Sometimes there are coincidences in this world that are so incredible that you can’t actually appreciate them. For example, the sun is about 400 times larger than the moon at the same time that it is 400 times further from the Earth than the moon is. This creates the illusion in the sky that the sun and the moon are the same size, while of course they are not. It also allows for the opportunity once in a while for the moon to pass in front of the sun and perfectly block out all of its light. Can you really appreciate the coincidence of this? If the sun were just a little bit bigger, or we were closer to it, the possibility of total eclipses would vanish. There is no reason, when you think about it, that the sun and the moon had to be the proportions that they are. It’s just a coincidence. And since this happenstance is so remarkable, we actually appreciate it less. It’s so improbable that it just makes sense. I think that is unfortunate. I am interested, therefore, in being a part of the worship of remarkable coincidences such as these.
I am not implying that my band is remotely as important as the movement of the spheres, nor that our proportions are as celestially miraculous. No, no, we are just five ungainly hobos. But because we are out in the world, we are at the mercy of strangers and at the whim of certain coincidences that sometimes break our way and sometimes don’t. This is all the more sharply delineated when we play music on the street, as we often do.
Most days on tour consist of driving to a city, getting to the central area of town, finding an appropriate place to set up and play on the street, loading our instruments out and then parking the van, then setting up and playing for people that sometimes ignore us and sometimes treat us like we are the god Quetzalcoatl and they are the humble Aztecs who will give us anything to please us. Mostly the reaction is somewhere in between. It is always interesting.
For example, on the streets of Minneapolis a couple weeks ago during a half-hour of rather fruitless busking, a strange-looking man came up to the band and held out a gold ring for Nathan. This man asked if Nathan wouldn’t mind proposing to this man’s girlfriend for him. This man was shy, apparently, or looking for a romantic opportunity to ask the question or (maybe?) scamming us. It was hard to tell at first. I was leaning towards thinking it was a scam, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what the scam would be. He had grabbed one of our CDs and said that he wanted it but didn’t have any cash on him. He said he would get money from his girlfriend. That sounded a bit like a scam, but just a tiny one. He indeed went across the street and grabbed a woman and brought her over to us. He explained to her that we were this nice band and we had a CD and then he gestured to Nathan and Nathan held out his palm with the shiny ring in it. Nathan communicated some sort of marriage proposal, and the man kind of nodded in agreement, and the woman seemed to accept the offer by kissing him. We all cheered and played the most romantic song we knew and then the man asked his new fiancee for twelve bucks to buy our CD.
In Madison a few days later, we set up in the evening in the middle of a city-wide music festival. We played for an hour and handed out flyers to our show that night. At the club later that same night, we started our set to a fairly empty room. A polite golf-clap followed our first song. But people filed in throughout the set and the room got rowdier and rowdier, to the point that after the last song they cheered wildly for an encore, something no one would have predicted after the first song. The next day, still in Madison, someone told us there was going to be a farmer’s market around the capitol building. We went down in the late morning and there were thousands of people milling about in the bright sun. We played on a street corner and gathered a large crowd for a good while. Little children sat in a row at the front and then boldly asked their parents for a dollar bill to put in our case. One by one, they would stumble nervously up to us, drop the dollar bill in our case and then run back to their parents. The day was beautiful and yet cast in an interesting light, with the capitol building always looming overhead, like we were there to protest something.
After a show in Eau Claire that night, we drove back down to Madison to spend the night. We got up early the next morning to drive to breakfast and on the way we ran into another street fair. We had no particular plans to busk that day, but faced with a crowd of people on the street we basically had no choice but to do it. This fair was in a narrower area than the day before and already featured about six stages of musical acts along the four blocks of the fair. It was hard to find a good spot to busk, but we parked our van and set up our instruments opposite one of the stages and waited for the band to finish. We started our first note right when they were done and played until the next act was ready to go. You know that a day of busking is going to go well when people start lining up to watch and investigate your CDs before you’ve even played a note. We jumped about during another sunny day in the middle of a crowd of pretty girls and dancing children. We sipped on smoothies afterwards and laughed about not having to go into an office the next day.
I often tell people about our habit of playing on the street, and they look at me with a bemused, sort of pitying look, as though they’re talking to a homeless person or something. They apparently misunderstand the aim of our busking. Maybe they think that it is a sign of abject desperation, like we are playing for spare change so that we can buy day-old bagels as our only sustenance for the week. And then they ask if we made a couple bucks out there that particular day, and I tell them how much we actually made and their eyes light up and they say, “Really?” And I say, “Yes, really.”
And they want to know how it works, and I tell them that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to me. I’m generally a soft-voiced, introverted person, and yet I am now often standing in the middle of a crowded street on weekend mornings and yelling out “BATTLEGROUND!!!” Years ago I made a living painting faces on the streets of New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and playing music on the street is a very similar discipline. And yet, while painting faces I never once had any interest in engaging in the hustle aspect of it. I learned how to face paint from friends who went about attracting business by walking down the street and shouting out come-ons to the crowd, “Hey y’all, how ya doin’? Come get your face painted for the MARDI GRAS!” But it just wasn’t in my personality to do such a thing, so I decided that I was going to be myself, and either I would succeed or fail as a face painter on my own merits. And I never once hustled people or yelled out to anyone, I just put on a big cardboard hat that said, “FACE PAINTING” and people would slowly come up to me and ask me to paint their faces, and someone would see me painting that one person’s face and then it would grow and grow until I was making $400 or so a day. And that was remarkable to me, but I also felt I could always take it or leave it. I didn’t love the art of the hustle, and so I didn’t care about being a face painter as a career. It was just a way to be doing something creative and get paid for it.
And it is the same now with busking, with the added benefit that it is a job that is closely aligned with my chosen field, and so when we are playing on the street and selling CDs, we are not just making money but also promoting our band, and that success spills over into the shows. But still, I have no particular interest in becoming a better hustler and finding ways of getting the crowd riled up. I just want to play my songs, shout them out there as loud as I can, and the people can choose to freak out about it or not.
After Madison was of course the night of comedy in Chicago and our failed attempt at getting into Canada. We drove around the Great Lakes and got to Burlington, Vermont late on a rainy day. We played a gig to a room that people told me was emptier than it should have been, because of the rain. The next day was luckily sunny even though the forecast called again for rain (celestial spheres moving coincidentally, thank you to whoever’s in charge…) and so we set up in the middle of crowded Church Street and—as I said before—I screamed “BATTLEGROUND!!” for two hours and when we counted our money afterward we were astonished to find that we had made eleven hundred bucks. If that sounds like a lot to you, consider how much it sounded to us. Our goal for the entire tour was to bring in ten thousand dollars, and so in one afternoon in Burlington where it just happened to not rain, we made more than ten percent of our planned goal for the whole six-week tour. And keep in mind that this was just a random segment of the population, who had no idea who we were or that we were going to be there at that time. They were just people walking around on a nice day, looking for something to do. Why on Earth would they respond to us in that way? And so that’s what I mean when I talk about coincidences.
From Burlington we went to Boston and tried to play in Harvard Square. I dropped the guys off to set up and I drove the van around and looked for parking. The streets in Boston are such that one street forces you to turn a certain direction, and another forces you to turn a different direction, and then in five minutes you haven’t seen one parking place and you are suddenly three miles away and across a river. At the far point of my wanderings, I got a call from Scott back at the busking spot saying that the police were telling us we couldn’t play on the street. Which had never happened to us before, surprisingly, but then what could we do… if he said we couldn’t play unless we had a permit, then he was the guy with the gun and we had to believe him.
A couple days later in New York City, our luck changed back again. We set up in Union Square in Midtown Manhattan and played for a couple hours. At first, the jadedness of the New Yorkers seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, but slowly we gathered together a group of upwards of a hundred people. And it was New York, so you had every color and type of person imaginable. An old Asian man danced goofily while his wife stared at him with an embarrassed look. Young punks held their skateboards and looked out from under the sweep of their haircuts. A man who I imagine was from Nigeria came up and asked me what kind of music we were playing.
“You mean the name of the band?” I asked.
“No, what TYPE of music is this?” He asked.
And I said, “Well, we sometimes like to call it… Hobo Gospel.”
It stunned him for a moment and then he repeatedly the phrase slowly with a smile on his face as he turned away, “Ho-bo Gos-pel!”
We collected our money in Union Square while another busker set up next to us and started to play. We did pretty well for a busy city in the middle of the week. The other busker was just one man, playing all sorts of percussion. He was really good and very entertaining, and quickly gained a crowd as large as ours. But after about ten minutes, two New York City police officers came over and talked to him for a few moments. The man turned to the crowd and said, “These police officers tell me I have to stop, so I’m sorry, but you’ll all have to go.” And the crowd went, “Awwwww” and booed the police officers. I went over to the street musician and gave him ten dollars from our pile. “Sorry about getting shut down, man. Better luck next time.” He thanked me and we went off to play our proper gig in Manhattan.
Two days later we were in Nashville, Tennessee, playing on Broadway. That town calls itself Music City, which means that there is a guy with a guitar and an open guitar case on every corner, strumming away to “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…” Which made us seem less novel. We spent half an hour playing and had trouble gathering a crowd. One guy walked by and flashed a ZZ Top backstage pass and said, “This might be your lucky day… I’m with ZZ Top…” But wandered off and never really elaborated on how ZZ Top could be lucky to us in any way. When we finished and counted our money, we had only about forty bucks, which was about what we had made that day in Minneapolis where the man asked Nathan to propose to his girlfriend.
But we are not about to complain. It would be like looking up on a sunny day and complaining that there’s NOT an eclipse. There can’t be an extraordinary coincidence every day. Just knowing that they have happened before gives hope that they can happen again.
