The Minneapolis rock band Lifter Puller, who were together from 1994 to 2000, had a way of inspiring obsession in their fans. I picked up their final album, Fiestas + Fiascos, only about a month before they split and became enthralled with it too late to see them live. So when they reunited in New York in 2002 to play a farewell show for the East Village club Brownie’s, I spent two entire paychecks to fly out and be there. And I was hardly the most dedicated fan in attendance—I met one guy from San Francisco who had lftr pllr tattooed across his knuckles and asked me to call him Nightclub Dwight, after a recurring character in the band’s songs.
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By the time the band recorded the punchy, hooky songs on Fiestas + Fiascos they’d perfected a muscular blend of indie rock, new wave, and hip-hop—Finn’s talk-singing owes a lot to rap, and the drumming shows a bit of that influence too. But even a superfan like me can admit that the music isn’t consistently great. Lifter Puller’s early singles and self-titled debut consist mostly of blurry, half-formed Archers of Loaf retreads, and their second album, Half Dead and Dynamite, has a few duds too.
On Lifter Puller‘s third track, “Star Wars Hips” (recut in an improved version on the band’s 1998 EP The Entertainment and Arts), he offers more details. This time the narrator warns someone named Juanita that he’s been busted by the cops and snitched to cut a deal, linking her to a series of nightclub fires. Thus begins in earnest the sprawling story that unfolds in bits and pieces across the rest of the band’s discography, with a cast that includes not just Juanita, the narrator, and Nightclub Dwight but also two more female protagonists, Jenny and Katrina (aka Special K or just K), and dozens of fuckups, rich kids, cokeheads, and petty thieves—basically the sort of people who tend to find one another, whether they want to or not, in the underbelly of any city’s nightlife.
