by Andy Langer Guy Forsyth doesn’t worry about his next meal. Even if his
blues became self-fulfilling, and his
girlfriend and dog conspired to throw him out of the
house, his band left him, and every Austin club blacklisted him, Forsyth could
still take his acoustic guitar to the street, and only an hour or so later have
enough money for a burger and fries. To know you have a next meal is to meet
life’s most primary expectation. And while Forsyth’s club successes make it
unlikely he’ll need to fall back to the streets,
he says there’s comfort in knowing he just has to “find
people, peck a little, sing a little, and eat.”
Best of all, Forsyth now puts food on the table directly
because of the skills he learned playing on the streets of Austin, New England,
and Europe. In fact, Forsyth says he first learned to play guitar studying
Rhonda, a transvestite street musician in Kansas City. As a result, Forsyth
discovered how to connect with individuals and crowds alike while improving his
guitar playing, vocal strength, and songwriting through experimentation and
repetition. Thus is the role of a street musician, perhaps the oldest
occupation, short of prostitution or hunting and gathering. On the street,
music’s oral tradition can be passed along in the same way American Indian
shaman and European roaming minstrels disseminated their knowledge for hundreds
of years.
Although it’s debatable how profitable street playing, can
be
in Austin, the city has always sported a healthy number (two dozen or so) of
street musicians playing regularly. While the names and faces turn over every
couple of years, with the musicians moving on to new towns or graduating into
the club scene, Guadalupe and Sixth streets have been consistent venues for
musicians honing their skills or wanting to become their own bosses. “Sometimes
in the clubs, you can feel like your whole purpose is to sell alcohol,” says
Forsyth. “It’s not like that on the street. It’s a shitload of work, but the
reward can be knowing you’re working for yourself and your music.”
Aside from the inherent competition from Sixth Street clubs,
the street also offers other unique challenges to street musicians in that the
sidewalks are crowded, passersby are often intoxicated, and you must be loud
enough to compete with the music spilling out from the clubs. Of Sixth Street
musicians, none are more consistent or high-profile than the King. Positioned
near Babes of late, the King (Garry Van King) ended his career as a funk and
soul session bassist sometime in the late Eighties, and took to the street with
only his bass, a small Radio Shack amplifier, and a crown. He’s been there six
nights a week ever since. “First I had to get the nerve,” says the King, who
mixes original soul material and a Parliament-Funkadelic medley into a
repeating hour set. “Now, if anything goes wrong, it’s my fault. And I ain’t
going to disappoint me.”
Over the years, the King’s presence has given a public
face to a usually low-profile art form, attracting a regular following and the
admiration of his musical peers. Forsyth simply says “everyone wants to be
King,” and renowned session bassist Jon Blondell maintains that the King is the
most original and accomplished bass soloist he’s ever seen. And although Van
Wilks often brought the King with him to play his regular Monday night
Steamboat gigs in 1992, the King says he’s more comfortable with the challenge
of street crowds. “You have to catch the crowd and keep them,” he says,
“because they’re not just sitting down comfortably with a beer.”
Yet, as successful as the King is at attracting a crowd,
it’s
initially puzzling why he plays on the section of Sixth Street with perhaps the
least amount of traffic. The answer lies in a problem many of King’s colleagues
also cite: the increased risk of obnoxious drunks and thieves on the street’s
densely populated sections. “You have to be careful,” he says. “Down here
there’s less danger and I can relax more. I work in a small doorway, so you can
only back me up so far. Space has to be limited so that you can’t act like
you’re dancing, move me around, and get into my case to steal my money. I have
to be alert, because there’s plenty of negative people roaming around.”
Newer to the street, but already familiar to the harassment,
are a pair of female singer-songwriters, Kacy Crowley and Renee Woodward. They
say they play together despite ongoing careers as separate artists because it’s
ultimately safer. Woodward says she has instituted the obvious “you touch, I
stop” policy for the drunks, and Crowley says she recently had a passerby
harass her by offering “more money than is in the case if you’ll go home with
me.” But like the King, the pair say the benefits of street playing far
outweigh the sleazy incidents.
“We play as a duo not only because it’s safer, but we can
learn from each other, complement each other musically, and play for longer
stretches together than we could alone,” explains Crowley. “The advantage out
here is that we can improvise, improve, and make decent money while constantly
meeting the music industry professionals, and fans that will help when we
ultimately move into the clubs.”
Will Greenstreet did exactly that. Before his Greenstreet
Band became a regular Elephant Room act, Greenstreet spent over two years
playing saxophone on Sixth. “The social aspect is amazing in that it’s a
tremendous amount of human contact,” says Greenstreet, who reports that many of
his best nights were after 2am when the clubs close. “Even in a packed club,
there’s not the same kind of intimate interaction. [On the street] I was not
only meeting people and learning what audiences respond to, but improving as a
player with stamina. It’s the ultimate apprenticeship.”
And like the King’s shows with Van Wilks, Greenstreet says
his popularity and profitability soared on the street after Soulhat’s Barry
“Frosty” Smith encouraged Greenstreet to jam with his band at the Black Cat.
Greenstreet says not only did the Soulhat shows introduce him to full houses of
fans that would later pay to see him play on the street, but it gave him a
context with which to look at his street work. “The Soulhat experience gave me
a perspective on how popular music could be,” Greenstreet says. “When I walked
on stage people would cheer, whereas only a few minutes earlier I was on the
street getting spit at like a lost dog. I was playing the same way, never any
different. It was all context and made me think, `Why not me?'”
Although Greenstreet is now exclusively in the clubs, he
says
that finding and keeping a location alongside Sixth Street’s busy sidewalk
traffic was one of his larger hassles. The unwritten code between the musicians
themselves is that whoever is somewhere first gets to play there. The street’s
merchants and residents are less cooperative. Most working street musicians on
Sixth have a pre-arranged agreement with a merchant to play inside their
recessed windows or closed doorways, to avoid blocking pedestrian street
movement. As a result, police officers on the Sixth Street beat say they rarely
interact with the musicians. And as long as the musicians are not vocally
asking for money, police say it’s not solicitation to accept tips in a jar,
hat, or guitar case, given the tip jar does not interfere with sidewalk
traffic. Primarily, the complaints about street musicians and the subsequent
police actions fall under the noise limits.
While clubs have pre-set, enforceable limits, section C of
the noise ordinance says the noise from street musicians must only be
“reasonably calculated to disturb others” to be in violation. Police Lt. Gerald
Raines says he gets frequent complaints from Sixth Street residents, citing a
recent taped call, complete with bongo accompaniment, from a woman upset to the
point of tears about the percussionist on her doorstep. Lt. Raines and Austin
Music Commission Liaison Bob Meyer are currently working together on creating a
variance to the ordinance. While Lt. Raines says he would like to enact zones
for street musicians to play within, Meyer says he hopes any variance in the
code would simply restrict play in particular problem areas rather than create
one area that street musicians would be confined to. At this point, both the
musicians and police officers on the street agree enforcement is primarily
“complaint-driven.” “I do believe street musicians add to the ambiance of the
street, but I’ve got certain residents’ numbers on my phone’s speed dials
because their complaints are so frequent,” Raines says. “It doesn’t enhance
ambiance if I have to hassle [the musicians], so we’re in the process of
finding a way to keep the residents, merchants, and musicians reasonably happy
and within compliance of the law.”
Legal questions also arise with street musicians playing on
Guadalupe. Because of the high volume of University-driven pedestrian traffic,
the Drag has long been a successful base for artisans, merchants, and
preachers. The confusion as to what constitutes the Drag, and what is
University property, results in the most frequent police actions. Street
playing on campus is prohibited by the University police, who cite solicitation
as the offense. The University controls the Drag’s University side, except for
the city-controlled, 10-foot easement across from the University Co-op, and
beneath the steps that lead into the West Mall. Although the occasional
percussion ensemble attempts to drown out the preachers that utilize the
easement, most street musicians take their chances hassling with merchants on
the Drag.
“I have received permission from both the Bagel Manufactory
and Church of Scientology, which makes it tough for the police to harass me,”
says Charles of Pancakes With Cheese. “In terms of the cops hassling me, it’s
only isolated cops in isolated instances. The merchants and musicians are more
concerned with the young kids without jobs that are panhandling and harassing
the passersby. They’ll try and get change right in front of where I’m playing,
and when I ask them to move over, they’ll throw all this punk stuff out at
me.”
Charles (one name, like Prince) says that although the
increased competition with the gutter punks has noticeably cut into his
earnings in the last two years, he prefers the Drag to Sixth Street because the
days offer longer hours to play, and the nights can be used to rehearse or play
the clubs with his band. Charles also says the money he can earn on the Drag is
comparable to his bandmates’ minimum-wage day jobs, allowing him to write and
rehearse during the day while building up an audience for the band’s better
paying club gigs.
“I have regular customers on the Drag, who will pay to hear
certain songs they like,” says Charles, who uses a solicitation and vending
loophole by requesting a $7 tip for the band’s CDs. “Some have come for years
and most will eventually bring friends by to hear me as well. The impact on the
Pancakes With Cheese shows is slight, but people make the connection, and
potentially will later pay cover in the clubs.”
While Charles, Greenstreet, Forsyth, and Slaid Cleaves all
say they can see the impact their street work has had on their club attendance,
perhaps nobody in Austin has parlayed street success into the type of club
following David Garza has. With Twang Twang Shockaboom, Garza worked the West
Mall for tips in late 1989, carrying the guitar case of money to Conan’s Pizza
for pizza parties after each street gig. “That was before we had booking agents
to take 15 percent,” Garza jokes. When the University police cracked down on
Twang Twang, they found a loophole to the University law, and formed a
University organization. Guy Forsyth would later do the same.
“Without the West Mall shows and the direct communication it
afforded us with our fellow students, Twang Twang couldn’t have been,” says
Garza. “For the most part, we kept it a UT thing by playing the Cactus and
Texas Tavern at night, where those that watched us during the day for free
could pay at night. The exposure was profitable from the get-go. I’ll still run
into UT alumni in someplace like Chicago and they’ll say they remember seeing
me on the West Mall. Even today, those people are paying their money at the
door.”
While the cross-promotion pay is valuable for street
musicians that take their acts into the clubs, most full-time street musicians
say they’ve found better financial success in Europe or other American cities
like Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, Cambridge, and Denver. On Sixth
Street, most musicians say a night’s work could yield anywhere from a $40
average to $150 on an exceptional night. Despite longer hours, the Drag seems
to pay somewhat less per session.
Charles says that many of the University students he
encounters from Houston or Dallas, cities without a street musician scene,
don’t realize that tips are part of the equation. Others, like Jason Eklund, a
nomad street musician who’s plied his street trade in hundreds of cities across
the country, say that Austin itself doesn’t yield much money to street
musicians in general. On the other hand, he says appreciation for the music
itself seems to be greatest in Austin – especially among the musicians
themselves. “It’s all about trading material,” Eklund says. “I’ll borrow lines
and songs from others a lot and they’ll borrow from me. It’s sort of the
historical outlook. It’s especially important that we look at work of the older
street musicians, who have died or are near death. They perhaps didn’t
necessarily have the chance to record, and other street musicians can carry
their work on.” And whether it’s trading songs, or trading tips on profitable
festivals or seasonal location in warmer climates, street musicians say there’s
defiantly an informal nationwide network in place. In fact, there’s even
networks within the local scene.
Rey Arteaga, now a percussionist with Centzontle, Grupo
Alamar, and until recently, Mariachi Los Dimantes in San Antonio, says that
he’s organized and participated in street sessions that allow percussionists,
horn players, and bassists to play together and rehearse on nice days. “It was
basically percussionists,” says Asteaga. “We’d find a sax player for basslines
and practice on the Drag. That was a few years ago, but I met a lot of people I
play with now, and have remained friends with the other musicians like David
Garza. In the old days, on a nice weather day, the rule was to sit home and
expect or make calls to get a session going.”
Arteaga says he went back to the Drag recently for a reunion
with some of his old session cohorts, and the heat beat them down quickly. Now,
Arteaga, like Greenstreet, says the street work makes for a better back-up plan
than daily gameplan. Others, like Forsyth, say they still take to the street
when they get the chance. In fact, Forsyth’s Asylum Street Spankers project is
all about taking the acoustic techniques he mastered on the street into the
clubs. And still others, either new to town or simply practicing, will continue
to hit the street in what Slaid Cleaves calls the “easiest gig in town to get.”
And while newcomers like Crowley and Woodward can look to the club success of
the “Class of 1989-93,” (Forsyth, Garza, Greenstreet, Joey DelLago, Wammo, and
Arteaga), they can also look at the stability of someone like the King. Perhaps
in the end, no matter the level of street play, the art’s mainly about
advancement, improvement, and guaranteeing the next meal.
“I did some traveling a few years back on the festival
circuit and everywhere I went, people were looking to Austin,” says the King.
“They’d always be talking about my home, and how I was leaving it. Why travel
when Sixth Street and the Austin vibe is right here? Needless to say, I came
home. I know I’ll be playing until the record companies and Grammy people come
and find me.” n
This article appears in June 2 • 1995 and June 2 • 1995 (Cover).