Right now you’re gearing up to head out on tour, ears still ringing from Boys and Girls in America being loudly endorsed as one of last year’s best. What’s the current feeling in camp Hold Steady?
The Hold Steady photograph by Marina Chavez
This will be one of our longest tours in the U.S. We’re home for two days, and then we go back to Europe for summer festivals and stuff. This will be the first U.S. tour where our crew has gotten bigger; we’ll have a lot more help in terms of stage techs and tour managers and things like that. We’re going to have two vehicles.
Logistically it’ll be different for us; we’re finally getting to that point as a band where we just have to worry about showing up and playing a really good show. We haven’t been out West since last fall, and we’ve never played Vegas.
This stop will be a smaller show than the rest of the tour, and it’s free. How did it come about?
[Marketing director] Dave [Knapp]—who’s got Beauty Bars all over the U.S.—we’ve done things with him in the past, after-parties and things like that; we’ve kept in touch. Vegas is logistically hard to do, and he said, “Hey, we’re having this anniversary; I’m looking at your itinerary online, and it doesn’t look like you guys are playing a show.” We actually were, but we switched things around so we could make it work out because he’s been a good friend to us and it sounded like a really fun thing to be able to do.
Any additional acting offers since that Target mini-movie ad from a few years back?[Laughs] No, I think anybody who’s seen my performance in that probably looked elsewhere. No agents have been calling me. There hasn’t been a flurry of phone calls for representation, unfortunately or maybe fortunately for everybody else. I guess I did play a Catholic Bishop in our first video for this record. To pull that off took a little bit of preparation, I suppose. But it’s the same thing as the reason that they never allowed Rodney Dangerfield into the Academy. They always said that he wasn’t actually acting, he was always playing himself.
The Hold Steady headline Beauty Bar’s second anniversary party. June 3, 8 p.m., free, 598-1965.