Band People Quotes

“The original sin of song copyright in America is that it wasn’t set up for a context of collective creativity. “Songwriting . . . is the only instance of creativity that is singled out for special payment,”29 wrote Deena Weinstein. “Writing songs is a form of domination [in which] the egalitarian myth of bands is almost always violated.”30 When the collectives that enforce song copyright were initially established (ASCAP in the US and PRS in the UK were both founded in 1914), popular songwriting was the domain of professional songwriters, or partnerships of a songwriter and a lyricist. As a result, while bands are, of course, free to split percentages as they please, the traditional split has been 50 percent ownership to a lyricist and 50 percent to writer(s) of “the music.” “The music” is historically defined as a melody line and chords, as notated on a “lead sheet.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“It depends on the day,” says Ara Babajian. “Today I feel like a tired old whore. Some days I feel like a god. Most of the time I feel like an ambitious T-shirt salesman with entitlement issues.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Musicians, as workers in the culture industry, occupy overlapping and sometimes conflicting roles: as skilled craftspeople, whose technique requires years of focused, repetitive exercise and maintenance; as crowd-pleasing entertainers at the mercy of the market; as self-employed small business owners, employers, and contingent employees (often simultaneously); as artists cultivating and protecting unstructured creative time; as rentiers, union members, day laborers, independent contractors, and members of self-organizing collectives.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Being giving artistically may seem like an altruistic or generous state of mind, but it’s very self-serving, ultimately,” says Peter Erskine. “I’m the puppet master. The drums—by shaping the dynamics, by controlling the rhythm, I can pull a lot of the strings of the music, and that’s satisfying.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“The drums are the engine making the ship go forward, and the guitar and the singer and whoever else are all up on deck, showing off and performing a show, and the bass is the thing that is steering. Because if I’m just holding an E, we are going straight ahead. If I start to add some other notes, we are going in this direction, and nothing that you can do is going to change what I’m doing to go in that direction. I liked having that control, and being the person who is mediating between the thing that is pushing us forward and the stuff that is going on top. That role in the band is a really satisfying one for me.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“I get frustrated by [my instruments’] limitations,” says Peter Hess, a multi–winds player. “Some of them I’m still just trying to beat into submission; and others I’m trying to push their boundaries—specifically alto saxophone. I really want it to be an analog synth, and have that cutting sine wave power that could slash through anything and make one note be everything, because I don’t love that sound. Does anyone really love the sound of the alto saxophone? Unless it’s Johnny Hodges. So rather than ‘tired of them,’ I’m trying to make them really, really speak.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“You’ll meet people who think that your instrument is one color in a paint box,” says Stuart Bogie. “And when you train on an instrument, you train to think of your instrument as the paint brush, and the colors are the different tones and harmonies that you employ—it’s a very different way of looking at things.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Some songs that Wilco plays I have a lot more latitude; other songs I have really set parts. To me, that’s what music is—it’s just a combination of freedom and limitation, or freedom and rigid structure.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“I started to feel that it was similar to painting or visual art—of course this is romanticized; I’m putting myself in the mind of the painter—you are looking at the painting, and the main goal is that the painting is an evocative piece of art. So you walk up to it and you put a red line diagonally from one corner to the other. Then you step back and look at it, and then you add a little blue square, and right at that moment something profound is happening for you. Then you go up to it and you put a figure of a human being in the lower left-hand corner—and all of a sudden that moment you had a few moments earlier, where something was taking place, is now destroyed. And now nothing is taking place when you look at it. It’s that kind of awareness that we need to have in the recording studio.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“It involves keeping track of what you’re playing. For an album, it pays to be aware of the fact that someone is going to sit and listen to this thing. I was just listening to a recording yesterday, and the drummer was giving his all on every tune, throwing everything including the kitchen sink in terms of rhythmic choices, and basically over-playing. I could see his wheels spinning, like when he could slip in the next impressive lick. Which maybe on one tune is okay, but these performances are all going to be put together. It’s like a film—if you’ve got an actor who’s rolling their eyes every time, you know they’re the bad guy, and they let us know they’re the bad guy. It’s like a grotesque vaudeville performance.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“As our band’s progressed,” says Jenny Conlee, “Colin [Meloy] has wanted more and more creative control over the music. So I feel a little bit more like a player. . . . [I’m] a keyboard player, he’s not a keyboard player, so I can do what I want. I feel a little bit worse for [Chris] Funk our guitar player, because Colin’s a great guitar player and he has ideas for Chris. So Chris is a little less free.” At the same time, she says, “I think I’ve gotten more respectful of the song as the years go by. I came from a jam band scene [where] every single moment in the song is filled; so I came into the band like that; ‘Oh, we need piano on that,ʼ and Colin is like, ‘Rein in the Bruce Hornsby a little bit.’ . . . As our band is getting older, I feel like Colin’s giving me more freedom to be a little bit busier—I guess you have to rein it in before you can let her go again.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“When songwriter Jim White recorded with drummer Jay Belrose, “I said, ‘You’re playing so fucking great, what are you doing, why does this sound so good?’ and this was his reply: he said, ‘On your demo tapes, I can see that you really like drum machines, so I tried to play like a drum machine.’ This was one of the best jazz drummers walking the earth, and he attached no ego to it. He just understood, ‘This is how I can best reflect this artist’s vision,’ so he played like a drum machine. But he also made it incredibly personal.”42”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Some of this youthful exhibitionism is about being noticed, placing a musical watermark: Nate Brenner, on early Tune-Yards, “was thinking a lot about my personal style in terms of wanting some of the bass lines to be recognizable. . . . It’s like [when] you hear Charlie Parker, you hear his same licks—a lot of people have their go-to licks—so you can immediately identify them. Growing up in the jazz world, I thought more about that—wanting people to hear the bass and know it’s me.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“But I feel like accepting the typecasting, because a good thing about typecasting is that maybe other people know better what you’re good at.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Victoria Williams, says Joey Burns, “would describe things like a story: ‘This song is a cloud in the shape of an elephant, and it’s trying to squeeze through a keyhole to get into this room.”26 This technique, says Brian Viglione, is particularly effective with songwriters, “because they tend to be very feeling-based. If they don’t have the terminology at their disposal, they can say, ‘Well, this is where I’m coming from emotionally.’ And I work very well with that, because a lot of my playing is based on emotion too. When I try to listen to the lyrics of a song, that can help guide my drum performance, because I can play off the lyric. There’s that symbiotic relationship between the story being told, and how I can help support that.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Over the next few rehearsals, the producer kept walking up to me and [saying], “It sounds like smooth jazz, what you’re doing there.” And I’m thinking, smooth jazz? I’m not even playing with that sort of articulation [or] phrasing at all. I’m going straight for some cool jazz, a modal thing. And he says, “Ah, it sounds nam-by-pamby.” And I’m like, “Okay.” Then the director said, “Stuart, you’ve got to do something else for this. I need you to ‘squeeze the lemon.’ I need you to really seduce this woman with your saxophone.” And—not that I make a habit of this sort of behavior—but I think there is only one person in this room who has had a romantic encounter through playing the saxophone, and it’s me! I think I’m the expert! Not that the saxophone has been the aphrodisiac that the world may imagine, but what it does have, I feel like I have at least been exposed to. So I was like, “Fine, fine, fine.” And I did an impersonation of what I thought was old burlesque saxophone, you know like “va do va vu va ve va vu vuh.” I’m like, this is ridiculous. And after, everyone was saying, “Yeah!” And I’m like, “What? You like that?” And they say, “Yeah, yeah, that’s perfect.” Afterward I was getting a drink of water and one of the dancers came up to me and [said], “Stuart, I don’t know what you were doing with your saxophone in that last run-through, but that was fantastic.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? This is what impressed you?” Okay, all right, I get it. I’ve just got to get out of my own silly head and remember that I’m painting in primary colors; I have things to communicate, and too subtle of a tonal area isn’t going to work. I was dead wrong, and they were right. It’s a different thing, what translates on Broadway. If you go to a Broadway show, I think the actors probably experience a similar thing—if you go up there like a film actor, you are not going to communicate anything. It’s not going to reach the edge of the stage. You need more concrete gestures.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“The Basie band consisted of individuals each of whom was in his or her own right a musician of superb skill and musical intelligence, who realized those qualities to their fullest by placing them at the service of the common enterprise. It was a remarkable social, no less than musical, achievement, not the least of which lay in the realization that the problems can never be solved once and for all but must be solved again and again every day and require constant vigilance and diplomacy.17”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Musicians were the canaries in the coal mine of the precariat, accomplices in their own swindle (“Thanks @spotify for adding my song to their #BBQParty #playlist!!”);”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“When you are “living in a tube with wheels one hundred fifty days a year, with everybody’s butt and elbow right in your nose,” says Rick Steff, “you can be the best player in the world, but if nobody wants to sit next to you on the bus, you’ve got a problem.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“The crucial test of charisma and expertise can be found not only in communicative strength and persuasiveness, but also in the responses of organizational subordinates.”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“Every band is a foreign country, with its peculiar customs and dialects, slang and standards. But every band is also (when it works) a small business, a romance, an employer/employee dynamic, a hierarchy, a creative collaboration, and something between a family—siblings or cousins, sometimes literally—and a gang. The rules governing those relationships and hierarchies are usually unspoken, unique to each collection of personalities, and have to be developed and negotiated from the ground up in each situation; often by young people whose priorities are driven more by idealism than by the practicality and the best practices of human resources management (“Pop music is not only cultural work,” wrote cultural theorist Andrew Beck, “it is, apparently, very badly organized cultural work”).1”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

“As sociologist Howard Becker (whose Art Worlds is a crucial reference for this book) wrote, “These [occupational titles] carry a great deal of symbolic meaning.”7”
― Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music