Song of the week

Lifter Puller- Nassau Colosseum

Singer Craig Finn and his buddy were watching a Grateful Dead show at Nassau Coliseum. Halfway through the show his buddy starts tripping balls and throws up all over Finn and everything else. After fleeing the scene, Finn drove around trying to calm his buddy down. When driving didn't work, they snuck into Ninja Turtles II. After some overblown, if genuine concern about Donatello, Finn finally got his buddy back to earth.

Nassau Coliseum is an outdoor venue in Long Island (last line of the song) nicknamed the "Nassau Mausoleum” in the 80s and 90s for its state of disrepair and "Bust Palace" in the 70s for the frequent drug busts. Considering Nassau Coliseum, was released on Half Dead and Dynamite in 1997, Craig Finn was probably at the concert during the Mausoleum era although it sounds like he was in on the Palace scene as well.

The song starts as a relationship dirge about boozehound romance. It moves to the fallout, the accompanying binge--the euphoria (bigger than Jesus), bottoming out and then the realization that you were never able to get away.

Finn idolizes the Replacements, another bar band from Minneapolis. The Replacements drank themselves to death while touring and treating their fans like shit. Lifter Puller was also a hard drinking bar band but they genuinely appreciate their audience. However, there are a few exceptions: the hippies, the hipsters the indie kids.

Hippies are clearly the villains in Nassau Coliseum, stealing girlfriends and casting themselves as martyrs. In the Hold Steady song Positive Jam, Finn calls out the "sniveling indie kids" and the "clustered up clever kids" who I take to be the hipsters. By rejecting the dominant groups that make up his audience, Finn pulls a reverse sell-out refusing to ground his music in the tired worldviews of hippie martyrdom, indie know it all-ness, or hipster superiority.

Instead, Finn's music comes from the everywhere and nowhere place of a hard living drifter. In Nassau Coliseum, Finn travels from Jamaica to Alaska, from being kicked out of concerts to kicking kids with cops. The only constants are uncertainty, an inability to boil the world down into a worldview and an ultimate ideal of hanging out.

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