Featured Essay: Separation Sunday at 20

by Cooper Lund

Minnesota is a state that loves its native sons and daughters. Bob Dylan hitchhiked to New York with the intention of never coming back and we still painted his face six stories high on a parking ramp downtown. Prince decided to stick around and the whole state had three days of mourning when he passed like he was the Pope. The Hold Steady released a concept album about a hoodrat named Holly doing drugs around the Twin Cities and they’ll be able to sell out First Avenue from here to eternity. That album is twenty years old as of May 3rd and has a strong case to be the most important album in my life.

I first heard The Hold Steady when the guitar player in the folk band I was in when I was 18 came to me and said, “we need to cover this song”. That song was “Stuck Between Stations,” which is from The Hold Steady’s very accessible Boys and Girls in America, but it was both the first time I had heard someone talk about the place I grew up in a way that resonated with me and a way that made it sound cool. That alone would have made me a fan, but what made me a fan for life was Separation Sunday.

It’s very difficult for me to dislodge The Hold Steady or Separation Sunday from that time in my life; it’s one of those albums that’s a portal from who you were to who you became in the way that you can still do when you’re still young enough to have to worry if you knew anyone who might be nice enough to buy you beer. Before I started listening to the Hold Steady I was spending every weekend I could driving down with a group of friends to see third-tier jambands at a venue south of downtown Minneapolis called The Cabooze. You’d think that there wasn’t a lot of crossover in 2006 between the people who read Relix magazine and guys in glasses who read Pitchfork, but there’s a reason why Craig Finn keeps a Grateful Dead sticker on the Telecaster that dangles around his neck on stage. 

The thing that unifies the scene between The Hold Steady and the Grateful Dead (or Phish) is that they’re always pointing at other music. It’s music written by nerds with big record collections. Hell, to tie it back to the first musician I mentioned, the Dead covered enough Bob Dylan songs to fill an entire album. Reading music as something that contained citations was something that clicked for me immediately because I had used the Grateful Dead to learn about American folk traditions, and when I looked where The Hold Steady were pointing it blew open the world of rock and roll for me.

The Hold Steady have always loved to reference, but when I first heard Separation Sunday I didn’t know that much about it. I knew the Beatles, and I knew whatever I had absorbed from friends who adopted punk as a teenage personality. The Hold Steady were a way into the early-70’s Stones groove of “Charlemagne in Sweatpants”, or the Led Zeppelin drive of “Stevie Nix” in the same way Phish pointed me and a generation of crunchy kids toward the art rock of Talking Heads. They were the ones who got me to see Minnesota as the home of the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and not just Prince. It turned my folk band into a rock band, and it changed the people I hung out with. Maybe all of those things would have happened as part of the progression of going through my college years, but I can point to the time I spent listening to Separation Sunday by myself, or picking through it on my friend’s college radio show on a Tuesday night, or covering “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” opening for Motion City Soundtrack at the big spring concert and see The Hold Steady and this album as the catalyst.

I’m 36 now, which means that twenty years ago Craig Finn was more or less around the same age that I am now, and going back and listening to Separation Sunday I feel the same affection and worry for the oddballs of the scene of my youth that he did when he wrote Holly, Gideon, and Charlemagne. I think if you hang around a scene, any scene, it gets bloody, or druggy, and ugly. I remember going to a house in St. Paul after an EOTO show at The Cabooze and watching a guy who was on some research chemical his friend couldn’t identify have a seizure while I was talking to him. The party went on around him, and the whole thing creeped me out. I hear that experience in “Banging Camp”, when Holly takes a hit and dunks her head, but I also hear it in her crashing through the vestibule in “Crucifixion Cruise.”

I’m also in Brooklyn now, which is ironic given that I spent my youth thinking that the Minnesotan who moves out to New York is a cliche. I suppose it is, but it’s also walking in the footsteps of Craig Finn and Tad Kubler. There’s something about spending so long away from where you grew up that gives you the perspective to really appreciate it. The Hold Steady happened because the two of them watched The Last Waltz, the film that Martin Scorcese made about the last concert The Band played in 1977, and realized there weren’t any smart rock bands like them or The Replacements in Brooklyn, so they started a band. The Hold Steady aren’t like The ‘Mats, but knowing how to make something that feels like that instead of sounding like that gets a lot easier when you’ve had some time to be able to look back instead of living it. Separation Sunday sounds and feels better now, twenty years later, when I’m no longer living it.

I was on a run, sometime in the late 2010s when I still lived in Greenpoint, and I came across an intersection that looked familiar. I stopped, googled the intersection, and started laughing. I was standing at the exact place where Craig Finn took the cover photo of Separation Sunday. Maybe someday they’ll have a mural up on Conselyea Street that says Hold Steady rest in peace. I’d help paint it, I owe them for who I am now.

Cooper Lund is an IT worker and writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York and has seen The Hold Steady more times than he can count. You can read his writing at cooperlund.online and reach him on Bluesky at @cooperlund.online