down at the rock 'n' roll station, they're exhuming the bones
He shaved his head at the airport / in a bar at the end of the concourse / He said you're kind of catching me at a transitional time / I'm a bright light burning into a dark horse
She said I'll strap on the saddle / And I'm sorry but this city's a cesspool / I've kissed and I've cackled with half of these jackals / Still couldn't get any jet fuel
Walked her out to the taxis, took her out to some parties / Found a man with a handful huddled over some car keys / It doesn't have to be pure, it doesn't have to be perfect / Just sort of has to be worth it
A Residence Inn at the top of the exit / You pay the admission and here's what you get / The stench of death in the credits, the montage set to "The Time Of Your Life" / A shot in the dark in a bar that's too bright / A window sucking up all the available light, right?
“Taking a haircut.” “Starting over with a clean slate.” Hold Steady albums are all people, places, and things, winking identifications and pins on a road map, little bags of hard evidence. But they’re idioms and imagery, too. The pieces are littered all over the floor, waiting for you to put them together, connect the dots, construct a narrative.
Thrashing Thru The Passion opens right up and says, here is the work of art that killed its creator, and in so doing any pretense of original meaning, because whatever the artist intended to convey (and might have been otherwise understood, intuited by the observer) is now eclipsed by that grimly comic tragedy. I bet it’s the first thing people think of when they see it. It's instantaneous, reflexive, automatic.
It's kind of like being a one-trick pony, isn't it? How many times do you think the band has heard that phrase, read it in print? (But hey, at least someone's talking about you.)
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
And a demonic horse, at that — the eschatological symbolism is obvious. It goes without saying. Finn is becoming more abstracted in his invocations of those classically Catholic preoccupations: temptation, guilt, punishment, sacrifice, judgment. Once upon a time, Holly wore a cross to ward them off. Now, all the bums on the windowsill just say she's crazy about horses still. It's a different class of metaphor, but he can't resist beating you over the head with it.
I’m loving it. I want to be clobbered with every refrain.
What else? What am I missing? A horse is an animal that must be tamed before it can be ridden, made useful. You “break” a horse. You take this beautiful, magnificent, wild creature — a force of nature — and you rein it in, put blinders on it, jab it into line with spurs. You guide it to the starting gate with all the other horses and force them to race each other, taking bets on which one can run around in circles the fastest. People gather in crowds to watch this exhilarating spectacle of controlled ferocity. It's incredible. It's grueling, pointless, and brutal. Kinda like playing earnestly reverent and referential rock music in this day and age. But man, is it fun. Somebody profits from it. You might, too, if you're lucky.
I think its name was Chips Ahoy.
A horse embodies the frontier in the white American imagination, what was unknown and uncharted, now conquered and commodified. Freedom turned Hollywood fodder. It's genre at this point, tropes and conventions, clichés and meta. If you're not challenging it, you must be playing along, right? Buying into it. At best, cashing in on nostalgia; at worst, on a flawed legacy built from stolen goods. What is rock 'n' roll, after all, when you dare to look at it under the microscope? Why are we so hung up on this music? Why can't we stop beating . . . I won't even say it.
It's been done so many times. What could possibly be left to reinvent?
Don't it all end up in some revelation? With four guys on horses, and violent red visions, famine and death and pestilence and war? I'm pretty sure I heard this one before.
Yeah, yeah. But after five years, it was a hell of a showing. It was fantastic. An amazing record. Some things just sound so good, they bear repeating, over and over and over again.
A bright light burning into a dark horse. Ain't that the truth.
P.S. if you thought the recurring equine motif was freighted with meaning, don’t even get me started on HOTELS. Another post, another day, maybe.
A secondary postscript: It’s been a long time, I know. The summer felt full of hope. Promises were made, and explanations are probably owed. I wanted to wait until I could produce this hypothetical, frankly delusional masterwork I had cooked up in my mind to mark my formal Return to the Blog, a retrospective on 2021 and the State of Live Music that could also explain and justify my prolonged absence. I was bashing my head against the wall trying to wring it out of myself, cover the ground I wanted to cover, shape it into something that was both coherent and comprehensive.
And then my friend Mike Bankhead invited me to come talk on his podcast last week about Fountains of Wayne, which I had great fun doing. (It’ll be out next April. He’s a songwriter from Dayton, Ohio whose music is very much worth your time.) After we finished recording, he said to me, “You should write more.” So I started thinking about the things that made me want to write about music, and the reasons I wasn’t doing it. Or, rather: why I was writing all the time about music, in fits and starts and impassioned bits and pieces, and refusing to show it to people.
Turns out I am very good at getting in my own way. Trying to get this blog to fit a predetermined vision, or even a set schedule, is fighting a losing battle. I am inspired to write in accordance with the same basic mechanism that compels me to stand directly in front of a stage where there are people playing loud, electrified instruments. Something comes over me, comes out of me. Thinking about doing it, what it looks like to other people when I’m doing it, how I can box it up, put a bow on it, make it presentable — it’s antithetical to doing. If I want to do it, I’ll do it.
I was listening to The Hold Steady this morning, and it came over me, came out of me. I wasn’t going to publish it here, because it was so raw and spontaneous and unstructured. I’m publishing it anyway.
It doesn’t have to be pure, it doesn’t have to be perfect . . .
-Bux