It’s almost comically apt that The Gospel of the Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels, out July 25 on Akashic Books, is an oral history of the band. What else would it be? For 20 years, the Hold Steady have been a band for whom storytelling is paramount. Their rangy, classic-rock-oriented music is the setting for declaiming voices, whether via singer-lyricist Craig Finn’s careful eye and craggy bellow or the mass audience sing-alongs his lyrics inspire (and cultivate).

Co-written with the band by the British rock journalist Michael Hann — author of another oral history, the highly entertaining Denim & Leather, about the turn-of-the-’80s “new wave of British heavy metal,” or NWOBHM — How a Resurrection Really Feels is a compendium as much as a single narrative. Interspersed between chapters are testimonials from notable fans — authors Rob Sheffield and Isaac Fitzgerald, for example — and the book’s final third is given over to a slew of fans recruited from the ranks of the Unified Scene, the band’s online community. (In the interest of focus, this review will concentrate on the oral history part of the book.)

How a Resurrection Really Feels is a fan book the way that term signified in the ’70s and ’80s — heavy on photos and lore, stuffed with snaps from every era, from promo shots to candids. But there’s a marked difference between this and earlier fan bios: Instead of being aimed at teenagers like a vintage Culture Club or Duran Duran title, this one is consciously designed for, and co-written by, a much older niche demographic. This year is the Hold Steady’s 20th anniversary, and this book is part of a series of events — including their appearance with the Bob Mould Band and Dillinger Four at the Minnesota State Fair on Saturday, Sept. 2 — commemorating it.

Though Hann gets testimonials from others in the band’s circle (label owners, producers, engineers), the Hold Steady’s members, old and new, earn their co-author status: they’re responsible for at least 90% of its block quotes. It’s also focused on the band as a band; the personal lives of the players are basically off the page unless they impacted upon the group in full and while Finn is the most quoted member, by far, his solo career is mentioned only in passing.

Hence, it makes a kind of sense that the narrative just drops us in the middle of the action with Finn leaving Minneapolis for New York shortly after the breakup of his band, Lifter Puller. The back story is filled in gradually, over the book’s early pages, but that start is a little jarring — and also begs to be solved, thus pulling you in.

Finn in his time between bands is clearly itchy — a live wire looking for an outlet, an artist reluctant to call himself one but increasingly aware that it’s the only real definition that applies. During the late ’90s, Lifter Puller was pretty much the best rock band in Minneapolis: As Jeremy Ackerman of Walker Kong & the Dangermakers — who along with Lifter Puller were regular headliners at the late, lamented Foxfire Coffee Lounge — once put it, “If the Foxfire was CBGB’s, they were the Ramones.” But if you’re the Ramones only at CBGB’s, and aren’t catching fire too many other places, maybe that’s an issue.

Then something even weirder happened: Lifter Puller took off, post-mortem, on the internet. This strangely ingratiating band, with Steve Barone’s needling keyboard hooks and Finn’s glottal bark, was starting to gain traction online. This came as a huge surprise to both Finn and LP’s bassist, Tad Kubler. At one point, Finn says, “A strange article that came out in the Village Voice for no reason. I open it up one day and there’s a full-page article on Lifter Puller and I don’t know why.”

I know why, because I wrote it: It was a review of both Soft Rock, a two-CD compilation of the band’s work, which had recently come out, and a Lifter Puller reunion show at Brownie’s, a Lower East Side rock bar that shortly afterward became Hi-Fi, featuring one of the first digital jukeboxes in New York. Details fall away, but for Finn, the what-the-hell? sense of surprise didn’t: Lifter Puller had been kaput for two years at that point.

But Finn wasn’t alone. Kubler, long a guitarist, had also moved to New York, and soon they were working on new material together. One of the key aspects of How a Resurrection Really Feels is that it demonstrates just how collaborative the band’s songwriting has been from the start. (Most of the group writes music; Finn writes the words.) Kubler, whose narrative voice here is wiry and matter-of-fact, was leaning back into the classic rock he’d grown up playing on guitar; Finn was beginning to reshape the Twin Cities mythos that had defined his earlier band. “I had a lot of confidence,” Finn tells Hann early in the book. “In Minneapolis coming out of Lifter Puller, people were quoting lyrics and hosting costume parties based on the characters … and I was pretty confident about the writing.”

He had good reason to be. I was living in New York then, and in early 2003, I saw a very early Hold Steady play to a whopping six people at the Lower East Side bar Piano’s, opening for some awful British goth band. It was a busy time for live rock in New York, and the Hold Steady stood out instantly. You might have gone around humming the Strokes or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but you weren’t quoting them at length, and that seemed the only appropriate engagement with Finn’s new songs — even more, it was thrilling to learn, than his old ones. Quickly, groups of people were shouting along with them just as they had at the Foxfire.

The first song they played at Piano’s would also open their debut album, The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, in 2004: “Positive Jam,” which climaxes by creating the new band’s myth: “I got bored when I didn’t have a band / So I started a band, man.” Simple as that, but the setup contained worlds — memories of older rock folkways mixing and merging in the arrangements, particularly once keyboardist and composer Franz Nicolay came aboard one album later on Separation Sunday in 2005.

That album, understandably, gets the longest, deepest treatment in the book. The band’s acknowledged masterpiece, Separation Sunday changed everything. “I realized people liked us, and I wanted to grow the thing,” says Finn. “But I don’t think in making Separation Sunday that I thought it was going to kick off something that would make me unemployable and put us on the road all the time. I thought that there would be maybe 8 to 10% growth rather than 200%.”

The new member helped that expansion greatly. “Piano wasn’t a huge part of indie rock,” Finn tells Hann of Franz Nicolay’s addition to the band, “but it makes a huge difference live when you go down to just a piano break. And then coming back with a big guitar solo is a ride that you can take the audience on.” “Stevie Nix,” on Separation Sunday, was the key moment: “That’s a big thing … [that] we had the big, grandiose, ‘Jungleland’ type of song,” Finn says. “We all knew, collectively, that it was definitely an artistic step up, even while we were doing it,” bassist Galen Polivka says. (Nicolay wasn’t the only new addition: the first half of Separation Sunday featured Judd Counsell on drums and the second half had Bobby Drake, who’s been with them ever since.)

The shows began to expand as well. Those early appearances were airtight, typically an hour or so onstage, but in the midst of touring for Separation Sunday, the Hold Steady began experimenting with longer sets, starting with a three-hour marathon in Omaha for “60 people,” as Finn tells Hann. Eventually, those would become far more standard as the Hold Steady’s fan base began to solidify.

Early on, Kubler and Nicolay’s personalities clashed; Nicolay left the band for a few years in the early 2010s. Today, to Hann, everyone dismisses it as workaday stuff: “There’s an inherent dislike of repetition in most bands,” reasons Polivka, “so just having those two voices in the same band was cute.”

“Cute”: no one else in the group would use that word, or at least not in that way. Hearing the voices of all of the Hold Steady is a big draw of How a Resurrection Really Feels: You don’t get to be in a band like this one without holding your own intellectually, whether you’re basically game, a la the garrulous Polivka and the dry Drake, or you’re leave-me-alone intense a la Kubler or an expansive intellectual like Nicolay.

Nicolay’s playing made Separation Sunday feel epic, and his writing gave Boys and Girls in America, from 2006, even more gravitas. Boys and Girls was a canny next step — walloping songs sans connective storyline, a perfect first step for the nonce. The Hold Steady moved on to the larger indie label Vagrant and brought in producer John Agnello. “Vagrant knew what to do with Boys and Girls in America,” Agnello says. “It was a whole team effort.” Agnello also took it upon himself to “help them improve on ... Craig’s vocal delivery,” he tells Hann. “[Finn] has that talky thing, and I wanted to work with him to make choruses with more hooks. At one point, I told him, ‘Dude, it’s not a chorus unless you can put a harmony to it.’”

Touring behind Boys and Girls, the band went down a storm in the U.K., performing on The Jools Holland Show and getting the attention of the Rolling Stones, who enlisted them to open for them at Ireland’s legendary Slane Castle for a crowd of 85,000. “We didn’t even meet the Stones,” says Finn. “But even hearing Mick Jagger onstage saying, ‘We want to thank the Hold Steady’ — wow, that was cool.”

The 2008 follow-up, Stay Positive, made it four killers in a row — but while filming a clip for the title song, Kubler took sick: “The next morning I woke up and I thought I had kidney stones, or something like that. A couple of days went by and it got progressively worse. And I finally called my doctor at home and I was like, ‘I am in an insane amount of pain.’”

Kubler was diagnosed with pancreatitis; the tour that was set to begin a day later was called off. “It was frightening,” says drummer Drake. “When that happened, it took a lot of gas out of the tank. Uncertainty everywhere.” Kubler would have to stop drinking to right himself: “I’d never been onstage sober to this point, ever. It was really scary that way … It took me two or three years to even get comfortable onstage playing.”

Other bands might have written the next two albums about this; the Hold Steady waited until their 20th anniversary oral-history book to open up in full about it. Kubler’s illness was a shock to the band’s internal system, and they drifted. The blessedly straightforward Polivka has the most concise things to say about what followed: “Heaven Is Whenever has moments,” he offers politely. Later: “Teeth Dreams was not a hugely fun record to make. I don’t think the material was as strong as it could have been … Teeth Dreams is not a mind-blowing record. Again, there’s songs on there that I like, but it’s the same kind of thing as Heaven Is Whenever, but without life-threatening illness involved.” When Finn began making solo albums afterward, Kubler, already white-knuckling his way through the enforced sobriety his illness mandated (not counting a short spell involving pills), gritted his teeth: “I definitely thought, All right, Craig’s had enough.”

But those hiatuses worked: Finn and Kubler found a new personal rhythm together, and the band followed suit. They weren’t driving in a legendary ice truck that had no business being a touring bus anymore, but they had insurance. And they’d figured out how to stay out of one another’s way. “Now instead of actively avoiding everybody, we like to have dinner together,” says Polivka. “It’s not The Partridge Family. We don’t live together. But I went from not always enjoying everybody’s company to enjoying everybody’s company.” As anybody who has followed the many, many rock-band histories that end in acrimony, courtrooms, or worse — meaning anybody who’s ever felt the Hold Steady — this is a genuinely happy ending, even by the standards of a fan bio.

The Gospel of The Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels. More Info

Book signing and Q&A. 5 p.m., Friday, Sept 1 at The Electric Fetus, Minneapolis. Info

The Current's Music On-A-Stick featuring The Hold Steady with special guests Bob Mould Band and Dillinger Four. 7 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 2, at Minnesota State Fair Grandstand. Tickets & Info