The Waiting Game: Part 2

In last week’s post, longtime busker Dave Harris, shared his memories from the old days when the causeway buskers had to put in a lot of “butt-time” in order to play at the more popular spots in downtown Victoria.
This week I will continue with some more recollections, this time from fellow buskers Jaime Nolan and Swan Walker.

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Jaime Nolan has spent the past 18 summers busking on the inner harbour causeway, where he plays guitar and sings a mix of 60's to 90's folk/rock. In the off-season Jaime is a biology and chemistry teacher.

"Right now, you look back on it as fond memories," he said. "But I’m sure at the time it was pretty painful at times when you’d be sitting there for like six hours, so you could do your two hour set. I remember many times, you never knew how many buskers were gonna be there before you, it was a gamble every day. You’d be walking and you’d see one of the other buskers a block ahead of you, and they’re just walking, taking their time and you’re like ‘Oh, if I run and get past them, that’s two hours I don’t have to wait,’ so you find some back alley way, and run real fast, to [try to] make it there before them, and if it was a tie, you’d do a little paper-rock-scissors."

"We’d get down here at 10 o’clock, so you could have the noon [slot], and of course if they beat you by five minutes, that was an extra two hours you’d have to wait. And then there was the time where we couldn’t leave the causeway, if you left, you forfeited your spot, so you were really glued to the causeway when you waited your time. If you left and someone showed up, there’d [sometimes] be like fisticuffs, you know, ‘You left, the spot’s not yours anymore,’ and you’d be like ’But, I went to get a coffee’. So then we started [to] make sure that the other buskers watched each other’s stuff, you know, so that’s when the community started to develop, ‘cause you needed to get off here every once in a while, to get something to eat."

Jaime said "It was definitely way more interesting, and I do miss the sitting [around] all day ‘cause you got to talk to the tourists, it was more of a community when you sat here all day, and you just felt like more a part of the scene. Now that we’re on our [scheduled] time slots, you show up like five minutes before your slot and leave ten minutes after, and we kind of don’t have the community that we used to have."
"The change came at the right time for my life, ‘cause my son was born and there’s no way I could sit here eight hours all day with a baby, so it coincidentally worked out for me, ‘cause I could then budget my time slots around my son’s schedule, but there is a big part of me that does miss sitting here all day like that."

I asked Jaime if he had the ability to turn back the clocks, would he want to go back to the old system.
"No, no, I wouldn’t, ‘cause things come at a price, like not having to wait all day and you can have a life outside of the harbour. But then of course, you’ve lost the community. I made way more friends, sitting down here all day, [talking] to the tourists, and [making] many connections, and I feel like that’s lost now with the time slots, but times change. Maybe I just gotta come down here and sit all day anyways, just for the hell of it [laughs], no reason why we can’t do it anyways."

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Swan Walker started busking on the inner harbour in 1997, and he plays the steel drums, guitar and sings. His repertoire consists of reggae, calypso and other popular tunes.

Swan said "There were a lot of good things about [‘the waiting game’]. You used to wait, but, I think the time went by so fast. It used to be fun, you know, people hanging out here, it become like a little community, there was so much that used to go on. You [would] have a lot of people who weren’t playing but they wanted to hang around. Now it’s a bit more cold, you know, everybody comes and they do their thing and they split. Before there was more warmth, I think."

In regard to the times when he’d come down to the harbour, and there’d be no spot for him because it was all backed up, Swan said, "Yeah, I remember those, you know there was nothing. Well, I never had a problem with that, because I know that’s how it goes. It never bothered me, I’d just go, and come back earlier [the next] time. [Sometimes] there were people who used to come, and I would [already] be here too, so, I had no problem with that, it didn’t make me feel bad at all."

The earliest that Swan ever arrived at the harbour was 7:00 in the morning. He said "I waited all day for the night spot. I suppose back then, when the moment lingers, you’re kind of ‘Oh, I had to sit here all day,’ but after it passes, you don’t remember it. I only remember the good things about that period, the time when you get to talk to [other] people who hung around you."

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As you have read this post, you may have noticed that the two words that Dave, Jaime and Swan mentioned more than a few times were “camaraderie” and “community”. It was these aspects of the ‘waiting game’ that made the whole process more bearable.
A large portion of our time was spent sitting around in our fold up chairs, on top of the concrete receptacle by the stairs on the north side of the centre of the causeway where the garbage bins used to be stored. We began to call it the “Buskers Dressing Room”. Most days we would be camped out there, shooting the breeze and joking around among ourselves and some of the other buskers that would occasionally join us.

I remember one time when when Dave and I were sitting around joking with another busker Chris Trygg, about how it would be neat to making a video movie parody of our lives as buskers. One of the ideas was a humourous poke at the competitiveness of trying to beat the other buskers to the spot. At that time, a number of the buskers had dollies that we used to transport our gear to the causeway. I had envisioned this skit of us all racing down to the harbour in a take-off on the chariot scene in the movie Spartacus. We’d all be racing down trying to get ahead of the next guy, cutting each other off, and having blades popping out of our wheels in order to try and pop the tires of the next guy, and so on.
Between the three of us, we kept bouncing the ideas back and forth and laughing hysterically. It was pretty silly stuff, but it did inspire Dave to show up a few days later with his newly purchased video camera with which, over the summer, that we thought might be our last, he started documenting the busking scene on the harbour and uptown. This all resulted in a couple of videos that both give a good sense of the Victoria busking scene at that time.
If you are interested in purchasing a copy of either of these DVDs, you can contact Dave Harris at his website.