The Hold Steady Live at Prospect Park Brooklyn
By Bill Reese
They started five years ago with the aspirations of being a great bar band. As he looked out into an estimated 5,000 people in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Thursday night, The Hold Steady singer Craig Finn remarked, “Well, this is a pretty big bar.”
Barnstorming the country for most of this year, The Brooklyn via Minneapolis quintet’s free show as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn series served as a homecoming of sorts for Finn, who grew up in the land of 10,000 lakes, but had his life change upon moving to New York City in 2000.
From the opening muted chords of “Stuck Between Stations,” Finn and company seemed as energetic and hyper as some of the chemically induced characters in their songs. However, unlike his fictional junkies, Finn’s drug of choice was his own adrenaline. Although his shiny black guitar slung around his neck for the entire show, Finn seemed more concerned with delivering his lyrics as if they were soliloquies from “Macbeth” at Shakespeare in the Park. His TONY-worthy stage performance found him pantomiming everything from numbers to syringes, frequently ending his stanzas with wide, open arms, as if he intended on giving one giant hug to everyone in attendance.
While Finn’s guitar served mostly as a prop, HS lead guitarist Tab Kubler assumed the reigns and tore through devastating hooks and dazzling solos. He was prone to swirl his axe around his shoulders without warning or ceremony, never losing the beat. On the other side of the stage, The Hold Steady’s Roy Bittan/Danny Federicci doppelganger Franz Nicolay peppered the guitar jams with perfectly placed organ licks, including some new keyboard interpretations of the group’s early work.
The set covered equally from the band’s first three LPs, playing all but one track from 2006’s Boys and Girls in America. While the crowd sang along with the songs from Boys and Girls, the biggest cheers seemed to come when they dipped into 2005’s punk-rock opera Separation Sunday. Songs like “Stevie Nicks” and “Multitude of Casualties” showed off the band’s formative song structure, characterized by long-winded, spoken word verses and big, instrumental breakdowns. These were counterbalanced with the knockdown-dragout rock choruses from Boys and Girls, especially in “Chips Ahoy!” and “Hot Soft Light.”
Throughout the show, Finn’s stage presence and energy drew comparisons to his idol, Bruce Springsteen, as well as the showmanship of contemporaries such as Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. The E Street similarities were everywhere, from the kooky, Fedora-wearing keyboardist, to the robot-man precision of drummer Bobby Drake, to the fact that Finn didn’t seem to want the set to ever end.
Finn, a native Minnesotan, spoke only briefly about the tragedy in his hometown, saying that Minneapolis is in the news for “all the wrong reasons,” before dropping into the teen-angst breakdown in “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.” For the encore, he walked onstage with a game-worn jersey from his favorite player, Twins legend Ken Hrbek. After someone yelled “Go Brewers!” into the mic, Finn gazed back at the audience and said “We’re gonna win, Twins,” perhaps unaware of the emotional and powerful statement entwined within that simple fight chant.
