On April 10, Indie rockers The Hold Steady played to a packed house at the Fox Theater here in Boulder. Appealing to a mix of the young and hip and the grown-up and mellow, this group of rock and roll storytellers put on quite the high energy, low tech spectacle. Whereas only the night before the Fox Theater had been aglow with BoomBox’s pink, purple, red, and blue lights, the closest thing to the Aurora Borealis that Boulder will ever see, for The Hold Steady the theater was bathed only in dull
The Starry Plough bar, on the corner of Shattuck and Ashby in Berkeley, stands out on the block as there is not much else around. I arrived a bit early and saw Dead Heads standing outside the bar smoking joints and cigarettes, making me think I was walking down the mythical “Shakedown Street.”