The roadie brought beer bottles out. A positive sign. (As was the roadie testing the bass by playing Flipper’s ‘Sex Bomb’.) I’m so fed up with bands drinking from water bottles. It was one of the things I really liked the only other time I saw The Hold Steady. It was at The Bottle Tree in Birmingham, Alabama in March 2007. The first thing I liked was the opening band: The Thermals, who were so invigorating that I knew The Hold Steady were going to be too. Only a confident band would dare let The Thermals open for them. And not only they did they bring their singular brand of literary barroom rock with them that evening, they got drunk. I would’ve hated to feel what the bassist felt the following morning the way he was putting the scotch away. I was a little apprehensive that 3+ years later they’d be drinking Evian. But nope. Beer bottles. Like I said: a positive sign.

I turned around to survey the lay of The Variety Playhouse. It wasn’t sold out. Not all balcony seats were taken. Or maybe The Hold Steady’s crowd was like Clash crowds: nobody wanted to be up on the balcony when The Clash came on. There were certainly more fans crowded around the stage than usual.

At 9:40 to some cheesy fanfare, The Hold Steady walked out supplemented by a guitarist for hire and keyboardist who took his place to the drummer’s left. (Franz Nicolay is no longer lending his Roy Bittan-like keys to the proceedings and that’s a good thing.) They’re a fairly bland lot for a rock and roll band. The only one who stands out really is the singer Craig Finn, though it’s hard to pinpoint why. He may have a black guitar and sweat like Joe Strummer but Joe’s guitar was a Fender Telecaster and Craig’s is a Gibson Les Paul and Craig is no way as near as intimidating. He’s kinda goofy looking.

With his penchant for wordplay and black-rimmed glasses you find yourself comparing him to Elvis Costello except EC can sing and is a far a better guitar player. (I remember one show: Leamington Spa, England, March 1980: EC and The Attractions played ‘Moods For Moderns’ and EC impulsively played lead guitar throughout the whole arrangement and never sang a single word of the lyrics!)

Actually the person Craig Finn resembles more than anyone else is the comedian Phil Silvers. A very manic Phil Silvers with spittle flying and arms all over the place. Except I doubt most of you remember Phil Silvers. So let me say that he brings to my mind Richard Dreyfus in American Graffiti - only instead of looking for the beautiful blonde, he’s looking to put on a good rock show.

“Hello Atlanta! We’re going to have a good time tonight,” he says and the band starts playing ‘The Sweet Part of the City’, the opening cut from Heaven Is Whenever, their newest album, and the crowd starts singing along right through to the closing lines: “We like to play for you.” You could tell Craig Finn meant it.

It’s a real compliment when the crowd claps along without any prompting and that happened several times during the early portion of the show. It was happy crowd that knew the words far better than I did and shouted them along with Finn and they moved their arms just as much as Finn did. I had a fun time watching everyone else shouting out words I did not know.

The concert kicked into high gear and never looked back with the seventh song of the set: ‘Barfruit Blues’. It has this memorable couplet:

She said it’s good to see you back in a bar band baby.
I said it’s great to see you’re still in the bars.

And Finn sang it with a devilish grin; his chin dripping with spit. For some reason I looked around and the beer bottles were emptying. From this point on the show’s a bit of a blur because Hold Steady sets are Clashical. (A term coined by the way by Stephen Graziano, a deceased friend.). Songs are coupled together another and they go by swiftly like an express train. ‘Chips Ahoy’, ‘Stuck Between Stations’, ‘Sequestered In Memphis’, ‘Most People Are DJs’ and the closer ‘Slapped Actress’ with everyone singing “Whoa oh!” were all highlights. I believed Finn when he said “This remains the best job I’ve ever had in my life.” The man was born to be front a rock and roll band.

That being said, the fact is if it wasn’t for Finn’s way with words and his manic Richard Dreyfuss persona, The Hold Steady is not much more than a vivacious bar band. So why aren’t they back in the bars? There’s no light show and no stage props other than the upraised hand from the cover of Heaven Is Whenever on the bass drum.

The answer is Tad Kubler, whose rhythm guitar playing is top-notch if not his leads. (They brought to mind that Winnie the Pooh line about it being a blustery day. His leads were windy like that.) Rhythm guitarists are too often disparaged like right fielders, but its Kubler’s rhythm work that underpins Finn’s lyrics and punctuates them like a good editor. He is the secret to The Hold Steady’s success. I thought that from the moment I first heard the guitars kick in on Separation Sunday’s ‘Hornets! Hornets!’ His sound is like a remembrance of guitarists long past: you can hear guitar work from Jethro Tull’s ‘Cross-Eyed Mary’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Houses of the Holy’, and Iggy Pop’s ‘TV Eye’ cleverly put to new use. That’s one reason why you find older rockers at a relatively new band’s concerts.

Beginning the encore, Finn said there was girl in the audience somewhere who was going to Australia. The girl to the left of me who had been singing along passionately all night yelled out it was she. Finn dedicated ‘We Can Get Together’ to her. It’s one of the prettiest songs from Heaven Is Whenever and it’s the song that gave the album its title. There are some nice sentiments on the album and a few choice words of wisdom and I recommend you check it out. There’s a Lennonesque quality to the outro of ‘We Can Get Together’. I mean his solo work, not what he wrote while with the Fab Four.

I give The Hold Steady’s performance an 8.3. Finn and Kubler are true artists and showmen but the rhythm section never made me take notice of them, the keys were too low in the mix (even during solos), and the guitarist for hire didn’t earn his money.

I give the crowd’s performance, however, a 9.8. It was only marred up front by a middle-aged guy who barged forward about 3/5ths through the set and handed Finn a Minnesota Twins jersey. He’d had too much but he was harmless really… just really into The Hold Steady. When he sat down on the lip of the stage the Flipper playing roadie gave him such a sharp shove that he landed on his ass and you could tell everybody felt bad for him, even the roadie who gently helped him down the second time he sat on the stage.

The Hold Steady are a Brooklyn-based band nowadays and for north-easterners – even former ones like me – summer begins Memorial Day Weekend. Seeing The Hold Steady a few days before Memorial Day was like lighting coals on a barbecue grill. It was a good start to the summer.