The early signs at last night’s Hold Steady show were not good. A group of fans had shown up wearing “Unified Scene Drinking Team” softball shirts. And while I couldn’t say exactly what Craig Finn had in mind when he invented the first half of that phrase, I was pretty sure it didn’t involve flipcup.

The opening act compounded the problem. Homogenous pop/punk with a Bosstones scream — they weren’t my thing, really, although a lot of the crowd liked them. Tuning out early gave me plenty of time to think about why the Hold Steady had given them an opening slot. I concluded that it wasn’t the band, it was the idea of the band — they were joyful and enthusiastic. And visually, they covered all the bases: there were a couple of tattooed rap/rock fireplugs, an asymptotically skinny indie boy, a nerd-rock drummer peering through dirty hair and ludicrous glasses, and a little keyboard-playing white girl in a pretty Motown dress. My friend Chris summed it up well when he said they looked like a rock band from The Sims.

Which left me in an awkward position. As much as anything the Hold Steady have built themselves on a downright mythic idea of rock and roll and the people that listen to it. I can’t say I’ve ever been a part of a scene like that, but it always sounded pretty good to me. Now I was standing there, staring at what I could only take to be a living shorthand for what they’d had in mind, and it was a cartoon. Suddenly I was in a crowd of fellow fucking tourists, wondering if I’d be wearing a softball jersey, too, if I’d been born into the wrong online neighborhood.

But then the band took to the stage and I realized what you probably already have: this is all ridiculous. Their stories are too good, the music’s too good, to get tangled up in worry over authenticity. By the end of the first song Craig Finn had made us toast Joe Strummer, and I found I didn’t even care if, for the people around me, the honoree wasn’t any more real than Charlemagne or Holly. Their hands stayed up after the toast, and that turned out to be the important thing.

The show wasn’t recorded, but the band did a set from this tour on World Cafe, and you can listen to or download it here. If the links wind up broken let me know and I’ll repost ‘em.

ONE FOR THE SKEPTICS: Here, listen to this:

Image by Flickr user hyku, used under a Creative Commons license

Ticket prices are dropping to face value. Anybody else planning to go on Thursday? I think I’m going to try my luck outside the show.

It’s beautiful outside. I have the windows open, the better part of a pot of good coffee ahead of me, and I’m listening to music that’s both aggressive and aggressively poppy at a pretty significant volume. As a plan of action for a Friday in August, I heartily endorse this one.

I am on the record as being anti-Phil Collins. This puts me at odds with some good friends who have jumped wholeheartedly into the half-serious Collins renaissance that’s been plaguing our great land as of late. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s got legs given its likely provenance, which seems to me to clearly involve Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, This American Life and/or a need to sidestep mainstream America’s rededication to all things Journey. The SWPLishness of the situation is so glaring as to be embarrassing.

But it’s not just this specific musical throwback that worries me. Even though I enjoyed Yglesias’s 90s alt-rock party, I have to admit that the theme made me uneasy. I believe that as we get older the first muscles to lose tone are the ones that, when tightly clenched, produce a convincing sense of irony. Sure, listening to Silverchair might seem like a great idea now. But if you aren’t careful, before you know it you’ll be no different than your uncle who paid $120 for an obstructed view at an Eagles concert that starts at 5pm.

I’ll admit that the alternatives are grim. But I think there’s at least somewhat more dignity to be had by clinging tightly to Pitchfork’s Best New Music section and copies of Paste until the whole enterprise buckles and collapses under the weight of your teenage offspring’s embarrassed disavowals. Nostalgia is best left to people who’ve given up or are too young to have been there in the first place.

But I know that most people don’t find this very convincing. So let me try another tack: this past weekend Emily, Scooter, Lauren, Sommer, Jeff and I were at a bar in Philly — one of the few where you can still smoke, and therefore one that is certifiably cool. We headed upstairs, where we found a table and some DJs. These guys seemed authentically hip: sporting horrible beards and wraithlike t-shirts, they looked like emaciated bears that had staggered out of the woods and into a Salvation Army, where they constructed poor disguises before setting off to South Philly in search of PBR specials and/or salmon. It should have been a pretty good set, in other words.

Instead? Marcy Playground. Excusable, perhaps, for novelty value (which for some reason seems to be synonymous with “totally monotonous and unbearable”). But then they followed it up with Verve Pipe’s “The Freshman” and I knew we were doomed. The biggest hits from the darkest days of the 90s continued to issue from the speakers at an uncomfortable volume (to replicate the effect, turn your radio up and tune it to DC101).

Emily eventually saved us and, pouring on the charm, got them to turn down that dag-blasted racket — we were the only patrons in the room, so it seemed okay to ask. Despite our miraculous escape, the lesson should be clear: ironic musical nostalgia is too dangerous a force to be trusted to civilians. It can go so horribly, horribly wrong.

But I understand the impulse. Maybe it’s inescapable. For example, I can’t help but regard this as being among the most awesomely moody things I’ve ever seen:

And no, I can’t tell if I mean that ironically.

(Thanks to Jon for sending me that clip originally)

Morning Edition talked to the Hold Steady this morning, inconsiderately making me late to work. The interview’s a worth a listen, as is the additional online clip in which Craig Finn talks about playing with Springsteen and his affection for the song “Atlantic City”. That prompted me to go listen to the song again, which led me to this cover, which is really pretty nice. Go have a listen.

I’ve been friends with Charles for a long time now. There’s no use trying to fool anyone, so I’ll fess up: I’d support his musical endeavors even if they were terrible.

But it’s awfully nice that they’re not. I’m not sure when it happened, exactly — the frenzy of the Iota show and the vastness of Fort Reno may have concealed the exact moment — but last night at the Black Cat it was clear that the City Veins’ live show has passed a new threshhold. God damn but they killed it. Maybe it’s just Stockholm Syndrome; if it is, I’m prepared to embrace it.

Watching them play, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of envy: it’s tough to see such wholehearted commitment to the moment without wanting more of it for yourself. Fortunately it was easy to drown that wistfulness in joy, and pride, at watching your friends throw themselves so completely into something they clearly love.

It looks like it’s easy now, like the songs have been worked and reworked until they’re so pliable that they can be twisted into whatever shape the band imagines during the count-off. I’m sure that’s just an illusion. But it’s a convincing one, and a testament to how good these guys have gotten at playing together.

I’m sorry I didn’t mercilessly promote last night’s show; if you weren’t there, I wish you had been. I’ll do my best to step up my harassment when their next DC gig rolls around.

Charles says they’re slated to go on second, around 7:50. Looking at the sky right now makes my weather widget’s dire predictions look unfounded. We seem poised to rock.

And hey, not only will you be able to enjoy a beautiful summer day, free music, and the sight of adorable children gamboling across the lawn as their embittered ex-musician parents look on, you’ll also be able to soak up some X-Files-style conspiracy theorizing. Behold!

• A DCist commenter noted that Ft. Reno is well-known as a not-so-secret presidential hidey-hole and linked to a
• Related site with the following documents:
  
     - Artists’ rendition of the facility’s hypothesized layout (see also)
  
     - Incriminating document (PDF) indicating that the FAA sought to build a secret mind control transceiver/shed on the property
• Reports of a mysterious motorcade at the park in the midst of the arsenic scare. Could the purported potential for poisoning be dastardly Dick Cheney’s bid for a new lair?!! It seems all but certain.

You know what to do.

The only thing I feel like writing about at the moment is how much it stinks to be sick and how much I’d rather be on my couch assassinating people in the virtual Holy Land. So instead, two brief pieces of internet advice as you seek worthwhile content elsewhere:

1. Update your RSS reader! Spencer has a new home and a badass header. Don’t let the weird teaser view (which begins after the third entry) bamboozle you into missing this post, which I especially liked, and which also gives me a good excuse to link to DCeiver’s currently-running presidential ipod experiment.
2. Whatever you do, don’t pay any attention to Stereogum’s review of the new Hold Steady (now available on iTunes thanks to the record company panicking over the leak). I admit I was slow on the uptake — it’s much better than I initially thought it was, largely due to the band deciding to stick its best stuff in the album’s second half.
   
   
   But I didn’t get it as exactly backward as Stereogum does: “Sequestered in Memphis” is actually one of the album’s weakest songs; “One for the Cutters” is probably the best, newest thing on the album; and “Constructive Summer” is fun and catchy but completely incidental. He’s right about “Navy Sheets”, though: it really is bad.
   
   
   Anyway, a much better take can be found at Tiny Mixtapes. The only thing I’d add: neither review talks about the title track, which is understandable in that it only sort-of works on the record, but also too bad in that the anthemic, wistful “Stay Positive” seems poised to be an incredibly great song to hear live — something I intend to do as soon as I can.

John Allison reviews Chinese Democracy.