Stay Positive: The Hold Steady Bring the Bar-Band Gospel to Mississippi Studios

There are bands that make you want to text your friends, and then there is The Hold Steady, a band that makes you want to text your friends, buy a round, and testify. On Friday, August 7, Craig Finn and company bring their literate, unreasonably cathartic rock to Mississippi Studios — and a room that holds only about 300 people is, frankly, an almost unfair advantage.

Let's talk about why this booking is a gift. The Hold Steady built their reputation on rooms exactly this size before the acclaim caught up with them: sweaty, sold-out clubs where Finn's half-sung, half-preached narratives about damaged saints and bar-stool philosophers land close enough to see the spit fly. Put that band in a 300-cap former church with a legendary sound system, and you have the ideal conditions for the kind of communal roar the band exists to summon. The chorus of "Stay Positive" hitting the rafters of Mississippi Studios is the sort of thing people describe years later.

Mississippi Studios earns its place in this story. The North Portland room is the city's premier listening space precisely because it refuses to get bigger — the intimacy is the product. It's the kind of venue where a road-hardened touring act can still feel the crowd breathing on them, and where a Friday-night crowd shows up ready to give it back.

This is also, worth noting, one node in an absurdly loaded first weekend of August for Portland. The same stretch of days offers everything from a big-tent touring circuit out at Edgefield to Robert Cray at the Aladdin — but the Hold Steady show is the one for people who like their catharsis at arm's length rather than from the lawn.

A few practical notes. Doors and set times run typical for the room; get there early, because the floor at Mississippi Studios fills toward the front fast and the sightlines reward commitment. Duck into the adjoining Bar Bar beforehand for the patio and a burger. And pace yourself — a Hold Steady show is a marathon of choruses, and you'll want your voice for the encore.

Thirty years of Portland bands have learned the same lesson this show will reteach: the best rock-and-roll rooms are the small ones, where there's nowhere to hide and no reason to. Friday, get to the front. Stay positive.

Sources: Portland Area Concerts — JamBase; Mississippi Studios