Guest Listener - Jim Waterson
Who’s Jim when he’s at home?
I cover politics for BuzzFeed, which is probably the best job in the world for someone who likes the internet and politics.
Jim’s Top 3 albums ever?
Oh I’m not playing that game. I’d go mad trying to decide and anyway, singles are better.
An album to listen to on a long journey: Galaxie 500 – On Fire
An album to listen to when going out: Erol Alkan Bugged Out Mix
An album to listen to when you just need amazing pop music: Robyn – Robyn
What great album has he never heard before?
Almost Killed Me by The Hold Steady
Released in 2004
Before we get to Jim, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Almost Killed Me
Our house band - The Hold Steady.
Let me quickly run through the biography.
Craig Finn, future leader of The Hold Steady, was THAT kid in school - neither the first to be picked for the sports team, nor the last. A bespectacled adolescent navigating the school corridors, aware that there’s an “in-crowd” and he’s on the outs.
He’s the kid in-between - like most of us. Like me.
So what’s the plan? How does he get from there to here?
Does he settle or does he aspire?
He does neither, he retreats into a world of books and music and becomes an expert in HIS field. He learns how to play guitar, becomes a fan of local Minneapolis bands like The Replacements and Husker Du, and, even though he’s still a kid, he goes to see them at the “all ages hardcore matinee shows” in town.
Just a quick aside here but “hardcore matinee shows” sound like the most fun in the world - something to really build a day around. I’d basically vote for any political party that introduced them into the U.K.
But back to the story….
In his early ‘20s, Finn forms a band called Lifter Puller who are simultaneously pretty good but also not quite right. What works, spectacularly, is Finn’s lyrics about drugs and the shady characters that surround them but “the not quite right” bit is the music - a sort of '80s inspired synth overdose that, at its worst, sounds like the soundtrack to a Brian De Palma movie and, at its best, sounds like the soundtrack to a Brian De Palma movie.
After a few albums, a modicum of success, Lifter Puller split up and Finn becomes a financial broker for American Express before moving to New York to get a job at a digital webcasting company. At this stage in Finn’s life it would appear that his brief flirtation with a career in music had ended and he was now on a course for a series of jobs in tech and finance. In fact, he doesn’t do anything related to music for two whole years. He’s just the guy at work, the one who used to be in a band called Lifter Puller.
And then it happens.
Craig Finn is watching Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, the film of The Band’s final concert, and he turns to his friend Tad Kubler, and says “Dude, why aren’t there any bands like this anymore?”
Finn’s observation is correct - there are no bands like that and I’m not sure there ever will be. But that’s obvious, that’s the bit we can all see. Even I’ve watched The Last Waltz and said to my mate Dan (I don’t have a mate called Tad, I wish I did) - “Dude, why aren’t there any bands like this anymore?”
No, what I love about this moment is what they did next. Finn and Kubler, there and then, decide to form a band like that. They took the completely mad decision in 2003, when everyone was still floored by that Neutral Milk Hotel album and everything it spawned, of creating a band with just guitar, bass, and drums.
They called themselves The Hold Steady and there wasn’t a singing saw, a zanzithophone, or a wandering genie organ in sight.
What started out as an excuse for a bunch of guys in their '30s to hang out, drink, and play the occasional show, then becomes something of a going concern. Finn’s lyrics, framed by Kubler’s big riffs, created an unlikely breath of fresh air, a sense of celebration. Before long they’re signed to Frenchkiss, the best name for a record label ever, and they release their first album - Almost Killed Me.
The album, in fact their career, opens with A Positive Jam, a song which tells the history of 20th Century America in 171 words. In the background, a lazy guitar struggles to wake up as the events are passed like road signs. It’s their first song, on their first album, and after 90 seconds there’s been a stock market crash, a World War, and 3 Kennedys are dead. The lyrical economy is remarkable, the way he deals with each decade precisely and definitively in one sentence.
This is how he nails the '50s -
“We got shiftless in the '50s, holding hands and going steady, twisting into dark parts of the large Midwestern cities”
No need for the white picket fence trope, no need for Ike or Truman to co-star. Post war America perfectly reduced to “Holding hands and going steady”. And then The Twist tells you the ‘60s are coming. I got it straight away.
And this is how he nails the '70s -
“We woke up on bloody carpets, got tangled up in gas lines and I guess that’s where it started”
He rhymed “carpets” with “started” and reduced the long term economic and political effects of the 1973 Oil Crisis to a line. What’s not to like? I can still vividly remember my first listen now - the time, the place, and an album cover of blacked out faces. It was immediate. I was in.
And I didn’t even know then what I know now, that he was providing context - that he was explicitly saying “We have shared history.” Because at the end of the song, he brings us up to date, the guitar does wake up and the band kicks in. It’s then that he tells us that he was bored so he started a band, it’s then that he tells us that he wants to start it off with a positive jam.
The first time I heard Almost Killed Me I rewound the opening song again and again. I guess the “positive jam” that the song was trailing was The Swish, the second song on the album. But I couldn’t get to it, I couldn’t get past how good the opener was. I listened to it five times on the spin – by the time I was finished 15 Kennedys had died.
But then I did I get past it. I got to The Swish and my head fell off. Honestly, I stood there laughing, air riffing and dancing, in thrall to my new favourite band after just two songs. The bridge from A Positive Jam to The Swish is one of THE moments in music for me. It simultaneously comes out of nowhere yet evokes a memory. I made it through the rest of the album, breathless and giddy.
I’d never heard anything like it, despite having heard things like it.
Does that make sense? That bit really needs to make sense.
You know when The Sopranos came out and you thought “Jesus, not another story about Italian American Gangsters. Surely not THAT again.” But then you watched it and saw that the characters were immersed in that culture as much as the viewer. They existed within their own context and couldn’t move without referencing it.
And that was the difference. It was derivative but it was spun, from an angle so it wasn’t head on.
That’s The Hold Steady. That’s Almost Killed Me.
It would be easy to say it’s my favourite album of the 21st Century if only it didn’t have to compete with what they did next - Separation Sunday, Boys and Girls in America and, finally, the hangover, Stay Positive. Finn had done it, with his friends they’d made one of the greatest runs of albums ever - an aggregate score of at least 36 out of 40.
At least.
Yes, there were comparisons to things you’d heard before, a familiarity, but for me it was almost entirely different. People screamed Springsteen, people screamed The E Street Band but I never really knew why. These weren’t stories about open roads, about making love to the interstate. These were stories about the claustrophobia of community, about the kids in between - confined by drugs and religion. And you know what? Springsteen never swished through the city centre to do a couple of favours for some guys who looked like Tusken Raiders did he? No he didn’t, he was probably driving somewhere.
The Hold Steady wore their influences on their sleeve but they spun them. They humoured them. They said “Tramps like us and we like Tramps” and told stories about people who looked like people - people who looked like Rocco Siffredi, Elisabeth Shue, Izzy Stradlin, Alice Cooper, Mickey Mantle, and, of course, Tusken Raiders. They were doing that thing again - they were saying “We know you know. Because we have shared history”
But this analysis, my attempt at explanation, is nothing compared to the visceral triumph and joy of a Hold Steady show - the pleasure of watching this band that had been plucked from their own lives and were creating anew. I used to spend hours looking at the bass player, I’d never seen anyone work so hard whilst standing still - a man who started the night dry and ended it dripping in sweat and smiles.
And then there was Finn - the inbetweener, the most generous of front men. He was always so warm and inclusive to his audience, so glad that they’re there with him. Yet he never forgets the band. Never. And for someone so wordy it’s remarkable the gaps he leaves for them - the gaps for them to play and for him to admire. Often he’d be clapping, dancing, and having so much fun in admiration, that I’d worry he’d forget to join in again – that he’d forget that the moment after the gaps were his.
But he never did.
Fast forward to 2014 - to the Holiday Inn, in Brighton, a few hours after a Hold Steady show.
I’d probably had my back to him for about 10 minutes, having a night cap at the hotel bar and thinking about what had come before. But then I turned around and there he was - Craig Finn, sitting alone, a hero rather than a star. I decided to say hello and he gestured for me to sit down. We talked about The Last Waltz. I asked him if it was true, whether that’s really how it started, and he said it was. We talked about the rest of the film, all those conversations, you know where they go - Joni Mitchell and all her chords; Van Morrison and that ridiculous high kick. And somewhere in the drink and The Last Waltz I lost the memory of the night, other than to say he was good company and he paid his way.
And if I met him now?
If I met him now, I’d probably get lost down another rabbit hole - about how we’re the same age and how I wasn’t picked first for the sports team either. I’d ask him how he feels now, at 44, about the start he gave himself at 33 - whether that still surprises him, whether it ever did. Whether he knows, REALLY knows, that for about four years The Hold Steady were the best band in the world. But more than that I’d tell him about how HE influenced, how HE inspired, about how Ruth and I always used to say this album club was about spinning familiar stories, about telling them from an angle rather than head on - just like The Hold Steady.
Because that’s what we used to say. When we wanted to avoid nostalgia and reheating the past , we used to say it should be “JUST LIKE THE HOLD STEADY”.
And before I lost another evening, and its fluid memory, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank him for that.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Almost Killed Me
Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound both gave it 8/10
Rolling Stone named Almost Killed Me the 99th best album of the decade between 2000 and 2010,
So, over to you Jim. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
Because I perceived The Hold Steady to be the sort of band that a trendy Dad driving a Volvo estate would stick on the car stereo, allowing him to rant about the joys of the open road while sticking to the speed limit on the A64.
At that time it was released, 2004, I was an only child living in a small North Yorkshire village where the idea of entertainment was the annual biggest weed competition at the village fete. Luckily we had a dial-up internet connection and, on the internet, not only can you be a dog but you can also spend every waking minute posting on pre-MySpace music forums under a pseudonym. Which is what I did: it was the last parp of the NME era, when they were pushing The Libertines, a scene called “New Yorkshire” and they could still make the release a new Art Brut single feel like a world event.
This was a strange crossover period – oooh a whole eleven years ago – where the internet had transferred most music scenes online, making it much it easier to get recommendations about new bands and opening up the possibility of talking with people who were into the same stuff. But at that point you still couldn’t actually easily get hold of the bloody music online to see whether the tips were good.
Remember what it was like?
People posted in forums based around particular scenes or bands. They’d tip something they’d heard but actually checking out a new band involved waiting 40 minutes to download a virus-laden mp3 from Kazaa on dial-up, loading it into Windows Media Player and then feeling sufficiently excited to go into town and spend £10.99 at Track Records on the album. TEN POUNDS NINETY NINE! Then you’d have to sit on the bus home and read the liner notes before you could hear it. CD singles were considered a legitimate product rather than an overpriced way of getting hold of 3 minutes of music. MySpace’s four song uploads weren’t there yet, nor was YouTube available for streaming. This was just a decade ago. I now inject Spotify directly into my bloodstream.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to go through all that for a band like the Hold Steady.
Also, in 2004 I was a 15-years-old and considered following bands to be a fairly partisan matter. At that point I was fan of British Sea Power, as much for their worldview as their music. Thanks to lifts around the country from people I met on those forums and blagging guestlists I probably watched British Sea Power play about 40-odd times while a teenager. They had a football ultras-style team of regulars and every gig felt like it actually mattered. By comparison I seem to remember some people wearing “The Hold Steady saved my life” t-shirts but it all seemed too bloody earnest and they were mainly worn by the odd guy with a beer gut.
(One of the regulars at these BSP gigs was future RAMAlbumClub Guest Dan Maier. I also ended up going to see last week’s guest @hrtbps play in bands. I think you need to work out why you’re recruiting exclusively from people who were at the Leeds Cockpit in 2005.)
Soon afterwards I twigged that the way to actually meet the people I liked was to be this thing called “a journalist” so I set up a badly-photocopied fanzine and started turning up to interview bands, managing to get Swedish pop star Robyn to take me out for a steak dinner and 80s oddball Julian Cope to give me a tour of stone circles. But by university I lost interest in guitar music when someone tried to make The Twang into a thing, so going to clubs mixed with Actually Good Pop Music became my thing. Definitely, definitely not some earnest 6Music-dwelling guitar band from New Jersey.
All of which is a very long way of saying: I bloody love music but at every single point of the last eleven years I’ve quite purposefully avoided The Hold Steady for various reasons centred on my belief that they were earnest bastards playing sub-Springsteen shite for the sort of people who try to recapture lost youth by writing earnest over-long self-indulgent pieces about their teenage connection with music.
Oh.
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
Don’t make me say it. I don’t want to say it. Oh OK then: it was perfectly alright. Actually, I quite liked it. Now, as a result of this I’m worried that I’m going through an early mid-life crisis which will end in me moving to Surrey and spending my weekend tending the barbecue at real ale festivals.
There’s an awful lot against this album: there’s guitar solos that go on for over a minute for no particular reason, and you’ve got to have a pretty good excuse to do that. There’s earnest “me-and-my-bottle-of-Budweiser-against-the-world” songs about hard drinking in American bars which always sound a bit bollocks and just make me want to sit down for a quiet pint of Sam Smith’s, especially when Guided By Voices do the sozzled guitar thing better. Then there’s that goddamn earnestness which I’ve always hated in American guitar music: I’ve always got a lingering suspicion that the songwriter writing about their hard-partying life on the edge of society is basically an undercover Pitchfork writer doing a feature on what it’s really like to get drunk backstage at some fleapit venue.
And have I mentioned that I’ve always had a largely irrational hatred of Springsteen? And the same for Bob Dylan? These guys really want to be Springsteen and Dylan.
And yet, and yet, and yet, I started listening and The Hold Steady just really go for it. And they don’t piss about and they chuck out song after song and sure they all sound a bit the same and sure they’re all shouting lyrics about people in bars and sure it’s all a bit incomprehensible. But they drive on relentlessly. And there’s bits which are basically just Teenage Fanclub with an American accent, which is always going to be alright with me.
I rarely listen to albums properly these days and individual tracks don’t really stand out on first listen so it’s odd to try and concentrate on a single lump of music for so long. But among the tales of chainsmoking and heavy drinking there’s the odd pop song in there. There’s still a few too many songs which make me think of blokey men nodding earnestly at the side of gigs while holding a £5 pint of Carlsberg but then I remember I do quite like Bob Mould’s Sugar and this sounds a bit like that at points.
At one point they use the lyric “I’ve been trying to get people to call me Sunny D, cos I’ve got the good stuff that kids go for”. This is brazenly awful. They immediately jump in my estimation.
But it’s on the fourth listen that their appeal starts to makes sense: they’re never going to be my band, this is never going to be an album I truly love but I can imagine someone getting obsessed with them, getting wrapped up in every story and screaming the lyrics out of the window of their car.
And more than anything I love listening to any band that inspires total devotion in a group of people. It’s fandom that makes bands more than just some musicians who chuck out a few songs every few years. It’s why One Direction are elevated by their obsessive fanbase and why people still go to see Optimo DJ sets and why the devotion that surrounded smaller indie bands from a decade ago like Forward Russia or The Long Blondes also really, really, really mattered to the relatively small groups of people involved. Fandom is great, music that can inspire fandom and obsession is better than something that’s technically alright but worthy and doesn’t make you desire more. Fandom is basically the lifeblood of good music and – unlike a lot of bands that make similar music – I can see why someone would get utterly devoted to The Hold Steady.
I’m not going to say “The Hold Steady saved my life”. But I can see why someone might feel that way. And I like them for that.
Would you listen to it again?
Only if I’m driving on the pan-US Interstate with the windows down. Or failing that, heading across the M62 in my mum’s Ford Focus.
A mark out of 10?
7
RAM Rating – 10
Guest Rating – 7
Overall – 8.5
So that was Week 48 and that was Jim Waterson from Buzzfeed. Turns out he’d never listened to The Hold Steady before because he lived in Yorkshire. So we made him listen to them and I think he liked them, or at least bits of them, but probably not enough to save his life from the 27 Hold Steady fans that will now internet stalk him until he accepts that they’re better than British Sea Power.
Next week, Tracey Thorn listens to something from 1973 for the first time.
Until then, here’s A Positive Jam because if you’ve never listened to The Hold Steady before you have to start here.
But, then of course, you also need to listen to The Swish next