Every party comes to an end, and some parties almost kill us. We wrap up our review of Almost Killed Me (though not Season 1 of A Positive Jam!) with a look at “Killer Parties”, the closing track on the Hold Steady’s debut album. It’s a ritual as much as a song, and we treat it with all due consideration. That includes making this a four-person episode, with regular guest Matt Brooks rejoining us as well as Shawn Westfall hitting us up for back-to-back appearances.
Mike Taylor kicks off the episode with a story about trailing the Hold Steady on their fall 2006 tour and how Killer Parties underlines all that is good about the band. We then go into a discussion about the band’s use of ritual, including Craig Finn’s So Much Joy speech, and the dichotomy between freshness and familiarity.
Stay tuned for a few bonus episodes over the rest of the month.
Here’s the episode itself.
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Here are a few categories and things to listen for, in the song itself and in our podcast:
Some Bars We Remember: The Hold Steady is a great live band, and between the four voices on today’s episode we’ve seen them in a lot of places. Here are some of them:
- The Ottobar, Baltimore, MD
- The Local 506, Chapel Hill, NC
- The Black Cat, Washington, DC
- The Brooklyn Bowl, New York, NY
Billy Joel/Bruce Springsteen or AC/DC/Thin Lizzy?: Every Hold Steady track seems to exist on this spectrum. It’s a contrast between loud, guitar-driven rock that takes no prisoners and more of a soulful, troubadour lyricism both in the melody and the lyrics themselves. Like any band, the Hold Steady is at their best when they forge their influences into a unique sound. But it’s still fun to try to rank their songs by which side of the line they’re closer to, so we do that frequently on our podcast’s episodes. And even if we don’t remember to do so live, we can revisit here thanks to our handy graphics department.
This song has to be right in the middle of everything. The name drops and the empathetic feel speak to the Billy and Bruce side of the stage, but the jam like elements recall more of the harder rock that The Hold Steady pulls on.
Authenticity vs. Ritual: One of our big topics on this episode is the authenticity of Craig Finn’s famous ‘So Much Joy’ speech, which he drops as the song stretches out in an encore of a given concert. We hashed out whether it cheapens the effect to repeat it every show or enriches it.
I (Daniel) didn’t contribute much to that discussion, but I was reminded of a conversation I had with a musician in the mid-00’s. I interviewed Eddie Argos of Art Brut, a great ’00s-’10s band that I always viewed as an English counterpart to the Hold Steady, with the same playful sneering take on the scene at the time, and a similarly retro sound (theirs pulling on punk and post-punk).
Anyway, I interviewed him on his tour bus before a show at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, another great venue. At some point, I mentioned that there were blog reviews of his shows, talking about some of the things he did to their songs – like shout out local bands in an added breakdown to ‘Good Weekend’. He was truly bummed that people knew that was coming.
Which is to say, there was a time where the rituals were more word of mouth and secret, and now they spread lightning quick, but they’re still what tie these killer parties together.
So Much Joy: Here’s the video we played at the end of the episode, h/t to Tony Earp.
Key Episode Insight: The Hold Steady has better songs, bigger hits and deeper moments. But it’s hard to find a song that matters more than “Killer Parties” for who the band is. Agree or disagree?