THE HOLD STEADY ALMOST KILLED ME

[June 8th, 2005] It's 5 in the afternoon on a Sunday back in February, and I'm riding in the back of a rented minivan with four members of a little-known band called the Hold Steady. In the next two months, these four guys will be plastered on the cover of the Village Voice, in the pages of numerous national music mags and on glowing television screens across the nation following the release of Separation Sunday, the band's sophomore effort and the best rock album of the year, so far. For now, though, we're crammed into this van, heading to the Presidio Travelodge in San Francisco, and I have only two things on my mind: Where is Craig Finn, and is Tad Kubler too drunk to drive? A cell-phone call answers both questions.

Finn's absence is a concern. As the chief of the group, he's the one responsible for penning the rambling tales of subversion and survival he has just delivered in his gravelly bark to the crowd at the Bottom of the Hill that afternoon. He's the one I want to ask about everything he talks about on his album; about God and deception and getting high and how you can do all of that and not lose your mind. Or if losing your mind is just part of the deal.

Finn calls to say he's still at the club. And Kubler is at least tipsy enough to fear Finn's response to the fact that he's driving. "What's your name?" he shouts back at me while bassist Galen Polivka holds the phone. Moments later, he is informing Finn that I, being the sober one, am driving them back to the hotel. He can meet us there. And suddenly I am living a frightening rock-n'-roll dream, knowing that first I will be zigzagging through the streets of San Francisco at the whim of a man who steers with the same expertise-wrapped-in-reckless-abandon he uses when playing some of the grittiest guitar parts this side of 1975. Then I'll have to lie to a musician I've loved since my days in Minneapolis.

Back then, Finn and Kubler played in Lifter Puller, a band that, in its six-year history, painted an entire community of debauched characters. When they formed the Hold Steady after moving from Minneapolis to New York in 2000, Finn and Kubler continued painting those pictures. In 2004 the band released an ode to bar rock called, fittingly, Almost Killed Me and the band's course, it seemed, was plotted in a hazy nightclub crawl. But Separation Sunday is different. Here Finn's characters don't just get high, they get born again and everyone gets confused. If everything the band did before was akin to doing coke in the bar bathroom, this album is like popping pills in the cathedral. Souls are at stake here.

"I guess I heard about original sin," drawls Finn on "Cattle and the Creeping Things." "I heard the dude blamed the chick/ I heard the chick blamed the snake/ I heard they were naked when they got busted/ I heard things ain't been the same since."

It's 4 am now, and Finn and I have been talking for hours about growing up Catholic, his wife back in Brooklyn and storytelling. The sinning and being saved isn't really important, Finn says, "the thing I love is the storytelling." Then it's time to go.

"Travel safe," he says, showing me out. "And thanks again for driving those guys back to the hotel."