Finns for our feet

I'm standing onstage at the Great American Music Hall. I'm playing Craig Finn's guitar. And some girl is handing me an open bottle of Jim Beam, wiping the remains of a shot off her lips. How did it get to be this way?

It may very well be par for the course for Hold Steady shows to evolve into wild free-for-alls by night's end, or last night may have been an unusually festive occasion. There were a hell of a lot of people there who knew every word to their songs, and the band is clearly receiving more attention than ever before. (A page and a half in the Sunday NYT Arts and Leisure section, huh?) The posse of young rowdies to my left, right below Finn's nose, was in full frat mode: crowd surfing, stage diving, shoving people around. I guess that's what happens when you make a full-on arena-rock record. (More photos from strangers are here and here. Interactive version of the photo above is here.)

Was the music good? Sure, assuming you like power-chord rock straight out of the 1970s, delivered like the band has wanted to play it all their lives. (Check Tad Kubler's "Best Bands of All Time" list.) Frontman/writer Craig Finn presents himself as neither a good guitarist nor a good singer, but rather an enthusiastic firebrand/ringmaster whose boozy rants, wild pantomiming and over-the-top charisma set the band apart from its riff-rock peers. (To be fair, there are many other things too: the wild antics and generally odd appearance of skilled pianist Franz Nicolay, Tad Kubler's licks on the double-necked Gibson, and the bash-and-pop rhythm section that knows how to make things right for everyone else.) They throw everything in the playbook at you, and nearly everything works.

Last night's show reminded me of seeing Guided by Voices at Irving Plaza in 1995 and 1996. The face of rock'n'roll is starting to look less like the classic Jagger/Plant-type frontman, and more like Finn: pudgy, drunk, balding, entering middle age, and yet all fired up about making music like it's the last thing he ever wanted to do. His onstage moves circle beyond irony and back to fun, like Bob Pollard's; the music is not so much a reinterpretation but rather a reinforcement of everything you (might) already like about rock'n'roll. They may have stretched too far on their latest record, or maybe not, but in person they are unquestionably a first-rate band.

Everything hit the fan during the encores. Kubler mounted a speaker and started taking beers from people in the balcony. Finn started spraying the crowd with beer. Kubler successfully crowd-surfed. The guy in front of me loaned Kubler his hat. Kubler wore it for awhile, then threw it into the crowd. The guy looked worried that he was going to lose it forever. Kubler asked him if he played guitar, handed him his axe, and started pulling people out of the crowd. Once he'd yanked four or five people onto the stage, everyone started climbing up there, myself included. The bottle of Beam, passed around onstage during the show, became everyone's. Some guy had Finn's guitar, but couldn't play it. And so I wound up taking it from him, and the last licks of the night came from my fingers. Kubler came over and was ready to shut me down, but saw that I was playing in tune and so he let me go a little bit more. I don't know whether Finn plays in drop-D tuning or if the instrument had been molested sufficiently to knock it out of tune by that point -- how could you tell? He hardly ever plays it during their songs -- but I made it through without sounding terrible. I think.

Somehow, this isn't on YouTube yet.