Brian Diaz

Photo Credit: Brian Diaz

Guitar Tech / Photographer

Fall Out Boy / Bush / Guns N’ Roses / Stone Temple Pilots

CHANGEOVER: Tell us a bit about who you are, what you do, and your history in the music industry. 

Brian Diaz: My name is Brian Diaz. I have been in the music industry, between being in a band and being a tech, for over 20 years. I guess since I was around 18. I'm 43 now so around 25 years. I've been a tech for 17 years - guitars and backline. I tour managed for a bit and I didn't really care for it because I don't like babysitting adults. That’s the world I come from.

How has COVID-19 affected your job in the industry? 

I don't have a job anymore. I mean, here's the deal. I think there's a lot of people being really hopeful about things coming back at some point, in some format, but it's going to be really weird when it comes back. Obviously I'm out of work like everyone else. I have a few things here and there. I can fix guitars at home, but who needs their guitars fixed when they're not playing shit? I was working for the band Bush right when this happened and everything got canceled. We were supposed to go to Australia. This whole thing got canceled and they kind of put me on hold. They were like,“whenever something comes up, we'll figure something out.” I don't know what's going on just like everybody else. 

Photo Credit: Elliot Ingham

What have you been doing now that the industry is on pause? What have you been doing outside of the industry to stay busy? 

I've always done photo work but I need to take it more seriously, or at least put more effort into making it something that I could do at least part time. I was doing concert photography, street photography. I was selling prints of that stuff. I do all of it myself. I shoot it. Some of the film I develop. I scan it. I thought, “I can do this. I can make a little money doing this.”

Then the protests started happening. I started shooting the protests and felt like I couldn’t sell prints of this stuff without donating it. I started donating money from that towards various causes. Now I’m donating money and I'm not making money. Then I had to figure out how to make money.

Honestly, it's the most boring thing in the world, but I've been doing commercial photography for a storage space chain that needs website photos. It's super boring, but it pays money. I don't know how long I could last on doing that, but I have got to figure something out. Panic mode is what I've been doing. 

Before the protests started, I was shooting stuff in L.A., just an empty L.A. kind of series because for a while it was completely empty. Everything was completely closed. I went down to LAX and shot photos there and the beaches and it was empty. Those photos ended up in a British newspaper because they wanted to show what was going on in America. They paid me for some of those and that was cool. I was like, huh, maybe I can keep shooting. Then the protests happened so I started doing that. I sent some of those photos to the same paper and they weren't interested because they didn't want photos of just people protesting. They wanted to show how crazy it was and, for the most part, it's not crazy. It's just people marching.

So I had all these photos but then had this one particular photo at a protest that got out of hand and people lit a cop car on fire. I had the photo of that and was selling it and donating the money back to the organizers of the march. That photo ended up getting the attention of a gallery downtown. So I'm working now to put together a show. It's like a group show with other people who have been shooting protests and all the shit that's been happening in the city. I'll see where that goes. I mean obviously you can't have a group show, or any kind of show, in L.A right now. Maybe by the end of summer or early fall. I don't know. It's just hard to say.

Photo Credit: Elliot Ingham

What do you feel is the future of the industry?  

Everyone is on this kind of schedule. Everything that we were going to do this year we're just pushing forward to next year. Everyone has their dates already. They're just the same dates as 2020 but in 2021. Are these bands even going to be together in a year's time? Are people going to be around? I feel like people are just like “oh yeah, we'll be back on tour in a year.” In a year’s time your life is going to change considerably. The industry's going to change. Things that are happening now, with drive-in shows and reduced capacity shows, if there's any at all, I don't think most people and most bands even want to do that. They just want to be doing their normal stuff, but I get it.

On top of that, I think there's going to be a lot less production. Nobody's going to be able to afford to bring out a big show anymore. I was supposed to go on tour with Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Weezer and we were already in rehearsals. It was a pretty big production. We were doing baseball stadiums. I guess a lot of this stuff is built already and they have the set pieces, but I don't know. After a year of not touring, and Live Nation losing all this money, are the guarantees going to be the same or are they still going to be able to do this? I don't know. It's a huge question mark. 

To wrap this up, what is the greatest piece of advice that you've ever been given?

It was early on when I was with my first serious band. We did a record and signed a small deal with a label. We were on tour with the label owners bands in Europe. They had brought us to Europe to open and, at the time, we weren't like a full time touring band. We had jobs and stuff on the side. I was talking to the singer of the band and said “I wish I could do this forever.” He just looked at me and said “be careful what you wish for because you will end up doing this forever.” He said it in a way that was almost like a warning. 

I took it like “haha, yeah, I'll find out.” That was 1997 and here I am 23 years later and I'm still doing that. I’m still doing the damn thing just because I figured out a way to do it. I think that was one of the points he was trying to tell me. If you want to do something, if you love doing something and you really want to do it for a living, or do it full time, you will figure out a way to do it. That's what I'm trying to figure out now. I don't mind touring, and I feel like when it comes back I'd like to still be able to do tours, but I'd like to take this time learning how to do something else and maybe make that a part time thing so I don't have to rely on music as much. But who knows. In a year's time, this might come back and I might just be fully in that mindset again. I just miss it.