Franz Nicolay—the keyboardist who ruined the Hold Steady with his E Street Band fetishism—released his solo debut, Major General (Fistolo), earlier this year and is planning to tour (August in the U.S., then fall dates with Mark Eitzel and Chuck Prophet). OK, maybe he didn’t “ruin” the Hold Steady. He took it in a direction that it wouldn’t have necessarily gone with the post-Lifter Puller core leadership. You people love to argue about this stuff. Here’s the video for Major General track “The World Is An Open Door.”
