The Obnoxious Back-Up Singer Meets the Back of My Hand

After returning from my first rehearsal for The Full Monty last night, I was feeling pretty pumped about the performance prospects of the production, so I put off going to bed and booked it out of my building to go busk (sorry...in an alliterative mood).

I wasn't out for long. By the time I cracked open my guitar case, set up, and started playing, about four trains had gone by, which is never a good sign because there wasn't much of an audience lingering in the station. Exacerbating the evening's outlook considerably was a large black man who decided to sing unrelated back-up vocals for "Heart of Gold" -- the first song I played! Unbelievably bad luck. His friends thought it was the funniest schtick they'd ever seen. Being a billowy, blubbery sort of fellow, his voice more than drowned out my own, and I was forced to wait it out until he amscrayed.

When their train arrived, the group shuffled over to it and the dude's friend goes, "C'mon, man, give him a dollar!" The dude just starts laughing and shakes his head. I couldn't believe it. I wanted to channel good 'ole El Kabong from that Hanna-Barbera cartoon and smash my guitar over his empty noggin, but remembering that I only have one guitar, I abandoned this option.

A minute later, I thought of a decent comeback. "No, tell him to keep his money. He needs it for voice lessons." Always too late.

An Inkling

Last night was a late one. Even without me watching The Legend of Boggy Creek until like 3 am. I usually busk until 8 or 9, but I've been feeling pretty liberated (read: poor) lately, mostly due to my lack of other jobbyness, so I stayed out until midnight.

I've encountered some pretty weird troglodyte-type characters in the nocturnal hours of Subwaydom (most of which are way scarier than those stupid things in The Descent), but this time around I was blessed with a pretty tranquil evening at 23rd Street.

A few new songs entered the mix, both substantial classics: "Lola" by the Kinks and the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Feeling ballsy, I even tried playing the standard "Love Hurts" (Roy Orbison and Gram Parsons have covered it, among others), even though I had only an inkling of what the chord progression was. Turns out that inkling was a right inkling. It's kinda cool to know that I can more or less play a song after hearing it a couple times (providing it has a somewhat traditional chord structure). Remembering the lyrics, however, is a different matter altogether.

A lady asked for my contact info last night just before she hurriedly hopped a train. She tried shouting something as the doors closed, which very likely could have been, "I'm working on a movie and we needs songs for the soundtr--". Then again, maybe she was saying "I work for an insidious organization that shops people's phone numbers around to all sorts of terrible telemarketers and nefarious nogoodniks and dastardly do--". With my luck, it's probably the latter.

A-chording to Me.

To provide some contrast to my day-to-day posts, I figured I might spend some time answering a handful of questions people ask me from time to time about the daredevil realm of busking. Consider this entry an Official Busker's FAQ.

Do you get tired?
Ah, good 'ole fatigue. It's tiring to do anything for three hours at a time, but when there are sharp strings and soft fingers involved, fatigue tends to lead to a fair bit of abrasion and eventually some nasty strumming wounds. I'm often seen sporting some fashionable Rocko's Modern Life band-aids as a result. Maybe it gives me some indie cred or a streetwise appearance. Probably not, unless it's still 1996.

Don't people steal from you?
Yes, there's the ever-present danger of having someone steal from the veritable cornucopia of cash that is my beat-up guitar case (I should point out the intended sarcasm in that sentence so as to avoid any mistaken "cocky" labeling). I've actually never had a problem with this yet, but there have been a few instances when a couple of thuggy kids (it's aaaalways kids) have eyed my property and I had to go all Conan the Barbarian on them (because no one deserves Conan the Destroyer), which for me means puffing myself up like a blowfish and trying to look intimidating. For proof of the existence of God, I'd cite that this tactic of mine has miraculously worked and none of my earning have ever been ganked by a lowlife. Then again, maybe I just didn't see it happen.

What about your voice, dude?
Yeah, it's pretty rough singing nonstop for three hours or more while trains whizz around and people bark at each other and the smart ones just keep listening to their headphones in order to stay sane. There have been a few instances when my voice started feeling pretty ragged from being pushed too much, forcing me to call it a night. This past Friday evening, my voice completely bottomed out in the middle of "Eve of Destruction" (a P.F. Sloan tune that the Turtles covered). It wasn't a good feeling, and I've been resting my voice ever since (it's fine now). I went to school for musical theatre, so I know how to take care of my voice...sometimes I'm a bit too stubborn to take the proper measures.

Are you homeless? Can I like...give you food?
Yes, I'll totally take your food. I'm usually hungry. One kind lady gave me a water bottle the other day. No, I'm not homeless. Interestingly enough, one homeless fellow gave me a bag of chips once. I would have counted that as more of a favor if he hadn't already opened it and ate half of them.

Can I get change for a five from your money if I leave you the five?
This happens a lot, actually. Passersby would like to leave some money for me but only have a five dollar bill. It's fine and I let them change it out in my case. Sometimes I get weird looks from other folks who didn't see the whole transaction and must think the person is stealing from me and I'm just standing idly by. But whatev.

Do you take requests?
I can try to! I'm not quite up to human-Wikipedia skills yet, but I know a fair amount of bands and songs. And I like to make people happy. So go ahead and try me (if you want definite results, it's best to stick to Neil Young, the Beatles and Weezer).

Well, I think that's all for now, but I'll be happy to answer more questions in the future. Feel free to contact me through this blog if you have any other questions about the wide world of Busking.

Wild at Heart and Crazy on Top.

I was out for maybe 45 minutes last night until one of my strings broke. Replacing it would have been a cinch but I'd taken out my boxes of strings at home, searching them for a G and lamenting that I'd used all of them already. My current G string (for my guitar, thank you very much) is coming apart at almost every fret, and I was certain it would blow off and lash my face at any number of my outings lately. However, not to be figured out so easily, the Universe willed my D string to break instead.

On Tuesday night, a girl slipped the following note into my guitar case:

hi!
(I'm not a sketchball)
I saw you getting out your guitar with your harmonica around your neck and wondered if I'd be lucky enough to hear Dylan. Then it was the first song you played. (let's be friends?)

She included her name and e-mail address as well. I appreciate the note a lot because it seems like something I might do if I liked a street performer, and simultaneously didn't wish to be mistaken for a creep. I'm really afraid of that. I remember realizing one day in high school that someone who feels things as strongly as I do (in this case, it was love) tends to be regarded as a creepy person. And I didn't want that. At the same time, I don't really know how else I should do things. I guess it's nice to be so passionate all the time, but it gets less nice when you get labeled "crazy."

Not that I particularly care what people think. I used to wear polar bear pajamas and hawaiian shirts to school while singing along with the Devo songs playing in my blue Sony Discman that I'd outfitted with industrial strength velcro in order to attach the unit to the fuzzy ceiling of my 1989 Honda Civic so I could avoid track skipping on bumpy roads. In case you're wondering, it didn't work.

Nevertheless, I don't like the idea of being discredited. That's why I don't ever want to be an alcoholic, drug addicted, child molesting, fascist, hallucinator who's a fan of Gray's Anatomy: it totally discredits anything else you might have done. People won't trust you around their wines, medicine cabinets, children, flags, senses of reality, or television sets...and that's no good at all.

Things got so hot and stale in the 50th St Station last night that I very nearly passed out. I love how I can put off busking for days at a time when the weather's nice, but once the thermostat creeps up to the triple digits, I'm out strumming my stuff every other night. Take that, Global Warming!