This annotated playlist, created by author and musician Franz Nicolay, dissects some songs that make appearances in his new book Band People, which looks at the lives of musicians who make up a band without being the frontperson of any one band. Read on to hear how musicians handle songwriting credits, live versus recorded performances, and collaboration over the course of a career—and listen to the playlist here, or click the song titles to listen on YouTube!
“I Want To Be A Sideman” written by Dave Frishberg, performed by Rosemary Clooney
In Band People, I explore the creative and working lives of support musicians in the rock world. In the pre-rock decades of recorded popular music in America, the preeminent stereotype of a band person was the big-band “sideman”—the Willy Lomans of jazz, playing cards at the union office, sleeping upright in the band bus after a dance hall gig in Dubuque. In the peak years of the big band boom, Down Beatran a column called “Sideman Switches,” noting movements between bands. “These guys were like ball players,” wrote Warren Leight in his play Side Man. “On the road, written up in the papers, endorsing trumpets in Down Beat. Bands passing each other in the night even traded sidemen: one first trumpet player and an alto for a second trumpet and a tenor to be named later.” The romantic vision of the workingman artist toiling in anonymity remains irresistible.
“No Funeral At All” by Causing A Tiger (Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi, Shahzad Ismaily)
The introduction of the book shines a close light on one musician, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, who is renowned among his peers for his abilities as a collaborator. Says Carla Kihlstedt: “He is a master at dragging it out of everyone else. Early on, when I first met him, he would always be pushing me to play instruments I’d never played before or go walk in the woods and record myself playing accordion, and sneak into the Redwoods while no one was looking and stay there after hours. And he’s always like, ‘How can we get the most vulnerable and powerful version of you?’ And that’s his mastery as a collaborator. For a while I was in an improvised band with him called Causing A Tiger, where for one record he just said, ‘Okay, you’re not playing violin on this. You’re too comfortable playing violin. You’re just going to sing.’ At that point I hardly considered myself—I sang a lot, but I was uncomfortable with that moniker. I feel like if he could turn 5 percent of that skill on himself, the world would just ache to hear it.”
“Bride of Rain Dog” by Tom Waits
In Band People, I use the analogy of the “character actor” to refer to band people. That category can include both those who remain recognizably themselves regardless of part, whose personal quirks and tics are the core of their appeal, as well as the discreet craftspeople who “disappear” into a role—the Jeff Goldblums versus the Mark Rylances. The late Ralph Carney was the former: “Usually people want me because they want what I do,” he said. His longtime collaborator Tom Waits—who Carney compares to Duke Ellington for his tendency to hire people for their specific voice—described Carney’s playing as “like a broken toy that works better than before it was broken.”
“Trashman in Furs” by The Geraldine Fibbers
One of the signature challenges for band people is translating a bandleader’s often vague or metaphorical directions into concrete parts. Nels Cline has confronted the difficulty of satisfying artists who have “a sound in [their] head . . . that is, let’s say, in some cases not professional sounding.” He continues: “I started realizing that a lot of songwriters don’t want finesse in their music. They’re looking for something raw, something immediate, something that stands out, that’s a signature sound on a piece rather than a bunch of fancy note-blurs, flurries of notes. That can be a challenge for me—not conceptually so much, but to actually do that so somebody with that sensibility is convinced by it. Otherwise, I’m putting on a little hat and pretending. It has to be convincing. I’m not married to the idea of sounding like I know what I’m doing, so at least I have that going for me. Carla [Bozulich] had an idea on a song called ‘Trashman In Furs’ that she wanted the guitar solo to sound like an earnest 14-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom on his bed trying to play a lead guitar solo, but not well, he’s not good. I tried; and I don’t think I got it, quite, on the record.”
“Books About Miles Davis” by The Ergs!
Meanwhile, those frontpeople/songwriters can feel quite possessive of their imagined arrangements. “Ultimately when you’re writing the song, you know how it goes in your head,” says Mike Yannich, who has been on both sides. “So, in certain band situations with The Ergs!, we would have arguments over certain things that would go on the recordings; and I always felt like, well, it’s my song. There is a famous—amongst our friends—fight about an egg shaker on a song called ‘Books About Miles Davis.’ I laid the part down, and as lead percussionist and the songwriter, I thought, why not do this? And Joe, the bass player, and I had a pretty epic fight about it. I definitely lost that fight—but we had a compromise a year later and put out the ‘egg shaker version’ of the 7-inch single. We worked it out, [and] that just seems so funny and trivial now. But at the time—I mean, it was a scary fight, lots of yelling.”
“American Waste” by Black Flag
An underrated challenge for band people is joining an existing band, sometimes replacing a member with an identifiable sound or whose parts or personality have become beloved to fans. Drummer Bill Stevenson “felt like in Black Flag my job was to just do the best I could to do the stuff how [ex-drummer] Robo had done it, or on newer material to try to do it how Robo would have done it, because I loved Robo. Robo is one of my heroes, and he kept getting deported. Okay, Robo can’t be here; but I’m here, and I will do this how it is supposed to be done, how he would do it. But as we progressed in Black Flag, oddly enough, as we moved into new material . . . [bandleader] Greg [Ginn] made it really clear to me that he had not been fond of Robo’s drumming. He wanted me to play a more strong, sturdy rock beat. So, to me, I was underutilized in that band, because Greg had this idea that the beat should be strong and simple. By contrast, before me, Robo is from Colombia and he brought this cumbia influence to Black Flag, that probably no one in the whole world even knows what I’m talking about—but if you listen to the way he plays, his high- hats come in little sets of threes and this is a cumbia thing, like jink jink-jink sha jink-jink jink jink-jink sha, so he brought a flair to the music that made Black Flag sound how they sound.”
“Odd Said The Doe” by Nina Nastasia & Jim White, performed on ABC Australia 2007
Until relatively recently, to be a musician was to play live, full stop. For the last century or so, the job has bifurcated: playing live, and recording. There is surprisingly little consensus on the question of whether the two skills are different. A specific issue in touring situations is how to keep fresh when arrangements may not change night-to-night. Players focus on detail work. “Sometimes I talk about rolling a rock up the hill every day,” says Jim White, “and the sun is different, you see something else, and you push it up.”
“Within the pop- structured rock songs that get played live,” says Doug Gillard, “I like seeing improvisation, different fills, different drum fills, different guitar flashes. … I’m always trying to think of, ‘Can I join here? What chord voicing can I throw in here that will not disrupt the band, not sound too weird for the band that I’m playing for and distract them, but also be interesting to the crowd?’” Not every gig, though, includes the possibility of these low-level moments of improvisation. White made a duo record with Nina Nastasia which featured elaborate arrangements. To reproduce them live, he prepared and played along with overdubbed and pre-recorded tracks: “I suddenly realized after a handful of shows, basically there was nothing to—[it] was the same every night exactly. It was just a representation, just a presentation, rather than an event. I was kinda like, ‘Ah shit.’ … I never did it before or since.”
“Right Now” by Babes in Toyland, performed at Primavera Festival 2015
For Lori Barbero, though, “every night is different, and we don’t care about perfection. When we just played Primavera in Barcelona, [Babes in Toyland singer/ guitarist Kat Bjelland’s] strings broke, and our tech wasn’t with us that night, so a stage person put ’em on, but they put ’em on upside down. It was being recorded live, and there was probably thirty thousand people, sixty thousand people there. Huge festival. And Kat had to just fucking go with, ‘Oh, the strings are upside down.’ But some people said they thought that was unbelievably great when shit like that happens, [not] ‘Yeah, it was exactly like the last time I saw ’em.’ We’re playing the same songs and stuff [each show], but we have a different energy.”
“Javelin Unlanding” by Bill Callahan
Similarly, musicians can grow frustrated with the limitations and cliches of their primary instruments. Drummer Thor Harris “was really tired of the rock beat, the boom–chick,” and on Bill Callahan’s Dream River “tried not to play drum set. I tried to play congas on the whole thing, with a kick drum and a clave on my left foot. … There is something about that sort of nervous exploration, when I’m playing an instrument that I’m not very good at, that is far more interesting. When I play drums, the trouble is there’s a lot of tried-and-true tropes that just come out of me—because I’m a musician of a certain age who listened to certain drummers—and I do consciously try to pluck that stuff out and not play a bunch of clichés.”
“Lust For Life” by Iggy Pop, “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, and “Walk On the Wild Side” by Lou Reed
Many musicians have a pet example of an instrumental part that’s so distinctive that it comes to define the song, without being eligible for the lucrative residuals that come with songwriting credit: for Jon Wurster, it’s Hunt Sales’s drums on Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life”; for Brian Viglione, the mariachi trumpets on Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” “The guy that played bass on ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’” says Joe McGinty, “probably should have gotten songwriting credit. But some people consider the chords, the melody and the lyrics—that’s the song; everything else is arrangement.” (For his part, Herbie Flowers, the bass player in question, is more pragmatic, having devised the distinctive doubling of electric and acoustic bass in order to get a double union fee: “You do the job and get your arse away. … Wouldn’t it be awful if someone came up to me on the street and congratulated me for Transformer?”)
“Art of Almost” by Wilco
Drummers have particular difficulty accessing songwriting credits, which by legal tradition accrue to lyrics, melody, and chord changes. Drummer Glenn Kotche says that when he is hired for a session, he doesn’t expect to have a piece of the songwriting: “Even if the drum part has a big impact, I know that legally all that stuff comes under the umbrella of arrangement. … [It] would ultimately be [Jeff Tweedy’s] decision. … When there’s been a song where my part has changed the character of the song, I’ve been offered writing credit. So a song [like] ‘Art of Almost,’ or ‘I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,’ things like that where the drum part is distinctive enough that it definitely had an impact, I do get writing credit. Or if my field recordings are used prominently in a song or something like that, I get them.”
“The Hungry Wolf” by X
“Certain drumbeats are signature beats,” says DJ Bonebrake. “Like with X, ‘Hungry Wolf’ is kind of a signature beat. You could say it’s a Gene Krupa lick, but it’s a floor tom thing that goes dut dut dut, dutdutdutdutdutdut. And as simple as that is, it’s kind of a signature, so I’m really torn about the legal part. Obviously as a drummer you think, ‘My part’s really important, and it contributes something.’ But on the other hand, from a practical point of view, you go, ‘Well, can I copyright 1-2-3-4?’”
Franz Nicolay is a writer, musician, and faculty member in music and written arts at Bard College. In addition to records under his own name, he has been a member of World/Inferno Friendship Society and the Hold Steady. He is the author of The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar and the novel Someone Should Pay for Your Pain.
