In a bit of a reversal, for the last few days I’ve been the one skipping out on family interactions to watch live-stream events. Usually, this is SteelyKid’s shtick, but this is the weekend that the Hold Steady would’ve been doing their usual multi-night stand at the Brooklyn Bowl. They obviously couldn’t do it in person, so they replaced it with a live stream of three shows and a sound-check event over three days. I’d usually make the trip down to Brooklyn for just one night, but since this was all taking place on the Internet, I went for the full package, which has meant a lot of evening and weekend Zoom.
I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this. On the one hand, they’re the kind of band that really feeds off the energy of the crowd, so playing in an empty bar might come out kind of flat. On the other hand, though, I’ve found socializing over Zoom with my close friends from college and our usual Friday happy hour crowd surprisingly satisfying. I figured that, worst-case, I’d check out the Thursday night show and the Friday sound-check would have some Q&A that might be interesting, and that would be pretty good.
The actual event vastly exceeded my expectations. I’ve watched parts of some lockdown shows by other bands, which have mostly been hand-rolled sort of affairs, just a step or two above singing to a propped-up iPhone, but this was a full-on professional operation. The band was set up at the Brooklyn Bowl as usual, with full lights and the works, just no fans. They had at least half a dozen cameras, some fixed, some handheld, and cut between different angles pretty effectively. And the sound was pulled right off the board, so it was impeccable. Major props to the folks at the Brooklyn Bowl and Fans.live (who I had never heard of before) for the excellent technical work.
The shows also worked really well thanks to the commitment and professionalism of the band. It’s got to be super hard to summon real energy playing to an empty room, but they did a great job making it work. Craig Finn did all his usual frontman moves– wild hand gestures, bad dancing, pointing to imaginary people in the crowd– and Franz Nicolay was jumping and dancing like crazy behind his keyboard. And, of course, they’re just really good musically, a very tight unit playing very complicated songs nearly flawlessly.
They did have some element of fan interaction, via an adjunct Zoom feed and big video monitors in the Brooklyn Bowl. There was a Zoom link you could click to join a meeting with other fans, and somebody on the tech team was cycling through the video feeds from fans at home, putting them up on the monitors (and cutting some of them into the video feed of the show). This added a weird fun element– lots of people dancing in living rooms around the world, many with small kids, and some with pets (about which more later). They also had chat windows in both the main video feed and the Zoom meeting, where people could comment on the proceedings (mostly simulating yelling along…).
It took a little while to get this sorted out– Thursday night, I’m not sure they really knew what it was going to be, and at the start of the Friday soundcheck, Craig got distracted by the video feeds and flubbed the lyrics of “Sweet Part of the City” so badly they had to re-start it. They hit on specifically requesting people to hold up signs sayin where they were from, though, and also asked people to show off pets and drinks, and that gave it a bit more form. They carried that over into the Friday night and Saturday evening shows, and it served as a pretty effective vehicle for between-song banter.
(I joined the Zoom for the soundcheck and the Saturday evening show, but needed to be at my desktop to do it, as my Chromebook would pause the main feed any time I tried to pull up the Zoom window, which kind of defeated the purpose. The Thursday and Friday shows I just watched on the Chromebook from a more comfortable chair.)
The clear highlight of the Zoom videos for the weekend was the moment on Friday night when they were cycling through shots of pets, and cut to two turtles who appeared to be, as someone in the band (I think Steve) drily noted, working on making a third turtle. This was immortalized in a T-shirt, and a lyric change Saturday night when “Mosh Pit Josh” altered the breakdown in “Stay Positive” to “It’s one thing to start it with a positive jam/ It’s another thing to see turtles screw.”
There were, of course, some weird aspects to seeing them live and alone. It’s very strange to actually hear the background vocals from Franz, Tad Kubler, and Steve Selvidge– usually, there are several hundred people yelling along with those bits, that kind of drown them out. It was also amusing to seem how many places Craig stumbled over the words, because again, normally the crowd can kind of carry that. (This is not a knock on Craig, by the way– as he said in a response to a question at the soundcheck, they have something like 118 officially recorded songs, all of which are pretty heavy on the lyrics. That’s a lot to keep track of when you’re on stage…) Finally, it’s pretty weird to do the set/encore break when there isn’t a crowd to cheer and yell through the break, but it was okay in the end.
As for the content of the shows, one of the things that makes them a great live band is that they have that deep catalog, and they’re not afraid to use it. Somebody in the chat shared a Google Sheet where they were keeping track of which songs got played each night, and the three main shows included 56 different songs, with only 15 played more than once. (The list of songs played every night is pretty obvious if you’re a fan: “Stuck Between Stations,” “Constructive Summer,” “Chips Ahoy,” “Entitlement Crew,” “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” “Sequestered in Memphis,” and “Killer Parties”) There were a another half-dozen that showed up only in the soundcheck (where they basically played through Heaven Is Whenever, replacing a few tracks with material from the bonus tracks in the just-released anniversary edition) but they didn’t make the spreadsheet. A handful of these were brand new tracks, from the album that will be coming out in February, and they all sounded great.
This depth makes every show unique, and is one of the reasons fans will turn out for every show of a three- or four-night run. They did some fun stuff with these– following “Chips Ahoy” with its sequel song “The Weekenders,” running the “youth services” ending of “Multitude of Casualties” into the start of “Blackout Sam,” and of course the ever popular combo of “Constructive Summer” into “Hot Soft Light.” They had the “Horn Steady” (Peter Hess and Jordan McLean on sax and trumpet) in the house for the Friday and Saturday shows, and mixed them in pretty effectively. My favorite setlist trick, they pulled twice, doubling up classic set-closers. On Friday they followed “Southtown Girls” with “Slapped Actress” and then Saturday did “Slapped Actress” into “How a Resurrection Really Feels.” There’s really nothing better than the moment when the a capella “Whoah-oh” bit at the end of “Slapped” ends and then Tad hits the opening riff of “Resurrection,” even if it was only over the Internet.
Of course, there is something lost by not being in the room to feel the crowd react to that riff, and the events of this year inevitably cast a bit of a pall on the proceedings. Craig actually seemed to get choked up doing the “So! Much! Joy!” speech at the start of “Killer Parties” the first night, which carried into the start of the lyrics after the first guitar break, and the Saturday show closed with the video feed cycling through fan signs offering various positive messages. On the whole, though, it was much more participatory and cathartic than I would’ve expected from a mere live stream. I left each show with a huge grin, and the world feels a little brighter this morning than it did earlier in the week, and not just because the weather has improved.
And, ultimately, that’s why these guys are my favorite band. I can’t wait to be back in the room with them– maybe as soon as next year if these vaccines pan out– but even on streaming, their music makes everything a little bit better.