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!

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.