Busking in San Francisco – A $2 Bill

For the past six weeks, I have been busking (playing music in the street for the entertainment of passers-by) as often as I can manage it on Valencia and in the 24th Street BART station — sometimes nearly daily. I’ve always wanted to do this, but for various reasons I never did. However I’ve discovered that I love doing it, and it’s fascinating enough that I want to write about my day-to-day experiences in a series of blog posts.

What got me started was a simple conversation with a fellow musician. I took Dave Rosenfeld’s Klezmer Ensemble class at Zambaleta this past season, in order to meet some like-minded musicians, and not long after that I was hanging out with one of them, and we got to talking about busking. I confessed that I’d never done it, and she said “never?” and looked at me with such incredulity, you’d think I had told her I’d never worn a T-shirt, or kissed a girl. Obviously busking was one thing that I really ought to have done by now.

But there was a minor problem. I’ve only recently (that is, within the past three years) taken up music again. While I have historically never had problems performing or playing music for people, when I was a teenager I had a lot of fears and performance-related issues to sort out and get over. Unfortunately, in all the years I never played anything for anybody, those problems returned, and I needed to work them out anew.

My principle fear was that my music would annoy people, that it would be unwelcome. It’s an irrational insecurity borne of some very bad experiences centered around my piano practice when I was a teenager, and borne of some more recent interpersonal conflict that my practicing habits have given rise to. So I started small, testing the waters a little at a time. I had been posting videos to this site and to Facebook, getting nice encouraging comments, and so I felt ready to go out and try to face the world.

The first time was pretty nervewracking. I remember pacing around my studio thinking “okay, today is the day, today is the day,” and procrastinating endlessly. Then, finally, I packed up my fiddle and got on my bike and rode about three blocks. I set up in front of the Levi print shop, near 17th, and took a look around: would the people having an early dinner on the patio at Frjtz be annoyed? Was someone in the building going to hate this? Was I going to play badly?

I quietly tuned up and played a few notes, just open strings, then a G arpeggio, then some fiddling around the third-finger A on the E string — the little gestures and testing moves I make at the start of almost every session, to get oriented, make sure the instrument is in tune, and to find the tone I want, to get into the groove.

And then when I was a little warmed up, I decided to play as if nobody were walking by. Well, not exactly: I wanted to play well, because people were listening, so I decided to regard my little street session as what I call a “trial performance” — a dress rehearsal really, where you privately play through a set list as though you were performing it for listeners. So I dove into it; half an hour of Jewish music, half an hour of Irish music, trying not to notice that people were walking by, trying to avoid eye contact. And I got through it just fine.

Nor did anybody ask me to leave — far from. Just as I was wrapping up the Irish set, with a rendition of “Wheels of the World” that I’ve been working on for a long while, a construction worker emerged from the Levi’s print shop behind me, went to his car, and on his way back into the building thanked me for the music with a big smile and placed a crumpled bill in my case. I thanked him, finished up the tune, and inspected his donation.

It turned out that the first money I ever made for performing on the street was a tightly-wadded-up $2 bill. It seemed like a good omen, and since then I’ve kept it in my case for good luck.

posted: 11 May 7
under: Open Folio