When watching a live show by a rock band or listening to one of its recordings, most audience members probably aren’t thinking much about all that goes into the music. To them, musicmaking is merely the work of some kind of mysterious, magical machine; like electricity or the internet, they know there’s some kind of science behind it that makes it possible for such conveniences to exist—but why ponder the processes when you can just flip a switch and voila you have light or cat videos? And yet such face-value-taking is a testament to the well-oiled operations of a band leader and their accompanists: If it’s all working the way it’s supposed to, the audience won’t be wondering about the musical sausage-making.
So many of these jobbing musicians make at least part of their living by providing the artistic buttress and canvas-coloring texture to the visionary singer whose songs and shows they’re hired to serve. But what is it like to be one of these musical mercenaries, these less-in-the-limelight, sessioneer-ing side players? In his new book, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music, author and Bard College professor Franz Nicolay gives dozens of these often-unheralded musicians the chance to speak their piece. And it so happens that he’s an ideal conduit for their thoughts and voices—after all, he’s one of them himself.
“I conceived of this book as a collective portrait on the model of books like Studs Terkel’s Working or Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz,” writes Nicolay, a keyboardist and accordionist best known for his ongoing membership in indie rock titans the Hold Steady, in the introduction to Band People. “[M]ixing analysis, narration, oral history, and quotations from literature (academic and otherwise).” All of that the book certainly does, in thought-provoking ways that pull back the curtain for a glimpse of what it’s like to be a member of this chosen artistic outlaw tribe while offering therapeutic, peer-to-peer moments of shared hopes and experiences as it grapples with the rapidly shifting realities of working musicians’ negotiating an increasingly unforgiving digital age.
Granite State Grounding
Center Sandwich, the remote New Hampshire census designated place where Nicolay grew up, isn’t exactly known for having a thriving music scene. In fact, besides its annual Sandwich Fair, the hamlet (population 156 in 2020), doesn’t seem to be known for much of anything at all. But its ruralness had appealed to the musician’s back-to-the-land mom and dad. “My parents were hippies,” he explains. “My mother was a visual artist, and my father was a potter. We lived on 50 acres of uncleared land in a cabin with no running water, and our family raised sheep. It was a lovely way to grow up, but by the time I was 17 I was out of there and on my way to Greenwich Village.” He studied jazz and classical composition at NYU, and the idea of being in a band was, as it is for so many, a big part of the New York draw. “Most people coming out of the conservatory were more mercenary, but for me there was this romance associated with bands,” says Nicolay. “People in bands seemed to be attracted to idealism. A band was like a gang; there was this ‘all-for-one, one-for-all’ attitude, with a sense of bonding and in-jokes that served as a defensive wall against the outside world.”
Despite being in school, Nicolay wasted no time in making his way into the band world he’d been romanticizing. “I was a creature of ambition, and I started answering ‘musician wanted’ ads in the Village Voice,” he recalls. “I played guitar in an R&B cover band, I played piano for a singer. I was able to get my foot in a lot of different scenes.” One of those scenes was the dark-cabaret punk culture that had taken root in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, bringing a Brechtian bent and Weimar-era vibe to the club-scape. In late 2000 he joined the circus-like band World/Inferno Friendship Society, playing as the accordionist of the group’s frequently changing lineup. “Being in World/Inferno was an education,” Nicolay says about the ensemble, which was fronted by the late, eccentric Jack Terricloth. “It was a nine-piece band, and the vibe was very much ‘We bring the party.’ Everything was haphazard, and I was just a rube then. We went from playing to 40 people at Mercury Lounge to playing to over 1,000 at festivals.” Concurrent with his time in the group, in 2001 he founded Anti-Social Music, a nonprofit collective that presents concerts of works by emerging, mainly New York-based composers that to date has performed over 75 shows and premiered 123 new works. In 2002 he launched his own performing and recording project, the Balkan jazz-styled Guignol. But a bigger break, as it were, was just around the bend.
Grasping Stardom
Although he’d rejoin the group for shorter stints later, Nicolay served with World/Inferno Friendship Society for eight frenetic years, making three albums and touring widely with the caravan-like outfit before hopping off in 2008. Concurrent with his leaving, he started a solo career that thus far has produced six albums—the most recent is 2022’s New River—and a slew of singles and EPs. One of the bands that World/Inferno met and played with in the Midwest was a quartet called Lifter Puller. After the Minneapolis band imploded, its members Craig Finn and Tad Kubler relocated to Brooklyn, where in 2003 they formed the Hold Steady. Nicolay performed as a guest player on Almost Killed Me, the Hold Steady’s 2004 debut, and was invited to become a full-fledged member when the group was preparing to record 2005’s Separation Sunday. “It was a pretty unambitious invitation,” explains Nicolay. “I was already in five other bands, doing stuff here and there, and Craig said it wouldn’t really be a big commitment. So I was, like, ‘Sure, what’s one more?’ But it was like jumping on a rocket ship.”
The Hold Steady’s brand of earnest, literate, melodic, and unabashedly classicist alt-rock swiftly found fervent favor in the music press and broadcast outlets. The band steadily morphed into a relentless road juggernaut, becoming a big-drawing favorite at large clubs and indie festivals in the US, England, and Australia. Nicolay made two more studio albums with the group, 2006’s Boys and Girls in America and 2008’s Stay Positive, before leaving the group in 2010. “I was spreading myself too thin, it had been five very intense years,” he says. “I joined [Florida-based pop punk band] Against Me! as a touring member, which got me the budget to make another solo record [2010’s Luck and Courage; 2012’s Do the Struggle and 2014’s To Us the Beautiful would come next]. I also started doing a lot more sideman work.” In the latter capacity, Nicolay—who was dubbed “the number one accordionist in punk” by Dying Scene webzine—has seen his talents hired by the Dresden Dolls, Mark Eitzel, Frank Turner, Leftover Crack, the Loved Ones, Star Fucking Hipsters, Jennifer O’Connor, Hammell on Trial, and many others. Music, though, wasn’t the only creative or vocational avenue that Nicolay would pursue.
Back to School
Nicolay enrolled at Columbia University for writing, earning an MFA from the college in 2015; he’d later briefly return to teach there himself. When his Ukrainian-born wife Maria took a job at U.C. Berkley, he started as an adjunct teacher there in 2018. On his early solo tours of Eastern Europe he’d read ravenously and kept detailed road diaries, which would end up becoming the basis of his first book. “I’d always spend whatever free time I had checking out whatever bookstores there were near the clubs,” says Nicolay. “People would ask me to write things occasionally, and a friend of mine put out a chapbook that I’d written. It just seemed like the next logical step was a book-length project.” The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar garnered widespread accolades and was named a “Season’s Best Travel Book” by the New York Times when it was published in 2016.
In 2021 he signed on as a faculty member to teach music and written arts at Bard College, settling with his wife, who is also a Bard educator, and their two children in Tivoli. “I’d been to the Hudson Valley before,” he says. “I always liked it; it feels familiar because it’s mountainous and rural, like where I’m from in New Hampshire, but it’s not as remote.” The same year he started at Bard, Nicolay published Someone Should Pay for Your Pain, which centers on the dark and complex relationship and rivalry between an influential but marginalized singer-songwriter and his younger and more commercially successful protege, was called “the great rock ‘n’ roll novel” by Suicide Blonde author Darcey Steinke and a “knockout fiction debut” by Buzzfeed.
Simmer and Boil
With his two previous books drawing on his own musical life and observations, Nicolay was keen to turn the microphone over to the musicians he interviewed and quotes for Band People. Featured in the book are some bigger names, like Nels Cline, Mike Watt, and Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss, but also many who are perhaps less known to casual music fans—but no less valuable to the music itself. “I got stuck on this project, I think, as a way of making sense of my own career,” he writes. “[M]y barely bounded ambition to be a full band member and pro sideman and a legitimized composer/arranger and a cult figure and some kind of star and writer—and as a way to acknowledge the demands of my ego while still identifying with the craftsmanlike self-respect of being a reliable, prideful, dignified session player—even, occasionally, a secret weapon.” In the book, through his judicious interviews, the author-musician’s fellow tribe members candidly and vividly recount their methods for surviving as working musicians. Outside of Band People, though, Nicolay is emphatic about impressing upon his students the importance of having a sideline to being a side-player. “‘Get a portable skill,’ I always tell them,” says the teacher. “Something like carpentry, plumbing, copy editing, or house painting. Even if you have a decent amount of work as a musician, you can’t be on the road 365 days a year.”
Even with Band People‘s ink still relatively fresh—the book was published in September—Nicolay is already looking toward his next literary foray and planning still more musical endeavors. “I have about 50 pages toward another novel, so I’ll be getting more into to that soon,” he says. “It’s, like, do a book, let that simmer a bit while you go and do another record. Then do another book. The do another record. It’s like rotating crops.”
Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music is out now through University of Texas Press. Franznicolay.com.
This article appears in January 2025.
