you can make him like you
It seems natural that I’d want to review the Hold Steady / Drive By Truckers show last Thursday, that I should write a really clear and thoughtful treatment of how it came to be that I faced the Hold Steady in the setting I feared them most and lived to tell the tale. It is true that I came, saw, and conquered; I will note that I’m not one for fingerpointing, but I did dance and I sang along and I have to be honest – I knew the words to almost all of the songs, and I was sad that I didn’t have tickets for the following night.
Combined with an already unabashed love for the pure Southern rock of the Truckers, the evening as a whole was the sort that I haven’t experienced in perhaps years. It never gets old to watch New Yorkers get excited about a band, to sing, to dance – it’s a phenomenon I’ve even appreciated in my younger years, dragged to Dashboard Confessional shows by well-meaning friends. It’s a hell of a lot better, though, and feels a hell of a lot more important when the band does.
The events of the past week – the show, the week prior to it, a comment my friend Ryan left on this blog during that time – have brought both careful attention to and thoughtful re-examination of Boys and Girls in America. Each time I listen to it, I’m reminded over and over of when I went to look the lyric up online for “You Can Make Him Like You,” wanting to make sure I was understanding it properly. On one of the “365/Songmeanings/Etc” sites, a user had commented on the song with a note about how it was great to have a man sing a female perspective, and how it’s important to remember that if one boy doesn’t work out, there’s a whole world full of boys who will treat you better!
In some ways, this is horrifying; in others, it gets to the problem at the heart of the Hold Steady. At the risk of mentioning Springsteen too much in this blog (sorry, but he’s pretty much a big deal), it reminds me of seeing him at Shea Stadium on the Rising tour and watching as fans throughout the place waved American flags with pride the second he kicked into “Born in the U.S.A.” I felt nothing but scorn at the time, but years later in a “Springsteen Vs Petty” conversation with my father, he characterized it for me: “See, I love Tom Petty because he tells it like it is – or how I want it to be. The problem with Springsteen is that he writes great songs, but half the time, I have no idea what the fuck that guy is talking about.”
There’s a great deal of danger in writing songs that seem so obvious. Do they retain the same strength when they’re so easily misinterpreted as the very worry they’re being written about? Does that make them even stronger? “You Can Make Him Like You” is maybe my favorite Hold Steady song write now, because it’s simple and it’s powerful and it’s really quite sad. It sounds twice as good live as it does on the record, and it’s poignant and empowering in ways I’m not really smart enough to articulate. The danger in the narrow interpretation of the song is, of course, what makes it have a broader meaning at all. Insofar as there is a narrow interpretation, however, are we forever risking the notion that a girl will take hold of this song and keep it to her heart as proof that she can pass from boyfriend to boyfriend as needed?
(Even more frustrating: Does it matter?)
It’s funny how quickly I can embrace the song and how all at once, it somehow manages to address all of the “girl issues” I’ve long had with this band. I’m starting to see where this is all coming from; I’m more than able to sing lines like “She was a damn good dancer / but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend,” and laugh about it, thinking of the truth in it. But as always, I fall short at the moments at which we find ourselves in these fictional characters – we’re meant to engage in these fictions, for certain, but what happens when they don’t awake us to the broader understanding of our own realities?
The thought seems scary, but it doesn’t make me love the song any less.