They’re steady rockin’ -- in classic fashion

For a fast drive to the dark end of Thunder Road, hitch a ride on the Hold Steady’s “Separation Sunday,” an album that made a big noise on the best-of-2005 lists, including an eye-opening No. 8 finish in the prestigious Village Voice critics’ poll.

The recognition hasn’t changed the Brooklyn band’s life, but it’s another boost to a growing momentum surrounding its distinctive take on American rock. Like the similarly acclaimed Drive-By Truckers, the Hold Steady reclaims a neglected music and reinvents it with a fierce passion. “Separation’s” sales of 17,000 are solid for an indie band, and more than triples the sales of its debut, but the group’s growth is also measured by such attention as the profile on NPR’s “All Things Considered” late last year, complete with a rigorous annotation of the album’s pop, literary and cultural references. Singer and chief songwriter Craig Finn thinks of “Separation Sunday” as “a prodigal daughter story,” and says it was drawn from his own experiences and those of friends. The 11 songs follow a “hoodrat” on her wayward path through her late teens, as she encounters lowlifes and predators, saviors and lovers. Kids get high and get saved, hit bottom and claw for salvation.

Finn packs his songs with vivid, colorful vernacular, anchors the album with recurring characters and geographical detail and laces it all with themes of forgiveness and redemption rooted in his Catholic upbringing in Minneapolis.

“You’re still half a child, but you’re getting in these adult situations with a sense of wonder and a sense of stupidity as well,” Finn, 34, said this week. “I see it as a real universal suburban record.”

As a young teen, Finn absorbed the unruly, joyous aesthetic of the city’s great band the Replacements, and later participated in the edgy rituals of adolescence.

“There’s caves in St. Paul that a lot of people would go to that were pretty terrifying, but part of the whole experience was to be there drinking,” he said. “It was scary, and there were scary dudes sometimes, but ... it wouldn’t have been half as exciting to drink in someone’s parents’ basement.”

“Tramps like us and we like tramps,” Finn sings in the song “Charlemagne in Sweatpants,” having a little fun with a signature lyric by one of the album’s prime inspirations.

“Springsteen is a huge influence,” said Finn, sitting with guitarist Tad Kubler in the band’s dressing room at the Avalon in Hollywood, where they shared a bill with a couple of other bands from the small independent label FrenchKiss Records, Les Savy Fav and the Thunderbirds Are Now!

“He used a lot of words,” Finn said of Springsteen. “He tried to be very specific and descriptive, which is something I try to be as well. But also his literary take on what I call the American teenage experience ... rock ‘n’ roll always sounds best when covering that topic.... Springsteen had teenage dramas that were so vivid.”

Finn’s are vivid too, but the Hold Steady has another distinguishing feature: music that delivers the narrative payload with a grand, full-blown, classic rock sound drawn proudly from the likes of Bob Seger, Aerosmith, the E Street Band and Cheap Trick.

It’s a strange visitor to the world of indie rock, which is rooted in punk and other non-mainstream styles. Finn summarized indie music as “tightly wound,” which is what he and Kubler were in their Minneapolis band Lifter Puller. After that group ended and Finn moved to Brooklyn in 2000 came the revelation.

“My wife took me to see ‘The Last Waltz,’ ” he recalled. “I thought, ‘These guys are playing music, they’re listening to each other and they’re hearing each other and reacting off that, and they’re loose and it’s cool and they’re taking chances.’ ”

It struck Finn and Kubler as an invigorating alternative to what they saw as the sterility of the disco-punk sound that was so big in New York. Not that they had any huge ambitions.

“When we first started doing this, it was like, we’ll drink some beers and play a few shows and practice whatever we want to,” said Kubler, 32. “Then the first record came out.”

That was “Almost Killed Me” in 2004, the start of a slow but tangible process of connection between the Hold Steady and its audience, a mix of indie-rock kids and older, disaffected fans of classic rock.

“People started showing up,” the bespectacled Finn said of the group’s early performances. “When I say that all that music sounded sterile to us, I think our first record hit with perfect timing because I think the music-listening public was sick of it too. And people with loud guitars, solos, loose playing? I think it was fun for people to hear that, it reminded them of something.”

On stage at the Avalon, Finn was no longer the bespectacled intellectual. As he and the other four musicians powered up soaring anthems, he seemed to be taken over by a Joe Cocker palsy, convulsively gesturing and pointing every which way. His singing, like that on the record, was intense, raspy and almost tuneless, more like the rant of someone who has so much to say and so little time to say it.

“A lot of the rock that’s out there celebrates an element that’s kind of stupid, like the stoner rock, or garage rock where you dress up in the same suits and jump around,” Finn said earlier.

“There aren’t a lot of rock bands that are like, ‘OK, we’re a standard rock band, but we really want to be intelligent and talk about some stuff that’s interesting. It shouldn’t be so rare, but it kind of is.

“We’ve gotten a lot of fans off of being on NPR. ‘Cause they grew up rock ‘n’ roll fans ... people who have been Aerosmith fans now for 30 years, I can understand why they might not find the Hold Steady,” Finn said. “But if some of these people do, it’s a joy, it’s just amazing. And those people always look like they’re having a great time at the shows.”