There's joy in that-there rock.

Been a while since I walked out of a rock club dripping with beer-scented sweat. Yet there I was on Swan Street in Richmond last night with a few hundred other soggy souls courtesy of Brooklyn-via-Minneapolis band The Hold Steady. They played a raucous 100-minute set at a sold-out Corner Hotel. Crowd seemed a bit heavy (literally) with music biz types but the front of the house hung on every word spit by gentile madman Craig Finn and pumped fists to Tad Kubler's soaring solos (some played on a Jimmy Page-circa-1975 double-neck guitar). They opened with 'Stuck Between Stations', performed on the Letterman show in 2007 in the video above.

Quite a musical Monday: Springsteen and the E Streeters obliterated the bar for future Super Bowl halftime shows in the am; The Hold Steady blew the doors off the Corner Hotel in the pm. Rock lives. Long live rock.

Constructive summer?

Labor Day weekend in the States signals summer's end for most (in Asbury Park it was the start of 6 weeks of Bennie-less bliss, but I digress). Spring is peeking through a keyhole here in Melbourne but Stay Positive by The Hold Steady long ago threw open summer's door and started drinking on my proverbial front lawn. From the opening bash of 'Constructive Summer' to the sing-along end of 'Slapped Actress' the band cranks open the windows and shoots a greasy ball of smoke from its tailpipe. All you gotta do is dig the ride. They start a tour with Drive-By Truckers at the Ryman Auditorium -- the RYMAN, for chrissakes -- in Nashville on Halloween. Goddamn ... if that's not the double-bill of the year I don't want to know what else I'm missing.