The great irony of being a teenage Hold Steady fan was that these songs that glamorized being young and prone to fucking up/getting fucked up were being sung in retrospect, by a dude already well into his 30s. We were hearing our lives reflected back to us, down there in the pit; he was telling stories. “We’re gonna build something this summer,” he said. I was eighteen, just out of high school and not yet cognizant of the fact that the Perfect Summer was a pop cultural lie. (Michael Chabon once wrote that summer has the three act structure built in—June, July, August.) I was going to build something that summer; I ended up with a pathetic screenplay about a suburban suicide and a handful of memories revolving around making out on the roof of a Dunkin’ Donuts and trying to calm down a friend visiting from Iowa, having an unfortunate reaction to some tampered-with Long Island weed. It was the best summer of my life, I think. But what was Craig Finn doing that summer? Touring, I guess? Maybe buying health insurance, trying to set up a stable life for himself?
Anyway: A guitar solo in a Hold Steady song always feels like a comment on guitar solos—the experience of being young and invested in their power (which power has, clearly, diminished considerably in the last forty years) and hearing one for the first time that’ll forever bring you back to whatever shitty basement you were in when you first heard it. That’s the experience I had with the solo in “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” which has always sort of freaked me out: Am I a copy of a copy, finding cheap salvation through the same devices as folks who are plausibly, at this point in time, grandparents? Either way, “Lord I’m Discouraged” is, to me, the moment when the Hold Steady effectively ended; when whatever postmodern edge/irony that still existed between their warm, lived-in influences and that voice collapsed; when the Hold Steady stopped being a band about classic rock, and started being just another band with classic rock influences. Which is all to say that no I haven’t heard the solo record yet, I’m not good at downloading things illegally, does anyone have a copy.
