Franz Nicolay on Rock’s Middle Class

We all know the story of rock music by now: A small group of young, driven musicians gets together and creates incendiary songs in someone’s garage or basement.

The band plays in public, catches fire and winds up with a record contract and chance at greatness. A debut album gets made, and the band takes the world by storm. 

Then the band starts to splinter. Someone’s ego gets in the way. Two members openly feud. Someone, or a few someones, get substance abuse problems, and the band careens toward acrimoniousness, a failed sophomore effort, and break up. As a co-founder of the Refreshments, I can relate.

Band People author Franz Nicolay takes no interest in such overtold stories. Instead, Nicolay, whose career as a musician includes his time as the keyboardist of the Hold Steady, seeks to focus his book on the “musical middle class,” or “the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music.” These are the folks who fill out the stage around the star of that touring act you go to see at your local venue. They are the gears of the music industry who keep the headline artist sounding good and keep the show interesting while most of the crowd waits for the radio hit that got them through one summer in their teens.

In his book, the clichés of rock ‘n’ roll have refreshingly taken a back seat to the struggles of talented freelance professionals in a competitive business. How will I get through the summer financially if Client X doesn’t come through? How will I make one engagement in New York on Friday and another in L.A. on Saturday? How will I keep my family insured through all of it? So much for rocking and rolling all night.

The musicians Nicolay interviews in Band People come from a range of groups, with the majority circulating among what we might call the live rock music scene of the 21st century. In the book, Nicolay expresses some regret at not being able to touch on a wider range of musicians, and perhaps more musicians that fall outside of the white male rock type. I found that the choice to keep the focus on a smaller segment of the musicians allows his story to delve deeper into a particular subculture of musicians as opposed to getting lost in the wide range of books Band People could be.

In my interview with Nicolay, he describes the musicians interviewed as “quintessential band people, especially those who seem like ‘secret weapons’—appreciated in their field, not household names, but somehow associated with certain acts’ best work.” 

His process for finding these subjects was fairly organic. He started by interviewing those musicians whom he thought fit the bill and “would end each interview by asking those musicians who they thought of as exemplary of the category,” he says. “[Then I] tried to connect with that list, and so on. Some names came up over and over again—Jon Wurster, Kelly Hogan, Josh Freese, Shahzad Ismaily.”

In the book, Nicolay is able to get the musicians to open up about their profession. One admits that quitting his band was more traumatic than getting his divorce. Others are open about being slighted for not getting bigger cuts of songwriting money or tour receipts.

“For the most part,” Nicolay says, “it felt like people had been waiting to be asked these types of questions. As I say in the introduction, in general this is not a category of musicians who get interviewed a lot, and especially not about the nuts and bolts of behind-the-scenes band operations.”

While Band People refreshingly focuses on those musicians who don’t occupy centerstage, there are some heavy hitters interviewed, at least to me. Mike Watt is someone who was forced to the center of his own stage, in a sense, but it’s the element of shared experience that brings all of Nicolay’s subjects together. 

“By definition,” he says, “these are people who are not necessarily household names—so while Freese plays with big names, Michael Bland with Prince, Jim Sclavunos with Nick Cave or whatever, they’re not inaccessible, and I wanted to underscore the similarity of experience across levels of band visibility.” 

Since the beginning of the digital revolution, the industry has figured out that to play with the right artists, many musicians will do it for next to nothing—or even pay for the privilege—flooding the field with aspiring pros. Yet the impression from Nicolay’s book is that most of his interviewees make something resembling livings. I mention to Nicolay that I remember a band with several hits in the nineties proudly advertising for support bands for their mega-concerts, so long as the band was willing to play for free. For his book, Nicolay avoided the types of musicians who might say yes to such an offer.

VIDEO: Franz Nicolay on The Keyboard Chronicles podcast from Australia 

 “… I wanted to talk to people who were deeply into their careers,” he says, “to separate them from the amateurs and semi-professionals who may have a band for a few years but drop out by their mid or late twenties. By definition [the musicians interviewed in the book have] figured out a way to make it a living. In general … they’re primarily relying on income from live performance.”

The square peg of songwriting income has never fit well into the round hole of group songwriting dynamics, so it’s not surprising to find songwriting monies and credit to be fraught areas of inquiry for Nicolay’s interviewees. Nicolay points to familiar names when I ask for any examples—either associated with the musicians in the book or otherwise—where he feels like the group of artists in question got the songwriting royalty arrangement right. “It does seem to me that the fascination with U2, R.E.M. and Radiohead as gigantic bands who split songwriting equally speaks to a residual wish that that were the norm rather than the exception,” he says, “even as most veteran band people have acclimated themselves to various alternatives.”

For the interviewees of the book, the concerns have to be more down to earth. There are downsides to their career choice, but the rewards of living some semblance of a musician’s dream is worth the red-eye flights and non-regular pay and too much time away from loved ones. They’re paying their bills while maintaining their musical souls. How many musicians can say that?

“One of the through-lines [of the book],” Nicolay says, “is that musicians want to say yes to things, [but] they just don’t want to be disrespected, whether that’s by the pay, by unreasonable demands or by the sense that they’re not being treated as human beings and creative actors.”

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Art Edwards

Art Edwards is a co-founder of the Refreshments. His writing has appeared in Salon, Quillette, The Writer, The Believer, and many others. His most recently finished book is My Iliad Odyssey, a memoir.

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• Franz Nicolay on Rock’s Middle Class - September 5, 2024