The Heineken Inspire Festival, held at the Book Bindery Building in Culver City last weekend, included several unusual features. The building itself was swathed in cool muted light and featured a room with Wii games and another with a bunch of plugged in Fender guitars anyone could play. A beer sommelier was on hand to offer pouring advice, and the taps were plentiful.
Oh, and there was this: everything was free. Heineken beer in every form possible – specially chilled, or in hip new aluminum bottles, whatever your preference – as well as tacos, sliders, veggie ciabatta and hot dogs, all free. Optional donations went to the Life Rolls On foundation, which helps surfers with spinal cord injuries get back to the waves.
It was, in other words, a different and particularly cool event, in keeping with the ethos of the late Freddy Heineken, who grew the little Dutch brewery into a global brand and whose only complaint when he was kidnapped for three weeks in 1983 is that his captors tortured him by making him drink Carlsburg beer. “I really don’t care what people think of me,” read a quote by Freddy in a festival hallway. “Never did.”
Saturday night’s musical headliner, then, also made a certain amount of sense. The Hold Steady are a different kind of rock n’ roll band. The Rolling Stone calls them America’s greatest bar band. “At a time when all the hipster bands are highbrow conceptualists, the Hold Steady are keeping alive the tradition of the schlubby genius,” the magazine reported earlier this year. “The Brooklyn quartet make something mythic from a simple set of core values: sport drinking, mosh pits, power chords, sin, salvation, Springsteen.”
Lead singer Craig Finn is a 38-year-old Minnesota native who moved to Brooklyn a decade ago and thought he’d left his rock n’ roll days behind him. Then he went and saw a Drive By Truckers show in 2002 and changed his mind.
“I said, ‘Yeah, I want to be in a band again,” Finn recalled in a short interview Saturday night. “They look like they are having a lot of fun.”
The band has released five critically acclaimed albums in the last six years, including this year’s Heaven is Whenever. Finn, who has frequently been described as an IT guy accidentally fronting a rock n’ roll band, is short, bespectacled, kindly, and articulate – almost an anti-rock star. Finn is a practicing Catholic who gives up alcohol for Lent every spring. He told Vanity Fair earlier this year that he was talking to a fan about the mortgage crisis when the guy interrupted him and said, “Dude, you are the worst rock star ever.”
But to see Finn in person, on stage, is to understand what the buzz is all about. He’s been compared a lot to Bruce Springsteen, both for his voice and his subject matter. His holy romanticism and wildly exuberant wordplay is reminiscent of early, Greetings from Asbury Park era Springsteen, but the big commonality is this: Finn is a musical transcendentalist. He believes that rock n’ roll has the power to change lives.
“Absolutely,” Finn said Saturday night. “And also just sort of this communal aspect of playing a show is getting people together for a singular purpose, which kind of comes from a church kind of environment. There are associations, and that is certainly where some of the Catholicism that comes through in my music is – because of that, that connection to that kind of ritual. One of the things I love about when we play is not just the performance, but like you know watch all the set-up that goes into it, and the takedown, and doing things the same way, and just kind of this idea that you are setting up for a new group of people and sort of spreading the message.”
The message is big and warm-hearted and pounded through with a raft of heavy guitars. Finn took the stage looking every bit the IT guy – wearing a short-sleeved, collared, striped shirt appropriate for a round of golf – but the moment the music kicked in, an ecstatic smile wrapped his face, his eyes rolled slightly back in his head and he began dancing like a Sufi. When he approached the microphone, he raised his hands, palms up, like a preacher ready to deliver some truths.
“Back when we were living up on Hennepin, she kept threatening to turn us in,” he sang, launching into “The Sweet Part of the City”, the opener on the new record. “At night she mostly liked us. We used to pass around the thermos. Some nights she looked gorgeous.”
The song ends in a chorus that alternates, “We like to play for you/We like to pray for you.”
Indeed. Finn actually does seem to care about the spiritual health of his listeners. In fact, if Heaven is Whenever has a consistent theme, it’s about the place of suffering in life – that fact that there is, generally, little gain without some pain. In between the power chords and heavy thumps, he manages to deliver something close to wisdom. On “Soft in the Center” he sings, “You can’t tell people what they want to hear if you also want to tell the truth” and proceeds to offer big-brotherly advice: “You can’t get every girl/You’ll get the ones you love best/You won’t every girl/You’ll love the ones you get best.”
Finn is unabashed in his intentions.
“I think on this record I was very aware we were making our fifth record and I kind of wanted to have this tone of someone imparting wisdom, a cooler older brother, you know?” he said. “I want our music to combine these great guitars with intelligent lyrics. I think there is a lot of rock n’ roll fans that appreciate more than ‘Baby, baby, baby…,’ you know? And so it gives you something to riff away with in the mirror, but also something to think about, I hope.” ER
