What's It Really Like to Be in a Rock Band?

An interview with Franz Nicolay, member of The Hold Steady and author of the illuminating book "Band People" about "the character actors of music."

In the recent book Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music, musician/author Franz Nicolay pulls back the curtain on what it’s really like to live the rock band life—namely, it’s gritty, hard, underpaid work that’s sometimes creatively rewarding and other times involves swallowing pride, negotiating contracts, and figuring out your taxes. It’s a thorough look at what he calls “band people,” whom, he explains, are the character actors of music. They are the “out-of-focus guys,” as Almost Famous can tell you, the people behind the band’s front person. A lot of them, we learn, love this arrangement; they’d rather not deal with the pressures of lead-singer fame. But their lives are a lot more like those of architects, accountants, or any number of workaday professions than you might imagine.

I talked with Nicolay — who served as the keyboardist and pianist for the indie rock band The Hold Steady — about why he wanted to write about the working lives of “band people” rather than the more glamorous “rock star” narrative, how band dynamics can be difficult to manage as acts become successful, and how the book resonated with readers in related creative fields who saw parallels to their own experiences (including myself as an author). He also answered a question I’ve had for a while: Where have all the bands gone?

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong: You pitched this book originally eight years ago, but ended up writing your excellent novel about a struggling, middle-aged musician, Someone Should Pay for Your Pain, in the interim. Why and how did you end up coming back to this?

Franz Nicolay: I almost gave up on it, but I'm glad I powered through on this one. I did a couple of proposals, but I couldn’t get my agent interested.

JKA: What finally changed?

FN: I sold it myself is what happened, to a university press. Obviously [my agent] was thinking about what would appeal to a trade press, and that involved a lot more personal material. And also I think playing up the gossipy aspect of it, trying to get, not to put too fine a point on it — people to talk shit about their more famous band leaders.

That really wasn't the kind of book that I wanted to write for all kinds of reasons. And so I was griping about it to a friend of mine who's an academic and because one of the things that was really energizing me was this research in the academic literature around hierarchy and group dynamics and stuff like that. And so my friend is like, “This sounds like it belongs on a university press.” And we sort of hashed it out for a little while. He gave me a contact and I was like, “You know what? I know someone at University of Texas, let me just drop him an email.” And they got back pretty quickly and we're like, “Hey, sounds great. Let's do it.”

And the nice thing about Texas, especially with their American Music Series, is that for an academic press, they are pretty good at having their core academic publications, but also having some more public-facing material. They have a Times bestseller with Hanif Abdurraqib’s Tribe Called Quest book [Go Ahead in the Rain]. So they understood the kind of book that it was.

JKA: A million stories have been told about band strife. That's why we love Behind the Music. But your book does this thing that I feel like no one had done before, which is really delving into why it's such a unique arrangement, a band. Can you talk about that, the things that stood out for you as what makes bands so special?

FN: We've taken the institution of the rock band for granted when we write about rock bands without actually stopping and thinking, What is this thing? Because the idea of the rock band, and especially the rock band as a self-generating creative unit, is relatively recent. We're talking like 1965, ‘66, because the first generation of rockers were not bands for the most part. They're solo acts, they're Jerry Lewis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry. And it isn't until the British Invasion, and particularly when the Beatles start having hits as songwriters, that there arises this new expectation, which is that you're going to have this sort-of gang that's also a creative unit. So you end up with the expectation of an institution that's relatively egalitarian or at least idealistic in all sorts of ways, but that's also an entrepreneurial small business, but that's also a creative collaboration, and that's also this chosen family. It has these quasi-familial aspects to it. And so all these layers of it intersect in very fascinating ways. And it seems to have to be reinvented from scratch each time. And often by people who are too young to understand what they're getting themselves into if it's successful.

JKA: You make this point that they almost always start out, first of all, probably not making any money and being young. And then if they become super-successful, it's already too late to think through how this thing's going to be structured.

FN: It's too late, and it's usually, at that point, moving too fast. Decisions are getting made on the fly. You're getting a phone call while you're hung over and overtired in the back of a van driving from Des Moines to Minneapolis or whatever. It's hard to convene a business meeting in those situations.

So in a classic band of young people that get together with ideals and best intentions, they might settle on an idea of a relatively democratic hierarchy. But then when attention and money come into play, there can be emergent hierarchies. I think we're all sort-of comfortable with the hierarchies that emerge from egos and bruised egos, but just as often the hierarchies are imposed externally. That can be from management and business contacts, who find it easier to talk to one person in the band rather than all of them for logistical reasons. It's hard to get everybody in a room. Sometimes there might be only one or two people in the band who are comfortable talking to lawyers and management; some people aren't interested in that sort of thing or are suspicious of that sort of thing. And then there can be the pressure from press. Press find it easier logistically to, let's say, photograph one or two people for the cover of a magazine, instead of trying to squeeze four or five people in. Do you have to interview everyone? Do you interview them together? Do you interview them separately or just talk to one person? And then there's the audience hierarchies. Audiences are going to naturally gravitate toward and fixate on lyricists.

On a very basic level, it's quicker and easier to connect with lyricists. And so that brings another emergent hierarchy into the mix. Who's the star in that sense? Who's the audience looking at?

JKA: Jacob Schlichter from Semisonic talks about how the band people will take the local newspaper reporter’s interview instead of the front person, and he says, “We're basically a journalism training school.”

FN: I love that. The songwriter talks to the Post and the Times, and the drummer talks to the college newspaper.

Nicolay (far right) with The Hold Steady.

JKA: I definitely did many of those interviews in my day as a reporter, so I was always getting the third guy in Radiohead or whatever.

FN: As the keyboardist in The Hold Steady, I was often talking to the student journalist.

JKA: This book is focused on what you call “band people,” and I love that you describe them as the character actors of the music world, because I think we can really understand that. Why did you want to tell these people's stories in particular?

FN: In part because I'm one of them. The point at which I was conceiving of the book was the point at which I had come off the road for the first time in my adult life in my late 30s. I was a new father and my wife had started a stressful job and it made more sense for me to be the stay-at-home parent. And so it was a little bit of an identity crisis, but also an opportunity for perspective to get off the treadmill for a year or two and look back and think about: What is this thing that I devoted the first 15 years of my working life to that feels like it has meaning? There’s a community of people who recognize each other, but I don't know what the name of that community is.

I want to think through what the dignity of that work is because there's a currency in being famous. If you're famous, you can make things happen. You can put on a show and people will come. You can organize a benefit and you can raise money. You can do all these things if you're famous and that's the thing that you miss if you are respected but not famous. And so the question is: What do you get in return for not having that kind of currency?

JKA: What was the band people’s reaction to you wanting to tell their stories?

FN: In many cases, it was, Wow, I've never been asked these things before. I quote a couple people who point out that they've never been interviewed, and these are people who are 20 years into rock and roll careers. One was a drummer, one was a woodwind player. Why do people get interviewed? It's a question of the structural qualities of the music industry.

People are usually interviewed around a record cycle. That's when your publicist puts out a pitch and says, “Hey, this band is available to talk about this project.” And those conversations are usually going to be had with the singer or whoever the primaries in the band are. And it's a less obvious publicity hook to talk to people outside of a record cycle about the general work of being in a band, what it's like, in the absence of some controversy about the specific band or some project that you're trying to publicize. So there's never an excuse to have those conversations other than backstage at a festival. That's when I've had conversations like this. You can have some of that shop talk and some of that gossip.

Any adult who's good at their job will have spent some time thinking about their role in the world. What is it that I'm doing? Is it worth it? What parts of it am I good at? And so people have been thinking about this stuff and they're just not asked that often. Usually I found people have a lot to say.

JKA: Have you gotten reactions to the book being out from these people?

FN: That's really gratifying to field those text messages of people being like, “Wow, you nailed it. You got it. I really saw myself in this book.” Some of them were like, “I had a real philosophical afternoon thinking about my role in the world.” Some of them were like, “I'm going to ask for a raise,” stuff like that. And so that's really gratifying.

Another person who I had this conversation with is a music journalist who has his own platform and his own niche in the world, but also has a day job in corporate communications, primarily as a speech writer for a CEO. Having to inhabit the voice of a corporate executive for his job and then doing his own writing as a freelance situation, he felt like that was analogous to a musician who is a support for someone else's songs in one part of their life, and then in another part is maybe a band leader.

JKA: What do you think the general public gets most wrong about rockstar touring life?

FN: It’s like being in a submarine, this boat that's slightly bigger than your body, and you're getting a crappy night's sleep every night with 10 other people snoring 6 inches from you. I've found that a lot of bands, if they're given the choice and they have the financial flexibility, are always choosing van plus hotel over a tour bus if they can.

There’s still this idea that — how the cliche goes — do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. So many people would love to be professional musicians that the idea of talking frankly about the work of it in anything less than idealized terms is offensive to their dreams. And I've gotten that occasionally in the feedback to this book.

JKA: Interesting. Kind of like, “What are you bitching about?”

FN: Yeah. I think it broke containment a little bit when The New Yorker wrote about it, and so people picked it up thinking that it was going to be fun tour stories, and were disappointed that it wasn't. Of course, I'm grateful that they wrote about it.

JKA: What is the future of band people? Is it complicated by the rise of streaming music?

FN: Spotify and Apple Music, it's a little bit like Amazon and Uber. People who are paying attention have a sort of ambient sense that they're bad, but it's hard to meaningfully take a moral stand on that when they're so convenient. And so the problem with streaming royalties is not going to be, I think, solved by shaming customers. They'll just get mad at you.

It's the same thing as, if you remember Lars Ulrich and Napster back in the day. He was correct. He was not wrong. It was just a bad look.

Making customers feel bad is the worst. And it's hard to shame an offshore corporation that’s worth billions of dollars. So where are the points of leverage is a little bit of an open question.

JKA: And you talk in the book about the complications of songwriting credits — when the band people are credited and when they’re not. That must be so much more important now.

FN: It is in the sense that that's another income stream that's available. It isn't in the sense that where the real fortunes came in terms of songwriting credit was around radio play, and FM radio just doesn't play that much band music. So that's the other part of your question about what is the future of band people: What is the future of bands post-home recording technology, which has increased in power and decreased in price? So many people improved their home recording situations in the pandemic that there's a real disincentive to getting together with other people to make music. You need to find people that you get along with, whose creative vision matches yours. You need to find and pay for a rehearsal space, plan times where everyone can get together. As opposed to: You can open your laptop and put headphones on and make your beats. And so if you look at best new artist lists or the end-of-the-year lists of people that are new, it tends to be much more solo practitioners or solo practitioners that are masquerading as a band, like Waxahatchee is Katie Crutchfield. MJ Lenderman — it’s indie rock, but the ones that are breaking through are tending not to be bands in the classic, collaborative sense. You can make a full band record by yourself and then hire some people if you need to go on tour.

You can buy Band People here. For more about Franz, visit his website.

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