Fiddle Dave present and accounted for on the San Francisco busking beat. 6 months and nary a word written, besides the obligatory status updates on too many social media sites to mention and/or remember, what without status updates their may be a complete communication breakdown in civilization as we know it. Of course, while I was busy not writing I never quit busking. I avoided it. I procrastinated a lot about it. I consistently came to the conclusion that life would be far easier with a real "day job" as they say. However I have kept on with my busking adventures and have many a story to tell, although I realize sharing stories as they happen might be the most poignant way to go about all of this.
Sometimes a writer is jolted out of their self-imposed writer's block and in my case tonight this is most definitely true. I should be out busking now instead of trying to write about it amidst a complete cacophony of street corner madness. One should understand that I live on one of the busiest intersections in San Francisco. Little Italy meets Chinatown here and tourists meet the ghosts of yesteryear's beats. This is an inspiring place for many people and seems to be the "busking crossroads" as far as I can tell. A 3-way intersection where Stockton crosses Columbus flowing out of Chinatown's open air market and through North Beach down to the Wharf, and Green comes down the hill past old Italian restaurants and Irish pubs and runs into Telegraph after passing old musical haunts where Janis Joplin sang and Ginsberg read his poetry. So this incredibly busy intersection where from my 3rd floor hotel room I can sometimes count half a dozen busses at one time, legions of cabs and cars, hundreds of people and an occasional motorcycle gang, is somehow a busking hot spot. I always have some busking news to report from room 24, although the cacophony becomes maddening and days blur together falling asleep to the sounds of a doo-wop a cappella group singing gospel and waking up to a trumpet (far better then a jackhammer.) Luckily these stories that blow my mind the first time they happen seem to reoccur.
Here was my journalistic jolt for the evening. Things were proceeding like normal. I was procrastinating and finding little things to occupy myself with that didn't involve going out and actually working(busking). The young and talented trumpeter who I've been hearing regularly lately went through his evening serenades of jazz standards and the Godfather theme song. An older man across the street from him took his time setting up his steel drums and P.A. system while talking to folks on the corner. Eventually it was his turn and he turned on his metronome-like conga backing track on the P.A. and began to play. He doesn't know how to play so well so he plays in a minimalistic fashion. Here is where the sonic turf battle begins. A different trumpeter arrives on one of the opposite corners now and begins to play. I'm thinking to myself, in the right frame of mind you can listen to both buskers and with all the other industrial noise, make some sort of sonic collage that could be fun to listen to for a while if you use your imagination. Now the story get really interesting as ANOTHER steel drummer shows up on the scene. This is what amazes me how these stories actually repeat themselves! I've seen this happen minus the extra trumpeter and thought geeze, this must be a fluke, but here the madness repeats itself. This other, you might say, rival steel drummer that actually can play quite well, abandons any honorable busker's code (some buskers don't believe in it), and sets up right across the street from the other steel drummer and the trumpeter. I've seen this happen in the past and been blown away, like we live in this huge city and we have steel drummers competing for the same street corner!?
Normally I would have bolted out my door escaping the North Beach cacophony to find a quiet(in relative comparison) BART station to busk in, but being that I was busy procrastinating and this story is so bizarre that in presenting itself to me repeated times, I was jolted to break my blogger's block and get back on the busker's beat. Thanks for reading friends. I am now on my way to have more busking adventures far away from the dueling steel drums.
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