So that’s when I said, ‘Let’s get incredible’

Before Gideon, Holly and Charlemagne there were Night Club Dwight, Special K and the Eye Patch Guy. Before The Hold Steady there was Lifter Puller.

The Lifter Puller universe revolves around the Nice Nice, a club won by small time drug dealer and diamond smuggler, Dwight, in a card game. Eventually Dwight gets out of his depth and the Nice Nice is burnt down by Juanita (or ‘LL Cool J’) on the orders of the Eye Patch Guy. Other major characters are Jenny and Katrina (‘K’), two users and all-round scenester girls, and the narrator, who by his own omission ratted Juanita out to the police. Manpark, later known as Penetration Park and in fact a pseudonym for Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis, also plays an important role.

Lifter Puller was started by Finn in 1994 and disbanded in the summer of 2000. Before the re-release of their records on iTunes in December, it was almost impossible to find their music anywhere. The track ‘Space Humping $19.99’ was up on an old MySpace page, created in 2006 by former members of the band, but relatively little was known of their story. The MySpace page stated that a bio would be going up when the band had time to get around to it, but since the last login was back in March 2007, Finn fanatics have had to wait until now to discover more.

Kubler joined the band in 1998, but on bass, which would explain the less driven, more angular indie-punk sound of Lifter Puller, compared to the all-out, sprawling, bar-band guitar of the Hold Steady. The first album also showcases a slowed-down and completely stripped-back, tender and pensive musicality rarely seen on a Hold Steady album. Tracks such as ‘Lazy Eye’ and ‘Mono’ would seem out of place on the full-to-bursting Boys and Girls or Stay Positive. Other interesting sounds include some bizarre, jazzy brass (on ‘11th Ave Freezout’) and a little rap every now and then, sometimes from guest artist and fellow Minneapolitan, Slug. (Slug actually references Lifter Puller’s song ‘Roaming the Foam’ in his own work, with the lines ‘You kiss like you already came, and that’s a Lifter Puller line for those without any game’. Rappers referencing Craig Finn. Stranger things have happened, I guess.)

Finn’s voice sounds different on these records; it’s almost as if this was before he was told he couldn’t sing. The Lifter Puller albums are less conscious of their spoken word stylings and this takes some of the strain and tension out of the moments when Finn actually does all-out sing. These moments are far more natural than some of the more self-aware vocals of Stay Positive, where both Finn and the listener are constantly reminded of the singing lessons he took and the impact they’ve had on the Hold Steady sound. It feels like this is Finn’s true voice, exactly halfway between the non-singing, lyrical drawl of Almost Killed Me and the slightly try-hard, over-rehearsed voice of Stay Positive.

The thing that does remain the same is Finn’s gift for storytelling. The younger Finn may be slightly more concerned with being cool, name-dropping Gang of Four and various other acts, but the urban mysticism that has caused so many to fall in love with the Hold Steady is ever-present in the body of work left behind by Lifter Puller.

Religion still features largely in the lyrics, but in a more negative light. These stories seem to come from a time before Finn reconciled the Catholic teachings he received in his upbringing with the down-and-out lifestyle of the city kids. The ‘4 Dix’ of the song of the same, for example, are Famine, Death, Pestilence and War, i.e. the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The narrator stumbles across them in the bathroom of the Nice Nice where they are ‘wagering and arguing over which one gets to do you in’. The song ends with the desolate lines ‘And what’s left? 4 Dix and the apocalypse’.

In fact, the overall feeling of the entire Lifter Puller catalogue is less positive than Finn’s more recent work. The characters are far more hopeless and pessimistic, the narrator even states in ‘Double Straps’, the very first track from the first album, that ‘Love is just an ego boost’. The girls are looking for the guys who will take them away ‘into fortune and fame’ and the guys are only interested in scoring and screwing. There’s a feeling that no one is going anywhere. This is a time when the narrator feels that even his beloved Twin Cities are ganging up on him.

It’s not all misery though. In one of the most beautiful of Finn’s lyrics, the narrator says of Jenny (the Lifter Puller equivalent of Holly or Hallelujah), ‘(she) looks on the bright side, “I never saw the sun rise before I met all you guys”’. In Baudelaire-esque fashion, Finn sees the sublime in the prostitutes and drug-addicts which inhabit his world.

The albums are peppered with the witty, twisting word plays that are Finn’s signature. ‘I can see all the stains in your white tights when you stand in the black lights down at the Nice Nice’ or ‘I think the same thing that’s eating you up on the inside’s the same guy that’s eating you out’ are particularly good examples, although not suitable for those who thought Finn singing about coming onto navy sheets was gross enough. Anyone who’s ever managed to wrap their head around Almost Killed Me will recognise the motifs ‘Dripping wet with…’ and ‘Hi my name’s… but people call me…’, both of which are carried on into the first Hold Steady album.

The deluxe reissue versions of Half Dead and Dynamite (1997), The Entertainment and Arts (1998) and Fiestas and Fiascos (2000) also include live versions of certain tracks. (The self-titled debut album remains exactly as it was when first released in ’97.) Finn launches into the first live track at the end of The Entertainment and Arts with the words ‘Without further ado I’m gunna talk some shit’. If by shit he meant the most poetic yet concrete-cold relevant description of life for young, soulful, hopeless and homeless Americans since Kerouac, then he might have been right.