The Hold Steady: Hold on to your hats...

The Hold Steady seem to be picking up where Bruce Springsteen left off. Andy Gill joins America's new literate rockers at the Boss's old haunt

The boardwalk in Asbury Park stretches off into the dark for what seems like miles in either direction, a long herringbone of timber zipping together land and sea. In pop songs, the boardwalk traditionally signifies a sort of convivial refuge, a place to shelter from both sun and prying eyes, where romantic dalliance can take place amidst the sounds and smells of seaside fun and frolics, while the white noise of crashing surf caresses the senses.

But not tonight, not in January, when the wind whips in off the Atlantic with a ferocity that cuts to the bone. It's hard to be a saint in the city, a songwriter from around these parts once claimed, but in this city, right now, it would be harder still to be a brass monkey and retain all one's appendages. After a few frames, the five members of The Hold Steady abandon the impromptu photo-shoot and scuttle up the beach, jackets tugged tight, and back across Ocean Avenue into the warm embrace of The Stone Pony. Whose idea was this, anyway?

The Stone Pony is a place of legend, one of those few hallowed rock'n'roll sites that has become, like The Cavern, CBGB's and the Abbey Road crossing, a secular shrine luring pilgrims from across the globe. It was here, back in the early 1970s, that the city's favourite son, Bruce Springsteen, cut his teeth with a string of shows that crystallised his signature style of roughly equal parts Dylanesque wordiness, R&B grit and Jersey soul, immortalising local characters as players in his street-life operettas of teenage dreams and desires. Inside, the club is understandably immodest about its association with rock royalty, with a vast mural along one wall of the "Welcome To Asbury Park" postcard parodied on Springsteen's debut Greetings from Asbury Park, and photo-displays of Bruce and other local luminaries dotted about, along with the signed guitars and similar ephemera.

The Hold Steady, one of the hottest young bands in America, are pretty excited at the prospect of treading such illustrious boards and, listening to their new album, Boys and Girls in America, it's easy to understand why. In their singer and lyricist, Craig Finn, they not only have a wordsmith who can tap into the rites and mores of contemporary teenage life with comparable literate verve to the New Jersey Bard, but also a frontman whose vocal timbre and inflection - by turns urgent, conspiratorial and euphoric - uncannily approximates Springsteen's laconic, soulful delivery, too, animating his tales of stoned and aimless midwest youth with glints of redemptive nobility. And, augmented as they are tonight by a quartet of young, local, horn-playing fans, who contacted the group by e-mail asking to play the show with them, Finn's bandmates offer an impressive equivalent of the E Street Band, with Tad Kubler as the classic Miami-Steve-style guitar-slinger sidekick, and the moustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay sprinkling elegant piano embellishments around the songs with the aristocratic touch of a David Sancious or Roy Bittan. For these boys, this really is a form of pilgrimage, a proper chance to sup from the source of rock'n'roll greatness.

"We're all quite excited, obviously," confirms Finn. "We're all Springsteen fans, and this is, like, the scene of the crime for everything he did. One fan of ours, Billy the Gambler, he saw all those shows here - he reckons he'd seen Springsteen 75 times before 1976!"

For Billy, tonight's intense, action-packed show must bring memories flooding back, but there's little chance of those obscuring the impact of the here and now, The Hold Steady performing with a verve that brings the crowd quickly to boiling point, then never loses steam through two hours of outsider anthems and ecstatic encores. It may be possible, in this day and age, to secure a chart-topping single through an internet site, but, as Finn believes, there's no substitute for a great live show. "It's one thing to contact people through MySpace," he says, "but getting a hundred people to come together in a room is a whole other thing. Nowadays you can be on a band's MySpace site as a friend of the band, but when they come to town, you don't bother going to see them. There's this disconnect between the virtual world and the real one that's hard to bridge."

Does that make for a spiritual vacuum in modern American youth culture?

"I don't know about youth culture," muses Finn, "but there's a spiritual shortfall generally in the way we interact with the internet and so on, people's confusion over the difference between real life and celebrity culture. It's getting weirder all the time, and people have a hard time figuring where it all fits together. Like, CNN reported who Madonna endorsed for President! How did that happen?! And you know there's going to be a whole lot of idiots more affected by that than any other factor."

Finn is one of rock's less likely stars, his slightly geeky, bespectacled appearance belying an energetic, rabble-rousing stage presence. He looks more like a postgrad student, and is rather more likely to be influenced by writers than by Madonna's political opinions. The first song on Boys and Girls in America, "Stuck Between Stations", is a reflection on the relationship between art and depression, couched in an account of the suicide of the American poet John Berryman. The album title, Finn explains, comes from a passage in Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they go straight to sex without time for real talk - they want to talk about courtship, I want to talk about souls".

"It's such a dense sentence, I underlined it and thought, we can get a record out of this!" he says. "Like everyone, I read Kerouac when I was 16, and it went straight over my head, because I had no life experience to realise why this was cool. Then I read it again at 32, and I was laughing aloud at each page - I couldn't believe how funny it was! I noticed how he wasn't so much a participant as a recordist, an observer, which was a different take on it than I had the first time round."

The record that Kerouac inspired finds Finn playing the observer, reporting mostly on the lives of Midwest kids who've yet to take on the burdens of adult responsibility, their lives revolving largely around drugs - scoring, dealing, taking drugs, coming down from drugs, recovering from overdoses, and then going out and doing the same all over again. "They're not the actual things that happened to me or people I know," he claims, "but they're the type of things that were happening around me as a younger person. Which I think are the kind of things that happen to all American teenagers around the age of 17 or 18. Or younger, now."

So, do he and the band reckon there are too many drugs in rock'n'roll now, or too few?

"It depends on who's asking!" quips the lead guitarist, Tad Kubler.

"It depends on what time, too," adds Finn. "At the end of the night, there's never enough. Ask us again at 1am, and we'll tell you! It's funny, but you don't really see that many drugs until you're a headlining band. On our first tour as headliners, we were in one town and this guy says to us, 'Do you need anything?' I thought he meant, like, batteries or something!"

"Another time," recalls Kubler, "this crew member was like, 'I want to show you something down in the basement', and I was like, 'What, is there another bar in the basement?' 'No,' he said, 'I want to show you something down in the basement!' What do you want to show me? 'Let's go downstairs and I'll show you!' I totally wasn't getting it!"

Judging by songs like "Party Pit" and "Chillout Tent", he's in the minority in that regard, though his own teenage years were spent in a similar search for some form of stimulation that might relieve boredom.

"I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, where there's really nothing much to do except drive around and drink and listen to the radio," he says. "When I was coming of age, there wasn't any kind of alternative radio, so my initial exposure to music was classic rock. I'd borrow records off the older kids, and go see their bands play Judas Priest covers. But just driving around, looking for parties, and listening to the radio - it always comes back to that." Now, with two kids of his own to support, he's in a position to monitor the subtle changes in youth culture over the past decade or two.

"I'd talk to this kid, Nicky, who my girlfriend's mom used to babysit," he says. "He's 13 now, and seems to be interested in the same old things. In fact, I'm surprised he hasn't asked me to buy him a beer yet! It seems like a very similar experience, apart from things like the internet. The internet seems like a great way to get into trouble."

"One thing that has changed is meth (a ferocious form of amphetamine)," claims Finn. "Even being into drugs in high school, I never came across crystal meth, and now it's a real problem in schools across the Midwest."

Kubler concurs. "If you talk about drugs like heroin and cocaine, they're not produced in the US, so you need to know somebody to get them from," he explains. "With meth, you can have some jackass who's making it three blocks from your house. That's dangerous stuff."

Kubler met the other band members in Minneapolis, where they formed a group called Lifter Puller, which built up a tidy following in their home town but struggled to make a mark outside the Twin Cities. Eventually, they called it a day when Craig Finn decamped to New York with vague notions of working in the arts, maybe as a comedian, or a writer. Kubler would call in on Finn whenever he came to visit his girlfriend in New York, and before long the lure of the limelight struck them again. After one decisive visit, he flew back home, flung a few things in a suitcase, grabbed his guitar and flew back to form The Hold Steady with his pal.

"When we started the band, the idea was that we would get together a couple of times a week and drink beer," admits Finn. "We had no plans to tour or record, but then we played a show and people kinda got into it. I don't know if performance is addictive or anything, but you start making little goals for yourself, and now we find ourselves on tour for most of the year."

"Even when we made our first single," adds Kubler, "we told the label: 'We want to put out a record, but we don't want to tour that much'. Cut to nine months later, and we'd been touring half the year."

Despite the dissolute portrait of youth-culture depicted in Boys and Girls in America, however, the band believe that music remains a force for good in the modern world.

"Rock'n'roll is often thought of in terms of leather jackets and delinquency," says Finn, "but the way it affected my life, as a teenager, was positive - it steered me away from trouble. That's a very real thing in American culture, but it isn't always recognised as such."

Just how positive rock'n'roll can be became evident when The Hold Steady were invited to get involved with a project at Littleton High School in Colorado, directly adjacent to Columbine, the site of the school massacre.

"A teacher heard us on National Public Radio and thought our lyrics might be helpful in teaching the students literary appreciation," explains Finn. "He started playing them our records, and at first the kids didn't react that positively - well, if your teacher starts playing you this new, hip, band, you're going to be suspicious, because he can't possibly know what he's talking about, right? - but after a while they started to get into it. Then he contacted us and said he'd noticed we had a day off in Denver, and suggested we might like to drop in there.

"He teaches a programme called Freshman Academy, which is for kids who are at risk. In the wake of the Columbine Massacre, they did some research and decided the ninth grade was where they were losing the kids in some way, so he created this programme to deal with that.

"Once we agreed to go, he changed his curriculum to fit around the band - maths would involve problems like: 'The Hold Steady has to get from Portland to Vancouver for their next show, a distance of x miles; if gasoline is $1.69 a gallon, how much will they spend?' My favourite part was, while we were on tour, each kid would be assigned a tour-date destination to research, and on that date they'd have to get up and explain: 'Today, The Hold Steady is in Seattle, Washington. Seattle is known for coffee...', or whatever was the case. So we went there and we did a little acoustic show for them, and it was really overwhelming."

"It was really intense!" agrees Kubler. "I remember when I was at school, the huge part that music played in my life, and I would have loved to have a band come in and talk to us and play a bit. To be able to connect with these kids like that was extremely emotional for us."

Indeed, it's enough to thaw the coldest of hearts, and one has to wonder why such initiatives are not more common. Still, with The Hold Steady holding a beacon for them, there's every chance that the Boys and Girls in America might turn out better than expected.