Subject: RE: Street Musicians, Buskers?
From:
Willie-O
Date: 25 Feb 99 - 12:01 PM
I spent quite a few years playing on the street, mostly in the ByWard Market in Ottawa, but including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Kingston. I played hammered dulcimer mostly, which has a high "whazthat thing?" quotient, a unique and penetrating sound, and an interesting visual aspect. Six or eight hours a day of practicing was great for my technique, but then I was sick of playing, and tended not to sit down and learn new tunes on my own time, so I kept on with the same fifty or sixty. Which got boring. Hard to keep it in tune in the sun, needless to say, but I tried to keep it somewhere near concert.
I usually took a mandolin or fiddle with me to have something to switch to, to break the monotony or if a friend showed up to jam, but the dulcimer generated a lot more interest and money.
The amount of money I made varied pretty much in direct proportion to pedestrian traffic which is a function of time of day and what part of the week it is. Might make $30-45 on a weekday afternoon, $50-70 on a Saturday or Sunday, and at special events like Canada Day, $100/day was not at all unheard of. My best day ever was outside the Eaton Centre in Toronto, made $170 in a long day--probably eight hours of banging out tunes between noon and 10 p.m.
There's always regulatory politics in busking, and the regs are always changing. Since I got out of it ten or twelve years ago, Ottawa went to a licencing system, then dropped it. The only rule enforced now, I think, is it's bad form to hog the best spots for more than an hour--if either a vendor or another musician asks for the spot after you've been there a long time, you're soupposed to move on.
Busk stops--that's cute.
Longtime buskers get locally famous. (I think I know the "ragamuffin" guy you mention in Kingston, Jack--in fact I resemble him, although I ain't him.)
A buddy of mine who's a street old-timer, Spider Merritt, used to busk every winter on the Rideau Canal, which is the worlds longest skating rink. Canal officials used his picture in their publicity one year without permission or payment, and he took them to Small Claims court. He won $1800 for--get this--"wrongful misappropriation of personality." The defendants argued that the statute in question only applied to famous people. Spider's been a full-time busker for twenty-odd years, and has a big collection of newspaper articles & pictures of himself--which he presented as evidence and succeeded in proving himself famous!
Funnily enough, they busted another one-man-band busker on the canal this winter, and now he's famous too. The papers and radio stations couldn't get enough of him, and his CD sales are doing great!
I learned a lot working on the street, and the money was often o.k. It was cash, too. But most folks burn out on it eventually. I don't have it in me to do the 60-mile drive to town for who knows what compensation, and the dulcimer doesn't get played much anymore.
Bill
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