.
So I played it again.
I played the album — at work — for six weeks straight. It never got boring, and every time it started (with perhaps the ultimate rock’n’roll couplet “Me and my friends are like the drums on Lust for Life // We pound it out on floor toms, our psalms are sing-along songs”) I got swept up in it, the stories of booze and drugs, heartbreak and violence, lost souls and hood rats.
Then, in September, I downloaded a recent show from the band, from Athens, Georgia’s 40 Watt Club. I was playing Stay Positive in my office, and living with the 40 Watt show on my MP3 player. That show… Jesus, that show. Download it, see if you don’t see what I’m talking about.
See, I love concerts. I love going to concerts, that adrenalin rush as the bass hits you in the solar plexus, that ringing in your ears for the next few hours (or days, if you were as close to the Black Crowes’ stage as I was in September), that sense of abandon. I’ve always loved concerts, and, not coincidentally, bootlegs. Of late, though (and with the by-now likely unnecessary to mention exception of Springsteen pilgrimages), concerts are just nights out, a chance for dinner and a couple of drinks and some tunes. It doesn’t cut much deeper than that.
The Hold Steady at the 40 Watt, though… The first time I listened to it, I couldn’t help grinning like an idiot the whole time. This, this was a band. And this was a night. And that tape (I don’t care about the technological particulars: a live bootleg is always a tape in my mind) brought me a joy and a giddiness that I haven’t felt since I first heard the Springsteen Winterland 78 show back when I was a 14 year old kid.
So, yeah, the Hold Steady have IT, whatever IT is. When they announced dates in Seattle and Portland, I don’t think I hesitated — sign me up, and we’ll work out the details later.
But that’s not the whole story…
As is so often the case (perhaps it’s always the case?), it wasn’t just the music — it was what I brought to it as well.
The past few months have been tough ones for me. Struggling to finish the new book while the world seemed to shift and shudder all around me. It’s been a time of lengthy introspection: personally, professionally, emotionally. A rough time all round. How do you balance the very real blessings of the life I have with the despair I was feeling, all the reasons for hope with the despondency and hopelessness that came over me?
And into that emotional vortex came songs like Lord, I’m Discouraged (“excuses and half-truths and fortified wine”), Magazines (“magazines and daddy issues, I know you’re pretty pissed, I hope you’ll still let me kiss you”), One For the Cutters (“sniffing at crystal in cute little cars, getting nailed against dumpsters behind townie bars”) and Citrus, from B&GiA (“I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers…”, “lost in fog and love and faith was fear, I’ve had kisses that make Judas seem sincere”). There was epic love and violence, and emotional squalor, druggy highs and bloody lows. Four albums worth of people trying — and usually failing — to find their way in their worlds, emerging bloody and sometimes broken, if they emerged at all. So, sad and hopeless, yet strangely redemptive and affirming, all wrapped up in hook-laden pop and bar-honed musical chops.
And it spoke to me.
That’s what it comes down to, and I’m not sure if I can explain it any better than that — everyone finds things that get under their skin, for good or ill.
I’m not sure if I can explain how happy a song like Your Little Hoodrat Friend makes me feel.
I’m not sure I can explain the way the opening of the Seattle show, with Citrus into Stuck Between Stations, cut through me — cut through the years, cut through the questions and the pain and the uncertainty and made me feel young and hopeful and free. I’m not sure I can explain how the last song of that night, most of the band on-stage with The Drive-By Truckers for an epic version of Let There Be Rock made me feel, like an electrical current running through me — all I know is that I left the Showbox drenched in whisky and coke, barely able to speak, deaf in one ear, and smiling.
It is, as they say, what it is.
“The kids at the shows, they‘ll have kids of their own
And the sing-along songs will be our scriptures” — The Hold Steady, Stay Positive