Title: 'Band People' Tells the Stories of the Musical Middle Class

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new book called Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music looks at the dedicated players who work to build a musical career without all the fanfare of the rockstar fantasy. These are session musicians, unsung collaborators who aren't tied to any particular musical act but lend their talents to those who need them for particular things. Experts who get called in for gigs when they need a temporary theremin player. Joining me now to talk about his new book, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music, please welcome author, multi-instrumentalist, and music and writing educator, Franz Nicolay. Hi, Franz.

Franz Nicolay: Hi, Allison. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: He has performed on keys and accordion with some of the biggest bands you've heard of, Hold Steady, The Dresden Dolls, Frank Turner, The Loved Ones, and many, many more. He's the best person to write a book about band people. You folks who are listening to us, I bet we have some musicians in our crowd. Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Tell us how you think about the shape of your music career. What's hard? What's fulfilling? How do you make sense of mixing paid work with your love of music? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. What gave you the idea to write this book?

Franz Nicolay: Yes. I had just come off a period in my life where I had spent the first 15 years of my adult life trying to build a career in music, had come off the road. Like many of these crisis or inflection points in one's life, it gives you a perspective, a chance to look back and say, what is this thing that I devoted the first half of my adult life to? What is the community that I felt like I was a part of, that felt like it had a kind of guild pride and skills associated with it? I wanted to reach out to other people who I recognized reputationally and to talk to them about how they thought about their life and work and the dignities and indignities of it, and what were the particular skills and challenges.

Alison Stewart: Yes. You described the shape of the book as a collective portrait. Why did you feel like a collective portrait model was a good way to go?

Franz Nicolay: Well, because when you talk about musicians and freelance musicians, there's such a elaborate taxonomy. You're talking about hired guns. You're talking about support musicians. You're talking about, of particular interest to me, this bizarre organization of chosen family, small business, and creative collaboration that we call a rock band, that people sign up for often when they're too young to know what it is they're signing up for. Then, if you're lucky, you have this 5, 10, 15, 20 year or even longer relationship with these people with emergent hierarchies, with financial divergences, with people's personalities change under the various pressures of a music career. How do you negotiate those changes? How do you negotiate how you think about yourself as an artist or a craftsperson or somewhere along that line? How do you come to grips with this career that for many people, they didn't plan for themselves?

Alison Stewart: Listeners, if you're working on building a career around performing music beyond the rockstar fantasy, we want to hear from you. Tell us how you think about the shape of your music career. Tell us what's hard, what's fulfilling. How do you make sense of mixing paid work with your love of music? Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in and join us on air, or you can text to us at that number. Give us a call and tell us what it means to be a band person. My guest is Franz Nicolay. He is the author of Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music.

Throughout the book, you allude to this distinction between the artist and the artisan. What is the difference, and why is it important when we're talking about band people?

Franz Nicolay: Well, again, there's a sliding scale, but the basic binary, which I'm more or less borrowing from the sociologist Howard Becker, is about whether you conceive of yourself as the driving force of the artwork that's being made, or whether you consider yourself more of a technician. Are you a sculptor making fine art, or are you an extremely accomplished carpenter making really functional tables?

Alison Stewart: To introduce us to the idea of band people, you bring up multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, who's actually been on our show. Why is he a good example of a musician you were eager to explore?

Franz Nicolay: Well, he was extremely articulate about the challenges around his life in music, but also he stood in for a lot of the challenges that were shared by people in this community, including how do you value yourself? How do you feel about if you have a long and distinguished career as a support musician, putting yourself forward as the name artist on an album? How do you justify, in many cases, taking on what may seem to parents and peers as a financially irresponsible career and so on and so forth?

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about music as work. What does it look like for a working musician to cobble together a career that's enough to make a living?

Franz Nicolay: Yes. As drummer Ara Babajian put it to me, "Some nights I feel like a golden God, and some nights I feel like an ambitious t-shirt salesman with entitlement issues." [chuckles] It's that back and forth between a kind of life that can feel quite glamorous and a kind of life that can feel quite the opposite, depending on the situation you find yourself in. The skills are multifarious. It can be walking into a room and sussing out who the person hiring you thinks they've hired? How much creative leeway you're going to have on a particular project? How much they're going to welcome a transformative take on a song versus how much they want something quite simple and supportive of the song? How much that matters to you, how much authorship and ownership you feel over your parts and your contributions?

Alison Stewart: Here's a text we got, "I've been a busker since 1995. The best part about being a busker musician is the joy of playing music. However, when streaming services took over and eliminated CDs, my business income suffered greatly. I make virtually no money from streaming, and a lot of times my music is being used without my permission in some cases. The worst thing that has happened in my career is streaming services." What do you think?

Franz Nicolay: Yes, that's a challenge for all kinds of musicians, not just support musicians. I think one of the things that does affect support musicians specifically is the fact that on American radio, support musicians, i.e., the non-name musicians and the non-songwriters don't receive royalties when songs they play on are played, which is the standard in almost every other country in the world. There's been various legislation that has gone before Congress over the years to remedy that, but it runs up against the monopolies of Live Nation and Clear Channel and corporate radio.

Alison Stewart: You've talked with a bunch of different musicians, each with their own relationships to the art and the work. How do you make sense of the tensions that arise when you decide to mix money with something you're passionate about?

Franz Nicolay: Yes, I mean, musicians are idealists at heart. That's part of the problem with valuing themselves, is they want to say yes to things. Shahzad, in the introduction, says that when someone approaches him about a project and asks how much he wants to get paid, he says, "You know, your budget better than I do. I want you to go and spend some quiet time with yourself and your budget and decide what is the most that I can offer Shahzad for this project, and then I want you to come back and tell me that number and I want to say yes to that. I want it to be $1,500 for my famous friend or $50 for my janitor friend."

Unfortunately, the result of that is a lot of times-- any time that art and commerce come together, there's going to be friction and a lot of times, hurt feelings and musicians letting themselves be exploited.

Alison Stewart: There are different approaches to the kind of work that session musicians, and musicians play. Some are very careful about curating their image. Others are more liberal with the kind of work they'll agree to. What's the value in being more selective versus being open to all kinds of work?

Franz Nicolay: Well, not everyone can be open to all kinds of work. One of the things I talk about in the book is the difference between musicians who value being chameleonic, being able to play any kind of music in any kind of situation, and musicians who have a really distinctive flavor, either because of their limitations in their training, but that they have a really distinctive sound, a distinctive idiolect, and who are called upon because they have such a distinctive voice. Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus made entire big bands out of the distinctive voices of their players.

One of the other skills that band people have to acquire is a kind of self-knowledge about which kind of player you are, and whether you're the kind of player who can say yes to everything or whether you're the kind of player that is going to be the perfect person for a particular project, but not the perfect person for every project.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. This is Dominique calling from Brooklyn. Hi, Dominique. Thanks for calling in.

Dominique: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I am a flutist and pianist and a freelance musician. I've been in New York since 2009, originally from New Hampshire. I play flute with the all-women salsa band called Lulada Club. It's, I think, the best thing that's ever happened to me. We are kind of blowing up, and we've just performed at the Smithsonian for the Celia Cruz Quarter unveiling, and it's just been such a joy. I just wanted to talk about how you can really, like everybody in the band-- There's sometimes as many as 14 of us on stage. Every woman in the band is a freelance musician. It's really been really great.

Alison Stewart: Thanks so much for calling in. We really appreciate it. You know, friends, the musical work doesn't always have, like, a formal structure. You don't go to work at the same time, go to the same place all the time. What are some of the challenges that session musicians face in getting their, really, their money for their time and their talent?

Franz Nicolay: Yes, I mean, it's not a traditional workplace, but it is a workplace, and musicians are workplace colleagues. We share some of the familiar challenges that anyone has in their workplace. You want to balance having extremely capable colleagues with colleagues that you can get along with. A question that comes up a lot is, do you want the best musician, or do you want the one that's going to be the most fun to hang out with? You have to deal with all kinds of arcane accounting and budgeting to get yourself through the fallow periods between, let's say, tours.

You have to balance work life and family life in all kinds of ways. The demands of being in the studio for long periods of time or away on tour for long periods of time, or just the need to practice and stay up on your instrument can be really affected by having children, for example. Musicians have all kinds of ways of adapting to that. I talked to Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, who said that actually he felt like his work in free improvisation has been really affected by being a father because of just observing the sort of anarchic, improvisational way that a toddler goes through life has affected the way he responds to other improvisers.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Franz Nicolay. He wrote the book called Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music. Are you a session musician or someone who works behind the scenes? If you have gigs and tours and studio work, how do you juggle it all? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Franz Nicolay. He's accordion player, multi-instrumentalist, and author of the book Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music. It's about the unsung musicians behind the people who are in front of the mic for pop and rock music. All right, let's talk about writing credits, because it's not just about ego. Can you explain how songwriting equals money?

Franz Nicolay: Yes. Well, if you're talking about the conflict between art and commerce, who gets the credit for the collective creativity that goes on in rock bands, is exactly where those two things meet and becomes one of the most fraught of the fraught places. Not to get too deep in the weeds on how the legalities of song copyright, but the laws were written around a time over 100 years ago when the assumption was you had a team of professional songwriters, a lyricist, and someone who wrote the music, the melody and chords, who would write songs and then a professional performer would perform them.

Then sometime around the mid-'60s, after Bob Dylan and the Beatles changed the expectations to groups writing and performing their own original songs, that model doesn't overlay exactly when you have people sitting, the performers in a room together, creating collectively. Both from a combination of young rockers not entirely understanding how songwriting works, until it's too late in many cases, songwriting credits work. Just because of that uncomfortable overlay of the law and the reality of how songs get written, it's often the source of tremendous conflict in bands because it's the one source of money, one of the few sources of money, especially these days, that can accrue to musicians, to rock bands when they're no longer active or when they're off the road.

It's not money that comes from merchandise sales or from playing concerts. It's what musicians call mail money, or now, I guess, direct deposit money. It's what can quickly create a class system within an otherwise democratic group, or within a group that has aspirations to equality when one or two primary songwriters all of a sudden has this extra income stream.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Stuart calling from Long island. Hi, Stuart, thanks so much for calling All Of It.

Stuart: Hi, how you doing?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Stuart: Great to be on.

Alison Stewart: Great.

Stuart: I'm a professional musician. I've been playing professionally for about 30 years, full time for the last 20. For me, it's been a matter of always being willing to learn new things and explore new things and saying yes a lot more than I say no to gigs, especially if it requires me to learn new repertoires or new songs, because then that leads to new opportunities.

Alison Stewart: Love that, Stuart. Thanks for calling in. Let's talk to Matt from Rockland county. Hi, Matt, thanks for calling All Of It.

Matt: Hi, thanks for taking my call. Yes, I'm a third-generation artist representative agent with a manager working in the business that was started by my granddad back in the late '50s. I've been at this for about 27 years and have had a lot of interactions, of course, with working musicians over that time and have some perspective, I think, that I wanted to share about what I consider the role of music in society today. In our largely secular world, there is a lack, I believe, of ritual and ceremony and opportunities and the social function that has always served for us throughout history, which is really creating community.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling, Matt. You know, I want to ask you about this idea. You said something earlier, Franz, about being a good hang. Like, you get a call because you're a good hang. It kind of the-- similar, like, do you have good vibes? Can you bring good vibes to the situation? How does this change the line of work of musicians that not only have to be good and professional, but also have some sort of positive influence on the group's energy beyond performing?

Franz Nicolay: Yes, it creates an additional pressure on musicians who want to be part of this world, because obviously, some people have naturally effervescent personalities. Those of us, I might say, who don't necessarily have that on call all the time, you don't want that to keep you from getting work, obviously. Then obviously, the way that people want to be around people who are like them can tend to reproduce biases that already exist in the music industry around the kind of people who get hired. I would say that talking to musicians about this question, people came down very strongly on either side of it, as if it was self-evident that, yes, of course, you have to be a better hang than to be a better musician. Or, no, of course you'll hire someone who's a really transformative musician, even if they're a little grouchy on the road sometimes. It's not quite as obvious as it may seem.

Alison Stewart: Communication is important in any colleagues. In music, there's a common language of music, but you have to be able to communicate really well. You had one musician you spoke to, and he said he worked with a singer who kind of would speak in riddles. He would say stuff like, it's dirt. You're walking through the dirt, and there's Chinese food all around, and then there's a floor. Like, what does that mean exactly? What are some of the key communication skills that are unique to music that band people have to master?

Franz Nicolay: A lot of times people do talk in metaphor, because music is hard to talk about it. Music is hard to write about, famously. It's abstract in all kinds of meaningful ways. One of the things you try to develop is either a way, if you have a long term working relationship with someone, you can develop a shorthand. Otherwise, if you're going in and out of transient situations, you quickly, you just-- That's one of the skills you have to acquire, is figuring out what people who may not be particularly articulate about what they're looking for or may not have the technical language to talk about it, what they want.

One of the people I talked to reframed that sort of negative as a positive in saying that sometimes you have to think about, if you're not able to satisfy what someone's looking for, you have to reframe that as thinking about, well, they don't know what they want, but they do know what they don't want. We can continue this process of, no, it's not that. No, it's not that. No, it's not that. Until we've filled out all the negative space around what it is they actually want.

Alison Stewart: "My nomination," this is a text we got. "My nomination for unsung session musician is Nicky Hopkins. He played piano on early singles by The Who and The Kinks. He performed the piano solo on Revolution by the Beatles and was a member of the Jeff Beck Group. Unfortunately, he passed 30 years ago, but there's a doc about him that'll be streaming next month." Thanks for that tip. Real quick. Evan, you've got about 30 seconds. Is Evan on line six? Evan, you got 30 seconds. Go.

Evan: Yes, I'm here. I'm the drummer and band leader for High & Mighty Brass Band, and we've actually performed at the gala for NPR for the past few years and just wanted to say that as a working musician, it can be a struggle to balance the immediate money, private events, and still have the creative energy to promote original music and write, record all these things. I feel like the modern musician has so much asked of them. You have to keep up with the algorithms and posting and video editing, and photo shoots. Yes, it's a lot.

Alison Stewart: Sounds like a lot. We hope we see you this year. We've only got about a minute left. Franz, anything special you wanted people to know about your book?

Franz Nicolay: It's available now on University of Texas Press.

Alison Stewart: That makes sense. The name of the book is Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music. It's by Franz Nicolay. Franz, thank you so much for making the time to talk to us today.

Franz Nicolay: Thank you for having me.