Facing the onslaught of a new academic semester, as well as a recent breakout of Swine Flu, the student-driven community of Ithaca, NY gathered last Sunday to usher in Labor Day 2009. The occasion for this was the Positive Jam, a miniature music festival whose line-up comprised of the Rural Alberta Advantage, Deer Tick, the Felice Brothers and the Hold Steady.
Among openers, Deer Tick fared best, cycling through highlights from their twin LP’s War Elephant and Born On Flag Day without misstep. The band, whose frontman claims Hank Williams as a pervading influence, were an inspired choice for the event: they, like much of the crowd, consist of Northeasterners with an affinity for American roots music. It’s to their credit, too, that they were able to deliver a number of self-reflective numbers without losing their audience to the anticipation of those promised “positive jams.”
The wellspring of those jams, headliners The Hold Steady, arrived following an effusive introduction by promoter Dan Smalls. Smalls’ local booking company, Dan Smalls Presents, organized and promoted the event.
The Hold Steady’s set consisted mostly of tracks taken from their last two full-lengths, 2008’s Stay Positive and 2006’s Boys and Girls in America. Though it’s all a glorious mess of murderous townies and soaring riffs, one highlight was keyboardist Franz Nicolay’s self-consciously operatic solo on “Stuck Between Stations,” suspending the song in tense delay before a rousing final minute. There were others, too, like “Hostile, Mass.” and “Multitude of Casualties,” both early-catalogue staples that grow more ferociously accented with time. “Slapped Actress,” the final track on Stay Positive, closed out the main set with a wink to the Cassavetes’ film Opening Night. In a brief interview before the show, lead singer Craig Finn explained that the film had impacted him with its “all the world’s a stage” theorem, something he was concurrently dealing with as his band exploded and he began to discover fragments of his personal life doubling as blog headlines.
Finn went on to discuss a number of other points. When asked about the band’s mercurial attitude toward the desperate, liquoroed-up smalltown heroes that inhabit their songs, Finn confirmed that “it’s not out of dislike… it’s just describing certain clichés or things like that.” He also responded to the recent release of A Positive Rage, a DVD documentary/live album the band released whose footage was taken during the Boys and Girls in America tour several years ago. “When Boys and Girls in America came out, it felt like something was kinda lifting off. It took a hundred hours to try to make a compelling story out of it. Now, whether that’s compelling…” (Editor’s note: Don’t worry, it is.)
The band also unleashed a few new songs: the first sounded suspiciously like a punk appropriation of Meet Me in St. Louis’ “Trolley Song,” with a flailing Finn standing in for that Hollywood musical’s swooning actresses. Then there was “Heaven Is Whenever,” a ballad more in line with either “Lord I’m Discouraged” or “First Night” that seemed to convince the crowd that it had already been long-established among fans. Finn himself was unsure of the new material’s direction and whether it would continue the linear chronology of characters’ aging that has linked their first four releases. “Stay Positive definitely had a concerted effort to write about people that were a little older. That’s was it was about, keeping idealism as you’re aging,” he said. “What happens next, I don’t know.”
As The Hold Steady’s ambivalence confirms, it’s unclear how much satiric bite informs their own song “Positive Jam,” a cut off the debut Almost Killed Me LP. Either way, it seems that attitude has translated into a local reputation in step with their critical admiration. If “boys and girls in America have such a sad time together,” as the band’s Kerouac-borrowed lyric goes, at least they’ll wake up hung over on Labor Day remembering a night with the Hold Steady.
Mike Spreter (Photo by Judson Baker)
