Day Eleven - My Life As A Busker

Greetings, everyone.

This is day 11 of the 10 years of creation.

I'm going to do something a little bit different today. As you can see, I'm in a different place, and that's so very different than, you know, almost anything!

But the different thing that I was actually thinking of doing is to focus on one topic! Which is going to be busking.

I thought about talking about busking because I realized I have a rather unique experience with busking, and when I started playing in Lithia Park, I had no idea what busking was.

If you don't know what busking is, it is the practice of a musician basically playing in the street for tips, playing in public for tips, in some place in public for tips.

And there are many things about this practice that are key to the success of the busker. I cannot actually call myself an expert on busking, because I have busked in a limited number of places. I've actually busked in San Francisco, not at Fisherman's Wharf, where people get a permit to busk, but somewhere downtown. I can't even remember exactly where it was.

I've also busked in Sacramento, by the Coop in Sacramento, also busked in Harvard Square quite a few years ago. Again, I was just playing on the street. I wasn't very clearly aware of the idea of something like making a living at playing in public for people.

There are a few things that I would like to say about it, which I consider revelatory. Perhaps, the experience that I've had, busking in Lithia Park, has been - that's a good word for it - revelatory. It has revealed many things to me about humans, about about us being in the world together, and I think that's significant and worth touching on.

But first, I should say how it all began, without getting into the long story that was a preamble to my coming into Lithia Park.

Basically I was given a cello and that cello had arrived in Ashland. It had been shipped from Iowa, from a shop in Iowa, and I had received it. I was going to the park with my son at the time, just to play, and he wanted to see the cello. He wanted to hear the cello. And so I brought this beautiful cello that I had named Flare, into the park.

I've told this story about how this gift came to me. I won't share the whole thing now, perhaps on another video. I brought the cello into the park, I opened up the case, took the cello out, sat on the stone wall there, along the pathway in Lithia Park, and started playing. And from the very beginning, playing that instrument, it felt like getting on a jet plane. To me, it was so remarkable. It has such a beautiful voice, and just playing it fills me with love and inspiration.

So I played at the time, I was playing some things I knew, like the Bach G major Prelude, but a lot of what I was playing was just me improvising, which I learned to do in an earlier life, and that's another story I can tell. But not now!

I was not aware of the fact, which my son pointed out to me - he was about 11 at the time - that there was a fair bit of cash accumulating in my case after a half hour playing. I counted $25, and I was blown away. I had no idea that that would be a natural consequence of pulling my cello out in that place and playing, but that's what happened, and it was at a particular point in my life when, number one, I really just wanted to play music for people. It was the simplest possible impulse. And number two, I was not having success at all making money. I'd kind of given up on all the different kinds of jobs I'd been doing, and I really just wanted somehow to have a life being a person who makes music, and so this suddenly became an option for me, that I could come to the park and play.

At first I thought of it just as a way to get grocery money. If I didn't have quite enough to make it through the month, I would take my cello down, and I started playing in different places, sometimes at the entrance of the park. I played in the plaza, which is considered part of the park, but it's quite a different thing.

Eventually, this place in front of a stand of trees, in front of the benches, was the place that I found where there was the greatest contentment, I think, is what it was that I was gravitating towards because of the fact that people could sit and just enjoy the music. There was a little meadow just beyond the stone wall where people could be on the grass there, and the creek was behind me, and there was also grass behind me there where people could lay a blanket down.

It became a little vortex where the music could happen.

I did not know, nor could I have known, all of the things that would end up occurring in that spot. It certainly was always a function of my personal economy. It was a way to support myself, make some money, and it could be said that I support myself during the warm months, just basically from busking, from doing this - playing in the park - since I got back from being on the road in the beginning of 2014 and started playing in the park again.

I would say my average tips have just about doubled since that time.

One could speculate about why that is. I don't think I'm going to do that here. Clearly, I'm always trying to do things that will make what I'm doing better. I began at a certain point, to realize that I am making a performance, I am making a thing happen. I am attempting, you might say, to entrance this space. And in some very magical way, that is exactly what happens.

I found a little rug. Actually the first rug that I used was borrowed from the woman who was my landlady when I first came back to Ashland, and that rug was with me for quite a bit of time.

Eventually, there was a an older man who came into the park and noticed my rug, which had kind of a Persian rug quality. He said he might have some rugs for me. And it turned out that he was a collector of Persian rugs, and his wife had sort of given him the ultimatum that either some of the rugs had to go or she would. She was fed up with his collecting of these rugs. But I didn't see him again for a long time after that first time.

But eventually, one day, he started bringing rugs. I think he ended up giving me three different quite lovely rugs, and the one that I use now is, as he described it, a camel blanket, a blanket that was made to put on a camel to ride.

Which led to another friend of mine doing research on where I could obtain a camel to ride in to the park, which I had to put a stop to, because as eccentric as I am, I was not going to decide that I should start riding a camel into the park.

There are many things, of course, that I have done that are kind of off the map, but that is not going to be one of them.

So putting that rug down helps to create a space. It's all very deliberate.

I've made more money since I have played with backup tracks. That actually makes a very big difference, and that has been a long development process as well, which, again, I probably am not going to go into a lot of detail about, just enough to say that it sort of wasn't a thing that I could even do at one point that would be allowed. I had a lot of resistance from the director of the park at in the early days, at the beginning, not the eventual director, who had been there for most of the time that I've been playing, Michael Black.

There has been an evolution in the disposition of the folks who would have something to say about me playing there. There's been a little bit of, you could say, negotiation, and this is one of the things about busking, that it's a very mixed bag, where you can do this legally. Some cities have the forethought to create some sort of formal program where you can get a permit. There's an issue when you busk about whether you can sell things like CDs. You can't do that in Lithia Park. I did and I got a ticket. It really wasn't fun. It was a big thing. I tried to appeal, but it wasn't going to happen. It would be a great boon if I could, but I can't.

So busking is this renegade sort of activity. If you're lucky, you find, as a busker, a certain place that will work the best for you. That's called your pitch. A busker will find their pitch. That could be under an overpass or next to a particular store or in some kind of a courtyard somewhere.

In my case, that place where I play is just the perfect place for me to do what I do. And I have actually tracked my tips basically every day for 10 years. I have logs of what I make, and I sort of have to do that in order to have a sense that I'm not insane. Because it does make sense and it does support me, even though, you know, some people would say I couldn't live on that.

But I have been able to live on that and whatever social security that I get now.

There's one woman who is surely in her 80s, at this point, has been coming for many years to see me, and before I started collecting Social Security, she kept she kept saying I needed to get a job or play in the symphony. She was very worried about me, and when she heard that I'd started getting Social Security, she relaxed. It made her feel better that I I wasn't completely depending on the tips in the park.

It's clearly not just the money that has kept me coming back. Because if it was just the money I probably could be considered a fool for spending so much time at this process!

It's not just the two hours I play. Sometimes I play for three hours. It's not just this six days a week that I play. Sometimes I play four days a week. This year, so far, I'm playing six days a week. It's the time it takes to get there and be properly prepared and the trip back, taking care of keeping strings on my cello, keeping the cello in good repair, keeping the bow with good horse hair on it, all of the things that are needed to maintain my instrument. I'm not sure what the hourly comes down to, If I take all of it into account, but it is actually a continuously transformative experience for me, because of the transformation that I see in others, in so many others.

Today in The grocery store, behind me in the line as I picked up some groceries, I was at the cashier, and behind me in the line was the family that comes to the park sometimes - the father, whose name is Nels, and his little boy, Luca and his little girl Forest. Forest has come and danced three or four times in the most magical way. I would imagines she's five, she could be six. She came to my birthday gathering. They all came to my birthday gathering. She painted a little painting and put a little sort of a gem stone pasted to the painting.

And people have sketched things and painted things and written things and told me stories about people they have loved who have passed, and people themselves have continued to come and have passed, and I've played for their memorial services, and people have come to meet each other on their first date and awkwardly started kissing in front of me as I played.

I have played for wedding proposals and then for the weddings that have come from those proposals, and I have met my beloved there in the park, soon after I decided I was playing in the park again in 2014 when I came back from the road.

I scored a movie as a result of someone I met in the park. Many, many incredible things have occurred because of this time in the park.

I think it's worth saying because I'm sure the question might have come up in some people's minds whether or how long I plan to play In the park, because there are people that I have told, “this is my last season”. I just couldn't quite figure out how I could keep doing it. That is for more than one reason. It seems to be clear that I can't do it forever.

However I am enjoying the hell out of it. It has been growing into a kind of magnificence that I never could have imagined. The people who show up are so dear to me, every one of them, even the strangers, the new people, the people who have been coming back for years, the locals, the regulars and the people who visit Ashland and they know me as someone who's going to be there, but also brand new people who are discovering me for The first time, and I discovered them for the first time. And I'm always amazed by something about their story.

There was a very dear woman yesterday, probably, I would guess, in her 70s, but in some kind of a wheelchair like apparatus, who, after I was finished, wanted to come up and talk to me about her whole history of playing the cello. And how it was difficult now for her to play, but all the different things about what she loved about playing the cello, and she was completely adorable, and her daughter was there and was very happy that she was getting a chance to talk to another cellist.

Today there was a couple from Portland, and again, probably, I would guess, in their 60s, and the woman was Asian, and has been learning to play the cello for the last three years. They were just deeply into everything about it, the instrument, “and what about the bow”, and “what about the strings?”, and “what are some cellists that you follow?”

But then, you know, you have the little girl, probably six, maybe, who just started playing the violin and is very intent on setting up after me to play. I think she's literally been playing for two or three weeks, and she can play open strings, but she sees what a wonderful thing it is to be there and play some music for people, and she wants to do some of that. She wants to have some of that experience.

So that's a little bit about my experience of busking.

I want to say that I'm lucky, because this particular park, Lithia Park, in Ashland, Oregon, is one of the most wonderful parks, probably in the entire country. I think it's gotten awards as one of the top 10 parks in the country. It's an extraordinary Park. It has close proximity to downtown, so it has quite a bit of traffic from people who are here because Ashland is a tourist town, and so people are here to relax and enjoy and they wander into the park from the plaza, and that's remarkable.

I'm set up along a path which is on the way to all the good things in the park. So it's easy for those people to encounter me. There are benches for them to sit and listen, that's a setup that is a dream for a particular kind of busker, I would say.

And I am a particular kind of busker!

So that's all I think I will be sharing today, on the 17th of July, 11 days in to my next 10 years of creation.