I love this group - well worth seeing live. Here's the vid for Stuck Between Stations which is pretty good as well.

Surprise. I actually kind of like "Your Little Hoodrat Friend." Although the vocals aren't really my cup of tea. IIRC, they count such stuff as E-Street Band era Springsteen and Bob Seger as big influences. Funny, that.

Yeah, I liked them a while ago...hee hee. I kinda agree with jonmc though, I do find his vocals grate a little.

I have to thank matildaben for turning me onto them!

Yeah, especially since I hate Bob Seger. I blame that on my parents, mainly, and just an aversion to his voice.

No accounting for taste.

tad Kubler went to my high school.

I know, I do feel really special.

well, chuck, maybe your folks were onto something. Seger did do crap like 'Against The Wind' but his early stuff (streaming audio and an essay of my own) was a far different beast.

I may have mentioned this before, but it was in the contract with our wedding DJ, that IF he played "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll", he wouldn't be paid.

Worst Seger ever IMO? "Like a Rock", which contains one of rock's worst lines:
"Standing arrow-straight, like a rock"

Agreed on 'Like A Rock,' but 'Old Time Rock And Roll' still has a place in my heart for obvious reasons. Butthere's some great moments in the guy's pantheon, as the dudes in Hold Steady would be the first to tell you.

I like "Turn the Page," but "Old Time Rock and Roll" drives me nuts--something about that kind of nostalgia-driven song seems sort of hacky and lowest-common-denominator, like that Rod Stewart song about bringing over your old Motown records, or Arthur Conley's "Sweet Soul Music," or the Righteous Brothers "Rock 'n' Roll Heaven." Shrug. Maybe it's just me.

box: well, here's where there's a weird schism. Some people are really into innovation, even when it means embarssing failures. Some people are adherents to tradition, even when it means stodginess. I, personally, fall somewhere in between. But I'd be lying if I said that the songs youmentioned weren't good listening or didn't ring very true to me a lot of the time.

(and Seger's best song is "Feel Like A Number." Yes, it's 'everyman' angst, but rarely has it been done better)

(and we trad-rockers have our function. we keep the experimenters from wandering too far off into the ozone)

I love the Hold Steady, even though I think the singer sounds like a deeper-voiced Greg Proops.

I'm pretty much in the middle of that schism myself, jon. But when people think that everything new is bad and everything old is good, or when they behave as if decades of innovation just never happened (this one comes up a lot in jazz), or when they say, like Homer Simpson, that rock attained perfection in 1973, or that the best albums ever recorded were all released during their teens and early twenties, well, I think those folks are going way too far in the tradition/stodginess direction. (Note: I don't mean to say that you, or Bob Seger for that matter, are doing any of those things.)

Funny, I have been on the verge of posting some The Hold Steady myself. My liking for the band surprises me, but their sound is great. Love the upfront, sloppily phrased vocals. To me, they sound like they based an entire career around developing the song "The Boys are Back in Town" into an oeuvre, but in a good way.

we trad-rockers have our function. we keep the experimenters from wandering too far off into the ozone

That assumes that the experimenters are aware of your existence and give a shit about your opinion... and I'm not sure that this is the case.

[Thom Yorke is not sitting at the piano, thinking 'I can't go to C# here, because the trad-rockers won't like it... I'd better stay in F#.']

Artists are normally (and necessarily) isolated from such concerns. No one can create based on someone else's criteria unless they really want to.

The internets aside, we can debate the intrinsic value of Bob Seger's early work until the cows come home, but no one - outside of a few older folks in the states - has any idea who the fuck he is. It'd be like I were to go on about George Formby or something. Cute, but ultimately slightly irrelevant.

I think I mentioned this band to jonmc a year or so ago. It sounded like the kind of old-skool stuff he'd like.