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article by jennifer kelly. photos by jen.knee.
The Hold Steady was born from the fragments of Lifter Puller, one of the great lost punk bands of the late-1980s/early-1990s, celebrated more vigorously in retrospect than it ever was in life. Craig Finn was Lifter Puller's frontman, spewing inspired ironies and koan-like contradictions around his finely observed sketches of lost suburban teenagers. Tad Kubler played bass on the band's last LP, Fiestas and Fiascos, and joined Finn during a brief incarnation as a classic rock cover band. There, with expectations at zero, the two rediscovered a shared love for giant meaty rock riffs and turned them into an antidote for the then-fashionable disco punk world. Even in Williamsburg, where, as Finn observed, "most people are DJs", there were still certain songs that got scratched into our souls. Flip ahead to 2004, when Almost Killed Me spun poetry into AC/DC and Thin Lizzy riffs and linked free-styling hip hop with beat poetry with arena-style rock. Landing half a dozen spots on last year's "best album you never heard" lists, Almost Killed Me set the stage for this year's Separation Sunday, the best album of 2005 so far.
I talked to Finn a few weeks ago as he and Kubler took a break from their grueling promotional schedule. They had been called to LA on short notice; they were filming a college marketing spot for Target, and there were photo shoots in the works for larger magazines -- The New Yorker and The Village Voice, for starters. So we fed the promotional beast again, sort of, with a long conversation about desperate characters, parallel universes, Catholicism, hip hop, classic rock and what it takes to finally finish Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
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Splendid: So what exactly were you doing? A commercial?
Craig Finn: Yeah, what it is... it came up really quickly. It's very interesting. Target, the retail store, is doing these... they're basically short films that are going to be available online. They're about 15 minutes each. They're college promotions, back to college. It's kind of an interesting thing in that there's no real hard advertising. They're not selling a specific product. They're just making this film that's supposed to be entertaining. It's going to be available through Target channels, but it doesn't have any product placement or any branding. It concerns some college students who are trying to get cool bands to play at their college.
There are three bands involved. There's us, British Sea Power and the 22-20s. I'm not super familiar with the other bands. I think British Sea Power is on Rough Trade.
Splendid: I know British Sea Power. I don't know the 22-20s.
Craig Finn: What does British Sea Power sound like?
Splendid: They're good. The singer is sort of Bowie-ish, but the music is more post-punk. It's good stuff. They do this show where they have all this greenery on the stage and stuffed birds and things. It's a very cool band. I saw them two or three years ago at SXSW...
Craig Finn: Where are you calling from?
Splendid: I live in New Hampshire.
Craig Finn: Oh, cool, where?
Splendid: Walpole?
Craig Finn: I don't know where that is.
Splendid: Yeah, you probably know New Hampshire north of Boston, right?
Craig Finn: Yeah.
Splendid: This is almost to Vermont on the west side.
Craig Finn: Oh, okay, I'm actually from Boston originally.
Splendid: I read that about you. You also went to school there.
Craig Finn: Our keyboard player is actually from New Hampshire. He's from Exeter.
Splendid: Yeah, that's almost a Boston suburb.
Craig Finn: Yeah, so this commercial came up really quickly. We flew out here on a moment's notice. It's really interesting. It's a long day, but it's a real production. It's like they're making a film. The crew had to be 75 people or so. We had our own trailer. It's mostly us performing, but there were some small acting bits, too. It's something we don't normally do, but it was unique. We're doing it again tomorrow. It's a two-day shoot. But it's been pretty good, and they're really enthusiastic. And it's not... it doesn't feel awkward, just because you can't really tell what they're selling.
Splendid: You know what, I think that whole "selling out" thing is a dead alley. Bands need a certain amount of money to make records, and if you want them to make records without being pressured to make bad records, they should get the money where they can.
Craig Finn: Yeah... I think in the reality of the way records get traded and burned and downloaded, you know, it's extremely obvious to me, as someone whose record is not out yet... Our record technically comes out this Tuesday (May 3). We did three weeks around SXSW and there was -- at absolutely every show -- a number of kids who knew the words to every song on our new record. I don't feel bad about that, but I think the reality is that in the new millennium, musicians need to start looking further out, because you can't look to record sales for income... I'm not even talking to live, but just to fund their projects, their art.
Splendid: I think attitudes have really changed about that stuff, having songs in commercials or television shows.
Craig Finn: I think it's interesting. In general, I think that corporations... folks like Target... I think it's healthy. They get so many tax breaks from our government, and unless we become a more socialist country like Sweden or even Canada, there isn't that kind of funding available for artists. Certainly not rock 'n' roll artists. So it's a trickle down of all these tax breaks that corporations get. It's kind of interesting that it comes from Target, because we're all from Minneapolis and that's where the corporation is based. I think that has something to do with their awareness of us. But it's kind of funny.
Splendid: So this new album, Separation Sunday? It's awesome. It's better than the first one, which I really liked a lot.
Craig Finn: Thank you. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. (He laughs.) One of my favorite things I do to entertain myself is to read interviews with KISS. Every year they put out an album, and Paul Stanley is like, "I think this is our best ever." I kind of feel like that when I say this, but I really do feel like this is a better record. The first record we did in six days. We hadn't been a band that long. I felt like I was just getting on the mic and talking shit, and I think that in every way, the record we just made was so much more deliberate.
Splendid: I actually wanted to ask you how you do what you do, because it sounds like it might be stream of consciousness, but it's better than most people would do if they were just, as you say, talking into a mic. Do you start by talking or by writing? How do you do it?
Craig Finn: I have seven or eight notebooks full of stuff that I write fairly stream of consciousness. It's written stream of consciousness, and then, usually Tad or sometimes myself, we'll come in with a riff that we'll build up to a song, music-wise, and then I'll go through the notebooks and try to figure out what makes sense. So it's a little bit of both.
Splendid: So this album and the one before is just so dense with references to things past -- and in this one, you're even doing a little bit of referring to the first album.
Craig Finn: Yeah, sure.
Splendid: Which I think is really interesting. It's this blender that you're putting all this cultural stuff into and you don't know what's going to come next. Why refer to the first album? Do you see them as linked?
Craig Finn: Yeah, they're definitely linked. There are certainly characters who are similar. What I'm trying to do a lot of times is create a record, even a universe, an alternate universe, where all this stuff is taking place. What I hope when I'm making records is that there are references that people catch on their 55th time listening to the record, that they didn't catch on their 54th. Jay-Zee -- I really like hip hop -- calls those chestnuts. He leaves chestnuts for his listeners. So there's a little reward in it, that people say, "Hey, wait a minute... I didn't realize that refers to that other song off the first record."
Splendid: Yeah, I noticed it with "Hard drugs are for the bartenders..." and then there's another later on that I caught about Ybor City, and maybe others that I didn't notice.
Craig Finn: Yeah, there's umpteen things. I really hope people discover it, but not all at once. I think it's interesting. We're from Minneapolis. Our band is really the biggest there. We went and played there before SXSW, and there was a write-up in the paper. The writer had already gotten the record, and he said, the new record Separation Sunday is really hard to understand or it's hard to grasp the story. And he said it as if it was a negative thing. And I thought that... I guess the thing is that if you want to listen to a record in 40 minutes or however long it is and immediately get it, maybe it is. But I don't look at that as a negative thing, that it's hard to understand. When I got into music, that's sort of how I experienced it.
Splendid: Well, people who are listening to your record so they can write an article before the show are on a different time table than everyone else.
Craig Finn: Right, exactly, that's a good point.
Splendid: I actually find that after I've reviewed stuff... you know, it's like pulling teeth to listen that last fifth or sixth time so that I can write the review, and then afterwards, it's enjoyable to listen to it, because I don't have to think about it anymore. I can just sort of listen.
Craig Finn: That makes sense.
AUDIO: Cattle & the Creeping Things
Splendid: So I'm intrigued about this alternate universe idea. The people in this universe are all sort of young people. Are they going to get older as you go on?
Craig Finn: Maybe. I don't know. That's funny when you say they're young people. What I really have with this alternative universe -- and I don't think it's entirely in my best interest to talk a ton about it -- but what I would say is that, you know the Charlie Brown specials on TV?
Splendid: Yep.
Craig Finn: And you know how, when the parents or the teachers talk, it's just like wah-wah-wah? You can't hear the parents or the teachers. I've created this world, it's a suburban teenaged world, where I feel like... after I got my driver's license, parents and teachers, everyone stopped mattering to me. It was just like these kids that I knew. Everything, whatever world we had, and everything mattered so much. From this party Friday night to, you know, your interest in a girl or guy, the opposite sex, to friendships. It all was just so heavy, because you don't have any context to put it in. Like, oh, there's going to be other girls or other guys, or sometimes friendships go bad. You're just crushed. There's this teenaged world where people are kind of living and dying every day. That's sort of how I envision it.
Splendid: That's interesting. I like this Springsteen reference in "Charlemagne" -- "Tramps like us and we like tramps."
Craig Finn: That's just because he's such a huge influence.
Splendid: Tell me about that, because he started out, like you, singing about younger people, and now he sings about people in their 50s because that's where he is.
Craig Finn: Yeah, I think Springsteen invented the template, in my mind at least, for aging gracefully as an artist.
Splendid: Have you heard the new record?
Craig Finn: I have not. I have to say, my wife heard it and she didn't care for it that much. She didn't dislike it, but I think her reaction was mild enthusiasm. We're both huge fans. I haven't heard it. I feel like I need to get back home. I need to sit down with it. I'm a big fan of the first three records, especially -- they were influential, as you said, because they dealt with these young people, this... some of the same things that I deal with. This teenaged up and down thing. Being a teenager in America...
Splendid: And the same sort of teenagers that you write about. They aren't teenagers who are going to go to college and get jobs as engineers.
Craig Finn: They're desperate characters. And the thing is, these characters who are desperate are extreme. You have a lot of characters who are going between one extreme and another, and I think one of the things that motivates songwriters in general, not just me, not just Springsteen, not just anyone... to use these characters, is that when you have extreme characters in the real world, things change for them quickly. Their stories happen over days and weeks, not over months and years.
Splendid: Which is useful if you're writing about them.
Craig Finn: Exactly.
Splendid: A lot of them have discovered god in this album, haven't they?
Craig Finn: Yes. They're really coming from a religious background. That's what I'm saying. They're sort of between extremes. You know, I was just thinking about how I'm 33 years old now. Before I was like 22, I was so full of shit. My thought process was totally insane. I was thinking about it. I read all these books, because I've always read, and I still maintain my opinion on them. Like, I walk around at 33 saying, "Oh, man, Kerouac, he's kind of a cliché," because that's what I thought when I was 17. I was stupid. I need to go re-read everything that I read before a certain age. You know, so I went on the road, and I brought a bunch of Kerouac stuff. And I think it's just incredible writing, and beautiful, but one of those things that I thought was interesting was how he was always wrestling with his conservative upbringing. I think a lot of people wrestle with that, and that's what these characters are doing. They're swinging wildly between a conservative, religious upbringing and a more hedonistic, desperate lifestyle.
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Splendid: It's kind of a superstitious Christianity.
Craig Finn: Yeah, I think there's that power or mystery of Christianity. Catholicism in particular. I was raised a Catholic. That's really where my knowledge comes from. But obviously, these characters are indulging in drugs or alcohol. I've known a number of people who've gone into treatment, treatment that involved religion. They come out and not only are they sober, but they're born again. So, it's like, "When I last saw you, you weren't doing so hot, and now you're trying to tell me that I need to get with Christ."
Splendid: Yep.
Craig Finn: So, it's these extremes that I kind of find interesting. That's how the record evolved.
Splendid: It's so interesting, because it seems like the whole country is on this god trip at the moment.
Craig Finn: Exactly. The country is really extreme right now, right? Living in New York, you don't...
Splendid: You're insulated from it to some extent.
Craig Finn: Yeah, you look around and everyone has... at least leading up to the election, if not a pro-Kerry button, at least an anti-Bush button. You never realize that you're in the minority in the country.
Splendid: Just barely, though.
Craig Finn: Yeah.
Splendid: Minnesota is pretty liberal, though, isn't it?
Craig Finn: Yes, Paul Wellstone is from Minnesota. It's got a great liberal tradition. I think, actually, that our record and our band has an extremely Midwestern pride thing, because we're all from the Midwest, and around the election, it actually really bothered me to hear, like in New York, "God, everyone except for the coasts went for Bush." That's actually not true, because Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan went for Kerry. I don't know where you grew up, but...
Splendid: I grew up in Indiana, and I don't think my vote for president counted until I moved to New York.
Craig Finn: Did you go to school out there or something?
Splendid: I went to Dartmouth, which is sort of how I ended up here.
Craig Finn: Oh, sure, sure.
Splendid: I grew up in probably the reddest state there is.
Craig Finn: Indiana is a real conservative place.
Splendid: But you know, my dad was the president of the ACLU in Fort Wayne the whole time I was growing up.
Craig Finn: Oh, really?
Splendid: Like during the Skokie March. People were sending Nazi newsletters to our door and making threats over the phone. It was kind of a strange situation.
Craig Finn: It does sound that way. Where is Fort Wayne anyway? Is Fort Wayne kind of up by Michigan?
Splendid: It's in the Northeast corner.
Craig Finn: You know what's interesting about Indiana, and it's not the only state that's like this, but we notice it on tour: it's interesting how Indiana, Ohio and Illinois become really southern.
Splendid: Oh yeah, there's a street in Indianapolis where the accent changes... Anyway, another thing that struck me about your new album is that more of the characters are women?
Craig Finn: Really...
Splendid: Especially compared to Lifter Puller.
Craig Finn: There's just one woman character. There are three main characters. Charlemagne and Gideon are male. And Hallelujah is female.
Splendid: Okay, I need to listen again.
Craig Finn: Holly and Hallelujah are used interchangeably. It's just the short version of her name. And Holly is probably the main character.
AUDIO: Your Little Hoodrat Friend
Splendid: All right, never mind... So, I guess that musically, one of the big changes is that you have this keyboard player. Want to talk about how you found him and how that's changed the band?
Craig Finn: Yeah, he was in a band that was friend with ours, the World Inferno Friendship Society. They're kind of like a crazy, gypsy punk thing. We were friendly with him and we had some things on Almost Killed Me that called for piano. And he came in and put it on and he's a much better musician than any of us. He's a classically trained musician. So he kind of kicked it out in about ten seconds. Then he was like, "I literally could come up with a part for all your songs." So we said, "Not on this record, but we'll keep that in mind." And meanwhile, when we played live, he was joining us. We just got along really well. The personalities worked, so the more he started playing with us and the more our personalities starting hitting it together, the more we were like, since obviously it works, let's make him a part of the band.
Number one, musically, it gives us a lot more texture to work with. I think that's apparent. Number two, it allows us to write songs from a different angle. For instance, he came in and said, you guys write all these songs in keys that are good for guitars, like A, and I'd love it if you could write a song in B flat, because that's a fun keyboard key. So we wrote "Don't Let Me Explode". That's the kind of thing -- first, it allows us to do things a little bit differently and second, it allows us to stretch out a little bit. It's an extra layer or texture.
Splendid: That makes sense. You always have a whole bunch of horns and backup vocals.
Craig Finn: The horns are actually from Franz's other band, the World Inferno Friendship Society. They came in... and that's all, needless to say, it comes from the Springsteen tradition. What we call, in our band, sort of this classic R&B inspired hard rock. That's a three-piece horn section that came in, again different textures.
The backing vocals are really interesting in that this woman Nicole Wills -- she's a friend of Tad's family. She's in her 50s. She's worked with a lot of pretty inspiring musicians, including a band that's one of our favorite bands -- The Band. She actually worked with some of them in the glory years, up in Woodstock, New York. I don't know if you remember Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday mornings.
Splendid: Oh yeah.
Craig Finn: She sang "Elbow Room". Do you remember that song? Which was about Manifest Destiny and the westward expansion of the United States. She's on a lot of that Schoolhouse Rock stuff. She has this voice -- we were looking for someone who had kind of that husky 1970s kind of thing. We didn't feel that any of our peers really had that. So Tad was talking to her and he said, "Would you come in and sing with us?" So she did.
Splendid: Does she live in Minneapolis now?
Craig Finn: No, she lives in New York.
Splendid: So I know there's a pretty active independent hip-hop scene in Minneapolis and there are some similarities between what you do and hip-hop. I was wondering how much contact you have with that and how much is it a factor in what you do?
Craig Finn: It's more of a factor than people might think. Atmosphere is really the biggest hip-hop band in Minneapolis. Sean Daley is a very good friend of mine. Lifter Puller and Atmosphere both started to do well at the same time. We went to shows together. He appeared on a couple of Lifter Puller records. For his last record, he quoted me on a few things. And then the label Rhymesayers is really where the other stuff takes off. The other two big significant artists for us are Brother Ali, who I really consider to be the best lyricist in America right now. I don't know if you're familiar with his stuff but he's incredible. He's from Minneapolis, so he's a Midwesterner. He's an albino. So where he's coming from, his sort of take on things, is just super incredible. Brother Ali is playing our record release show -- at our invitation, just because he was my absolute first choice and I have so much respect for what he does. When you see him, he's almost like... when he performs he's like an orator or a preacher. He's just a really commanding presence. I don't know how to explain it, but it's just really neat that he's playing our show.
And then there's another guy who's become a great friend of mine, named P.O.S., who's kind of the newest young guy from Minneapolis. He's played a couple of shows with us and I just put a cameo on his new record. Again, he's super inspiring. He's African American, but a definite punk rocker. I've known him since he was about 16, from punk rock shows in Minneapolis. He's coming from a real punk rock angle. He's got Fugazi samples in his songs. He's really an up and comer. I'm really honored to be on his record, and I think people will be hearing a lot about him.
And also Sean or Slug from Atmosphere is putting out the vinyl of this record, Separation Sunday.
Splendid: What do you get, in terms of inspiration, from listening to those people?
Craig Finn: I think it's the focus on the lyrics. In hip-hop, there has always been a focus on lyrics. You have a repetitive beat or groove going and then you have the lyrics, the one thing that's always changing. So that seems to highlight the lyrics, just the way the music is laid out. And the sense at Rhymesayers, I guess it was the first time for me, coming from a non hip-hop background, a suburban background and a punk rock background, but that was the first time for me that I saw rappers as club artists. They were playing shows for 100 people. They were trying to deal with an audience, just as a punk rock band would do. That was really inspiring to me. And also they were talking and rapping about things that I understood... trying to find a job or about the punk rock scene. It meant a lot more to me, even though I've always been somewhat of a hip-hop fan, it just seemed more relevant.
Splendid: So, you mentioned Kerouac, I was going to ask you who some of your favorite writers are?
Craig Finn: Thomas Pynchon is probably my favorite.
Splendid: Have you gotten through Gravity's Rainbow? I've tried like ten times.
Craig Finn: I tried at least ten times and last year, I'm proud to report, I did it.
Splendid: Congratulations.
Craig Finn: Thank you so much. Do know the band Les Savy Fav?
Splendid: Yes.
Craig Finn: Tim from Les Savy Fav gave me a pep talk. I think it was my eight or ninth try, but I did it. He was like, "You're getting too hung up. If you don't understand a page, you've got to understand that that page was not meant for you to understand."
Splendid: Awesome.
Craig Finn: You just have to plow on ahead. You know what? You kind of get into this thing where it starts to make more sense. You have less of those pages, because you're kind of understanding... You're reading it and a lot of time you're just appreciating the language. But yeah, it is quite an accomplishment. I think that one of the ways it's affected me... he's always dealing with this static or interference or cloudiness that's part of the modern conditions. I think that, in some ways, my songs might reflect that. It's what we were talking about earlier. The 56th listen might produce something that the 54th didn't. It's a continual process.
AUDIO: Charlemagne in Sweatpants
Splendid: Yeah, my experience with Pynchon would be more like what would happen if I listened to the first three songs 56 times.
Craig Finn: Yeah.
Splendid: But I enjoy those first couple of chapters.
Craig Finn: Then it gets to be too much?
Splendid: I don't know what happens, actually. I had the same experience with 100 Years of Solitude. I started a bunch of times before I finally got through it.
Craig Finn: Yeah, the other stuff that's totally different, that I really like, is William Kennedy. Ironweed. It's all set in Albany at the turn of the century. There's something about that stuff that's really interesting to me. A lot of it deals with politics and this kind of formal but sort of handshake underground. Undergrounds or secret societies, that's something I'm really interested in. Things that happen that are unformalized. I'm thinking of paid-off cops or politicians, that's stuff that's really interesting to me, things that become part of the tradition but that aren't really formal or above the table.
Splendid: Do you write anything else besides lyrics?
Craig Finn: I have this novel that I'm trying to write but it's not going very well. It's pretty slow. But I have a good outline and I just keep expanding, and I figure that if I just keep expanding then eventually it will become a novel. I've been working at it for about six months. I've definitely got some good ideas. I've just got to find the time.
Splendid: It must be hard to focus on anything right now.
Craig Finn: Yeah.
Splendid: I was reading the press quotes on your last album, and all these places were calling it "The best record that nobody heard" for last year.
Craig Finn: Yeah, which is a backhanded compliment, in some ways. But I know that, in the big picture, it isn't, because coming off a small label, it's just an honor to be part of that. But I think with this record, we've at least cleared the hurdle. I think it will make more of a bang right off the bat. `
Splendid: It sounds like you're getting more of a push with this one.
Craig Finn: Yeah, I just did a photo shoot and interview for The New Yorker. And I think -- fingers crossed -- but we had a photo shoot tomorrow for what I think is going to be the cover of The Village Voice. Spin's got something this month. Blender... blah, blah, blah. I think the way they set it up, as one of those records you don't hear, it was great timing. We got a big bump on the end of year press, when everyone's shut down in November or December and it's just all lists. And I think probably scoring well on those, Pazz and Jop, all that stuff came out right as we entered the studio to make this new record. So it was good. It was well timed.
Splendid: A lot of the records that do well on Pazz and Jop are records that came out late in the year and that everybody still remembers, you know? Whereas yours came out earlier.
Craig Finn: That's true. I was aware of that. I knew that was going to hurt us. So I asked my publicist to send out a postcard that said remember, this record came out in March.
Splendid: But there are a lot of records -- like Califone's record and Destroyer -- that really got hurt by coming out early.
Craig Finn: Califone... I thought that record was amazing.
Splendid: Me, too.
Craig Finn: I also think that it didn't help that it was their fourth record, or however many records it was. I think bands have to have a bit of an image, so to speak. I'm a huge fan of everything Tim Rutilli has done. Red Red Meat, and Califone, I like even better. I have to admit the audiences are getting smaller for Tim Rutilli's thing, and I think maybe they're plowing through some sort of middle age as an artist. Califone is not yet like Yo La Tengo, where they've been around for a long, long time and they're an American institution. But it's just a great band. What can you say?
Splendid: I think it's the early in the year thing. I'm going to start keeping a list, because there's a lot of great stuff that comes out before April and, it sounds stupid, but you do forget.
Craig Finn: Do you have a blog? Because that's the way a lot of people do it.
Splendid: No. The idea of writing something else about music, it's just too much.
Craig Finn: Do you write for a living?
Splendid: I do, but not about music. I'm a financial writer. And then I just spend an ungodly amount of time writing about music. It's really fun, but the idea of putting up a web site of my own just to blather on about music....
Craig Finn: You write financial news.
Splendid: No, I do marketing stuff for big banks and insurance companies and mutual funds. It pays pretty well and they leave me alone and I can live here if I want to.
Craig Finn: Right... I worked for the asset management office of American Express under a portfolio manager when I was in Lifter Puller. And my sister worked at Forbes for a long time, just until recently. I'm really interested in that whole world.
Splendid: It's a pretty good gig, because a lot of people who like to write are kind of scared of business stuff.
Craig Finn: I found that when I was in Lifter Puller, it was a great job. It's hard to explain, but they were kind of way cooler about it. They didn't really know anyone else who was in a band. And I was like, well, I have to go on tour. And they were like, what? But they were really cool about it because it was not part of their world, you know? They were very, very impressed. It's hard to explain, but I always thought it was a pretty good decision. I don't think I could pull it off in New York.
Splendid: Yeah, there's a lot of good things about it. It's kind of a pain in the ass doing the actual work... but the people tend to be pretty nice. So I wanted to ask you a little about Lifter Puller. All I have is Half Dead and Dynamite, which was your first album, wasn't it?
Craig Finn: It's actually our second record. We had a self-titled album before that that wasn't very good. That was the first one that was real. There was an EP after that and then Fiestas and Fiascos, which is probably the best one.
Splendid: So my sense is that if your first record is the best record that no one ever heard, then Lifter Puller is probably the one of the best bands that no one ever heard... at least while it was going.
Craig Finn: Yeah... Lifter Puller. It was definitely a posthumous kind of fame. A lot of things happened after we broke up, critically. Which is fine. There were a couple of things that led into that. One is that we were from Minneapolis, which is sort of an isolated part of the country. And we did tour, but to reach New York or San Francisco or LA, it's half a country away. We were never able to get a label with that band, so we were never able to establish momentum with a team that was helping us. And also, the majority of the band happened pre-internet. It was more the word of mouth thing, and word of mouth didn't travel very fast, pre-internet. So all that happened and then we broke up and I started to get a ton of requests for CDs and tee-shirts. I was like, "What is going on here? This never happened when we were around." And then we did these reunion shows. We did one in New York and one in Minneapolis, and people were flying in from all over the country. So, yeah, I think The Hold Steady has benefitted from that. There are a lot of people at the Hold Steady shows who say, "Lifter Puller was my favorite band. I'm excited to see you, because I never got to see Lifter Puller."
Splendid: That's cool.
Craig Finn: It is. We had a rough go. I always thought that Lifter Puller, though we were big in Minneapolis, I thought we were really struggling out of town. There's some personal redemption in the end, even after the fact, to learn that people loved us.
Splendid: Now there's this story that after Lifter Puller was done, you were just kind of fooling around with this hard rock cover band.
Craig Finn: Yeah. There was a comedy troupe that we were friends with, and they wanted someone to come in and play covers... just like bumper music, going in and out of what would be commercial breaks, but it was a live show so there wouldn't be commercials. So we played AC/DC and Thin Lizzy and I don't know what else. We came in and we did that stuff, and it was fun and it sounded refreshing. At this point in New York, everyone was listening to The Rapture and Radio 4, these disco punk bands. It just felt good to hear guitar, bass and drums. I was like, god, this is great.
Splendid: But if you're 33, was AC/DC on the radio? Was it something that you remembered?
Craig Finn: Oh yeah, it was definitely on the radio. Absolutely. It was something I hadn't heard since I moved to New York in 2000. I felt like all this dance music and DJs had come up. I think of The Hold Steady as a classic rock band with a small, lower-case C. We take on riffs that are familiar. And then try to create a record based on classic sounds.
Splendid: I was going to talk to Tad about that, because there are these riffs that are driving me crazy because they're so familiar -- they remind me of things like Foghat and Queen and bands that I'm
almost ashamed to know the names of.
Craig Finn: Yeah... (laughs) But that's the thing about spending time in the Midwest. You kind of grow up in your car, getting high and driving around. There was no alternative rock radio when I was growing up. There was just that classic rock constantly on in the background.
Splendid: Don't you have a good college radio station at University of Minnesota?
Craig Finn: Yes, but not until the mid-1990s. Before that, if you wanted the radio on, classic rock was about as good as it got.
Splendid: So you have a lingering fondness for Van Halen?
Craig Finn: I love Van Halen. David Lee Roth only. I've always been a lyrics guy, so I've always had a hangup about Led Zeppelin, because their lyrics were so bad. But I've recently kind of gotten into them.
Splendid: Yeah, about five years ago, I bought this comp called Led Zeppelin: The Early Years and it was the only Zeppelin we had in the house at that point, and I was listening to it in the kitchen one day, and I was just kind of stunned by how much I loved those songs. I hadn't listened to them by choice in probably a decade.
Craig Finn: Zeppelin is great, especially the mellower stuff, I think.
Splendid: Yeah, have you spent any time with Zeppelin III?
Craig Finn: That's the psychedelic one. I like that a lot.
Splendid: And then we got the DVD, How the West Was Won, and I was like, god, I've got to buy it all.
Craig Finn: Yeah, from that first show, that really early one, it's incredible.
Splendid: Yeah, and it's kind of humorous to look at the first show and then the later one.
Craig Finn: I think the thing about a band like Zeppelin, you can't really consider yourself familiar with these songs until you've seen them played live.
Splendid: Anyway, thank you so much for doing this.
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Jennifer Kelly is the spy in the house of love.
[ graphics credits :: header/pulls - george zahora | photos - jen.knee :: credits graphics ]
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