June 3, Beauty Bar
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Killers bassist Mark Stoermer and Higher guitarist Reggie Ragen were among those milling about the stifling, crowded-but-not-packed back patio at Beauty Bar’s second-anniversary celebration, where audience members noshed on free barbecue and warmed up their eardrums with an opening set by local rockers The Skooners.
After an introduction proclaiming them natives of Arizona, Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis critical darlings The Hold Steady launched into a giddy rendition of “Stuck Between Stations,” the intro track off the five-piece’s third effort, 2006’s Boys and Girls in America. Disheveled and, according to a band insider, “drunk for hours,” singer/guitarist Craig Finn kept the comments brief but entertaining (“Gambling is the only vice I don’t like”), instead physically punctuating 17 tight songs with flailing elbows, prancing, jumping, running in place, frequent clap-alongs and a dozen other joyous spasms that had the low wooden stage buckling under each emphatic stomp of his black All Stars.
Nine out of 11 America tracks provided soundtrack for, as guitarist Tad Kubler put it, “the light show of God,” the single overhead street light’s proclivity for turning from pale blue to bright orange during his solos, only to switch off as the feedback died. The album’s “Massive Nights” was a rousing highlight, inspiring a PBR-hoisting, drunken bro-huddle at the foot of the stage, which remained clinched throughout Finn’s drawn-out conclusion, “The chaperone said that we’d been crowned ... the king ... and the queen.”
2004 debut Almost Killed Me’s “The Swish” and “Sweet Payne” appeared early on, while “Cattle and the Creeping Things,” “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night,” “Multitude of Casualties,” a sped-up, harder-rocking “Steve Nix” and “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” (during which Finn thanked the evening’s responsible parties and shouted out his Vegas-residing sister) represented 2005’s Separation Sunday. An accordion-and-bass-bolstered take on America’s “Citrus,” along with “First Night,” provided the encore, but it was during set closer “How a Resurrection Really Feels” that Finn chanted, “Walk on back, walk on back,” eyes closed and arms extended, summing up the entire ethos of the band, and for most, the evening: debauchery, transformation, good friends and good times, all of it so normal, and in hindsight, so memorably fleeting.