It's pouring rain and I'm in for today and looks like will be shut-in tomorrow also.
Last night or maybe it was this morning, the last bit of which I lay in bed for, getting up at noon, I thought about busker blogs.
I'd been following the few I could find for years. Maybe it's closer to decades now. I have been able to find smatterings of busker *information* where people relate their experiences on sites as disparate as www.mudcat.org and www.violinist.com and Trumpet Herald. I found busking experiences going back as far as the 60s and 70s.
But actual busking blogs are extremely rare. The Saw Lady, Natalia Perutz, was keeping one about her busking in the NYC subway system. And I think Cello Joe started out to do one, but in both of their cases they're really good and got bookings and a bit of fame and their blogs fell by the wayside. Marvin Naylor is the best busking blog I've found and he's collected his blog entries into two books. But he's not keeping up entries any more.
I'd say the average busker isn't interested in writing down their busking experience each day, and less so if they're doing well. Why bring in competition? "Hey, that guy's making $100/day in Coos Bay, maybe I'll dig my guitar out of the closet..." Pretty soon there are three guys each making $33 a day.
That might be the reason Marvin Naylor's kept going so long. He doesn't make that much money, at all. Also it's advertisement that he gives guitar lessons. He gets the odd gig, too, and least once went to Instanbul or someplace like that. I told him that sounded terribly exotic then did some research and realized Istanbul's closer to him than anywhere in Texas is to me.
But if you're hoping to find some blog or blogs that will give you the Key To Live A Free Life By Busking, you're not going to find it. You just have to get out there. And you're gonna suck. Or, you'll have mastered every Radiohead song and really not suck, but your voice will be gone in a few days. It's going to be hard.
Interestingly, I've never had anyone yell at me, "You Suck!". I've had a trumpet instructor, apparently, while walking by say with disgust that I was off-tune or something but then quickly follow it up with "But keep going!". I've had a couple of frat boys look me over like I was a specimen and then one of them say, "You look too 'together' to be out here doing this!" and I told him it was a side gig, like driving for Uber and that seemed to satisfy him. I've had a guy wince and say my PVC side-blown flute I'd made and was playing was "shrill" and frankly he wasn't wrong. And I've had lots of times of just making nothing, like $4 or $5 an hour. But it's not as hostile out there as most think.
That was a huge hurdle for me to get over: embarrassment. When I failed at moving back to Hawaii in 2003, I'd have made a go of things and stayed if I'd had experience busking. I basically had none. For some reason I felt like it would be a huge embarrassment if I was out on the street playing music; that my older sister and her network of elite prep school alumni would spread it around the whole island that I'm an embarrassment and untrustworthy.
The truth is, back home, almost no one will care. As long as I'm supporting myself legally and my music (if that's what I do) doesn't suck, it'll be fine. when people get to know me and see that I don't talk "street" or do "street" things like smoke cigarettes, don't have tattoos, they'll see that they won't have to count the silver around me.
I think back to when I left Hawaii to make my "fortune" on the mainland. It was 1986 and there was a hit song on the radio called "My Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades". Just get into tech, be a yuppie. At the company I worked at, in a tall building looking out on one side over this really great Goodwill thrift store, co-workers saw me going in and out of there and that did *not* help my status. Someone who shopped at Goodwill might do anything, better count the silver...
It's only been a pandemic and an economic depression or two since then... "Thrifting" is now cool. Hardly anyone believes in the old "work and you'll rise up" trope these days. Japan, go-go in 1986, had their economy crash in 1989 and now, in Japan and in China too, younger people are going out to the countryside to live on farms and communes. As facts skew "liberal", maybe the future skews Buddhist.
Today there was a terrific piece on the radio show "Against The Grain" on KPFA about Friedrich Engels. The stuff he'd figured out in the 1840s, is the very same stuff we're concerned about now. He probably contributed as much to Marxism as Marx himself, and he not only wrote, but picked up a rifle more than once and fought, for revolution. Just the Wikipedia about him is a great read.
It's only because of growing up and living in places like Hawaii and California that I know who Paul Robeson, a major 20th century figure, is. Or that Marx and Engels are worth studying or what an intellectual heavyweight MLK actually was.
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