How many people became Lifter Puller fans between 2000 and 2003? It's probably not a greater number than the fanbase that band built between their first single (1993's "Prescription Sunglasses") and their last (2001's post-breakup "4Dix"), or the number of people that've gotten into the Hold Steady since 2004 and subsequently got the notion to check out what the deal was with Craig Finn's old group. But somewhere between the release of their final album, Fiestas + Fiascos, and the three-night final-reunion set that inaugurated the music room of Minneapolis' Triple Rock Social Club roughly six years ago, Lifter Puller's following grew to the point where they wound up becoming a feverishly adored cult band-- not quite famous, but infamous to just about everyone who'd heard of them. Fans took road trips to the Twin Cities just to visit intersections name-dropped in songs, Finn's lyrical mythologies were built and deconstructed on messageboards and fansites, and at least one person went and got himself a set of "LFTR PLLR" knuckle tattoos. This band bred fanatics.
And it'll keep doing so-- this en masse reissue of the entire Lifter Puller discography should see to that. A decade past their heyday, there's still something that resonates unsettlingly in their songs, something even more seedy and desperate than the party-casualty scenarios that fueled the Hold Steady's breakthrough. With his first band, Finn's lyrical tics and themes were well in place already-- shady nightlife characters that introduce themselves with preposterous nicknames, unexpected collisions of different music-scene casualties, people fucking in bizarre locales and somehow waking up in even stranger ones. But it's all just a bit more threatening and sordid, the humor bleaker, the redemption more elusive. It could be that Lifter Puller's style puts an additional edge to things; trade in the Hold Steady's bar-band classic rock for a beat-up indie rock/newish wave that staggers between sludgy and jittery, and it'd be hard not to make the allusion-filled literary/pop-cult debris of Finn's burnout milieu feel just a bit more unhinged.
And it didn't take too long to get there, either. Both their self-titled debut and Half Dead and Dynamite were released in 1997, and the leap between the two is startling. The first album's a sort of textbook indie rock feeling-out process, an effort that results in a surprising progenitor of the band as we know them: "Star Wars Hips", a song which introduces the nightclub fire that would become the dramatic turning point of Fiestas + Fiascos and Juanita, the recurring figure of the Lifter Pullerverse who might have been responsible for lighting it. Most of Lifter Puller is sort of an uncharacteristic slog, though-- Finn's lyrics show early signs of his off-kilter, unpredictable internal rhyme schemes (from "Mission Viejo": "haven't been as high as this since the night I burned my lips") but aren't quite as dense with referential humor and feel more like narrative sketches than vivid character portraits. And despite a few scattered songs like the Pavement-with-a-switchblade slink of "Double Straps" and the vertiginous half-Wire of "The Mezzanine Gyp" (in which it sounds like Finn is muttering through a Burger King intercom), the energy level tends to wane, especially during the hazy, vague breakup postmortem of the seven-plus-minute "Lazy Eye". Even then, Finn scores a hell of a lyric: "Let this be a testament/ To every lightbulb filament/ That burned itself out before it got turned on."
Lifter Puller is best heard as a warmup for Half Dead and Dynamite, which is where the band started playing to their strengths (and adding a couple of new ones). Dan Monick's drumming provided a backbeat that sounded like it could trip and fall into the gutter at any moment but never really did, and doubled up with Tommy Roach's gelatinous basslines it was tight enough to make the hard rock strut of "To Live and Die in LBI" and "The Gin and the Sour Defeat" that much punchier. This was also the point when guitarist Steve Barone turned into guitarist/keyboardist Steve Barone, and his tendency to forgo solos for a restless array of post-punk/hard rock guitar riffs was augmented by a weirdly amateurish cheap-Casio minimalism that bled car-alarm panic all over "I Like the Lights" and turned the title track into some kind of John Carpenter nightmare; of course, it fit perfectly.
And while Craig Finn sounded like Craig Finn from the start, this is where he really took off, spiraling deeper down into the subject matter of drugged-out, alcohol-soaked escapism and bad decisions, but tempering them with smart-assed punchlines ("She said she's waiting on the steady type/ Then she disappears with the eye-patch guy") and enigmatic yet evocative characterization that comes close to justifying the haze of hangovers and unfamiliar beds the songs' subjects stumble through. Then again, they hadn't just figured out how to pull this balance off for the first time, they simply proved they could do it more consistently and from every angle; the slow-building bitterness and violence that punctuates "Nassau Coliseum" dates back a couple of years in its origins as a B-side, but it stands out as Half Dead's dramatic high point.
1998's The Entertainment and Arts EP feels like a brief but boisterous kick in the ass-- a quick-and-dirty intro ("Plymouth Rock"), three bewildered pill-addled hookup chronicles ("The Candy Machine and My Girlfriend", "Sangre de Stephanie", "Roaming the Foam") and a slower yet more intense rerecording of "Star Wars Hips", all building up to the seething, feverish "Let's Get Incredible", as good a candidate for a Lifter Puller mission statement as any ("These kids want something new to get their eyes rolling back into their dreams/ They want a cellophane celebration/ A revolution rushing into dancefloor distribution").
But it's Fiestas + Fiascos, their rock-opera grand finale and the only Lifter Puller full-length to feature future Hold Steady guitarist Tad Kubler on bass, that the band should and will be defined by. Whether the cast of characters that had shown up in previous songs here and there had some grand design planned for them, or whether the album was simply a collection of callbacks fashioned into a loose narrative, F+F was a delirious blur of bloody fights and criminal activity and illicit sex rendered in ash-covered countertops and ripped upholstery. Everything comes in quick bursts, three and a half minutes at most, darting from song to song and event to event like a police blotter: a tweaky Springsteen lift turned into a tale of two drugged-up lovers screwing in a bathroom stall ("Candy's Room"), a jumpy little number about anonymous gay hookups and people "making money with their mouths" ("Manpark"), a sinister-sounding profile of the cracked-out, club-owning schemer Nightclub Dwight ("Nice Nice") and the declaration by a criminal loan shark, namely Half Dead and Dynamite's Eye-patch Guy, that both Dwight and his nightclub are marked for destruction ("The Flex and the Buff Result"). Because Lifter Puller are all about the feeling of now-fucking-what panic, that's where the album ends, smothered in a muffled yet blown-out squall that sounds like the music itself is going up in flames, a story that ends with a gut-turning uncertainty.
The story of Lifter Puller themselves almost ended that way, too, with tales of live shows getting passed around like rumors and those crucial albums lapsing out of print by the time the first Hold Steady album saw the light. 2002's Soft Rock compilation was a valiant effort at tying the mythos together before it could get any further unraveled, but these reissues easily top it by dint of including practically everything the band ever released. That includes the singles and B-sides accumulated on Slips Backwards-- not the most cohesive picture of Lifter Puller at their best, but nearly every song's characteristically theirs, and the two best tracks-- "Math is Money" and "Secret Santa Cruz"-- sound so in tune with the vibe of Fiestas + Fiascos that it's hard to believe they didn't make the cut.
Each reissued album also includes a few recordings, mostly bootleg-quality, of live shows that were roughly contemporaneous with the albums they originally toured behind. They're nice little bonus curios for the most part, though none of them have the electricity in the air that filled the room during the 2003 Triple Rock shows, six songs of which are included with Fiestas + Fiascos. Three years after Lifter Puller broke up, there they are performing to a crowd that's ecstatic at the possibility of finally getting to see this myth in person one last time, a crowd that can't help but sing along at every opportunity. Surviving the nightlife is tricky enough, but Lifter Puller survived potential obscurity, too -- and they've earned every fanatic.
