“I don’t necessarily want to have the first line of my obituary be, ‘He played a good organ patch.’”
Ah, the plight of the sideman, the second fiddle, the often-faceless, underpaid, rarely laid unsung hero of rock and roll. As far as the breed goes, Franz Nicolay is among the more recognizable, as much for his kooky handlebar mustache as his high-profile gigs in The Hold Steady and the World/Inferno Friendship Society. He’s a magnificent musician, an accomplished guitarist and accordion player whose fired-up piano is often the match to the Hold Steady powder keg. But does Nicolay get the glory? Of course not. He’s a sideman.
So what’s a Number Two to do? For better or worse, the answer in most cases is “solo album,” which is music speak for “vapid, masturbatory disaster.” Ever hear a Gene Simmons record? OK then.
In Nicolay’s case, however, the solo album is a revelation in its own right – if not for breaking new ground musically, then for illuminating exactly where his bands get a good portion of their spunk from [he also performs in Balkan klezmer band Guignol and chamber-pop collective Anti-Social Music]. Major General, released in January, is a curious, vibrant record that skips audaciously from all-American barnburners to gypsy romps. Flanked by a roster of musicians that includes members of World/Inferno and Dresden Dolls, Nicolay bellows cathartically and operatically about everything from subway graffiti to Jeff Penalty, a replacement singer for the Dead Kennedys. The music can be melodramatic and over-earnest, but at least it’s honest. Above all, it’s obvious that the album is less of a vanity project than a means for Nicolay to find a home for some the nomadic songs wandering around his brain.
“I didn’t feel like I had much to prove,” says Nicolay. “I had just built up a collection of songs that didn’t have an obvious home in World/Inferno or The Hold Steady or any of the other bands. A couple of the songs I’ve had around forever, and I just felt like, ‘Even if I don’t ever play this song live, I just want to get it on a record and move on.’”
Major General is the beneficiary of Nicolay’s lifelong musical wanderlust. The songs cascade off each other, punk bleeding into gypsy bleeding into – was that a clarinet solo? When isolated, only a few songs (”Jeff Penalty,” “Dead Sailor”) raise the pulse the way a Hold Steady song might, but as a whole, the album captivates with its sheer scope and ambition.
“I get excited about novelty,” Nicolay says. “I’ll get really excited about Balkan music for six months, and then I’ll get really excited about the Beach Boys for six months. There’s always some tidbit that I’ll get out of each of them about ways to sing background vocals or where you put the glockenspiel overdub or how the string arrangement for a George Jones record differs from a string arrangement on a Divine Comedy record.And all that stuff goes in the cauldron and can bubble up in unpredictable ways.”
Nicolay brings his mustache, his guitar and his botanist friend (he’ll have to explain that one himself) to ABC for a special solo show this month.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
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