Truth & Consequences

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Tad Kubler urges you to take it easy, and he’s made a point of verbalizing as much for good reason: because he knows that you probably won’t, because he knows that it’s hard, because he knows that his band’s tunes just seem to go hand in sticky hand with a pile of crumpled beer cans at your feet.

As Kubler’s band, the doggedly revelrous The Hold Steady, prepares to make its Las Vegas debut this weekend as part of the Beauty Bar’s second anniversary festivities, the guitarist wants to ensure that folks manage to stay upright, with their facilities relatively intact — at least until the end of the show.

"When we don’t get to towns that frequently, it’s like I’ll show up at the venue to watch the first band play, and they’ll be these guys like, ‘Yeah! Hold Steady!’ and they’re already so drunk," Kubler chuckles from the back of his band’s touring truck, en route to Boise, Idaho, from Salt Lake City. "It’s like, ‘Dude, there’s no way in hell that you’re going to make it until the end of the show tonight. You’re gonna be passed out in an hour and half and you’re going to miss our show.’ Pace yourself. And we’ll try and do the same."

As Kubler’s words suggest, these dudes like to drink, but in many ways, The Hold Steady is the great American party band that never really was.

Their latest disc, "Girls and Boys in America," sounds like the ultimate Saturday night out, one spent on the town and off the wagon, a big glorious mess of salivating guitars and pianos pounded into kindling that’s thick with the scent of a thousand corner bars wafting through most every tune.

It’s the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of tanning oneself in the glow of neon beer signs.

"Hey barroom, hey tavern, I find hope in all the souls you gather," singer Craig Finn gushes on "Massive Nights," a song best served with Excedrin and a three-day weekend.

But in this band’s 100-proof canon, most every wild high is met with a crushing low.

"Some nights, the painkillers make the pain worse," Finn observes on "Chips Ahoy!" and on the street corners and high school dances where his tunes are frequently set, party girls end up with guns in their mouths and sooner or later everyone’s world starts spinning.

Songs begin with brews in hand and end in the hospital; drugs are snorted, and then IVs are inserted.

"If you listen to the lyrics of the songs, Craig never talks about the party without talking about the hangover," Kubler says. "There’s always consequences."

"But when it’s time to let go, it’s time to let go," he continues. "There’s certain things that have to happen throughout the course of the day before we can get to that spot. As soon as 9 o’clock rolls around, it’s play time. Does it get fatiguing? That question becomes harder and harder to answer because the hard-partying image that we have gets blown out of proportion a little bit. If you’ve seen our live show, it’s obvious that we like to crush as many brews as we can onstage. The Guided By Voices comparison has been made quite a bit."

Like that band, The Hold Steady stuff classic rock conventions — huge, Econoline guitars; elaborate, album-long narratives; Springsteen-worthy anthems — into a much tidier, approachable, egalitarian package.

It’s arena rock sans the arena.

These days, so much of popular music has become polarized between brainy bards and party hard populists — you’re either the Decemberists or you’re Buckcherry — but The Hold Steady have an affinity for both.

"It’s like, you can combine these huge, throw-your-hands-in-the-air rock riffs with something that’s literary, without being pretentious," Kubler says of his band’s repertoire. "There’s more humor to it than anything pretentiously literary. It celebrates the better things in rock ‘n’ roll as opposed to just the ironic, cheeky, big dumb riff."

It’s this mix of loud and proud guitar ostentation and grizzled yet affecting lyrical character studies that’s come to define this bunch, whose catalog is both brash and endearing, a study in the trauma and triumph of adolescence viewed through the boozy lens of adulthood.

Listening to the band’s records is akin to flipping through old high school yearbooks and reminiscing about long nights spent drinking in the woods and chasing girls who were hard on the heart, soft to the touch.

It’s inherently relatable, indie rock without the exclusivity, the rare party that everybody’s invited to.

"You come and everybody’s involved, it’s very inclusive," Kubler says of The Hold Steady’s gigs. "It’s collectively people having a good time together. Especially with the political climate right now, the world is going down the toilet, but you know what? Come to a Hold Steady show, and for 90 minutes you can forget about that and be a part of something that’s bigger than just you."