Popscreen: The Hold Steady

The Hold Steady

“Chips Ahoy!”

Dir. Moh Azima



Meet Craig Finn. Craig plays rock and roll. Craig has a band. The band is called The Hold Steady. The Hold Steady tries to sound like Bruce Springsteen. Craig does not look like Bruce Springsteen. Craig looks like Randy Newman.

Meet Franz Nicolay. Franz is also in The Hold Steady. Franz has a waxed handlebar mustache. Franz’s name is Franz.

You were introduced a paragraph ago, and you’re already willing to dismiss Finn and company as losers; as middle-aged men playing air guitar in dive bars, pining for the brawny riffs and throbbing bass lines they knew in their youths; as a band with a dude named Franz. But don’t be hasty.

The video for lead single “Chips Ahoy!” plays up the band’s loserish appearances knowingly but not affectedly. And it’s hilarious—Finn plays a TV news anchorman unable to land an interview with his uninterested paramour—but it’s also heartbreaking, since every other member of the band gets with the girl. It’s 70s, with the square-frame glasses and garish striped ties, but the boys wear ’em with irony suitable for the oughts. The song rocks hard—but there’s Finn’s nasal speech-singing drone squarely in the middle of the mix.

The video, too, is stripped bare. No special effects, no gimmicks—just grown men dressed up as priests and pool boys, battling for the attention of a woman in front of an abandoned desert hotel. It is wonderful. And Franz, as Zorro, somehow makes that goofy porn ’stache work.

The Hold Steady isn’t cool. The Hold Steady is so cool.

—Jake G. Cohen