Playing music on the street involves more risk than playing on stage. You have to contend with Mother Nature, the grande dame of bitch-mistresses who always sets the thermostat too low or too high and can send out millions of creatures to bite or ooze goo on you. There’s the matter of outdoor acoustics; storefronts weren’t designed for optimum audio reflection, and there’s also noise from traffic both vehicular and human. There’s also the matter of a transient audience — you don’t have them nicely corralled the way you would at a club or concert hall.
Another problem is etiquette. Etiquette varies with surroundings. Put people in a well-appointed symphony or opera hall and dress them in formal wear, and they’ll suppress their coughs until the intermissions. At a jazz concert, people will keep their conversations down to whispers or low murmurs. A bar has to be incredibly divey before anyone would even dream of hopping up on stage and joining the band (WARNING: Not safe for work — nudity and general sleazy content).
The street is something else entirely. There’s a kind of tragedy of the commons that applies to etiquette out there — the street doesn’t belong to anyone, so any kind of behaviour generally goes. For the most part — and this goes double for Canada, double that for a busker-friendly city like Toronto and double it once more for Queen Street West, where I’m reasonably well-established — street audiences are pretty good. They’re friendly, they’ll chat with you, they’ll even apologise if they haven’t any change to spare and if you’re a very lucky accordion player, you’ll even get smooched every now and again. With tongue, even!
You will also get the occasional jerk. It can’t be avoided, and it’s something with which you’ll eventually deal.
Most can be talked down or dismissed. There’s the person who’s miffed because you don’t know the chords or words to their favourite song. There’s the street kid who feels that you’re interfering with his God-given right to the spare change in everyone’s pockets. There’s the bald guy who wanders up and down Queen Street yelling about Jewish/Arab conflicts. There’s the skinny dude who is always convinced that I have in my possession a pound of weed and why couldn’t I be a dude and give him some?
Then there are the assholes. Once an old Eastern European woman looked at me with eyes of fire and said that a “Chinese should not be playing the accordion. Only Polish.” She even gave me the finger. Kiss my dupa, ma’am.
And last night, some guy who was a combination of angry drunk and frustrated drunk (when he wasn’t giving me a hard time, he was annoying a woman for not giving him an easy time) kept walking up to me and asking me “Why are you doing this, man? You’re annoying me. Stop it.”
To which I replied: “Hey, jackass — do I go to where you work and slap the dick out of your mouth?”
(Thank you, Mr. Show, for that line.)
His friends got a good laugh out of it, dragged him away and gave me a fiver.
Never underestimate the value of a snappy comeback.