A song I’d not heard before came on the radio this afternoon, “Stuck Between Stations,” by The Hold Steady.
I thought to myself, “Dang. This sounds like the Twin Cities. Is it Bob Mould or something? I dig it!” I turned it up loud enough so it could be heard over cubicle walls.
I’d recently, and regretfully, passed up on a new Golden Smog CD, so the sound of the Cities has been on my mind lately.
I surfed over to their website (which I found thanks to a major search engine whose name is not a verb) to see what I could find out.
I clicked MP3s, and bam: The Foshay Tower, the IDS Center, and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge jumbled together like some kind of Cubist Minneapolis landscape nightmare.
It’s missing some of my personal favorite Minneapolis landmarks, the Spoonbridge and Cherry, the Weisman, and the Stone Arch Bridge, but it was the Twin Cities.
According to Wikipedia, the Hold Steady are actually a Brooklyn based group with strong connections to Minneapolis. My weird Upper Midwestern ear wasn’t tuned too far off.
I am so nostalgic for Husker Du, The Replacements, and Soul Asylum that I could put on an old flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of Docs, jump in the minivan and drive the 14 or so hours it’d take me to get to the Bryant Lake Bowl for a pint of Bass tonight. I miss the Lagoon and Lake of the Isles. I miss the Lund’s at Lake and Hennepin. I even miss the cold.
I’m going to pick up the kids at daycare tonight humming a love song to my old home: “It’s you, Girl, and you should know it.”
October 12th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Follow up: It turns out Hold Steady guitarist, Tad Kubler, is originally from Janesville, just 45 minutes south of the Mad City where I grew up. Things are really starting to make sense. You should check this podcast (http://theholdsteady.com/HOLD_STEADY_PODCAST_01.mp3) which includes tracks from The Replacements, Bad Brains, Soul Asylum, and The Descendants.