Sweat.

So hot. Want to touch the heiney.

New York is gross right now. I, being my usual brain-a-tron self decided that such an environment might be ideal for busking. I'm sure I don't need to relate to you the details of what I discovered.

But I will. I think I'm becoming a manly man, in the sense that I sweat all the time, but unfortunately still don't have muscles or an imposing presence. I suppose I'll take what I can get. Subway stations are particularly bad places for sweat glands to be. Above ground, you can at least air out smothered areas of your body, and if you're lucky there might even be a stray gust of wind to refresh your heat-addled existence.

In Subwayland, there's nothing like that. Well, there is actually. With every roaring train comes a boiling maelstrom of engine exhaust that's very likely to strip away the flesh on your forehead if you're not cautious. Other than this unpleasantry, literally NO AIR MOVES in the subway stations of New York City.

Not a good thing. It sucks enough when I have to go off to my mindless office job or to gorge upon delicious milkshakes uptown. But these trips only require a ten-minute wait, tops. Imagine being in a station for, say, three hours. While strumming fast enough to fuel multiple strum-o-matic power plants. While singing with the efforts of a hundred men, women and children, none of which are strong enough to counter the fearsome thunder of incoming trains. While pressing an increasingly warming guitar body up against one's own, creating a wondersome jungle of steam, friction and discomfort. Then add in the part about a cockroach trying to stowaway in my guitar case, and you've pretty much recreated my typical Friday night.


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Forgotten Glockenspiel

There's been an eminent lack of tips lately. I've always admitted to my pursuit of busking being purely for the purposes of catharsis, practice, and providing entertainment. But hey, the money's a plus. And it sucks when people are super stingy just because they're in a super bad mood as a result of every single summer blockbuster this year being a load of codswallop. (Even that might be generous for DaVinci Code).

Maybe it's the heat, the recent life woes, or the inevitable feeling of going through the motions....at any rate, I've been noticing that I'm trying almost too hard to get tips from people lately. This desperation is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that everyone seems to be as miserable as I am. I'm not going all-out with mugging for my "audience" or anything, but I've been doing this weird thing where I kinda close my eyes when I'm singing, as if I'm channeling the Great Spirit or something to prove how well I can emote in the 59th Street Station. I mean, I do close my eyes sometimes, but this is way overboard. Luckily, I have all the aforementioned excuses as well as the ultimate one: this heat is freaking disgusting. After checking out Gore's documentary, I'm half-tempted to shut off my computer right now and pretend that I can feel the world's overall temp increase by some infintessimally small percentage.

On the ever-present upside, I rediscovered my love for the ole classic song "Mr. Bojangles." I know tons of folks have covered it, but I'm principally familiar with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's version. For anyone not already familiar, "Mr. Bojangles" is a melancholy little 3/4 tune about a preternaturally-gifted dancer who tours the fairs and the like in the South, impressing people with his deft moves and impossibly high jumps. I remember my dad used to love the song, and the first time he played it for me (in the car going somewhere...Abu Dhabi perhaps) I got a little choked up in spite of myself when Mr. Bojangles explains that he made his dancing rounds with his dog for 15 years before the latter "up and died."

I've always been a little too sensitive for my own good.

As a side effect from this obsession with Mr. B, I've had a sharp stab of homesickness, probably because of the delicious chain of Bojangles fried chicken restaurants that are studded around my hometown in NC.

Don't think twice, it's all right.

I guess I don't think of my music as being all that cinematic or underscore-y, but the world seems to think otherwise.

My friend Jeb asked me to work on a soundtrack for a short film he was doing back in March. I expressed a little reservation because I simply don't write a whole lot of instrumental tunes, and certainly know next to nothing about the finer points of film scoring. Ultimately I gave it a shot because he was doing a western, and being such an idolizer of a healthy chunk of that genre, I'd always wanted to write my own version of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" theme. The end result turned out halfway decent. (It's on my myspace page as "The Ballad of Rusty Spurs.")

A few nights ago at 59th, after singing some Radiohead cover, a twenty-something girl approached me.

"Do you write original stuff?"

"Yeah, I do. Why do you ask?"

She produced a flyer from her bag. "Well, I'm doing a threater show right now, and I'd love to have you as our musician. We just need some haunting guitar music to serve as transitions and the like."

I was certainly flattered (she even offered to pay me), and politely "maybe'ed" the proposal. Could I really write 20 minutes' worth of music in less than a week for a threatre piece? Unlikely. But then again, I do tend toward the haunting side of things with a lot of my music, so there'd be a natural knack built in, and it'd be a good challenge for me anyway.

Then I woke up this morning and realized that neither of us had contacted the other.

"Scratches on their Forearms."

This message, hastily scribbled on a scap of parchment and delivered to my brownstone moments ago by a satchel-toting Nike of a lad, appears to be the latest of Mr Morrison's correspondences from the front. If you fancy yourself bold enough to scan these jots and floats of brainnotes, I shall by all means curtail every impulse to beg you to consider the consequences of such devious actions (not to mention the significant difficulty in trying to chew food despite the holes hewn through one's mandible by the namesake weapon of the laserbats) – in short, read away:

My friends.

Allow me to declare that which most of you have wished for many a moon: war upon Music Under New York, (or MUNY). For the few of you who aren't familiar with this insidious organization, allow me to explain. MUNY is an organization for which one must audition which purports to foster musical performance and appreciation in the New York subways. Once admitted, performers (for they can hardly be called buskers, as you will soon see) are given a banner to hang up behind them which emblazons their skills and origins (mine, for example, would read: "Rob Morrison, folk singer, guitarist and harmonica player. Mortal enemy of MUNY.") and a schedule that depicts specific times and places when and where a performer shall perform.

Okay, fair enough, you say. No, not quite, say I. These fine philistines can boot out any other busker from their pitch if said busker isn't fortunate enough to (or isn't wont to sell out) possess the sacred MUNY banner.

It's my opinion that to have a schedule, not to mention the "authority" to forcibly remove others in order to strictly adhere to this schedule, strikes me as extremely antithetical to the basic idea of busking. In my warpedly idealistic mind, busking is about performing music that is important to the busker, in a manner that makes it easily affordable to an audience, not to mention displaying a "DIY" aesthetic, through which music should be music, performance performance, and most importantly, performer performer. In other words, setting up organizations that dole out performance times for their members is a ridiculous, because these locations are not to be booked as if they were concert venues; they are subway stations. Not only that, but having to go through a booking company immediately begins to zap away the special aspects inherent in busking. Perhaps I am misguided: perhaps there are underground coalitions through which homeless persons schedule windows of time for appearances in desirable locations throughout Manhattan. But I suspect that this sort of organization does not exist, and if it did, an audition/interview process would certainly be required so as to sort through applicants and select the most respectable lot to be set up as members. Obviously, this goes against most commonly established notions of what it means to be homeless: if there are such institutions that would prove so organized and so thoroughly resigned to helping their homeless clients earn money, shouldn't such an institution simply become a shelter or a mission? That would provide true help.

The analogy is, of course, somewhat incongruent. Buskers, most of them anyway, do not typically require help in the form of bookings or money (though many find both in the subways). Nonetheless, MUNY seems expressly aimed at supplying both of these to their musicians.

In the past few months, I've had plenty of encounters with MUNY folks, most of them ending with my exit from the desired pitch. I can't say that this has exactly changed recently, although my last run-in was my most ballsy by far.

About a week ago, I arrived at the 59th St Station around 6:15 pm and set up as rapidly as I could. I hadn't even made it through my first song before my peripheral vision picked up a duo of asian musicians setting up behind me. It wasn't long before I caught a glimpse of the familiar gold and black MUNY banner. After a brief flicker of a temptation to pack up, I firmly resolved to completely ignore them and continue playing. One of the members of the duo walked up to me, and I avoided eye contact and persisted in strumming out any opportunity for him to engage in conversation, quickly going into my next song and my next song after that, not allowing any breaks in between. He ultimately came right up to me and asked me to go away, brandishing his schedule of righteousness as proof of his entitlement.

I wasn't satisfied, and blurted out frankly, "Look, buddy, anyone can perform here. That (the schedule) doesn't mean anything to me. If I don't do this, I'm not going to eat tonight, and since I was here first, you'd better find somewhere else."

The starvation claim was definitely an embellishment. But my feelings were sincere, and a good 20% of my income is derived from busking. He seemed rather flummoxed, and conferred with his duo member before then shuffling off to further confer with the police. Obviously, my protest had reached the pinnacle of its effectiveness (I doubt the police would have appreciated my points), and I scurried off amidst a fog of my own expletives.

Rest assured, my friends: this war has only just begun.

Rob Morrison

Well, Morrisonites, I daresay that this note hardly makes sense to most of you. Nevertheless, Mr Morrison seems to find some import in these matters, and will, I am sure, be greatly moved by your taking such matters to heart.

Godspeed.

Archaeopteryx T.C. Bustard