Country Dave's Acoustic Routes

The Copper Cowgirl

2011-07-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

Throughout the cities of the world, there are probably many hundreds if not thousands of talented people who gather the tools of their craft and head out into the streets and public spaces to make their living by entertaining, and hopefully brightening the day of some of the people who pass by. Collectively called buskers or street entertainers, they come in a variety of artistic categories. There are musicians, jugglers, mimes, human statues, poets, dancers, clowns, balloon artists, and the list could go on.

Up to this point, mainly because I myself am a street musician, my posts have been stories about the musical aspect of busking, relating a few of my busking experiences, and those of some of my fellow musicians. While I will no doubt continue to have more stories about street musicians, in this, and I hope future posts, I will interview other buskers that fall into some of the aforementioned categories.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and do an interview with Claire Bezuidenhout (pronounced bĕ-zādĕn-hōt), who makes her living as a “human statue”. Claire was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and moved to Canada when she was a teenager, and has been living in Victoria BC, ever since. She began busking in 2007, and as the Copper Cowgirl, she has become a very popular attraction for visitors to the inner harbour causeway.

At first sight, as she stands silent and motionless atop her copper pedestal, one might think that the Copper Cowgirl was one of the local art installations, but then she’ll make an unexpected movement and elicit shrieks of surprise and laughter from her audience. Sometimes when someone takes the opportunity to stand next to the Cowgirl for a photo-op, they might suddenly be caught off guard when she places her hand on their shoulder. With each tip that is deposited in her copper coffee pot, she comes to life and commences into a “wild-west ballet” of robotic movements and friendly gestures, before drawing her copper pistol from her holster for an imaginary shoot-out, after which she slowly winds down to her original statue-like position.

Over the past four years, Claire has spent her “northern hemisphere summers” busking in Victoria, and in the off-season, has taken her act overseas where she has also busked in Melbourne & Perth [Australia], Auckland & Wellington [New Zealand], London [United Kingdom], Malaga [Spain], Paris [France] and Berlin [Germany].

In fact, it was her interest in traveling that inspired Claire to give busking a try in the first place. She explained, “I wanted to find something that could help me earn money while I was traveling, so I thought I would become a human statue, because I can’t play an instrument. I think it’s a really great way to travel, I feel like you really get a feel for the city [that] you’re traveling into, as opposed to just visiting it for a week and doing touristy things. You really are on the streets meeting real people and seeing the day to day activities. So, I feel like I get a really great perspective of each place I travel to.”

I asked where the inspiration for the Copper Cowgirl’s character came from and Claire said “I’ve been around horses all my life and I’ve grown up riding horses, so I guess I always felt like I had the cowgirl spirit. And I have a lot of the clothes already, so that helps.”

On the topic of the Copper Cowgirl’s outfit, Claire said “I have a lot of fun making my costume, as much as I have performing. I did paint my outfit, and I’ve made my chaps and several other articles of [the] clothing as well. That’s one of the fun things, to make the outfit and try different things. I have a few different outfits now, different chaps, a different jacket. and a few different versions of the cowgirl, so it’s as much [about] creating the character as it is performing the character. I have a Viking outfit as well, which is what I use in Europe, ‘cause they’re not as in tune to cowgirls there.”

Claire told me that what she enjoyed most about busking was making people laugh. “I really enjoy playing with people, having fun with them, getting them to play along with me and surprising them. And I love having fun with the kids as well. It often kind scares them, but [it] excites them at the same time.”

Out of all the places that she has busked, Claire said that Melbourne was her favorite. “I don’t know what it is about that city, it feels kind of like Vancouver, and kind of like Victoria I guess, but, yeah, I love Melbourne. I always have fun with the people there [and] I always meet really friendly people there. There’s a big arts scene there as well, so I like going to the theatre shows and stuff after, or going to the beach right before I busk, and then I’ll go to a theatre show.”
“In Melbourne, I busked around the South Bank area, everyone called the strip along the [Yarra] River, the South Bank. Apparently, the Bourke Street Mall is really good to busk at, but you have to busk at least six months along the South Bank before they let you audition for the Mall, so I was never there long enough to audition for that.”

When I asked Claire what her most memorable busking experience was, she mentioned performing in downtown Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics. “It was a really, really wonderful experience for me, because everyone was ridiculously happy the whole time. Everyone was there to have a good time, so it was fun, tons of people every day and it was one of the greatest ten days of busking I’ve ever had.”

As the decision to be a busker would probably not be very high on most people’s list of career choices, I was curious to know what Claire might’ve said when she was 8 or 9 years old, if someone had suggested that one day she would be making a living being the Copper Cowgirl. “I would have said they were crazy,” she said, and then laughed. “I wanted to be a real cowgirl when I was a little girl, not a pretend cowgirl. I would’ve said ‘Close, but not quite what I was looking for’.”

And for anyone who might be thinking about trying their hand at busking, what has Claire learned in her four years as a street entertainer, that she would pass on as helpful advice? She said “I think that it’s important that you enjoy what you’re doing, because if you don’t enjoy it, you can’t expect other people to enjoy it.”
“Don’t take things personally. There’s always gonna be one or two people that aren’t very nice to you, and you can’t take that personally, you just have to brush it off and keep on going, and don’t let those little things get you down.”
“What else? Just be open to explore with your audience, don’t just present things, but always be open to do more and see more with them too, if that makes sense. Play with it, ’cause you’re on the street and unexpected things happen, and you just have to go with it.”

You can see videos of the Copper Cowgirl at the following links:
Copper Cowgirl on the causeway in Victoria, BC
Copper Cowgirl at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics

The Waiting Game: Part 2

2011-07-08T01:30:00.001-07:00

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.

* * * * * * * * * *
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."

* * * * * * * * * *
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."

* * * * * * * * * *
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.

The Waiting Game: Part 1

2011-07-02T04:11:00.000-07:00

In early 2005, there were fears among many of the causeway buskers, that the transfer of the management and oversight of the inner harbour causeway, from the City of Victoria to the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority would bring about the end of the busking scene as we knew it.
As it turned out, there were changes, but not all of them were as dire as we had feared. One in particular was a very welcome change.
The causeway buskers were now able to pick our time slots at weekly scheduling meetings. This meant that we no longer had to get up at ridiculous hours in the morning just to try and beat other buskers to the spot, so that we could have first pick on a time slot that we would then have to spend a considerable amount of “butt-time” waiting on, before we could finally set up and play our two hour set.

From a historical perspective, I thought that this would be an interesting topic for a blog post, so I called on three of my fellow causeway buskers Dave Harris, Jaime Nolan, and Swan Walker so I might be able to include some of their recollections of that era, in the post. I will be posting the article in two installments, today will include Dave’s memories, and next week I’ll post those of Jaime and Swan.

Just a bit of history; prior to 1994 when the City of Victoria started licensing street entertainers, it was not hard to find available places to busk as there wasn’t a lot of competition, but with the new licensing, there came an influx of prospective buskers, and consequently, a higher demand for the more popular locations around town, which included Murchies on Government Street, and the north and centre spots on the lower causeway. It was only natural that with this increase in competition for the same spots, that there would eventually be some disagreements.
In order to try and work things out and minimize any hostility among themselves, the buskers began to work out agreements regarding how the process for picking a time slot should work. It was agreed that it be on a “first come - first served” basis. After the first busker decided what he or she wanted to wait for, then the successive arrivals would pick their slot from what was left over. The two hour slots were booked on the even hour, ie: 10 AM, 12 noon, 2, 4, 6, and 8 PM, the most popular of which were the 12, 2, and 8 slots.
Over the next ten years, besides Dave, Jaime, Swan and myself, some of the other buskers vying for these time slots were Marty Field, Chris Trygg, KC Kelly, Jim Meighen, Julian Vitek, Shillelagh, Billy Goats Gruff, Angela Basombrio & Peter Richards, Oliver Swain, Steve LeStrange, and many others.
It should also be noted, that the upper causeway buskers and those along Government Street continue to operate under the old “first-come / first served” system, although it certainly doesn’t seem to be as competitive as it was in the past.

* * * * * * * * * *
Dave Harris is a one-man-band on the causeway, and he has spent the past 35 years busking on the streets of Victoria.
He recalls “The ‘waiting game’ was in full effect in the late ‘90s, I guess, early 2000s.” There [were] 600 licenses, I believe in ’99, or 2000, and okay, of those 600, probably fifty of them were panhandlers, and another two or three hundred were people that only came out once or twice, but there was a regular batch of at least eighty or a hundred buskers that were out on a regular basis, [so], If we wanted to get certain times at the harbour particularly, or at Murchies [on Government Street], there were a lot of people trying to get the same time slots, and it required often that people would have to get there early and wait to play sometimes quite a few hours.”

“There definitely was a nice shared energy among the people that were waiting, it was quite good and people were coming [and] seeking out the music in those spots because they knew there was going to be good acts because, only the good acts were willing to wait four to eight hours to play because they knew they were going to get a pay-off at the end. If you were just somebody that was a little bit green or a little bit rough, it wasn’t worth waiting four hours to play to make $10, so people came knowing there was going to be something good, [and] Murchies in particular was a destination for a lot of people that would wanna hear good street entertainment.”

“I’d come down, sometimes in those days I could still get away with playing on Government Street, and [still] go to the harbour and wait on the evening. I’d play at Bastion Square from 12 ‘til 2, and if Murchies came open, sometimes surprisingly it would, I’d whip down and play [there] for a couple of hours, and [then] whip down to the harbour as fast as I could and claim the night spot and sit for four hours.”

“I can remember waiting as much as twelve hours on long weekends to play at night on the causeway, getting down there at 8:00 in the morning to play at 8 at night. I did that several times on long weekends and only just beat other people that wanted the same thing, I can remember them showing up five or ten minutes after me and being quite irate that I was already there.”

“I remember Canada Day, maybe 1999 [or] 2000, 2001, somewhere in there, I can remember one guy camping out at 3:00 in the morning with his bicycle with all of his stuff. He had a little rollout mat, and went down there and slept on the buskers dressing room, thinking that he was going to beat me out for the night time of Canada Day. Well, of course, as you know, Canada Day down there at night is basically unworkable as a time slot so it backfired on him. He spent all that time waiting and none of the other buskers except for Swan showed up. He’s thinking we’re all gonna be showing up at 8:00 in the morning, 10:00 in the morning whatever, nope, nobody shows up and he’s just waiting and waiting and waiting. So, not to be mean to him, but he just didn’t know the ropes.”

“[And] yeah, the ‘waiting game’ had a certain amount of hostility associated with it too. There were a lot of people that weren’t really fans of the ‘waiting game.’ [There was one guy], his way of playing the ‘waiting game’ would be to tie his [empty] guitar case into the tree, with a note pinned on it saying ‘8:00 at night’, or whatever he would write on it. Of course that wasn’t how we were playing the ‘waiting game.’ The ‘waiting game’ was, you were there [actively] waiting, yes, you were of course allowed to run off and do an errand, or go to the bathroom, or get yourself something to eat, those kind of things, and we’d all watch each others stuff, but you couldn’t go off and just busk elsewhere. So some of the people didn’t like the ‘waiting game.’ I mean, none of us were really fans of it, but those of us who got along made it work quite well, because we got along with each other.”

“So they’re was a little bit of ugliness associated with the waiting game, but it was also really neat too, because with so many of us sitting around waiting to play, there was quite a bit of camaraderie happening. We were called the ‘scruffy lot’ by one of the causeway artists, Brian Henderson (slate carver), and Dwight (scroll saw artist) used to really enjoy us all sitting around behind him there on the center of the causeway.”

“You, me and Swan were the ‘three busketeers’, and we used to camp out on what we called the buskers dressing room, which was [on top of] the old garbage [bin] at the foot of the stairs on the north side of the centre of the causeway. We’d sit up on top, of the garbage [bin] with our little fold up chairs, and we called it the buskers dressing room.”

“And for me, there was an additional sort of an upside, I started sitting in with a lot of you guys. I’d be down there at noon waiting to play at 8:00 at night. Well you know, what are you gonna do for eight hours, so I started sitting in with you, and with Chris, and with Marty, Jaime sometimes, Fred Robertson. So, that was a nice upside of the waiting game was the camaraderie and the sitting in.”

Next week: The Waiting Game: Part 2

In the meantime, to read more about the local busking scene, be sure to check out the following archived posts:
October 15, 2009 - Victoria Busking Scene: 1977-1980
October 22, 2009: Scene Changes: 1989-2004

Space Germs Have Attacked My Brain

2011-06-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

On a couple of occasions back in March, I was walking down Government Street and came across a trio of street musicians playing in front of the Eddie Bauer store. I had interviewed a couple of them individually as solo artists, and now, here they were playing in a bouncy little combo called Spatiu Germene, which I was told is Romanian for “Space Germs”. Comprised of Levon (fiddle), Gabriel (guitar) and Blaine (accordion), they are usually accompanied by Ranger, their road manager / attorney. As well as playing at the Eddie Bauer spot, I have also seen them playing at the entrance several times at the entrance to Fan Tan Alley in Chinatown.

Gabe had somewhere else to go, but I was able to arrange an interview with Levon and Blaine [under the watchful eye of Ranger], and I tried to get a little background on the group.

I started by reminding Levon that I thought when I had interviewed him once before, he’d told me his name was ‘Mack’. “That was my clone,” he said “Yeah, his name was Mack, he was a pretty interesting character. It’s kind of a long story, and I’m really not allowed to say, but uh, let’s just say it was an experiment gone wrong and we just decided to split our losses.”
I commented that the music he was doing with the group was certainly very different from what Mack was doing. “Yeah, my clone is a kind of a rambler,” he said. “I don’t know what happened in the experiment, but he might’ve actually got [some] old mountain rambler genes.”

For his part, Blaine recalled my having done an interview with him. “Yeah, that was me,” he said "But that was a cover for…”
At this point Levon interrupted and said “This time we’re gonna tell you the truth. That was a cover, that [wasn’t] the real story. He was under witness protection for a while, and had to use that story, but now that he’s safe again, uh, he was actually raised by a pack of wolves in Siberia, in Russia, and that’s where he met Ranger, [who’s] like a brother to him.”

Levon and Blaine continued to tell me how the group had gotten together. Their convoluted story involved, among other things, futuristic fortune tellers, space aliens, crop circles, trailer parks in Quesnel, and crystals. The more they told me, and the more variations there were to their fantastic ramblings, I began to fear that maybe this was some kind of elaborate dupe on their part, to confuse me and then attack and take control of my brain.

Needless to say, editing the interview transcript into a viable blog post was quite a long frustrating process. I had given up on the task a number of times, but always felt somehow compelled to come back to it and try again. After several weeks, I think I have finally succeeded. You be the judge.

Whatever their story, the one thing that can be counted on when you come upon Spatiu Germene, is that you will probably find yourself being drawn to their repertoire of catchy, upbeat renderings of eastern European gypsy-jazz and ethnic-folk music. They also have a few tunes in their repertoire that are sure to be familiar to some of the passersby, including Hava Nagila and Bella Ciao.
Blaine said “We do a very souped up version of that [Bella Ciao],” and Levon added “It gets pretty fast [and] it’s pretty fun.”
As well the guys have got some original tunes. Levon said “We just wrote a song for our friend’s birthday party, it’s called Catherine’s Song. That’s one of our nicer songs.”

I haven’t seen them in recent days, so they may be out of town, but if they return, and you manage to see them in your wanderings downtown, I'm sure you'll be thoroughly entertained, although you might want to get your innoculations first.

In the meantime you can see a video of them at the following link:
Spatiu Germene busking on Government Street

Interview with Shelley & Owen Vaags

2011-06-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

This past April, when the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority held auditions to fill the causeway busker positions left vacant by non-returning entertainers, I decided to go down to the inner harbour and check out this year’s batch of prospective applicants. Over the period of a few hours, the hopeful candidates showed up to perform two or three songs in front of the three judges and an audience of dozens of passersby who were stopping to see what was going on. In the end, twelve acts had tried out for the five vacancies.

One of the successful acts was the mother & son duo of Shelley (guitar & vocals) and Owen Vaags (cajon aka beat box & vocals). Shelley is not new to the busking scene; she was a regular face on the harbour for about eight years from 1988 to 1996. Owen, who is 15, doesn’t remember, but his mom would sometimes also bring him in the stroller, along with his sister, down to the causeway when she went out to busk.

Shelley recalled “I was married in ’90, and it was a couple of years before then because we were saving up for our wedding, so I was out there busking to help pay for our honeymoon, I got enough money that we got two tickets to Europe. Then when I was pregnant with the kids I was still busking, but when the kids were born, it got a little harder. I brought them with me but they started getting antsy so you couldn’t keep them in one place for very long.”
“My daughter Morgan was coming down since she was a baby and when she got old enough she’d sit in the guitar case and sort my money for me, whenever I got any bills, she’d put them in the flap of the guitar case so they wouldn’t fly into the [harbour], and she took it very seriously, she sorted the quarters. This was when she was about 2, but she seemed to start figuring out the money thing really fast. She’d [also] pose whenever a Japanese tourist came by or someone with a camera, she would pose with them, she knew exactly what to do, she knew her role (laughs). We actually got on the Sally Jessy Raphael show because of what she was doing with me down in the harbour, so we went on there and told them about it too. It was probably the last show she aired, but yeah, a lot came from that.”

Shelley was part of a musical family and she got involved in music at a young age. She said “I was 7 when we started performing and all my siblings are younger than me, so we started quite young and I started playing guitar about 11, 12 years old, so, yeah, been performing since that time.”
Along with her sister, and two brothers, Shelley spent seven years playing in a band called the Timebenders, and they continue to perform as the Smiley Family Band.

A few years ago Shelley asked Owen if he was interested in getting involved in music and he jumped at the chance.
“I was like ‘Sure, why not’,” he said. “[Playing] music with the family was originally [why] I wanted to start learning how to play, but then after I started playing more and getting more confident, I wanted to do something more with it, so I suggested that we come down to the harbour and get a busking license.”
Owen plays a little bit of guitar, but he said he still doesn’t feel confident enough to play all the songs with Shelley, so in the meantime he brings down his cajon (beat box) to add to the mix, while he continues to expand his guitar skills.
As well as attending school, and busking with his mom, Owen also plays in a little combo called Four Door, who already have a couple of gigs under their belt, the biggest having been the Special Woodstock concert in the Cowichan Valley.

When it comes to the music that they perform together, Shelley and Owen do a lot of songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“I like to think it’s music that helps people stay in a good mood,” said Shelley. “It’s nothing political, no downers, [I’m just] trying to keep it in the kind of mood that if I were going on holidays I would wanna hear, so just trying to keep it light, easy, and fun. I’m really lucky that my son loves that stuff as much as I do, so we have a lot of fun, ‘cause there’s always lots of harmonies.”

Owen mentioned the Beatles, the Doors, the Monkees, and the Beach Boys, when I asked who some of his favorite musicians were.
“And Herman’s Hermits, I really took a liking to them,” he said. “I just can’t seem to get too into any kind of group on the radio now [that] most of the people my age listen to. Sometimes I’ll listen to it, but I can never really say I like the group, ‘cause it’s maybe only one song. It’s never like they really produce an album that you [say] ‘Oh, did you get that album?’ It’s usually just ‘Oh, did you hear that song?’ you know, compared to the way it used to be like.”

I asked Shelley if she wrote any of her own material and she said “I used to write music and now that the kids are older I’m feeling more creative again, so I’ll be writing again. Whenever I think of a great phrase, I wanna write it down for when I do write some music. I had some pretty good songs that I wrote [but] there’s not a lot of places to play originals. They want to know the lyrics and sing along.”
Owen added that he'd also written a couple of songs. "Just some cheesy stuff about old girlfriends, you know, stuff that most boys think about,” he said.

When asked what his friends at school thought about him being a busker, Owen said “I’ve told a couple of people and at first they made fun of me like ‘Oh, what do you go down there and do a little jig’ and stuff like that. I have a basketball coach that just likes to rag on me all the time and once he found out I was like ‘Yeah, coach, uh, I won’t be here for this little scrimmage’ and he goes ‘Oh, why not?’, [and I said] ‘I just can’t be here,’ [so he said] ‘No, tell me why.’ [I said] I’m going busking.’ [He said] ‘You’re what?’ So my basketball friends ragged on me, but they’re all nice guys, in the end they think it’s pretty cool, especially since the odd time you make way better than any job at McDonalds or Tim Horton’s or stuff like that. So they think it’s pretty cool.”

Does Owen see himself continuing with the busking thing beyond this summer? He replied “Oh yeah, I definitely do. Just seeing how much fun it is, I can’t imagine anything gets better than this, so it’s quick, easy, fun money, like if I get a license I can bring out the guitar whenever I want, so I definitely will.”

Most enjoyable thing about busking:
For his part Owen said “I don’t want to sound shallow or anything, but right now it’s the money, because I don’t have a job. I used to be just getting my money from weekly allowances, but that’s never enough, you know, so I wanted to make some extra money, and I love music and so what better way to do it than come out and busk.”
Shelley said “I think it’s picking the songs that I wanna do and trying them out on people, and if the people don’t like them, they keep walking. And if they do, you know it’s a winner, ‘cause they stopped and you make money on it. So you know which songs work and which ones don’t.”
“I love the sunshine [and] meeting people from all around the world. You’re part of the cultural fabric of the city, [and] an ambassador for the city. You’re in photo albums all over the world. Yeah, you’re a memory for somebody, a good memory hopefully.”
“I just love it. I’d forgotten how much fun it was. I was playing [once] up in the Empress with [the] band, and I came down here for my break and you were playing, and I missed what you were doing, so much more than what I was doing, I was thinking ‘gosh, he’s lucky to be down here’. We were traveling and I didn’t enjoy it near as much as I enjoy being down here. I think this is where I’m supposed to be.”

To see a video of Shelley & Owen, and more information on some of the other things that they're involved with, check out the following links:
Shelley & Owen on the causeway
Special Woodstock
Smiley Family Band

Marty Field aka Encyclopedia Brucetannica

2011-06-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

One of the major players in the Victoria busking scene, is guitarist/singer Marty Field. With 17 years experience as a street musician under his belt, he has become a familiar face playing outside of Murchies on Government Street and down on the inner harbour causeway. For the most part, Marty is a one-man-act, but back in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, he also played in various combinations with Leigh Grisewood (bass), Caleb Kelly (fiddle) and Julian Vitek (violin). In more recent years he has been regularly teaming up with longtime busker Dave Harris, and occasionally Marty and Dave have also rocked the causeway with the guitar slingin’ son of one of Marty’s friends, in the causeway supergroup Jake Quake & The Seismatics.

Whatever the musical permutations, the sound remains pretty much the same, as rock ‘n’ roll is definitely a dominant part of Marty’s DNA. When asked to describe his musical style, Marty said “I think I’m pretty much a rock and roll player, leaning somewhat towards a folky, kind of hick sound, but, certainly, I love rock and roll, and that’s mostly what I play, old ‘50s stuff, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Eddie Cochrane, [and] into the ‘60s with the Stones and Dylan, and the Beatles.”

Originally from London, ON, Marty lived in Victoria for a couple of years when he was a kid in the early 1980s, before moving back to Ontario.
He first picked up the guitar when he was about 13. “I started plucking around with some chords [that] a friend of my mother’s taught me”, he said. “I’ve always loved music so, it seemed like a natural thing for me to do then.”

The first time Marty played guitar on the street was in his hometown of London in the late 1980s. “I played a few times, sort of cut my teeth back in London." he said. "There was a guy that used to busk there, an older guy. I’ll never forget this guy. His name was Robert James, I thought it was a really cool blues name, and I used to stop and listen to him play. Every once in a while he would have to go for a Coca-Cola or something, [and] he’d say ‘Would you watch my guitar?’ I’d ask if I could play it, and he’d say ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ He’d come back and say ‘Keep playing,’ ‘cause I was kind of making him money. So I’d play his guitar and I ended up playing a few tunes and it was like a bug, you know.”

It wasn’t until he returned to Victoria in 1994, that Marty decided to launch himself into a full time busking venture. “When I came out here, I was in desperate need of money [and] I couldn’t find a job. I saw quite a few people busking in town, and I thought to myself, ‘I could try that’. I was never really much of a singer, but I just sucked it up, and the first couple of times I tried it, and I made enough to sustain myself and my girlfriend, at the time. [That was] the first time I really did it full time, or seriously, as a job, [in] ’94 during the Commonwealth Games.”

If you were to catch Marty’s sets often enough, you would soon come to know him for his many Bruce Springsteen covers. I think it might have been former local street musician Jim Meighen who coined the nickname ‘Encyclopedia Brucetannica’ for Marty, who some believed could probably perform Springsteen’s entire catalog.

I asked Marty if he could in fact play every one of Bruce’s songs, and he responded with a laugh and said “No, contrary to popular belief, I do not know every single Bruce Springsteen song. There’s a few that I don’t play, but I could certainly play a song from every album.”

On why he likes Bruce Springsteen:
“I’m a big Springsteen fan. I’ve been to a number of his shows, and I always heard that once you saw his show, you were a Bruce fan for life, and it’s true. I saw my first show, [when] I was 13 going on 14, and it was a three and a half hour show, and it just changed my whole outlook on rock and roll. I’ve seen him in Toronto, twice in ’84 and ’85, during the Born In The USA tour. and then I’ve seen, I think four shows in Vancouver including a couple of his solo acoustic shows. I’m very moved by his music, and I really get into his lyrics, [they] really speak to me, so whether he’s doing a rock song or a folk song or a country song, he’s just a great writer, [who’s] in tune with the human spirit. I think he’s got his finger on the human condition, and he speaks to me, that way.”

I asked him what his favorite song was, I was pretty sure it would be a Springsteen song, and I was not surprised when he answered, “The River, yeah, it’s just a beautifully written song, and it’s actually one of the songs that people request from me.”

Marty has also done a bit of songwriting of his own. “Yeah, I’ve got some of my own material, I don’t really play it a lot because, well, those aren’t the money making songs. People want to hear what they know, but if someone asks me to play one of my songs, sure.”

Most enjoyable thing about busking:
“I guess the thing I enjoy most about busking is interacting with the different people. The thing that brings me most joy when I’m playing is to have little kids dancing. There’s no better praise than that, to have a little kid dancing to a song I’m playing. That makes me happy, and that’s what I enjoy most about it. And the money’s okay too.”

Most memorable busking experience:
“There’s been so many, but I guess the most memorable ones are playing with other musicians. Do you remember Leigh [Grisewood]? I used to play with Leigh, big double bass. I miss those times, man. He was great to play with, he was so fun and energetic.”

Strangest thing anybody ever threw in case:
“There’s lots of strange things, I think I told you before, a nun gave me a lunch one time. People think you want food or something when you’re busking. I’ve gotten marijuana and condoms and little notes. Sometimes girls write little notes or little poems, drawings, other people’s drawings. Lint, a lot of lint from the pockets of the masses. And of course we get a lot of international monetary coins, but I always think the weirdest thing is food.”

Advice to anyone who might be considering trying busking:
“Some very talented people will try busking for the first time and they’re not used to playing in front of others. Something I always say is ‘sing it like no one’s listening’. You really just gotta get over your nervousness, or whatever’s holding you back, and play like no one’s listening.”

Check out the check out the following videos to see Marty in action:
Marty with Dave Harris
Jake Quake & The Seismatics

The Bennetts Brothers

2010-09-30T15:05:00.001-07:00

Each year there are always new faces turning up on the inner harbour causeway to try their hand at being a street musician.
In the summer of 2006, two of these new faces were a pair of brothers, who although they are relatively new to the Victoria scene, they are anything but novices when it comes to busking in general, they are in fact busking veterans.

The two buskers, or “street singers” as they call themselves, Ian and Jonathan Bennetts began playing on the streets of Paris, France in 1957. Other places they have busked include Denmark, Switzerland, the Middle East, North Africa, New York and San Francisco. More recently, since the summer of 2006, they’ve been living and busking here in Victoria. They both play guitar, and sing a mix of folk, blues, rockabilly, skiffle and country.

Originally from Yorkshire, England, Ian and Jonathan, have a direct connection to the late ‘50s British skiffle scene through their younger brother Les, who was achieving success as a premiere guitarist in his own band Les Hobeaux, and then went on to play lead guitar as a member of Lonnie Donegan’s band.

After hearing a few of their stories, I knew their early experiences playing on the streets of Paris would be a different perspective from the Vancouver/Victoria angle that’s been the focus of the blog so far. Last January, I finally got a chance to sit down with the brothers at Serious Coffee in James Bay, where they shared a few of their memories from their early days as street musicians.

CD – How did you decide to become a street musician?
Jonathan – My father was a guitarist and a singer with a dance band, didn’t know him very well as he abandoned my mother at an early age. Not knowing him, I followed in his footsteps, joined the Paratroop Regiment and was posted to Cyprus, aged 18. That’s when I had this singular idea of being a singer, and it just stayed with me. I bought my first guitar in Cyprus just before heading back to (the) UK, and after checking out the local scene in London, figured I’d do a lot better in France, (it) seemed much more romantic than England and a hell of a lot less competition.
Within a couple of weeks of discharge from the army in 1957 and with about fifty bucks, I got the boat train from Dover, arrived in Paris, spent all my money quickly on a hotel room and largesse to waiters. I wanted to start from zero and declare proudly that I’m living totally off the money that I was earning as a singer.
I’d just turned 20. When I started singing, I knew exactly three chords, which my brother Les had showed me, plus one complete song, Yes Sir, That’s My Baby. I sang my lungs out, about thirty renditions, same song. Still makes me smile when Ian and I sing it on the harbour front here.

(Ian Bennetts, Alex Campbell & Jonathan Bennetts – photo courtesy of Jonathan Bennetts)

Jonathan – Then I met one of Scotland’s finest folk singers, Alex Campbell, (he) was working in a small club called La Contrescarpe, but wasn’t a street singer. I googled him recently and found out he made like a hundred LPs, really amazing guy. Anyway, he came roaring out of the crowd and said “For f--- sake, can ye nae play another tune,” and he grabbed my guitar and proceeded to play eleven different chords while singing San Francisco Bay Blues. We became really good friends and he taught me how to play the guitar, he was a lovely guy, he really was.
Ian came over and joined me about six months later after he got out of the RAF. We busked together probably about a third of the time. Generally we’d do it solo because you made about the same money, maybe ten percent more with an extra person, so it made more sense to split the places that we were doing.

Ian – I remember my first busking experience in Paris. When I got out of the service I went immediately to Paris where it was supposed to be really good, the woman were beautiful. I was put there by my brother Jon, with a guitar, right in front of Le Metro, the Parisian subway. (People) came piling out and I struck up with, I think it was a pretty poor attempt at Blue Suede Shoes, made not much better by the fact that my guitar was a very quiet electric Hofner cutaway I’d brought from England. It looked great, but was useless for a street busker (as) it had no volume or sound or tone whatsoever. And so there I was standing at the top with my knees shaking real bad and my voice was to say the least, feeble! I got through it somehow and within a few days I was totally confident that I was on my way to becoming what I’d hoped to be, a pretty decent busker. Still, after a while, I switched to a Spanish guitar, (which was) all you could get in France at that time.
I think probably we’re talking the late ‘50s, ’58 or something like that, Jon and I would sing outside of a café somewhere in the Latin Quarter of Paris. We’d do two songs and then Jon would go around with the hat, and while he did that, I would sing Summertime. At that time back then a long time ago I had a very sweet soft voice and I would sing Summertime and I’d usually aim my eyes towards a pretty young woman and sing the song as if I was singing it to her. I learned that trick as a busker early on, and so I did very well in the romance department by singing romantic songs, and that was a really good experience for me, and I’ve never looked back.

(Jonathan & fellow street musician Sammy Prosser entertaining the crowd at the Pont des Arts – photo courtesy of Jonathan Bennetts)

Jonathan – Every Saturday and Sunday, we’d go down to a place called the Pont des Arts which is just opposite the Louvre, and underneath the bridge on the Seine (River) we’d have a big outdoor concert, and usually about a thousand people watching our outdoor show. It was really extraordinary, a lot of the visiting musicians from Stateside, Jack Elliott, and Derroll Adams, Pete the Feet a superb 12 string player, and Joe Locker the banjo player, Mimi Baez, Richard Fariña, whoever was in town came down, and we’d do like a non-stop show, take a couple of crates of beer, and before the show started, holler at the gathering crowd to throw our beer money down, it was really fantastic, probably the best street singing experience ever.

(Columbia studio shot of Jonathan & Ian with Pete the Feet on bass in foreground – photo courtesy of Jonathan Bennetts)

Jonathan – Then we were discovered whilst busking, made a record for a small company called Unidisc, who recorded folk songs, we did EPs (extended plays) in those days, four songs and onto the juke box. Somebody from Columbia Records heard it and really liked what we were doing, so they got in touch with us and offered a one year contract, paid us about $500 a week plus our lodgings and expenses. (They) put us on a plane, flew us back to England, bought absurd tweed suits for us and then flew us back again on Air France, (where) we had the press meet us when we landed. We sang with people like Johnny Hallyday and Richard Anthony. Edith Piaf, was in the same recording studio as we were, I thought she was the cleaning lady the first time I saw her, and I was quite startled to discover she was “le petit oiseau, the little bird”. We toured all over France, during this year with Hallyday and Anthony, going to different cities and each night there’s a concert. (We) sang at the Palais du Sports and headlined the Olympia which is the French Carnegie Hall or London’s Albert Hall.
We did lots of television, made various records, often covers of hit Presley discs, we had several hits and the usual publicity, but no freedom of choice. Then we were offered a huge contract, but it was way too prohibitive. We used to go to Pamplona and run with the bulls every year, skied every winter, and I parachuted, lots of dynamic things, but we couldn’t do any of this in the contract. They were gonna put us in a house, (and) four mornings a week we had to have breakfast with specific visiting stars and music publishers and stuff like that. Plus wearing those stupid tweed suits, being British and I was supposed to smoke a f---ing pipe, like proper Englishmen, when actually, I smoked Gauloises like a good Frenchman.
Anyway, I turned it down, I said “No”, walked away from it and went back to the street scene. It was a good contract, a huge amount of money, probably like $500,000 a year, plus royalties for me as lead singer, and for the rest of the group it was a $100,000 each, but I didn’t want to do it, I really had no interest in being manipulated just to make some money, but I certainly had an interest in leading a free lifestyle. So, we walked away from it, pissed everybody else off, but I’ve never regretted it for a day.

CD – How would you describe your music at that time?
Jonathan – I was doing things like Bring A Little Water Sylvie and Lost John, Cumberland Gap, stuff from Donegan, and then as Presley got more and more popular, I started doing Presley songs and I moved easily into the diving around and doing the gyrations.
As far as I know, I was the first sort of rock ‘n’ roll singer to do a session on the street. There were French street singers, but they played the accordion and they did like the romantic songs, where as I was doing Elvis Presley, and from that it built up. After three years I think there was about 25 street singers from Germany, from Sweden, from America, from England, and it just got to be like an industry in that sense, so I’m really proud of the fact that we were there for the start of the whole thing. Then I got hired solo at the Moulin Rouge on Pigalle, and (laughs) I was stripped down to a pair of tight white pants and they painted my body gold and I stood on a thing and sang Elvis, Jerry Lee (Lewis) and Ray Charles numbers.

The brothers went on a trip to Turkey and sang in some nightclubs in Istanbul. They also traveled to Cyprus, Lebanon and Jordan, where they sang at a hotel called the Philadelphia Hotel, for King Hussein and the royal family.

Jonathan – It’s probably around ’59, ’60, Ian and I, we did various trips. I wanted to visit a lot of different places, and the beauty about being a street singer is that we literally didn’t have backpacks then, we just had a guitar case with a couple of pairs of shorts, and a pair of pants, and we didn’t need anything else. You just bought things as you went along, and you could arrive in a city with no money, and strike up and ‘bingo’. The first thing you’d do is make your hotel money, and then you’d make your food money. And then if you wanted a couple of days break, you’d work extra hard.
In Geneva, I was such a novelty, I was making around 50, 75 bucks a night, and that was a lot of money in those days, so it was pretty fantastic. I was the first street singer in Geneva. I know that for a fact ‘cause I got arrested and they said “What is this madness, singing in the street, rock and roll?”, and then I eventually I did a couple of days in jail, and they let me out, there was a newspaper article about my arrest, and then I got a booking in a nightclub, so (laughs) that was pretty nifty.
Then I kinda moved from singing in the streets if it was too cold, and I’d evolved into asking if I could sing inside of restaurants. So in the old town of Geneva for instance, (there) was a super five-star restaurant and I’d sing in there and I’d put like a twenty franc note on the silver collection tray, and I’d score around about $200 in one show, ‘cause they were very, very wealthy, and I spoke to them in French which helped a lot. There was a king called King Farouk, and he used to go into this place regularly. He lived in Geneva when he was in exile, and he was in there one night when I was singing, and he said “Do you know anything Arabic?”, he spoke in French, and I said ”Yeah.” There’s a song called Moustapha that was a very popular song by an Algerian singer, so I sang that, I figure he’s gonna give me at least fifty bucks, anyway (he) went up to the collection, and he pulls out a purse and he takes out a ten centieme piece, it’s like five cents, he clinked it on my tray. I picked it up, and looked at him and I said “Your Majesty, I understand you’re in exile, and things must be very hard for you, so I think you need this more than I do” (laughs), and I gave it back to him. He went berserk, so the owner of the place threw me out. He said “We’re terribly sorry, Your Majesty”, (then) threw me out, and he winked at me and he said “Come by tomorrow”. So I walked back in there the next night, and all the waiters and the chef came out and applauded me, they said “Fantastic, Jonathan”, gave me a beautiful dinner, and they said “This bastard’s been stiffing us”, he’d get a bill for $1000, and he’d leave a $1 tip”. (laughs). So I was popular for a long time in that place.

CD – You’ve mentioned that you guys have also done a bit of jail time for singing in the streets?
Jonathan – We probably went to jail, at least a hundred times, Even when we had a contract with the studios, if they were late in giving us our allowance for a week, I’d say “If you don’t give it to us, we’re gonna go out and sing”, and they’d say “Oh, no, you can’t do that, you’re stars now.” And I’d say “Bollocks!” and off we’d go. I think we got arrested one time, we were both stars in the system, and there was a big headline in the newspaper “Les Travellers sont arrêtés par la police”. It was actually fantastic publicity and it really helped us.
We lived in a very immediate sense in those days and the fame didn’t mean too much, though it was certainly a terrific kick to go in a bar and put on one of our hits on the jukebox, or stand casually next to one of the huge posters with our photos on them all over Paris. (We) were pissed off ‘cause we didn’t have any money.
Ian – I think that one of the funny parts that kind of pissed me off at the time, but looking back it makes me laugh, is when and if the cops got us, because we got so good at sensing the cops coming, we’d take our guitars and put ‘em under a car and stand in the crowd and say “What’s goin’ on?”, when the cops would be there. But when they got us, fairly good humored about it, take us to the local cop station, take all our money, and keep us for a couple of hours and let us go. (laughs)
Jonathan – We finally developed a system where we had girls collecting and the moment we’d collected like $10, we’d put it in a special bag and she’d hang on to it, we wouldn’t put the money on ourselves, so that way the cops didn’t get all the money.
Ian – Tell him about Tangiers.
Jonathan – Oh yeah, we busked in Tangiers and within thirty minutes there was a riot, all these women with their (burqas) they were screaming, hysterically, and all the men were shouting at us and we were just singing, and we were arrested and slung in jail, for creating a riot, it was the newspaper headline the next day. Then the chief of police came to see us and he said “You know I can lock you up for a long time for this, it’s very serious, but we’re having a police benefit, so if you agree to play at the benefit we’ll turn a blind eye”.
Ian – And that’s where they asked us to play, right there in the jail.
Jonathan – We sang for them, then headlined the police ball.

* * * * * * * * * *
CD – You’ve been busking here in Victoria now for five years, how does the causeway compare with some of the other places you’ve busked?
Jonathan – (laughs) Financially, not at all. For crowd reaction my favorite country in the world to sing in was France, the French are just so extraordinary, they really reacted ‘cause they just have a joie de vivre which you don’t find in North America. For whatever reason North Americans are really tough to get involved. On a percentage basis, in France, if I stood on the Carrefour de L’Odeon, which I did when I first got there, within ten minutes of singing, I had about fifty people around me, where as here I can stand there for an hour, if you get four people around you, you’re doing pretty good. So, Victoria, we do it more for our soul than for anything else.

CD – What do you enjoy most about busking?
Jonathan – I think the sense of freedom, and it’s just a joyful experience to be out there singing for people. It doesn’t get too joyful when people just keep walking by, but once you get an audience and get some people that are responding to you, then it’s really a terrific feeling. And even at our advanced age it’s still a turn-on to do that. It’s a good feeling. So I enjoy the exchange essentially, where you move somebody enough that they’ll stop and they’ll interact with you, come up afterwards and say “We really, really liked that. That was good stuff.” For me anyway it’s much more about that.
I haven’t done a lot of it the last couple of years ‘cause I was pretty sick for at least a year. Now, Ian, he’s been really solid, he goes down there three, four times a week on average, and he does it ‘cause he loves doing it, it’s not really for the money, unless you do like three sessions a day, you’re not gonna make enough money to live on.
Ian – I can’t really add much to that. I agree. It’s the idea that you’re doing something artistic and you’re getting reaction from complete strangers, you know. And one of things I love about busking is when either foreigners or children get into it, and you know that they don’t understand really what you’re doing, but they’re so happy about it and they’re jumping around and laughing and giggling and stuff like that.

* * * * * * * * * *
In 1963, Ian and Jonathan got free passage singing on a boat to the States, and ended up in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where they met and hung out with some of the up-and-coming names of the early ‘60s folk scene including Bob Dylan and the Clancy Brothers. (more on their Greenwich Village experiences in a future post)

In the meantime you can check out the following related links:
Bennetts Brothers – C.C.Rider
Bennetts Brothers – Lost John
Lonnie Donegan with Les Bennetts on guitar

Keep On The Sunny Side: interview with Emily Molloy & Leah Barley

2010-09-19T22:45:00.000-07:00

A week ago Saturday, I was doing my regular busking slot on the north corner of the inner harbour causeway, when I happened to glance southward and noticed that there were a couple of unfamiliar street musicians playing in the center spot. When I heard that they were just in town for the day, I relayed a message down to them, that I was hoping we might arrange an interview before they left.

I was just packing up my gear preparing to go down to the center spot and catch up with the duo, when I noticed them approaching me, and we made our introductions.

It was apparent that their musical talents and their friendly, outgoing, sunny personalities had made quite an impression among the passersby, and a few of the causeway artists. As we were talking, people were still coming up and offering them tips and positive comments about their performance.

Sunny Side Up, as they call themselves, are Emily Molloy, who plays guitar and sings, and Leah Barley, who also sings, and plays the banjo and tambourine, or as she calls it “alternative percussion”. Both are originally from Ontario; Meaford and Newmarket respectively. Emily spent some time in Invermere BC, and Leah was living in Canmore AB, before moving to Vancouver where they met.

Emily – We have a mutual friend, actually two of our friends, Scott Bell and James Green, who have a band called the Buffalo Swans, and I was there to support them, and so was Leah, and we met each other dancing. Then we didn’t see each other for a little longer, and then we met again at a party through James and we just started hanging out and playing music together, and we loved it. We really collaborate well and compliment each others style, so (we) kept it up.
CD – And how long ago would this have been that you started playing together?
Emily – About two months ago.

CD – What made you decide to try busking?
Emily – I knew a couple of people who had done it before and I thought about it. I was like, what’s the difference between me playing music in my room or in my house by myself, and being outside, standing on the street and getting feedback and energy from people, and you can kinda make some money doing it. So, yeah, I just started trying to do it that way and went, set out my little jar one day and it was working, and I was like “Wow, alright, this can kinda work” (laughs).

Although Emily had done quite a bit of busking when she first moved to Vancouver, she and Leah had never busked together until they decided to try it in Victoria.

Leah – On this voyage in particular, we just wanted to kinda get away, and come see what Victoria was like, and wanted to play and share our music, so busking is just an easy way to just do it. We love playing for people at house parties and whenever we jam with our friends everyone has such a great time, so busking is just an easy way to share our music with everybody.
CD – So, you came over on the ferry last night?
Emily – Yeah, then we hitchhiked into Victoria, and from there we had some friends pick us up and we played music all night and ate some food and…
Leah – Here we are (laughs).

CD – What do you enjoy most about busking?
Leah – I like when you’re into a song and you’re playing and you’re totally into it and then all of a sudden you’re finished and there’s a whole bunch of people all around you, and you didn’t even realize it and everyone’s just clapping. Or, like that little girl, we sang a kids song, Five Little Green Speckled Frogs (laughs), for this one little girl, and she was so happy by the end of it. You know, it’s just nice to share your music.
Emily – It is nice to share your music, and I like to close my eyes a lot, and I’ll open my eyes up and there’s a big crowd around, and they all smile and you think “Well, okay that’s amazing, my music does get out to people”. I know that all the musicians that I’ve been listening to, that’s how they got to me, and I like to be able to give back to other people.

CD – How would you describe your style of music?
Emily – Eclectic. I’ll sing anything from, you know, Nirvana, covers from like early ‘90s grunge to, like jazz, Ella Fitzgerald style, it’s pretty all over the place.
Leah – I like to cover music on my banjo that you wouldn’t actually hear on a banjo, so I do Sublime songs, and I like doing music from the ‘40s and ‘50s, like, I cover Blue Moon and Dreams. I like to do songs that people love and enjoy but they’ve never heard it in that style and it makes them think, and I just kind of put my own twist on things.

CD – Do you write any of your own stuff?
Emily – Sure do. I’m recording an album right now, it’s gonna be out hopefully in the next eight months and, yeah, you can go to www.myspace.com/musicofemily, and it’s all there. I think I have a very different style, I’m not really sure what I am, I can’t really, it’s… powerful, soulful… it’s hard… it’s just music, happiness, that’s what it is.
Leah – I’m attempting to (write), I’ve been singing for about three years, but I’ve only had my banjo for about a year, so just understanding the whole dynamics of putting lyrics together with chords is very new for me. I’ve written maybe three or four songs but nothing major and I’m just kind of playing with it. I just really enjoy accompanying Emily and learning from her, and learning from our friends, but definitely I’m learning a lot from Emily.

CD – Is there a song that you never get tired of playing, that you could play ‘til the cows come home?
Leah – To play with Emily, my favorite song by far is No Rain (by Blind Melon), the song that we performed for you. That song has such a deep emotional impact on me from when I was a kid, such a fun, fun song. But, I just love playing and singing, so I can’t really pick one song because, depending on my mood, it’s just whatever comes out of me.
Emily – For me, wow I was gonna say Black by Pearl Jam, it’s the song that I absolutely love to play, and everytime I play it, it’s actually different than the last time. It’s one of the first songs that I learned how to play and sing and it’s just very powerful and yeah, I love it. I did get sick of it for a while ‘cause it was the only song that people wanted to hear from me for a while, and then I started writing my own music. In terms of my own music, the one song that I could play forever is called This Old Box, it’s kinda got a special little special place.
CD – And is it on your website so people can check it out?
Emily – It is, yeah. People can totally check it out.

CD – In your short time busking, do you have any memorable experiences?
Leah – Well, this (interview) is going to be memorable (laughs). Just today was great having everyone clapping and being nice to us. One man came and gave us some of his paintings, and everyone’s been so friendly, and definitely, that little girl coming over and letting us sing for her was really sweet. It was just nice to see everyone was just so happy. It’s nice to do something we love and to have it impact people so positively.
Emily – I have two that really stick out with me. A little girl actually came and started dancing and she was wearing a tutu and her name was Ocean and her mom was just walking by like, they weren’t gonna actually stop, but she just couldn’t stop dancing, and so her mom eventually just ended up staying, you know watching her kid dance (laughs). It was like the cutest thing in the world.
Another one, this man came by one day, he was just walking by (and) he had a bunch of sage with him. He gave that to me as a gift instead of throwing a twoonie or something, and he asked if he could take my picture and I said ”Of course”. He used some of the pictures as part of his art project, and he put me up in (laughs) one of his art gallery openings, yeah, so that was pretty cool.
CD – Did you get to play at the opening?
Emily – No I didn’t even think about it at the time (laughs) I could’ve but (laughs) I didn’t think about it.

CD – If somebody came up to you and said “You know, I think what you’re doing is pretty cool, I’d like to try it”, is there anything that you’ve learned from busking that you could pass on to them as advice?
Emily – Definitely, just don’t reserve yourself, I think that’s the biggest thing, is just have fun with it and be yourself, that’s all you can do, right? Just being yourself and playing what you love to play, that comes out more than any other thing. Just putting your heart into it, that’s about it. As long as you love what you’re doing, people will come around and wanna be part of it, so yeah.
Leah – Make sure your heart’s in it, come prepared, know what you wanna play, keep ‘em rollin’. If there is a crowd, kind of try to interact with them.
Emily – (And) go when it’s not raining (laughs).
CD – (laughs) Sounds good to me. Have you ever done it in the rain?
Emily – I have.
Leah – Yeah? You busked in the rain?
Emily – Yeah, but I was under a covering thing, and it was raining on the street. It wasn’t good. (laughs) It really wasn’t good!

So, there you go. Best advice is if you’re going to try busking, "keep on the sunny side".

The pair are hoping to have a myspace page set up in a few weeks, at which point I will link it.
In the meantime, you can check out Emily’s music at the following website:
Music Of Emily

Caleb Kennedy & Jaime Nolan

2010-07-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

For most of my busking career, I have been primarily a solo performer playing my guitar, harmonica and singing, but over the years I have also had quite a few occasions to busk with other musicians be they non-busker friends or fellow buskers. Last year I posted a story in which I related some of those occasions. I also mentioned a few of the benefits of teaming up with someone else, the most obvious one being the extra boost of energy that comes from the interaction with another musician, which can go a long way to making the busking experience a lot more fun. (see blog archive – Sept 2009: Making Music With My Friends)

Down on Victoria’s inner harbour causeway, there have been many local buskers who have periodically joined forces to entertain the passersby. Some of these combinations have included one-man-band Dave Harris teaming up with myself or Swan Walker (steel drums) or Marty Field (guitar). Marty has himself paired up with Jake Quake (guitar), Leigh Grisewood (upright bass) or Julian Vitek (violin).

Another such combination is the duo of Jaime Nolan and Caleb Kennedy, two singer/guitarists who offer up rockin’ sets of popular songs that range from the ‘60s to more recent fare.
Of the two, Jaime, 34, has been busking the longest. After growing up back and forth between Ontario and Montreal, he moved out to Victoria in 1994 where he began playing along Government Street, and eventually he became a regular down on the inner harbour.
Caleb, 32, is originally from Keremeos BC in the southern Okanagan, and has been living in Victoria for the last seven years. He met Jaime when they began attending a weekly open stage / jam session at the Spiral Café in Vic West. In 2008, Caleb began busking as a guest on Jaime’s license, and last year he successfully auditioned for his own license on the harbour, and can now be found performing solo, as well as continuing the duo sets with Jaime.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Jaime and Caleb for this interview.

CD – Have either of you busked anywhere other than Victoria?
Caleb – I busked a little bit on the (BC) Ferries, I wasn’t planning on busking, I actually just started playing by myself and then people came by and they ended up giving me some money at the end of the thing. I (also) busked in the Okanagan when I went back to visit. In Penticton, there was a farmer’s market and I just played my guitar and people threw money in it so, it was good.
Jaime – I’ve busked all across Canada. When I was 21, I went all the way to P.E.I., and busked all the way back to Vancouver Island. Every city except for Edmonton, so I hit all the major cities, Quebec, Montreal, Halifax, Charlottetown, St John, Ottawa, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, didn’t do Regina.
CD – How did those places compare with Victoria?
Jaime – They didn’t. Victoria’s the best. That’s why I’m here.

CD – What do you enjoy most about busking?
Caleb – I like playing for people, and we get a really nice crowd down here and you make a little bit of money doin’ it. There’s not much better that you could do with your day, you get to be outside in the sun, playing music, I mean, the whole thing about it is good.
Jaime – Yeah, I just love bein’ out here with the people. There are other busker spots that could be more lucrative, but the inner harbour, I just love socializing with the people, I love being down here, the community.

CD – How would you describe your style of music?
Caleb – You couldn’t say a genre because we do all sorts of genres, but just energetic. We like to put out a good energy, sometimes we’re kinda funny, you know, but, energy almost in everything we do, whether it’s a slow song or a fast song, we’re always puttin’ a lot into it.
Jaime – Yeah, we definitely have a different style when we play together as opposed to when we’re playing separately. When we’re together we try to play off each other’s energy. And this year we’re trying to incorporate some comedy stuff in there. But whenever I play alone, I’m mostly a real mellow player, you know like slow songs, like Neil Young kinda stuff, Blue Rodeo, but when I’m with Caleb it’s upbeat the whole time.

CD – Do you write any of your own material?
Caleb – Yeah, I write lots of songs.
CD – And how much of that do you do out on the street?
Caleb – I don’t know, probably like five or six songs that I’ll do on a fairly regular rotation. When I’m by myself I actually do a decent amount of originals, stuff which goes okay, hit and miss, it kinda depends on the crowd. And it depends on the day, if it’s a quieter day, sometimes I’ll just try a new song out and surprisingly I’ve had a pretty good response. If there are kids around occasionally I’ll pop into a little repertoire of original kids’ songs as well.
Jaime – I write a lot of songs but I don’t play them down here. When I first started, I played mostly my own stuff ‘cause I didn’t have a large enough repertoire, and then the more covers I learned, the more money I made so I just stopped playing my own stuff, and I just keep my own stuff to play in coffee shops.

CD – Who would be your musical influences?
Caleb – The Beatles, I think is an obvious one for me. I really like Weezer, which is a band that we do a couple of tunes of. I personally like things that are catchy, I don’t care who the person is who writes it, if it’s got a good feel to it; I like music to sound honest. I mean some pop songs are honest, some are not, so I like honest songs that are lyrically driven. I’m a big lyric guy.
Jaime – Me, definitely Neil Young, Bob Dylan, mostly acoustic artists like Van Morrison’s early stuff acoustically, something that I can busk with, you know. I love Pink Floyd, but I can’t play Pink Floyd down here, so what influenced my playing is definitely Bob Dylan and Neil Young.

CD – What’s your all-time favorite song to perform, the one that you never tire of playing?
Caleb – I don’t know if it’s my all-time favorite, but I don’t think I’ll ever tire of “500 Miles” by the Proclaimers. Every time we play it we get such a reaction that you just can’t help but wanna play it. Even if I was tired of playing it, I would keep playing it because you get such a good energy that it feels good playing it anyway.
Jaime – You go through phases, like where you got a song that you just love playing and you play it all summer, sometimes you play it twice in a set, but it changes. However, I never get tired of my Neil Young songs.

CD – What is your most memorable busking experience?
Caleb – This summer my two kids came out with me, and Jaime’s son Harbour came out, and we had another friend over and the kids came up and they happened to be wearing their soccer gear, and they sang the “Waving Flag Song” which is the soccer anthem for the World Cup, and people just went crazy for it. So, it’s kind of a dad moment, ‘cause it wasn’t really as much about me, it was more about them, but that was pretty cool for me.

Jaime – It’s tough ‘cause most memorable moments, they change. This is my 16th year and maybe five years ago I might've had a different answer
‘cause other memories are fresh in your head. But for me definitely, I started busking this summer with my son on the drums. That was like the coolest thing ever. I thought that maybe when he was 16 he might play with me, but I didn’t expect him to be 6 years old.

CD – What was your worst busking experience?
Caleb – It was probably one of my early ones when I went to do an evening shift and I didn’t know much about it and it was windy and cold and people weren’t interested at all, and a couple of guys heckled me and I think I made like $4 in like 2½ hours, it was just terrible, so that was probably my worst one.
Jaime – I think my worst was, I was like busking hard for so many days and on the day of my birthday I got intense sunstroke and I got violently ill and I almost didn’t make it home and that was a horrible experience.

CD – Anything else you’d like to add in relation to busking?
Jaime – It’s definitely something you have to be devoted to. A lot of the new buskers, they try it once or twice and when the income’s not sufficient they give up. It’s something you’ve gotta be disciplined and you just gotta play all day in order to pay that rent, but, you have to love it, you can’t just do it ‘cause it’s a job, you have to love it.
Caleb – And you’ve got to be willing to take those days when you’re not going to do much and you have to be willing to be okay with that. You know sometimes, the next day you’ll do better, so you just gotta be okay with that. And that’s one thing I’ve sort of been training myself, like I’ll look down and it’s been an hour and there’s five bucks in there, and I’m like okay well that’s five bucks I didn’t have before. I could’ve sat at home and played guitar and made nothin’, so you know, attitude I think is a big part of success.
Jaime – Attitude, yeah.

When not performing on the inner harbour, Caleb and Jaime also play together in a 5-piece band called Weak Patrol, which will be playing at the Upstairs Cabaret in Bastion Square on Thursday, August 5th.
Jaime told me “It's nothing like our busking sets. It’s completely electric, and it’s all originals”, to which Caleb added “But, it’s still good, still high energy”.

If you can, be sure to check ‘em out, and in the meantime you can find video clips and more info at the following links:
Jaime Nolan circa 2007
Caleb Kennedy

Just Four Guys Named Shmoe

2010-03-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

Take a stroll to Market Square, and wind up at the Empress,
Come and catch the causeway show, if you’re feeling restless.
(D.Harris/J.Sinclair/J.Rogers)

So go a couple of lines from Take Me To Metchosin, a song by a very popular combo that spent most summer evenings through the 1980s, busking on Victoria’s inner harbour causeway. Over their seven year run, Special Delivery aka The Shmoes entertained the tourists and locals that were strolling along the harbour, and in the process built up a following of regular fans with their high-energy show that incorporated tight musicianship, catchy song parodies, humorous patter, and wild and crazy visual antics.

I was living in Vancouver at the time, so I missed most of the band’s heyday, but when I moved to Victoria in ’89, I do remember that after spending my days busking on the harbour, I’d usually stick around in the evenings and hang out with the audience to watch the Shmoes' shenanigans.

Over the years I have seen and listened to many street musicians, and I have to say that the Shmoes rank up there at the top of my list of favorite busking acts, along with Diamantose in Vancouver circa ‘79-‘81, and the Okie Doke Band in Seattle in the early ‘80s.

I recently sat down with fellow busker, one-man-band and former Shmoe, Dave Harris, to get the story behind the band. I could tell from the enthusiasm with which he spoke, that he was enjoying the memories of what was obviously as much fun for him as it was for all the folks that came out to catch the “causeway show”.

CD – What can you tell me about the genesis of the band?
Dave Harris – I was busking on the street as a solo, when I met Jimmy Sinclair. (He’d be) in town visiting from Pender Island, (and) he’d sit in with me on Government Street and play a few tunes on guitar, and I played fiddle or mandolin, so that’s how I got to know Jimmy.
I probably already knew Mike Kraft from the days when we played in front of the Empress (Hotel) under the Captain Cook statue, that’s how I met Mike. He would come down and listen to me playing with the Anonymous Street Band. Mike was a budding banjo player, so he would come and sit in with us when we were the large group, safety in numbers a little bit, he was very green, he’d be real scared, but we’d say “Jump out there”, and he’d do Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and Rollin’ In My Sweet Baby’s Arms and things like that.
Rod Thomson was another catalyst for a lot of all this. Rod was a little bit older than the rest of us and he played mandolin. He used to come and play with me for free on Government, those were the days when I was really struggling, and he started to teach me bluegrass songs, he knew a lot of songs and he was really into it.
Rod and Mike started living together and doing a little bit of gigging with other guys, and they formed the original Special Delivery band, in early ’79 I think, with a guy named Tom Coles, and I don’t remember who else. They were short-lived, but they did a few gigs.

The other guys ended up leaving, and when Mike came into the group with me and Jimmy he brought the name Special Delivery with him, so it was Rod on mandolin, myself, Jimmy and Mike, and we usually busked under the Captain Cook Statue on top of the causeway.
Around 1980, Rod, Jimmy and Mike went on the road with John Hopkins, but then Jimmy quit and we teamed up as a duo. We used to play a lot at the tourist information up on the top of the causeway, sometimes down below, but a lot up on top. This would be maybe about ’81, something like that, and sometimes my girlfriend of the time, Rhonda Broadfoot would join us as well. Then Mike came back, so we started playing as the three of us.
I was also playing with Jeremy Rogers in a separate thing. We were doing Blue Sky with Rhonda, and Jeremy was playing keyboards with us, so that’s how he came into the group. We didn’t have a bass player really, Jimmy would play some bass, but he was mostly playing guitar, and I was playing fiddle and mandolin, and Mike was playing banjo, so Jeremy came in and covered the bass lines on the keyboard. That basically covers sort of the genesis of the group.

CD – How would you describe the style of music you played?
Dave Harris – We were basically a bluegrass band, certainly when Rod was in the group we were really quite hardcore bluegrass actually and did quite a bit of Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and Jim and Jesse, that kind of material. I was mostly singing a lot of the material, songs like Rollin’ In My Sweet Baby’s Arms, I Gotta Travel On, Nine Pound Hammer. I was really into the Kentucky Colonels, Clarence White’s group from the ‘60s, and so I learned a lot of their songs, If You’re Ever Gonna Love Me, and Dark Hollow, Take A Whiff On Me and Last Thing On My Mind.
Jimmy really was the one who brought the diverse repertoire to the group. He did things like the Kinks’ Skin And Bone, and a bunch of songs by Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen, (and) he brought in some John Hartford too, like Steam Boat Whistle Blues, kind of obscure songs. We did all the big hits too Dueling Banjos, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, Rocky Top.
Mike brought a couple of Lightfoot songs into the group, Did She Mention My Name, and You Are What I Am and I did Early Morning Rain, so we had a bit of Canadiana in there as well. The songs that we covered weren’t necessarily always bluegrass, but we covered them in a bluegrass manner, so we were sort of newgrass, in a way.

CD – And some of your most popular songs were the parodies?
Dave Harris – We had quite a few parodies. That was Jimmy’s influence although all of us contributed. I can remember the funny story of us all sitting at Coffee Mac’s, it was an all-night restaurant, now long gone, over at Rock Bay and Gorge. We’d go play and when we were done we’d go home and we lived in that area, so we’d walk over there for something to eat, and sit around late at night yukking it up in a booth, and that’s how we wrote Take Me To Metchosin, which was a rewrite of a Bob Wills tune Take Me Back To Tulsa. It was all written right there in the booth, and we were rolling in the aisles. The waitresses were thinking “Boy, what are these guys on?” We just couldn’t stop laughing, we laughed about it for days. I remember the first time we tried to do it on the causeway, we just about broke down and fell on the ground, we were laughing so hard. In retrospect it wasn’t that funny, but at the time, you know.
Under The Empress of course came from (The Drifters’) Under The Boardwalk. That was Jimmy and another guy Joe Figliola, who played bass with us on occasion down there.
Then we had Just Four Guys Named Shmoe, that was mostly me. Jimmy and Jeremy, and actually even my wife Jane contributed a few lines in that, but that was basically mostly me. That wasn’t really a rewrite, it was just a funny song.”
Other rewrites that we did Bowling Down At Mayfair to the tune of Proud Mary, we did Fumbling Stumblebums to Tumbling Tumbleweeds.
The Polite Rodeo Song, instead of all the swear words it was “I’m overly concerned, you’re causing me to be irate”, that was mostly Jimmy again. Jimmy was into David Letterman who was really big at the time, he had a lot of that same kind of humor, dry wit.

CD – Your show was very visual. Tell me about some of the more popular antics?
Dave Harris – Dueling Banjos was a really big hit for us because when we were doing it, me and Mike would put on silly hats, I’d put the antlers on, it was like antlers on a helmet, and Mike would wear the pig hat and squeal like a pig. We’d each go a different way off to the wings of our playing area, and then we’d run back to each other and lock our heads together like a couple of bucking deer, that would be sort of close to the end of it.
Turkey In The Straw was another really big hit for us. We would put two cases out and run around them doing figure-eights (and) kicking each other in the butt. Of course ring-around-the-bass in Under The Empress, that was another big antic, and in Take Me To Metchosin we’d lie down on the causeway, flopping around like landed carps.
We had one that we called the "Toyota Jump", which was actually a couple of old fiddle tunes, I believe it was Devil’s Dream and Wagoner’s Lad. In the Wagoner’s Lad it goes da-da-dit-da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, so we’d jump on the da-da-dit (jump) da-da, and then Jimmy would yell out “What a fun bunch of guys”. We called it the "Toyota Jump", ‘cause that was when Toyota had their big “Oh, what a feeling” and they’d all jump, it was the big thing for about a year. A lot of our stuff came from television.
The fiddle tunes were the things where we really would usually do a lot of the dancing around, and so things like Orange Blossom Special was another big one for us, we’d go faster and faster, we’d actually use that as a money-grab, we would say “We’re gonna start off really slow, and every time somebody puts some money in we’ll speed up a little bit,” and that sometimes would work.

CD – And you also had some clever lines in some of the songs.
Dave Harris – “Clapping’s the butter, but we sure need the bread.”
CD – Yeah, and “Some folks like to come down close…”
Dave Harris – “…and get into the show, others like to stand up top and hang onto their dough”, and we’d call it (street level) the cheap seats, and things like that.
I should mention the girls, Mike’s wife Sandra, my wife Jane, and Jimmy’s wife Barb, we called them the Shmoettes, and they would sing some backups on some of the tapes, not live. And Jane would go around with the hat for us, that was even mentioned in the Shmoes On Parade song, “there goes Janey ‘round with the hat”.
We had a line about “our omnipresent baby” in Under The Empress. Our omnipresent baby was a lady that was probably an Eric Martin patient, I believe, and we maybe didn’t always handle her with the kid gloves that we should’ve, but she would come down and be pretty outlandish, sort of off-the-wall behavior. One night we were setting up to play and she was hanging around behind us. Anyway, she actually took a swing at Jimmy one night down there, and luckily without even knowing what was happening, he bent down just as she did it and she missed him, so that was sort of the initiation of her as the “omnipresent baby”.

CD – So, the the period we’ve been talking about from 1983 to 1990, that the last year with the group?
Dave Harris – When Rod was in the group in the very earliest years, that was about ’79, but the full-on era of the four Shmoes with Jeremy starts probably about ’82, ’83, somewhere in there, and runs right through until ’88, and then we had a falling out and Jeremy and Jimmy split off and decided they were gonna do their own thing, and Jimmy’s wife Barb came in on bass with them and Mark Bracken played a little bit of guitar with them few times.
Me and Mike Kraft kept going as a duo us and we brought in Dan Clifford for a summer, and then ’89 I think we may have done something different again, I don’t remember exactly, but definitely not with Jimmy.
We had a one month reunion with Jimmy and Jeremy in August 1990, (that) was the last year as the group for sure, and (then) we had another reunion in 2006.

CD – So, where is everyone now?
Dave Harris – Mike Kraft, of course as we know, is playing with the Clover Point Drifters, and living in Sooke, raising his girls who are actually just about ready to leave home, and he coaches sports, and works as a salesman for PFC Natural Foods.
Jimmy Sinclair is following his passion in a way, he always wanted to get more into writing, so he did that when he left town in the early ‘90s, and he just came back maybe three or four years ago, and he’s writing copy and covering sports events for the Sooke newspaper.
I don’t see much of Jeremy, he lives on the mainland. He’s not doing music much at all, I think he’s still in the accounting business of some sort, but I’m not positive exactly what he’s doing.
Rod’s back in Saskatchewan where he was from.
Joe Figliola passed.
The wives are all still with the guys. That’s a success story, all three of us are still with our wives. Jeremy is married now.
I’m still basically doing the same thing I’ve been doing since 1977, and that’s busking. I’ve gotten back to being a solo working as the one-man-band, and I occasionally play with some other people. I’ve started resurrecting a little bit of the old material from way back in the day, and I still do a couple of the causeway hits by request.

Special Delivery released six cassette tapes, 1983’s Highway Roller, 1984’s Special Delivery, 1985’s Just Four Shmoes, 1987’s Midnight Special, 1988’s Under The Empress and 1990’s Shmoes On Parade.
The cassettes are all out of print, but the greatest hits package Shmoes On Parade is available on CD, and can be purchased either from Dave when he’s on the harbour, or at his website Dave Harris One-Man-Band

See Special Delivery aka the Shmoes in action at the following links:
Special Delivery 1990
Special Delivery 2006

Interview with Blaine Komatich

2010-02-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

The Sunday before Christmas, I was reading the Times-Colonist newspaper, when I came across a photo of accordion player Blaine Komatich and his canine companion Ranger, under the heading “Busker doggedly pursues the holiday crowd.” After the new year had arrived, I made a point of searching them out to see if I could get an interview for the blog.

Blaine, 23, was born and raised in the north end of Winnipeg MB. When he was 8 years old, an uncle who was visiting from Gabriola Island gave him a little baby accordion, and he took beginner lessons until he was 10. He later attended Music Conservatory where he took piano lessons for a while. He also played guitar in his high school band. At 19, he decided to take a couple of months of classical lessons, but decided later that classical accordion wasn’t what he wanted to do. Blaine also spent a bit of time in a street marching band that walked around the neighborhoods once a week playing in outdoor bandshells and parks.

I thought I’d start by asking Blaine about the busking scene in Winnipeg, and he told me there were a few magicians and jugglers, but not a lot of music buskers. “Sometimes they’re passing through town and they’re playing fiddle or something in front of the liquor store, just trying to make enough money to get out.”

CD – Do you know if you need a license to busk in Winnipeg?
Blaine – You do in certain spots, down in the Forks, (at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers) some of the tourist traps down there, you need a license.
CD – Have you ever busked in Winnipeg?
Blaine – No. I liked to play outside a lot, I’d go play in the park more often than go out on the street. I had a little bit of change thrown in my case, but never really made a point of doing it every day.

When he was 20, Blaine got an offer of a job in the Northwest Territories, so he left Winnipeg and headed north to Yellowknife, where he did maintenance work on Twin Otter floatplanes. He spent the next 2½ years in Yellowknife and it was there that he got Ranger, a Canadian Inuit husky, and they have been partners since.

Not too long after he arrived there, he moved onto a houseboat that was only accessible by canoe, which he tipped one day with his accordion in it. He managed to save the instrument, but all the seals were broken so he had to get a new one. “I had a nice one shipped up from Winnipeg, one I kinda had my eye on before I left. The fanciest accordion in town, and probably the only guy who could play it.”

According to Blaine, Yellowknife is a small town, but it does have a pretty good music scene with a few local bands, and some open mics and jam spaces.

“I ended up living in the backyard of, this guy, Chris, who played in an 8-piece bluegrass band, and I was playing in the backyard one day and he walked over and said he’d love to make it 9. They had a nice medley of instruments, and they wanted to have it all, banjo, ukulele, electric bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, mandolin, fiddle sometimes and accordion.”
“The coolest place I ever jammed, the band’s jam space was an old derelict ship, a surveying vessel called the Aurora Surveyor, that had all the engine ripped out, it was rusted away, and anchored out on Great Slave Lake, you had to canoe to get there. We had a nice jam space, carpets all over the walls, it was safe, quiet, good vibes in a rusted out ship.”

In August of last year, Blaine and Ranger left Yellowknife and hit the road together for “the long trip down,” to Victoria. They finally arrived here this past October, and since then they’ve been busking along Government Street.

“I came here and I got a brand new accordion, dropped a whole bunch of money on it as soon as I got into town here and decided to try and pay it off. I met all these buskers that were working down here everyday and just felt like joining the family” he said.

CD – How have you been finding the busking here?
Blaine – Oh, great. It’s a lot of fun, yeah. I get to come out and practice, got children dancing, and smiles on people’s faces. And it’s a really nice way to sustain yourself to get your groceries and whatever you need, food for the day, beer, (laughs) it’s a really nice way to live, fall in love with the life, just playing music everyday in the street.

CD – Do you have a favorite spot to play?
Blaine – Starbucks (on Government). I like it ‘cause it’s dry, ‘cause you never know when it’s gonna start raining, and water and moisture’s not good for my instrument. And the sounds, I have a hard time time hearing myself when I’m too close to traffic, even though the thing’s bloody loud, other people can hear me but I am distracted by the traffic a little bit, and at Starbucks there, I can stand back, and you have stone walls behind you and above you. I can hear myself a lot better, it’s helps me play better. Playing outside’s difficult sometimes. I don’t know how those guys do it up on Douglas (Street).

CD – How would you describe your style of music?
Blaine – Oh boy (laughs), I don’t know, that’s really hard to do. It’s really my own style of accordion. I like alternative accordion. Right now, I’m more inspired to play rock oriented style. You know the accordion’s like an acoustic organ I can carry around with me. That’s the way I’m seeing it now. I really like playing with guitar players, and improvising and jamming, and finding the right keys to play in, and soloing on the accordion like a rock organ player would solo a bit.

CD – Who are some of the musicians that have influenced your style?
Blaine – Tom Waits, I guess. Ian MacKeye (from Minor Threat). I listened to lots and lots of music, and I went through lots of different phases. Listening to Robbie Robertson particularly, and the Band, for sure.

CD – Do you write your own material?
Blaine – Yeah, it’s almost all original and it’s all starting to come together the more I play it. I really improvise a lot of it and what’s happening after you improvise a lot, is you start to remember things and you write, you keep on playing and you keep improvising and you end up getting something together, trying as best as you can to play it exactly the same. (laughs) That’s why I have this (digital palm) recorder now, so I can record myself, if I forget, I can listen to it.

CD – What’s your most memorable busking experience?
Blaine – All the crowds of people around this (past) Christmas, and lots of little kids dancing in front of me. When there’s lots of people out, it’s nice, when you have people who are going to sit and listen, and it happens. I don’t think I have one that’s most memorable. I’ve had a lot of (laughs) interesting offers. Somebody offered when I was playing with a guitar player, told us to come and play at their hot-springs. I had a lady come and ask me if I wanted to come live on a farm with them.

CD – Have you played at any open mics around town?
Blaine – Yeah, I’ve done a few. The Hootenanny at Logans. Ocean Island a couple of times, I was living at the hostel when I first got here, so I did the Ocean Island one. Cabin 12. I prefer open jams rather than open mics, I perform just about all day, every day, so when it’s time to go to open mic, I’d wanna go there to be playing with a bunch of other musicians who wanna jam together. That’s what I prefer, and you can find things like that. Once in a while, the Hootenanny’s all right for that, you can kinda just go up and play. I’ve been to open mics where there’s more of a circle, like a song circle, and you can play, everybody can either request something, play something, sing something, and pretty much anybody can play, if they want to, everybody in the circle.

CD – I’d guess that when you’re busking, Ranger here, is probably a big part of the attraction?
Blaine – Yeah, talk about the dog. He’s become part of my act more just because I can’t leave him at home, but, he’s become part of it, yeah. People like seeing this guy. It’s a little bit like a circus sometimes, when I’m playing something fast and weird and the dog’s tied to my leg, trying to chase after another dog.

Interview with Sean Winter

2010-02-11T09:41:00.001-08:00

Just last month I was walking down Fort Street when I came across Sean Winter playing his tenor saxophone halfway up the block between Douglas & Blanshard. I introduced myself and we arranged to meet after he was done his set, and headed across the street to Delicado’s at Fort & Blanshard, where over coffee we got down to the interview.

Sean, 21, is from Victoria, and he has been playing saxophone, and busking for about ten years. While he was attending high school, he played with the Vic High R&B Band. Sean spent the last three years living in Vancouver where he also did some busking. Since moving back to the island in October of last year, Sean has been spending quite a bit of his time playing on the streets of Victoria.

Since the interview I have seen him busking at Douglas & Yates in front of the Scotia Bank, and he has also been regularly playing evenings outside the Market on Yates at Blanshard. Both are spots that are pretty non-traditional as far as busking goes, but Sean says they have been working out quite well for him.

CD – What made you decide to try busking?
Sean – It was pretty much pressure at home. My mom said “If I’m going to be paying for these saxophone lessons and renting this instrument, at least you could go out and try and make some money”. I was terrified, I thought that people would laugh at me, or point and stare, but then I just got out there and started playing and realized that half the people aren’t even listening (laughs). So, it was really scary at first, the idea to go out and make some money because we were poor, and at the same time not being confident because I’d only been playing for two weeks at the time.

CD – And how did it go on your first few times out?
Sean – Well, I really didn’t know what to do, so I just sort of noodled around and surprisingly, I was so young, that I think people were giving me money because of the novelty of it, that I was a little kid and I was out there by myself playing and that seemed really cool to them. So, that part was good and I guess right away I started playing more and more, just because I had to go out there. I found it pretty easy, not as scary as I had originally thought. Now I can’t even really imagine anything else.

CD – You mentioned that you did some busking in Vancouver, where would you have played?
Sean – On Seymour outside of the Granville Skytrain station, it would be one of my favorite spots because it was good for late and it was close to the big intersection, you know, Georgia and Granville. I played in Gastown almost every day because I lived there. The west end around Davie and Bute. I didn’t have my license the entire time that I was living in Vancouver, never really got harped on about it, but it did mean that I couldn’t play in certain spots.

CD – And you mentioned that you were thinking of going to Europe, maybe try some busking over there?
Sean – Yeah, I’ve been to Europe twice on school band trips, one I was of age and the other I wasn’t. It wasn’t that I was making any more money, it was just that the smiles were more plentiful and the people stopping and talking were nicer. I played in Copenhagen and in Liverpool.
There was a funny story, I was playing, and this little boy probably like 10 or 11, was holding his mom’s hand and (he) looks up at me and goes “Oh, why don’t you get a bloody job?”, and I pulled my saxophone out of my mouth and I said like “Hey, that’s not very nice!”, and he goes “Eh, you f---ing yank! “(laughs), and I’m like “Oh, okay.” And yeah, there’s gonna be bias anywhere, that we’re just like glorified panhandlers, but none the less, you know I was making good money, so you know, who’s to say that that’s not a job (laughs), yeah.

CD – Tell me about your experience with the Vic High R&B Band?
Sean – Oh, that was good. It basically was my professional training. Elementary school and middle school and even just like concert band in high school, got me learning my instrument, but there’s no real place to take a course to learn how to be a musician, to learn how to be a gigging on-call musician. And that essentially was it. We’d have such heavy intense rehearsals, and we’d be reading charts, and you know getting everything really polished and tight, and (it was) probably the tightest band that I’ve ever been in. Yeah, it was real like life experience, career experience, and now I know hundreds of songs, and I’ve played hundreds of songs with them.
When I first moved to Vancouver I auditioned for a band called Soul Assembly and got in, I think based on the fact that their entire set list, I knew, just because I was in the Vic High R&B Band.

CD – What do you enjoy most about busking?
Sean – I think I enjoy the freedom of busking the most, the nomadic kind of nature, basically, you can just go anywhere, any city in the world and just plop down and make a living. I don’t know, I think a lot of musicians are very self-critical and self-reflective and at the same time as it not having to matter if you’re doing good or you’re sounding good, it’s nice to have people stop and chat and saying ”You’re good, you’re great.” It’s a lot of fun, the social interaction (but) at the same time you don’t technically need that, you can just go play and do your thing, and you can close your eyes if you want and just be alone, doing what most of us love, be alone and intimate with your music. Then every couple of minutes somebody stops and says “Hi”, and chats, and you just keep going (laughs).

CD – How would you describe your style of music?
Sean – When I filled out my application for my busking license, it said style of repertoire or whatever like that, and I put “jazz standards & familiar tunes on tenor saxophone.” I guess that’s what I try to do, because I do movie themes and stuff, recognizable little riffs and things like that even if they aren’t real songs, they’re things that people can kind of recognize or latch onto. As well, I try to do like all the jazz tunes and things that I know. I got straight-up jazz like some improvisational kind of, no matter how much of a rock ‘n’ roll tune, or how much of a blues, or how much of an old sad song, I try and make everything a bit jazzy. And sometimes I play too many notes, so that’s jazzy (laughs).

CD – And what are the songs that you really enjoy playing, never get tired of playing?
Sean – I kind of have my repertoire that I do and it’s sort of about an hour, and I can stretch it and do maybe an hour and 20 minutes, or so, and then I just kind of repeat it, but there’s songs certainly that I play maybe a little bit longer or that I really stretch out on because I just like playing them, (like) Georgia On My Mind by Hoagie Carmichael, and Summertime by (George) Gershwin. I really like putting songs together, so if a song’s in the same key and maybe it’s around the same feel, I like to put them together as maybe a little medley, and so the one that I like the most is putting On The Sunny Side Of The Street and Makin’ Whoopee, together because they’re kind of in that same feel, and they’ve got good changes to them.

CD – Who are your musical influences?
Sean – Really, anybody who’s just rippin’ on their instrument, you know. On tenor saxophone specifically, Frank Catalano is a great player from Chicago, with a great sound, who I try to sort of emulate as much as possible. Also on tenor there’s pretty much all the big greats, Dexter Gordon, and (John) Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins. A lot of people tell me I sound like Sonny Rollins, but it’s funny ‘cause I don’t listen to him as much. We have the same kind of quirky mentality of playing, and I think that’s why people say that. I like guitar players and drummers, you know, if I’m ever at a jam I’m always listening to the drummer the most I think, yeah.

CD – Have you done any indoor gigs around town?
Sean – Oh yeah, mostly with the Vic High R&B Band. We did so many shows each year, and I was in the band for three years, probably did like 150 shows with them, just around in different venues and things. We played Hermann’s (Jazz Club) a couple of times.
I’ve played outside of the R&B band with people at Hermann’s. I like playing at Sopranos for the blues jam, but there’s been a couple of venues, and there’s coffee shops and things around that do open mics which I love going to, and just jamming.

CD – Do you have any memorable busking experiences?
Sean – I was playing in Gastown a couple of years ago and I was just on the corner and kept seeing this guy looking over from the table at the Chill Winston, it’s like a lounge, and there’s an outside patio. He kept looking over and finally he gets up and he’s wearing really nice clothes, nice jacket, and really expensive jeans, and was well manicured and all that, and he comes over and he said like “Hey man, you sound really good, that’s great”, and I said “Oh, thanks very much.”
He asks “So like, do you do any recording? Do you play around town or anything?”, and I said “Of, course, like what musician isn’t.” He goes “Would you be interested in listening to something to play over”, I’m like “Okay”.
So he said “Well, it’s just in my car.” And I go “That’s a little bit weird,” I’m not gonna go to his car. And he says “Oh, no, my car, right there”, and he points to the big limousine right outside of the Chill Winston, and I’m like “Okay, that’s kind of even weirder” (laughs), and he’s sensed I was a little apprehensive. So he says “Well, no, just let me put something in the CD and you just stand outside and just listen, and start playing along”, and he puts in, ah, what was it?, um, Easy Star All-Stars Dub Side Of The Moon, and he says “Can you play stuff like this?”, so I start playing and he’s like “Oh, this is great”, and he starts putting on other stuff, and he starts sensing that I need to go “Oh, you’re workin’ right, I’ll give you some money for your troubles”, and he opens up his wallet and he hands me a hundred bucks. And I went “Wow, thanks very much. Is there anything else?”, and he says “Come have a drink with me”.
So I come over and sit down and he’s got a $300 bottle of Cristal (laughs) on the table, and we just chatted and drank and had a merry good time, ended up being good friends for about a year. He was just a really nice guy, and that was just an interesting connection, meeting a lot of people, and he was an amazing drummer, so we’d go out to Delta for after hours club and then jam there, and play at the Yale all the time, just playing blues. Yeah, that’s probably one of my more memorable experiences.

CD – What’s the strangest thing that anybody ever threw in your case?
Sean – You know what? That’s a hard one, because I’ve had some weird things, I’ve had some really cool things, like little bouncy balls, some people put like candy or a cookie, or like an apple, or things like that. I’ve made beer, people would give me pot, maybe the strangest thing which somebody threw in a little while ago was (reaching inside his shirt collar) this dog tag, that you know, I just wear it for fashion, I don’t much support the military, that’s why I’ve got my little pot leaf here (laughs).

CD – Any other thoughts you’d like to add?
Sean – I think I mentioned it a little bit before, that there’s a really unjust misconception about buskers, that a lot of us are homeless, or a lot of us are feeding a habit or something like that, that as soon as you’re on the street, you’re essentially begging for money. There’s a lot of people who think that it’s something that it isn’t. But, we’re professional musicians, and we need to make money however we can, and busking is a great way to do that. It’s its own marketing system. If I could count all the people I’ve met, and the number of gigs or business cards, that I got from just playing on the street, I’d be very surprised. It’s far more exponential than if I was just sitting at home practicing, which would be good, but it wouldn’t be the same.

You can check out some of Sean’s tunes at the following link:
www.soundclick.com/seanwinter.

The Good, The Bad & The Weird

2010-02-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

In August of last year, I did a couple of posts in which I related a few of the memorable busking moments that I and some of my fellow street musicians have experienced. All of those stories shared were all on the positive side, so this time I've also asked around for some that maybe weren't so wonderful, and some that were, shall we say, on the odd side. But, lets start with the good:

I think it might have been my first or second summer in Victoria, 1989 or ’90, I was playing an early afternoon set on the center spot of the causeway when a couple of guys came up off the docks and asked me where the nearest liquor store was. At that time there was one just off Government on Courtney, so I told them how to get there, and they threw some coins in my case and headed in that direction. About half an hour later they were coming back towards the docks carrying some cases of beer and wine coolers, and one of them asked me what I was doing later. When I told them I had no plans, they told me to come on down to their sailboat with my guitar around 4:30 and play some tunes and they’d feed me a meal and a few beers. So anyway, I showed up and was welcomed on board by the guys and their female companions who were all visiting from Anacortes. One of the guys pulled out his guitar and we ended up jamming for a couple of hours, and at the end of it all they sent me on my way well fed and de-thirsted (is that even a word?), with an American $50 in my pocket. So that ended up being a lot of fun and profitable as well.

Dave Harris (one-man-band) – I've had many fine compliments. One special one was one day about seven years ago. A lady came by and said she had seen me playing for many years and always thought nothing of it, just went on by. But one day I guess she stopped to listen, and it had jogged her memory to when she was a girl. Her mum would take them out, I think they lived in the States, for some reason, and while they were out, her dad would set up his one-man-band and play. She remembered seeing him through the window. She said I reminded her of him and she thought my talent was taken for granted by the local public, as she herself had. (That) definitely made me feel good.

Ian Daykin (fiddle) – I was playing at the south corner when two girls stopped and watched for a while. They tipped me and also gave me this folded up piece of paper, which I later opened, they had written this poem about me, and I guess they had just written it as they were sitting there listening to me. I wish I could quote it, but I can’t really remember it all. But that seemed pretty neat.

Jay Garnett (guitar/vocals) – The nicest thing that was said to me, was a young lad in a wheel chair who could not speak, but he had a machine that typed out words for him, and he typed "I love you, Jay."

Jean Bedard (guitar picker/singer) – I was busking outside the James Bay liquor store on Menzies Street when this woman comes out of the liquor store and opens up her bag and she pulls out this bottle of wine and says “I want you to enjoy this.” And I said “Thanks a lot,” and then she looks at me, I swear she was so emotional, I thought she was gonna cry or something, I don’t know if she thought I was down & out or what, but she says “If you ever want a steak and prawn dinner, give me a call and then she starts to walk away and she says “I forgot to write my phone number on the bottle.” (So) I got a free bottle of wine for busking, that was kind of neat.

Jen Book (marimbas/vocals) – I had someone record me singing and playing guitar on the causeway my first year out, and sent it in as a demo for a folk club in Europe. They accepted me without any info and he tracked me down to tell me the good news. I wasn't even aware he had recorded me. This was one of the nicest things that ever happened while busking.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you’ve put in any amount of time as a street musician, as well as the really great moments, you will no doubt probably have a few experiences of the “not so good” variety. I myself remember a couple such incidents.

Back about 1986, I had been busking for about an hour and 20 minutes one morning in front of a liquor store on Davie Street near English Bay in Vancouver, when a guy walked up to me and said “This is my spot, take off.” I politely responded "Look, if you go across the street to McDonalds and have a coffee, I’ll be done in about fifteen minutes, and you can have the spot.” Well, he went away and I started into another song, and about half way through it, here he comes back again waving a 2x4 at me, so needless to say, I was outta there.

Probably, the worst experience that I’ve ever had, was in early 2006, I was down on the harbour waiting around to play, and my guitar case was sitting on the steps holding my spot. Meanwhile, I was not too far down the causeway chatting with one of the artists. While we were talking, I was also kind of peripherally keeping my eye on the guitar, but obviously not well enough, as Dean, the artist said “Dave, your guitar.” When I looked over, there was a guy running up the stairs by Milestone’s Restaurant with the case under his arms. Dean and I and a couple of others who were around at the time, gave chase up Government Street, but we never caught up with the guy. I was very upset at the time, but there was bit of a silver lining to the incident. A week earlier, I had just started a janitorial job, so it wasn’t as bad a situation as it might have been had it happened ten days earlier, when I would have had no other means of income.

Dave Harris – Some of my worst experiences have included dealing with bad drunks or occasionally, the mentally ill, or getting rained on unexpectedly with all of my gear and no umbrella.
(One time) my steel body guitar got blown over and broke it's neck! I had put my umbrella on the tripod guitar stand and the wind took it over. I was able to glue it, and I use it to this day.
In my early years playing on Government Street, maybe 1979 or so, an elderly man came by and said I was the worst singer he'd ever heard in his life. I was hurt at the time, but tried to turn it into a positive, using it as motivation to improve.

Jay Garnett – The worst thing anybody said to me was a couple of times I heard “Why don’t you go back to the East where you came from."

Jonathan Bennetts (guitar/vocals) – I was arrested and beaten up by the Danish police, then thrown out of Denmark for street singing.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sometimes, along with the tips that a busker might receive in their case, there are the strange or weird things that they may find themselves the recipients of. When I asked a few of the other buskers, I found that there were some things that seemed to be commonly received by a number of us, such as bottles/cans of beer, cigarettes, joints, flowers, candies, fruit, foreign currencies, condoms, drawings, tracts, etc.

Over the years, I myself have had cookies, lasagna, video arcade tokens, lottery tickets, guitar picks, once I even got a can of Carnation condensed milk put in my case. The one I remember most was the day a number of years ago, I think it might have been in the off-season, when I was playing down on the harbour. There were several people walking around handing out little bags of peanuts that had a label/tag advertising some airline’s new triangle schedules between, I think it was Victoria, Calgary and Edmonton. Anyway, these people were walking back and forth around the causeway handing out these bags of peanuts to passersby, and several times when they’d pass me, they’d toss a bag into my guitar case. I believe I ended up with about five or six of these bags. So, I guess the gist of the story is that I can quite literally say that “Yes, I have actually played for peanuts”.

Dave Harris – I was playing down here last summer, and a guy came up and put something in my case. I really didn’t think anything of it and I said "Thank you," and then a couple of minutes later, I happened to get up to do something and I looked in the case and there’s this big piece of dry toast.
Another time I was doing some filming of fiddler Graham Sullivan while he was playing, and a young kid came along and he put something down in Graham’s case and Graham says "Thank you," and he’s sawing away on the fiddle. I looked in the case and then I said "Hey Graham, look what you got," and we both couldn’t believe it. It was a woman’s shoe, like an Italian shoe not a high heel, like a wooden sole kind of thing, so that was pretty unusual.

Dylan Driscoll (guitar/vocals) – I once got some really vibrant looking crystals, like gems, they were just really wild patterns and looked pretty magical like.

Ian Daykin – I got a container of yogurt from a fellow who was flying out the next morning. It was really good, Liberty Mediterranean yogurt, that’s like five bucks for a small thing. He said he had planned to eat it that night, but went to dinner instead. He said “I don’t know if you want this”, but I was stoked, I mean, I was happy with yogurt.

Jay Garnett – I have received tokens for the bus, vouchers for free meals and a few hot phone numbers.

Jonathan Bennetts – I had an experience in Amsterdam, when a lady came up, and she’d just been shopping and she said "You boys look very hungry", and put two tins of meatballs in the collection hat.

Micah Walker (guitar/vocals) – I’m not sure what the weirdest thing I got would be. I got rocks, bracelets, pictures, cardboard, individual personal art that people have made, picks, cake. I’m not sure, I’ve never had like panties or shoelaces or anything like that.

Tristan Teal (guitar/vocals) – Me and Micah were busking at Murchies together, and this guy that we kind of know a little bit, one of those crazy out-there street guys that you always see around, and always kinda has something to say to you, he’s walking by and he’s searching in his pockets, smiling at us trying to find something to tip us and he tips us three little maple syrups.

So there you have it. Some of the good, the bad and the weird experiences in the lives of local street musicians. As these are but just a few of the stories out there, no doubt there will be more in future posts.

Larry, The Dobro Guy

2010-01-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

I first met dobro player Larry Stevens back in 1999, and we spent the next couple of summers busking together around town. We played mostly as a duo, although for a short time in ‘99 we played as a trio with Earl Purvis (mandolin/vocals), and in the summer of 2000, Tjac Townsend joined us on resophonic guitar. We usually would do a noon set at the north corner of the lower causeway, then uptown to Bastion Square for a mid-afternoon set, and then back down to the harbour where we’d do an early evening set at the Wax Museum.

I had a lot of fun hanging out and playing those two summers with Larry, and when I started this blog, he was one of the musicians that I’d put on my list of people that I was hoping to do an interview with.

In early October, I thought “why not kill two birds with one stone,” and so I phoned Larry and asked him if he wanted to bring his dobro down for a set and we could do the interview before we started.

CD – When did you start playing the dobro?
Larry – How it turned out, was these friends of mine were all players, you know, guitar players, mandolin players, and I didn’t play anything at the time, so, I’m blessed with a half decent voice, so I was the singer, but, after a while I got kinda tired of singing two or three songs over the night and not being able to participate in the playing. Because I had a big liking for country music, my friends decided “Oh, Larry should play pedal steel.” So we had been on a trip to Winnipeg and met this gentleman named Wayne Link, who was a pedal steel player, and he made steels as well, so these guys unbeknownst to me manoeuvred this deal, and I ended up one weekend going out to Namao Beach (near Edmonton AB) to my friend Dennis’s, and here’s this steel sitting there, “Well, here you go, Larry.” The unfortunate part about it, was it wasn’t really a beginners model (laughs), it had five levers, and four pedals, or whatever it was, so I was lost basically. I started trying to learn it, and it was a struggle.
Then I got a job working up in the Arctic islands, and I was thinking “Well, I don’t want to be packing an amp and a pedal steel with me” so I thought about it, and decided to trade in the steel and I bought myself a dobro and took it up north with me, and with the help of Dennis, he got me started, and I sort of self taught myself from there until I actually got up enough nerve to finally go to a workshop, and start learning how to play the thing properly, so to speak (laughs). So it was kind of an interesting story, how it all evolved. And I don’t play anything else, don’t play guitar, or mandolin, or anything, just dobro’s more than enough for me.

CD – Who are your musical influences? I know you’ve mentioned Jerry Douglas a few times.
Larry – Yeah, he’s definitely an influence. I guess Shot Jackson was the first dobro player I heard, he played with Johnny & Jack. And Cliff Carlisle, who played with Jimmie Rodgers. They were probably the two dobro players I heard first, and then Dennis and Rod, my two friends that were introducing me to bluegrass music at the time, threw on some Josh Graves. That was basically the end of the story there, I went from Josh to Jerry. The list just goes on and on, there’s too many to mention now.

CD – And, you’ve got a bit of a history in the bluegrass scene on the lower mainland, you were in a band in Vancouver?
Larry – Yeah. I was in several bands. I was in the New Nash Ramblers, they won the Bluegrass Band of the Year, back in the ‘80s. Then I was in 5 On A String for a little bit, and then I went on to play in several other bands, and I guess the most memorable for me was the Bluegrass Princesses.
CD – You didn’t have to dress in drag for that one, did you? (laughs)
Larry – No…no we didn’t, but that question has been asked quite a few times (laughs).

CD – What do you remember of our early days busking down here?
Larry – Well, I recall I’d just moved to Victoria, I wasn’t doing anything at the time, and I was going through a bad patch, and I spent a lot of time wandering around. I just remember seeing you on the causeway, and because I liked your choice of material, you were playing country music, which was my favorite, I would stop and listen, and then finally one day I just figured “Well, geez I wonder if he wouldn’t mind a dobro player”, so I just got up and approached you and introduced myself, and asked if you’d mind if I sat in with you the next day, and then it sort of went from there. It helped me occupy my days, and get some playing in, and it always put a little bit of change in my pocket, so a guy could buy a box of Kraft Dinner on the way home (laughs).
CD – And you brought a lot of bluegrass songs to the mix, I’d never actually played any bluegrass prior to that.
Larry – That’s right. And I really liked the little trio we had going there for a while with Earl, that was a lot of fun.
CD – Yeah, I don’t think we did that for very long though, maybe a couple of weeks?
Larry – Long enough for that lady to paint us (laughs). (one of the Bastion Square artists, Bonnie Lee had done a painting of the three of us playing in the square).

CD – Had you ever done any busking before?
Larry – Yeah, I used to busk at Granville Island (in Vancouver), quite a bit in the middle ‘80s. Sometimes it would be with some people who knew each other, and the other times it would be in a band, sort of thing, we used to just get together and play, something to do. “What are you doin’?”, “Oh, well, let’s go down to Granville Island and busk”, just out of the blue, and we’d figure we’d get to go play some tunes, and maybe make a couple of bucks. It was mostly about the fun though, for me playing is. As my good friend Mike Kraft says “Money just cheapens it all” (laughs). I just like playing, so, any opportunity I can get to play, whether it’s for money or not, I’ll take it.

CD – Do you have a memorable busking experience?
Larry – One of them is, we were busking at Granville Island, myself and the New Nash Ramblers, and this gentleman walked up and he threw a $10 American bill in the case, and stood around and clapped, so we had a little bit of a break, and I sort of recognized him, but I wasn’t sure, he just looked familiar. So, when we were done our little set, we stopped and this gentleman approaches us and he said to me “Gee, that’s pretty good dobro playing, “ so I said “Thank you very much,” and I said “My name’s Larry Stevens,” and he says “Oh, pleased to meet you Larry, my name’s Gene Wooten.” Well, Gene Wooten is a fabulous dobro player, and he did country stuff, so anyway, I knew who he was, and I had several records that he’s played on, so it was very “Oh, well, your highness, pleased to meet you” (laughs). Then he asked to play my dobro, and he played a couple of things, so that was one of the highlights for me.

CD – Now you’re a member of the Clover Point Drifters. How long have you been with them?
Larry – Well, we’ve been together ten years, this year. That’s myself, Alan Law, who in his own right is a pretty darn good dobro player and steel player. Mike Kraft plays banjo, George Robinson plays bass and Dan Parker plays mandolin.
CD – And you guys actually did a very prestigious gig playing for former Lieutenant Governor, Iona Campagnolo.
Larry – Yeah, and the new one, we’ve played for Steven Point this (past) summer, so we’ve been there (Government House) twice. We’ve played Butchart Gardens, we’ve done several workshops up around 108 Mile House, and done a couple of little mini-tours around the province, and played around town, and stuff like that, and then of course the Sooke festival, and the Coombs festival, so, yeah, we can be pretty busy. Sometimes we’re not busy.
CD – And, you and the guys have come down and joined me a few times. You remember that night when the big concrete slab dropped into the water while we were playing there?
Larry – Yes, I do. That’s true.

CD – I was talking to Dale (Manason) recently, and he was telling me about your trip in 2000 to Tennessee.
Larry – Yes, we went with Leslie Baker. She put together a Patsy Cline show, and I was lucky enough to be asked by Dale, if I recall correctly, Dale was sort of putting together the musicians, so he asked me and yeah, I’d never been to Nashville, so, that was a lot of fun. We did a BC tour, and played at the groundbreaking for the Rockabilly Hall of Fame that was being built in Jackson, Tennessee, the home of Carl Perkins. Leslie was planning on moving down there and pursuing a musical career and they invited her down to do her Patsy Cline thing, and she’d managed to talk them into allowing her to take us all with her, so that was pretty exciting.
CD – And that was you, Mike Brooks…
Larry – Mike Brooks, Mike Kraft, Dale, I don’t recall the drummer’s name off the top of my head.
CD – So you went to Jackson, and you went to, uh, no you missed the trip to…
Larry – I missed the trip to Memphis. Actually we were playing this set, they had this outdoor stage and they had this rockabilly jam right before we went on, and as the jam went on the volume went up and up and up and up. So, when we came onstage, we were all excited and everything, and Dale just wasn’t thinking, with nerves, so he never thought to check the volume button. I was playing lap steel, and was sitting down, while right at my left ear was Dale’s amp, and by the end of the set my ear was just ringin’ and I mean Dale had turned it down, but, it was just painful. So I ended up staying in the motel room while Mike Kraft and Mike Brooks went down to Memphis, which was too bad I missed (it), but that’s how it goes. Now when I see Dale I’m always giving him “Oh, yeah, my Memphis ear” (laughs).
But, anyway, I did get to go to the Station Inn (in Nashville) twice. It’s quite a hotbed for all kinds of country music, but, its known for acoustic music, as well. So, we caught Kathy Chiavola there one night, and when we were heading back from Jackson and waiting, our plane was late or early in the morning, so we went back to the Station Inn and there was this marvelous Texas-swing band playing, so I was in heaven myself, I just kept yelling out requests, and they just kept playing them. And then Tommy Allsup walked out on stage, he was a guitar player that had played with Bob Wills and Buddy Holly.
So anyway, it was a pretty marvelous trip, we wandered around Nashville, went to Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop, the Ryman (Auditorium). We didn’t actually go in, they would only allow you in on tours and there wasn’t a tour going on, so we sort of stuck our heads in the door before they caught us (laughs). We went to Tootsie’s (Orchid Lounge), we went to all those lounges, and you know the bands change in those places every hour, and it goes all day long, and they play for tips and CD sales hoping to get discovered. And it just amazed me how many people were playing on the street, I met this one guy who was a fabulous singer and guitar player and he’d been playing on the street like for three years. So, yeah, it was a wonderful trip, it was a lot of fun. I heard a lot of good bands. That was another highlight of my life ‘cause I never thought I’d ever get there.
CD – Well, you did, and I’m just a little bit envious (laughs).

We finally came to the end of our interview, so we grabbed our instruments and ambled over to our spot on the causeway and set up for a two hour set. Over the years, I have kept a number of the songs that I learned from Larry in my repertoire, but I always enjoy getting reacquainted with some of the others, that I usually only get a chance to play when Larry, the Dobro Guy drops down to the harbour to join me.

For more about Larry and the Clover Point Drifters, be sure to check out their website.

3rd Time's A Charm: chat with Ian Daykin

2010-01-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

Among the abundance of guitarists playing on the streets of Victoria over the years, there have also been a number of fiddlers and violinists bringing their talents to the masses. Two of the newer faces to the local street music scene are Celtic fiddlers Sarah Tradewell (more on Sarah in a future post), and Ian Daykin, who have both been regularly playing on the inner harbour causeway.

In early October, I caught the last 20 or so minutes of Ian’s set on the south corner of the causeway, after which, we headed up Menzies Street in James Bay, looking for a coffee shop where we could chat, and we came across the Travelling Bean Coffee House, where we found some seats in the back corner and began our interview over a snack and a couple of mochas.

Ian, 23, grew up in Port Coquitlam, BC. He has been playing fiddle for the last 2½ years. He has also played guitar over the years, changing styles from rock, to jazz, then to finger-style, and finally classical. Deciding that he wanted to be a music teacher, and needing a degree in classical music to do that, Ian came to Victoria two years ago to study at UVic. In spring of last year, Ian successfully auditioned for a busking spot on the inner harbour causeway.

CD – I know this is your first year busking on the harbour. Have you busked anywhere other than Victoria?
Ian – I’ve tried it maybe a couple of times before, but never with very much success. Once was in Port Coquitlam, way back when I was maybe 13 years old, with my friend Clay. We both played guitar, and we had put together some jazz tunes and stuff that we could kinda solo on. We set up in front of a liquor store, for about fifteen minutes, and then this old drunk guy rambled at us telling us it was his spot, and we had to get outta there. We didn’t really argue with him much (laughs), we just took off. And then we played in front of a Canadian Tire store, and got kicked out about ten or fifteen minutes later, so it was pretty unsuccessful.
I also busked for one day in Nelson, BC, where I had lived for a couple of years. I was playing finger-style guitar then, a bunch of Don Ross tunes, and that kind of stuff, and I was kinda nervous about the whole thing I guess, not about playing in front of people, but just busking itself. It was downtown, but, maybe not as central as I should have been, and so it wasn’t very successful. I didn’t go back.

CD – So, what made you decide to give it another try in Victoria?
Ian – A friend of mine back in PoCo who went to UVic as a music student, said he used to go play drum kit downtown and made pretty good money late at night on Friday and Saturday nights, so he said I should go busk, I guess that made me think about it.

CD – And, how have you been finding the busking here?
Ian – I’m pretty stoked, make some money, hang out in the sun in the evenings after work, you know. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot better at the fiddle this summer. I study classical guitar at UVic, so I always feel like I never have enough time to practice that as much as I should. I feel like, if I’m playing fiddle, when I should really be playing classical guitar, ‘cause I’m supposed to be spending all this money to go to university, I should put my energy into it you know. But now this kind of legitimized playing fiddle more, so I got to put a lot more time in that than I’ve done before. So that was really good, got to get some more skills going on.
CD – So you could say “third time’s a charm”.
Ian – Yeah.

CD – Do you have a favorite spot?
Ian – I have a bit of a soft spot for the south corner (of the causeway). That and Fisherman’s Wharf I like as well, ‘cause it’s just a lot more laid-back, you know, less people than the causeway, but it’s just a more kind of chilled out scene, which is nice.
CD – And do you do well over there?
Ian – Yeah, it’s been decent, you know, probably similar to the causeway.

CD – Okay, so, the music you do is mostly like traditional fiddle tunes?
Ian – Yeah, I’ve been playing mainly fiddle down on the harbour, traditional Irish tunes, and I’ve also been playing some mandolin and singing, I’m really into the east coast sea-shanty kind of stuff. I do a bunch of Stan Rogers tunes and that kind of thing.
CD – I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with the mandolin down there. So, you bring it out occasionally?
Ian – Yeah, sometimes. Three quarters of the time or maybe more than that, I just play fiddle.
CD – And I noticed that you kind of maybe run two or three songs together in like a medley?
Ian – Yeah, generally with Celtic tunes that’s what you do. You call it a "set", and you put between two and four tunes together, and you pick ones that not necessarily, but most often are in the same or similar key, so that it will kind of flow easier.
CD – Have you spent anytime back east to get in touch with that music?
Ian – Yeah, I have family in New Brunswick actually, so when I was little, we’d be out there every summer, and I’ve been around to P.E.I. and Nova Scotia, and I actually did a student exchange and spent two months in Newfoundland as well. And then my dad plays Celtic music, which is probably the biggest reason that I got into it, ‘cause I started playing guitar when I was 10 or so, and he would be like “Alright, good. Now you can play the chords for me” (laughs), and we’d be pckin’ tunes.

CD – Who are the musicians who maybe have influenced your style? I guess maybe Stan Rogers might be one?
Ian – Yup, I’m into the east coast kind of stuff, I just like that style of singing a capella, so kind of all over the place, with that kind of stuff. Dervish and Danú are a couple of Irish bands that play traditional Irish stuff, and they’re probably the biggest influence as far as my fiddle stuff goes.

CD – Do you write any music at all?
Ian – Yup, when I played the finger-style guitar I was performing then and would perform mainly my own tunes. I’ve done a little bit of songwriting, not a lot, but also write Celtic tunes.
CD – By songwriting, you mean with lyrics?
Ian – Yeah, finger-style guitar stuff being instrumental. And then I’d just kind of dabble for my own enjoyment in classical writing too. I’ll try to write little two part inventions.

CD – Do you perform any of your originals on the street?
Ian – No, not with the fiddle. If I was playing guitar then I would. I just figure that the instrumental guitar stuff is so quiet if you have to be unamplified, that I think that people wouldn’t really hear it. What I’ve discovered this summer is that if you wanna be passive and sit in the corner, people are happy to let you sit in the corner, but you’ve got to be pretty energetic and out there to catch people’s attention.

CD – What do you enjoy most about busking.
Ian – Well, I guess it’s the first time I feel like I have consistant gigs every day. It’s pretty nice that way, where as before with classical guitar stuff, I’d get gigs, but they were just few and far between. So, here it’s just like I can go down and play every day, so that’s pretty nice.
CD – And you’re kind of your own boss.
Ian – Yup, nobody tells you when to start and stop. The discipline comes into play there, ‘cause if I’m a little tired or something, especially this summer, I’ve been working painting houses five days a week, so I would play in the evenings and on weekends on the harbour, I would often be pretty tired after work, and it would be easy just to go to bed, instead. It took some will-power to make myself get out there.

CD – Any other thoughts?
Ian – I’ve only busked on the harbour, I’ve never tried it up in the city, but last night I was leaving a concert, the Sub City Dwellers, at like two in the morning, and there was a good lot of people around, and it seemed like nice weather and I thought, that could be pretty good. So, I’m debating about trying to start doing that, it’s kind of poor timing in the year to be starting late night busking when it’s October, it would be better to start that in June. If I can get past that, then it might be good.

Interview with Mack Jonsson

2009-11-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

Back in July, when I began this blog, I made a list of some of the street musicians that I wanted to interview. Two of these were Mack Jonsson (fiddle) and Pete Reid (banjo) who played in a trio called Ain’t Dead Yet with Tom Terrell (guitar). Through 2007 and 2008, as well as playing gigs around town, they busked fairly regularly on Government Street (usually at Murchies), and off and on, down on the lower causeway, serving up a fun, energetic repertoire of old-time music.

I hadn’t seen Mack out busking since the early part of the summer, and had heard that he had gone to the Okanagan. I finally got a chance to sit down with Mack in early October, after he had returned from doing some apple picking near Keremeos and Cawston in the Similkameen Valley, and we headed over to Chinatown, where we found a table at Bean Around The World, and talked about some of his busking experiences.

Mack, 22, was born and raised in Quesnel, BC. For the most part, he plays fiddle on the streets, but also on occasion plays guitar.

CD – So, what made you decide to try busking?
Mack – I think it had to kind of do with that I was already playing music decent enough, I mean I wasn’t bad, I was performing at a young age, a quality of music where I knew it could buy me a skateboard, and our family wasn’t the richest, and we couldn’t afford things so they told me to just try busking at the farmers market, and so I did and made a skateboard like right away, a really nice skateboard, and so it pretty much started there and I’ve never stopped.

CD – How long have you been busking here in Victoria?
Mack – I’ve been busking here on and off four years. I came here I think it was the summertime, I lived in Ladysmith and I would just hitch-hike here, on the weekends in the summer of 2005. And then I kind of traveled around went east and went south a bit and then just ended up just coming back here and busking for the last two years consecutively, winter, spring, summer, rain, all year ‘round.
CD – And, you were licensed for a year in 2008, down on the lower causeway?
Mack – Yeah, did a year of that, that was good, that was fun. I don’t know why the prices are so high, to have to pay that much. But, it can be lucrative.

CD – I saw you playing earlier today with Micah (Walker), and when I interviewed Dylan (Driscoll) and Tristan (Teal), they both mentioned that they’d busked with you.
Mack – Tristan, yeah. And do you remember Pete and Tom?
CD – Yeah, Ain’t Dead Yet. I have a photograph of the three of you down on the causeway. Anyway, from what I’ve seen and heard, you might just be the busiest busker out on Government.
Mack – Yeah, I’ve been quite the busking busybody.
CD – A lot of jamming?
Mack – Lots of jamming for sure. I like to dabble in all kinds, as long as it’s music and it’s flowing, right, you know, and I dig it, yeah for sure, I keep pretty busy.

CD – Have you busked anywhere else besides Victoria?
Mack – Yeah, I’ve busked all around, I’ve busked in Quesnel, where I was born and raised. I busked a bit in Salmon Arm, (where) I stayed in an abandoned orchard and lived off of nothing but busking one week at the farmers market, and they were super nice. I made enough to get by, and the farmers had so much extra produce that they kind of had to get rid of anyway, that I had so much free vegetables and stuff, that it just kept me going, and it was great, yeah.
From there, I went to Montreal, and that was good, and (then) all the way down the west coast in most nooks and crannies, in Portland, Los Angeles, Seattle, yeah, just all around, wherever. I used it as a tool to travel and experience adventure, for sure.

CD – So, tell me about your busking experience in the States?
Mack – That was a part of what we, me and Pete and Tom, we got a van and we called it “one of the world’s most broke-ass tours”, because we started with no money, ended with no money and had no money consistently. But, we still made our way happily with the greatest experiences, and were well-fed and such, most of the time. But, it started in Seattle, and Seattle was nice, and right away we met an old fiddler, and we were like an old-time string band, or a bluegrass band. That’s what we were doing, and that was kind of the start of me approaching music in a more serious manner than I did before, I started taking it quite a bit more seriously, and it just felt natural to start with the grassroots of western culture, so I became a little bit more kind of slightly obsessed with that style.
CD – And keeping it alive?
Mack – Well yeah, you gotta keep it alive, it’s still happening, that’s why we were called Ain’t Dead Yet.
CD – Like the Woody Guthrie quote?
Mack – Yeah, and it turns out, we didn’t even know, but that was one of his last songs, “I Ain’t Dead Yet”.
CD – Where did you busk in Seattle, would it have been Pike Place Market, or down on the waterfront?
Mack – Not on the waterfront, no, we just stuck mostly to Pike Place, yeah really nice market.
CD – Did you need a license?
Mack – Uh… yeah, we did apply for a license, but they had the temporary thing going on, and it was well worked out, you apply for it, and pay a small amount, like thirty bucks, and then you can busk there for a couple of months. But, if you want the year you can kind of get more of a deal, sort of.

CD – Okay, then you went to Portland, what was that like?
Mack – The busking in Portland is like, they’re just so liberal there, and they’ve got this accepting energy to it, where you won’t really need a license and they’re not very tight-ass about that whole thing.
CD – So pretty much a free-for-all.
Mack – Yeah, kind of a free-for-all, but don’t abuse that, sort of.
CD – And, you mentioned Los Angeles?
Mack – Yeah, that was in Venice Beach, and that was a trip of its own, it was pretty interesting.
CD – And, what about a license there?
Mack – Uh, no, didn’t need a license, not in Venice Beach, it’s pretty open.

CD – What about your style of music? Obviously, you’ve mentioned some of the traditional, old-timey stuff?
Mack – Yeah, well, since I was a kid for some reason, I just needed to become a fiddler, and I really love the fiddle, the sound of it, so my parents gave me a violin lesson, and I got bored for like two months and gave up, and then I realized it was the fiddle that I really wanted to play, and there was the Celtic stuff, and the old-time and the Metis stuff and there’s so many different styles, you could spend the rest of your life, or maybe three lifetimes trying to learn all these different styles, even just in North America alone.

CD – And who are your musical influences?
Mack – Oh, so many, I’d say… hmm, more than any artists who I don’t know personally, for me right now, my biggest influences are my brothers and my friends.

CD – I’ve seen you play a lot, and you do a pretty energetic set, a lot of up-tempo kind of stuff.
Mack – Yeah, I love that energy, its just kind of trying to grab people and wake ‘em up and kind of shake their souls. I think that’s what it was made for, that kind of music. Its just kind of just to bring people together in community and to have a little bit of a hoe-down.

CD – What do you enjoy the most about busking?
Mack – I think it’s the music. And I enjoy watching the reactions from the different people as they just constantly flow, sometimes you get a glimpse of them, and sometimes magic happens, like, you’ll get these moments and sometimes you can really connect with the songs, and you’re in the moment and then you remember “Oh, yeah, that’s why I play music”, that bliss that I found, and hope to find again, and probably will.

To see video of Mack in action, check out the following links:
Cats in Distress
Ain't Dead Yet @ Venice Beach

Interview with Dale Manason

2009-10-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

About a month and a half ago, I did a post where I wrote about some of the fun times that I’ve had busking with some of my musician friends. One of the friends that I have played with on a number of occasions is guitarist and singer-songwriter Dale Manason. I first met Dale in the fall of 1997 at the Mustard Seed Street Church, where he’d been doing some volunteer work. Not long after that, he got into the coffee business and did a ten year stint as a barista at a cart at Capital Iron and then at his own shop on Oak Bay Avenue. It was at these two locations, that I would often spend my between sets time hanging out and “philosophising” with Dale and a few other regulars.

Dale, 56, is a versatile musician who as well as playing acoustic and electric guitar, is working on blues slide, and has been known to fiddle around with the banjo. Over the years he has played several genres of music including rhythm & blues, country, bluegrass and gospel. In the last decade he has performed as a solo act, and in his own band that featured his daughter Melissa (vocals/flute). At the turn of the century, Dale and I did a handful of pub, coffee shop, and church event gigs together, and last year he did some guitar picking and vocals on a couple of songs on my recent CD. He currently juggles being a handyman carpenter with singing and playing lead guitar in a 7-piece R&B/Blues combo called the Boulevard Blues Band. And, as if that wasn’t keeping him busy enough, Dale still occasionally finds the time to come out and join me busking on the harbour.

In mid-September, we got together on the causeway, and over coffee, talked about his music, busking and a favorite music experience.

CD – So, you had done some busking before we met?
Dale – In ’97, I left my full-time job and for the next four or five months, April ‘til the end of the summer I think, I was down here almost every day. Sometimes I was down here by myself, sometimes I came down with my friend Greg Vaughan, and whenever I had the duo it was always better money, of course. But it was basically groceries, ‘cause I left a fulltime job and just had to kinda get my head straightened out.
CD – And you did some busking in the library courtyard, didn’t you?
Dale – Yeah, I did that one too. And down in front of Torrefazzione (now Starbucks next to Eddie Bauer).

CD – How did you decide to get into busking?
Dale – Actually I saw Marty (Field), when I first moved here, I would notice Marty down on Government Street, usually in front of Murchies, and on Sundays, I’d always come down with my family and have a wander around downtown. It was cheap or free for little kids, and we would usually stop at Murchies and get hot chocolate for the kids and coffee and sit there and watch Marty, and you probably were there for all I know, at that time. And I thought “Hey, I’ve always wanted to try something like that,” and being a musician, and adventurous, I wasn’t working anymore, I thought I’d go give it a whirl, and my wife said “Yeah, go ahead, whatever”. So I grabbed the bus, came downtown in a few minutes. It was cheap because I didn’t have to park a vehicle, and I would usually go home with thirty, forty bucks maybe. It helped to buy groceries at the time, ‘cause I wasn’t working full-time and my wife was. I figured for a $10 investment, I couldn’t go wrong.

CD – Did you have a favorite spot out of the spots that you did play?
Dale – Actually, I never did work the Murchies spot, but I always did quite well on the causeway, I think it was either down by Milestone’s or over here by the Wax Museum. The spot right below the statue wasn’t too bad. I always watched where the successful guys were doing their stuff, like Marty always worked at the bottom of Milestone’s, Dave Harris was always down there too, although Dave did do the center spot and managed it quite well. I always found we did okay until the jugglers came out, and then it seemed like nobody wanted to hear music anymore.
CD – (laughs) Yeah, we know all about that.

CD – What did you enjoy most about busking?
Dale – I suppose it was the freedom to just get out and bellow out the songs as best I could. It was limiting as a solo artist, which you probably know, you’re limited to what you can do, but there was that sense of freedom of just doing whatever you like, and if people stopped and listened, that was great, if they didn’t, well I’d sing anyway.
The downside to it though was that I got the impression that some people walking by considered busking as just a slightly elevated form of panhandling, so there were days where I’d go home feeling like I needed a shower, ‘cause people were giving me the evil eye. The ones that stopped to listen, I think they were pleasantly surprised, but there were others that I think just sort of thought “Oh, you know, there’s another dirty bum,” kinda thing. I tried to look better and present myself better than the average panhandler, but I think you still get smeared with that same brush. That was kind of discouraging.

CD – What would you call the style of music that you play?
Dale – I’m very eclectic, I think probably as time has gone on and I’m getting older, I find I like blues a lot more. I’ve always liked blues and I think most of my music has been blues influenced even from way back at the beginning, because even old ‘50s and ‘60s rock ’n’ roll was bluesy, coming out of the rockabilly stuff, so it’s always been blues influenced. But I did a stint in sort of country, country-rock, I play a lot of bluegrass, I’ve done acoustic music, you know America style, Neil Young and people like that, so I think I’ve dabbled in a lot of styles and I’ve never mastered any one particular one. I just like a little bit of everything.

CD – Who are your musical influences?
Dale – Carlos Santana, I think you probably would tell, Eric Clapton, Chet Atkins, although I’ve never been able to figure out the finger-style, but I love his music. Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits, and then of course B.B.King, Albert King and Robert Cray, and some of those guys. But I guess the biggest influences have been Santana and Clapton.

CD – And I know you write your own stuff?
Dale – I do, I have and I haven’t recently. Okay, so there’s sort of a threefold thing. I’ve written, I wrote a lot of stuff when I was younger, by myself or with my brother. My younger brother and I played together professionally for five years and traveled all over southern Alberta and into BC, and at the time we recorded an album of original material called “Money”, and of course it didn’t make any of that aforementioned money, we basically paid off the recording costs and broke up the act, but it served a purpose at its time. I’ve been seriously thinking of re-recording some of it different from the way it was originally done, it’s very ‘80s in its sound. It’s dated, but it has a smattering of everything from pop to country on it. One of the tunes that I wrote, “Boxcar Blues” that’s probably my favorite song off the entire album.
CD – I really like that one too.
Dale – I’d like to redo that one in its original form which was a whole lot slower and a lot bluesier, not as poppy or pop-country as it turned out. I don’t know how it transformed but it happens.
I’ve also written with my wife, who is an excellent lyricist. The gospel album that I did in ’96 is all original material, and she co-wrote probably about half that album. Two or three for sure, there was “Psalm 61’. Then there’s one that I’ve just recently recorded at home, that was written about the same time, Sharon wrote half the lyric on that one, it’s called “Midnight.” So, I finally got down to recording that, it needs to be tweaked a little bit, but it sounds pretty decent. The most recent thing I wrote, maybe about 5, 6 years ago, was a song called “A Hundred Dollars Closer To Mexico,” you’ve heard that one.
CD – Oh yeah! That’s another great song. You wrote that when you were working the coffee cart at Capital Iron. That was the sign on your tip jar. (laughs)
Dale – That’s right. Yeah, so that’s probably the most recent thing I’ve written. So either I’m too happy or too contented with my life or I’m just running out of ideas.

CD – What’s your most memorable busking experience?
Dale – During the period of time that I’d sort of been on the fringes you know, coming out with you or some of the other guys, I think out of it all, I’ve met a lot of really nice people, like yourself, Larry Stevens and Eric Adams, Mike Kraft.
CD – So, the friendships.
Dale – Oh, there’s been a lot of friendships that were musical, or the music was the common ground, that have gone beyond that. I think probably one of the most memorable things that have come out of busking, in kind of a convoluted way, was that through you, I met Larry Stevens, and through Larry, I met Mike Kraft and I met Mike Brooks, and because of Greg Vaughan, we ended up in the Patsy Cline tribute band doing the thing for Lesley Baker, the gal from Courtenay. So the most memorable thing as we come around through the whole convoluted thing, was the trip to play at the first ever rockabilly festival held in Jackson Tennessee, where they did the groundbreaking for the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. That whole thing, April 2000, was probably the highlight of my musical career. We did eleven theatres on the mainland and the island, and that trip to Tennessee just blew my mind.
And to be able to like namedrop, for instance having breakfast every morning for three days with Elvis Presley’s old drummer D.J.Fontana, and have the line-up, you’re talking about Johnny Cash’s drummer and bass player (W.S.Holland & Marshall Grant) who were with the Tennessee Three. And I met Carl Perkins’ son Stan, and Marty Stuart, Wanda Jackson and Brenda Lee that weekend. And I met Rocky and Billy Burnette, and Paul Burlison who was with the Rock and Roll Trio with the Burnette Brothers, that was Rocky’s dad (Johnny) and Billy’s dad (Dorsey).
So it was amazing, to be able to get up and do the stuff we did, and have that old guard of groundbreaking musicians in the backstage area listening to us. It was nerve wracking at the best of times, when we looked over and they’re giving us the thumbs up, and they came up to us afterwards and said “We remember Patsy”. One of the Jordanaires came up to Lesley after we did our first set on the Saturday and he was in tears. So that was the high point of my entire musical life, I think. I could beat that one to death.
CD – Yeah, no doubt.

CD – So, just in closing, I mentioned in a recent post, that occasionally I’ll get a phone call from you, asking if I wanted some company busking, so, obviously you must still enjoy it?
Dale – Yeah, it’s fun, I like to get down and keep my hand in it. One of the things I’ve found about music as I am getting older, and so are you…
CD – Thanks for reminding me. (laughs)
Dale – And a lot of us are, (laughs) it keeps me young thinking, and I can sort of forget the aches and pains and stuff for that period of time. So, it never hurts, as I said, ‘cause it keeps my hand in it and keeps my voice in good shape. And I don’t know, I like performing at the best of times.

Scene Changes: 1989-2004

2009-10-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

After many years living in Vancouver, I had decided that I needed a change of scenery from the big city, and thought I’d see what life was like on the other side of the Georgia Strait, so, in February of 1989, I moved over to Victoria. I had been on the island a few months, when the spring-like weather finally arrived, and I started venturing out along Government Street and the causeway to scout out the potential busking spots. At that time, there weren’t a lot of buskers, so it wasn’t too hard to find a location where I could set up and play.

Anybody who has seen me play often enough, might have figured out by now, that my preferred spot is the north corner of the lower causeway, but over the years I have played at many other locations around town. From 1996 until 2005, I did a lot of my off-season busking up on Government Street, mostly at Murchies, or if the weather wasn’t so good, at Torrefaziones (now Starbucks/Eddie Bauer). I have also played at the top of Bastion Square on what is now the entrance to the Irish Times Pub, as well as further down the Square, on the steps of the Maritime Museum, and at the top of the steps leading down to Wharf Street. Other places I’ve played at one time or another are next door to what was then Scott’s Restaurant on Yates Street, and outside the old Carnegie Library at Yates & Blanshard.

In my first couple of months of busking in Victoria, I began to meet some of the street musicians that were playing around that time. Tony & Jerry were a guitar/vocal duo, whose repertoire consisted of folk-rock from the ‘60s & ‘70s. They usually could be found in the library courtyard, or on the center spot of the causeway. Les Vaughan, was another guitarist/singer who did a lot of country-folky type stuff down on the causeway. Teo Mance (guitar/vocals) had his own amplification, and performed a selection of popular folk-rock tunes. He now lives and busks in Chemainus. I have seen him a couple of times recently playing at the Ships Point Night Market.

One evening, I was playing on the center causeway spot, when I looked up to the street level to see some guys with instruments looking down at where I was playing. As they made the motions of going to look for another spot, I called up to them and told them that I’d already been playing a while and that they could have the spot if they wanted it. They immediately came down and that was when I first met Dave Harris, Mike Kraft, Jimmy Sinclair & Jeremy Rogers. Collectively called Special Delivery, they were more affectionately known by their causeway fan-base as the Four Shmoes. Since 1983, theirs had been THE causeway show to catch, and they had the audience to prove it. After I packed up my guitar case, I stuck around to watch a while. As well as performing their repertoire of country, bluegrass, folk and song parodies, the guys were the most visually entertaining act that I have ever seen on the causeway. For the next two years I’d become one of their regular audience members. (more on the Shmoes in a future post)

During my second year of busking in 1990, four kids began showing up on a daily basis in their matching cowboy hats and western apparel, to perform their versions of old Hank Williams and other classic country tunes on the causeway. Scott Moffatt, 7 (guitar/vocals), and his triplet brothers Bob, Clint & Dave, 6 (vocals), had been wanting to go to Disneyland, and having decided among themselves that they could earn the money busking on the harbour, they told their Dad they were going out to busk whether he came or not, so, Daddy Frank was along in support. After a couple of summers doing their lunch time sets on the centre spot, and attracting large groups of passing tourists, their dad got them some gigs at a some local festivals and events, and next thing you know we were reading about them in the papers. It was 1993, and they’d made it to Nashville and were making regular appearances on TNN’s Nashville Now with famed DJ/host Ralph Emery. It wasn’t too many years later that they changed their musical direction, and from 1999 to 2001, the Moffatts were the #1 teen pop-rock band in Asia, and #2 in North America behind Hanson.

1994 brought some significant changes to the Victoria busking scene, when City Hall initiated a $10 licence requirement along with some new regulations. Prior to that year, there was no restriction on how long that buskers could play in one spot, and needless to say, that had been abused by a few. A three hour time limit was imposed, and that was shortened to two hours a couple of years later. Another change was the ban on amplification or taped music. For the most part, this was a good change, as it put everyone on a fairly level sonic playing field, however, it unfortunately put the kibosh on some, like the clarinet player who played along with taped musical accompaniment, or the classical guitar player who needed that little extra boost to be heard over the sounds of traffic, etc.

At this point, I was feeling kind of ambivalent about the whole licensing thing, so, I decided to take a break from busking. It wasn’t until two years later in 1996, when I realized how much I missed playing, that I ended my busking exile, and went over to City Hall and filled out my license application. After receiving my busker badge, I picked up my guitar, and I headed down Government to the harbour, and found a whole new much more vibrant scene along the way.

With the expected increase of visitors during the Commonwealth Games which were held in Victoria in 1994, it was not surprising that there would have been a corresponding increase in the number of buskers hoping for a little bit of the economic trickle-down, and then deciding to continue on with their newly-found livelihood.

Also, I think, that the 2 year old licensing and regulations, might have lent a perceived air of legitimacy to the scene, possibly encouraging a number of people who may not have thought to try busking before, to take their talents to the streets. Over the next few years, dozens of kids began appearing along Government and on the causeway, and some like brother and sister acts Tyler & Kendel Carson (fiddles), and Quinn & Qristina Bachand (guitar & fiddle) have since parlayed their busking experiences into wider exposure.

Through the rest of the ‘90s and into the new century, there were so many buskers, that it became very competitive at the most popular spots. It was not uncommon to see musicians lining up early in the mornings at Murchies on Government Street, and at the north and center spots on the causeway, to put in several hours of "butt-time", waiting for their turn to play. (more about this in a future post)

During this time period, there were numerous guitarist/singers whose chosen styles ranged from maritime music, to folk, to blues, to rock, to country, etc. These included Marty Field, Jay Garnett, Clay George, Jim Meighen, Jaime Nolan, G Willy, Jordan Gordon, Wayne Lukas, Dylan Davis, Fred Robertson, Chris Trygg, Belanos Crusoe, Freddie Bear, Trevor Holmes, Steve Lestrange, myself and many others.

Billy Goats Gruff and Kin Fo’ were just two of the combos that were busking in Victoria at the turn of the century.
Another was Shillelagh, a 6-piece celtic/Irish folk group that included Bryan Skinner (guitar/bodhran/vocals), Josh Neelands (guitar/mandolin/vocals), Aaron Ellingson (fiddle), Jasper de Groot (accordion), Nathan Gage (bass), and Jon Crellin (drums). (more on Shillelagh in a future post)

Other musicians who added a little bit of variety to the busking scene were Nick Coulter & Graham Hargrove (marimba duo), K.C.Kelly (slide steel guitar), Swan Walker (steel drums), Julian Vitek (classical violin), Caleb Kelly (fiddle), Angela Basombrio & Peter Richards (jazz & blues vocals with drum accompaniment), David & Mary Lowther (klezmer with guitar & clarinet), Irene Bird (piano/vocals), Bill Miller (piano), Andy Kreischer (percussion/didgeridoo), Sandra Ritter (harpist) and Aaron Watson (accordion/saw).

When the summer of 2004 rolled around, things were looking a bit ominous for the causeway buskers, and some of us feared that the end of the busking scene as we knew it might be just around the corner, when the management and oversight of the inner harbour causeway would be officially transferred from the City of Victoria to the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority. (more on the causeway buskers in a future post)

Victoria Busking Scene: 1977-1980

2009-10-15T02:17:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I sat down with longtime Victoria street musician Dave Harris, to find out about the early days of the busking scene in Victoria, specifically some of the old busking locations which have disappeared along with some of the city’s architecture, and some of the musicians that were playing then. (photo of Dave circa 1979 - courtesy Dave Harris)

DH – Okay so well, when I started busking in 1977, there were quite a few different spots. I used to play mostly on the other side of Government Street (across) from Murchies, which wasn’t there at that time, it was Spencer’s Hardware store, and there was no doorway for you to play in there like there is now. But, the doorway that you could play in, was across the street at the old Eaton’s building, it wasn’t the Eaton’s (Bay) centre yet.
The (old) Eaton’s building was in two parts with a big gap in between where Broad Street used to go through. Trucks would come in the one end off of Fort Street to do deliveries, so there was a little bit of a driveway in there (but) you couldn’t drive through. You could walk through there, it was a big walk in mall. A lot of people used to busk in there, (it had) good acoustics. There was actually a covered walkway that went across from one building to the other on the second floor, so you could play underneath there, even if it was raining. So, that was another good spot to play, not as busy as Government Street or Douglas Street, but still a pretty good spot.

I used to play out on Douglas Street a lot too. I did that again later as well which is probably what you’d remember, but in those early years before you came, in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, I played there a lot. There was an overhang, so you could play in bad weather there too, and then in front of Woolworth’s which is now Chapters, right at the bus stop, I used to play there quite a bit too. But bus stops are kind of funny, because you get the same people day after day getting on and off buses, so, it might be good for a couple of days, but then you’ve got to give it a break for a while, ‘cause you’re just gonna get the same people. And especially back then, the city wasn’t nearly as busy as it is now.

The Nootka Court liquor store (on Courtney Street), was another interesting spot. People used to busk in there, (and) it was sheltered, so it was a place you could go when the weather wasn’t good. And, as you know from your own experience, liquor stores can quite often be quite lucrative, that one wasn’t a particularly busy one, but none the less, it was sheltered. I played there once or twice.

Market Square was another place that people used to like to play, up on the top level in front of what then was Griffin’s Books, near where you used to be able to have the postings there, I don’t know if they still have that, Market Square’s changed quite a bit. And they didn’t pipe their canned music in, or at least they’d turn it off, and let people busk.

Bastion Square, right at Government Street was quite different. There used to be a big anchor there, and a bench, so there was seating, and it was a good busking spot. People used to busk there a lot, and of course that went on really up until the Irish Times (Pub) took over and started piping their music out and that killed that spot.

Other spots that used to be quite popular or used quite a bit anyway, were where the Christmas Store used to be, which is now the Bard & Banker (Pub), but of course that spot was killed when they moved in because, again they piped their music out, so, while they’re hiring live entertainment seven nights a week, in both the Irish Times and the Bard & Banker, they haven’t done a good service to the busking community at all by piping music out on the streets, and I personally, this is my own little personal bias, but I think they shouldn’t be allowed to pipe music out onto the streets. I don’t think that’s right, you know, if you own a store, you’re not allowed to play your music out onto the street. Why do they have special privileges, but anyway, that’s my own little personal bias. But that’s another spot that’s no good any more.

And then, another spot was across from Sam’s Deli, where Darth Fiddler still plays sometimes. Sometimes people would actually play right next to Sam’s Deli, where the art shop is, that wasn’t there at the time, (but) I remember there was a phenomenal steel drum player playing a single tenor steel drum, playing Bach on a steel drum. He was really amazing, this was way, way back when.

CD – Who were some of the musicians that were busking back then?
DH – There weren’t a lot of musicians out, (but) there was Fire Truck. They were kind of long-haired redneck hippies, (and) they used to play right up in front of the Empress Hotel, on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, on the other side of the street (from the causeway), and surprisingly they didn’t get kicked out. They were a trio. They had Ron Stanley, who’s back around town, I see him occasionally, he played rhythm guitar and did most of the vocals. Terry McDonald played banjo and did harmony vocals, and Mike Proklovich, played mandolin and sang harmony, and they did redneck country-rock sort of bluegrass, not really bluegrass, more like New Riders of the Purple Sage, Commander Cody and that kind of thing.
Mike would also play down at the Yates Street liquor store, which is long gone, on lower Yates Street, across from the parkade. He was a very loud singer, and he’d play guitar as well as mandolin.

Another busker around in those days, was a guy named Don Willkie, who’s sort of gone on to a little more celebrity, he’s an accomplished slide guitar player, and was back then too. He was about my age and he played with a fiddle player named Paul Jackson and they would, Paul particularly, they’d make enough money to go get a beer and then that’s what they’d do, go have a beer, and then they’d come out and make enough to get another beer (laughs), it was that kind of a thing. They used to play at Bastion Square. But, Don was quite an accomplished guitar player and singer, he lives up in the Cowichan Valley area now. I’ve seen him at a couple of festivals and things like that.

Other buskers from that era, there was Murray Drew, he used to play banjo, he played kind of old-timey music on a banjo. There was a guy we called Mississippi Dave, his name was Dave Glover. He played Mississippi John Hurt stuff really well, and old country-blues tunes, finger-picking, he was really good. This was back probably around 1980, ’78, 79, somewhere in there.

My buddy Paul Creasey, of course, on the recorder. Dale Mitchell, who now lives in Chemainus, and I believe still busks. The three of us would team up.

Iain McIntyre, the banjo player would come out sometimes, he was the best banjo player I’ve ever heard in my life, phenomenal 5-string banjo player. This guy was absolutely phenomenal, he’s in the Earl Scruggs league, this guy, he’s that good. And Rod Thomson played mandolin, and we’d all team up sometimes and play bluegrass stuff, and I learned a lot of my bluegrass from playing with Iain actually, he taught me, not the songs so much, I went home and learned the lyrics of the songs, but he taught me a lot of instrumentals, I used to back him up.

Dale Brophy, used to be around with his wash-tub bass, he’s passed now. Rhonda Broadfoot, I think I first maybe met her singing by herself down in Market Square, and then of course, we ended up being together for three years and having Blue Sky band.

Next week: Scene Changes, when I will talk about the busking scene in Victoria from the time that I arrived in 1989 and through the '90s. As well as some of the spots and musicians, I will also touch on some of the changes including the introduction of licensing, etc.

Micah Walker & Tristan Teal

2009-10-08T00:08:00.000-07:00

This was to have been the second installment in my series of interviews with some of the street musicians that have been active participants in the revived busking scene on Government Street. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as I had hoped. I'd been wanting to talk with Micah Walker and Tristan Teal, and had spent a couple of weeks trying to get together with them, but other commitments and one missed connection got in the way. It was beginning to look like it just wasn’t going to happen. My persistence did pay off, though, when I eventually caught them with some spare time on their hands, and we headed over to Bean Around The World, on Fisgard Street, for some coffee and conversation. It was, as it’s been said many times before, “better late than never”.

Micah, 22, was born in Spokane, WA, and grew up in Fort St. James, Summerland, and Clearwater, BC. He came to Victoria in late 2006. Tristan, 18, was born and raised in Victoria. They met and began playing their guitars and singing together in the early winter of 2007, what Micah referred to as “Cold, cold nights busking on Government”.

CD – Have either of you ever busked separately?
Tristan – I believe Micah busked by himself quite a few times before I met him, he was already in that groove, and when I met him and his younger brother Julian, and Mack (Jonsson) and other people, it was kind of my introduction to Government Street. I came in playing with them, and then a couple of months later I decided to try playing by myself on the street, and just see how it goes, but I definitely prefer busking with other people.

CD – Have you busked anywhere other than Victoria?
Micah – In 2007, I hitchhiked to Toronto from Victoria, I didn’t have any money, busking was my sole provider. Tristan and I have busked on Salt Spring (Island) at the market.
CD – Did you need a licence to play on Salt Spring?
Tristan – I’m not sure if we actually did ever figure out whether or not they have something worked out around that, but we went for the market, and it was pretty much first come-first serve.
Micah – I went to Hornby Island just the other day, and I asked if I could play and they were all very receptive, and then they finally got the one person they thought was kind of directing the whole thing, and she was saying that unless I’m a resident of Hornby or Denman (Island), I couldn’t busk there. But when you’re hungry, it doesn’t really matter, you just keep playing. I’ve busked in numerous places depending on how hungry I am I guess.

CD – Do you have a favorite spot where you like to play?
Micah – Sure, well, mainly it seems like when tourists come to Victoria they seem to either be herded around the city or just all walk up Government Street, so we usually try to play Murchies for one.
Tristan – Murchies is definitely the prime real estate for a lot of the buskers in Victoria. Starbucks is also a really good spot, by Eddie Bauer.

CD – Have you ever busked down on the upper causeway?
Tristan – Yeah, I played down there a few times with some other people. I’ve played there with Mack, and with Julian and Dylan (Driscoll) before. That place seems to fare well for other people as opposed to us, I think. You know mimes and more stationary acts kind of go down there, as opposed to musicians. I’ve seen a lot of people down there, but, definitely Government Street has been our favorite. We’ve also played around Chinatown a few times, it’s pretty good.
CD – Oh really, where?
Tristan – Just down the street here, from where we’re sitting.
Micah – It’s pretty good there during the market.
CD – Oh, okay, maybe if Ted (Tanner) isn’t booked in there.
Micah – Yeah.

CD – What do you enjoy most about busking?
Tristan – I think first and foremost, the people that I see when I come out to busk, are the highlight of it all. My friends are out here doing this. It’s also the easiest way to bring the music to the people without a lot of the stuff that comes in between nowadays, like just trying to book a show, or getting people to come to the show that you’ve booked. It’s pretty straightforward to deliver the sound to people’s ears, and I kinda like to think that it might brighten somebody’s day here or there. That’s just a little crazy thing I have.
Micah – Definitely we do. People come up to us all the time and tell us we’ve made their day, and then when they drop the twenty we tell them it made our day too, and it’s a happy circle.

CD – What style of music would you say you play?
Tristan – I’m always interested in learning or playing new music, I don’t have any boundaries, I’m not gonna play rap on an acoustic guitar, but anything under the sun that’s good music, really is what I like to call my style of music. Definitely, I’m driven more towards rock ’n’ roll, and sort of folk right now and some alternative bluesy sounding things.
Micah – We value good music, and it’s through our busking that we’ve actually been able to explore a lot of different kinds of music, because you know, you might get Mike, the blues man, he just plays straight blues, and watch him for a while and learn a little from him, and then learn a little bit of gypsy-jazz from this French musician that came, just learning to respect all the different styles, and how they were the roots to the music we have nowadays.
Tristan – That’s a really good point, Micah, You know, I think that’s kind of what gives us the diverse sound that people have really complimented us for, because like you said, when you walk down the street you’ll see a guy playing the blues, or you’ll see Devon (Floyd) kind of has his groove, his way of playing country. But you know, there’s only a handful of buskers in Victoria, who if you listen to for three songs, you might hear a really old blues song, and then like a new-age rock-n-roll song, and then a really mellow folk song, and not really be able to see the similarities between all those styles, there’s not the same thing happening in every song. We really try to play those songs the best we can sort of in their original state.
CD – I think that’s pretty cool, because when I was your guys’ age, rock music was the world to me, and that’s all I would listen to and all I wanted to play. Anything else, like folk, or even a bit of the blues or jazz, I just wasn’t interested in. Now, It’s just been maybe the last twenty years, that I’ve been discovering all this really great early stuff and thinking “Wow, why didn’t I get into that when I was younger”.
Tristan – Yeah, I remember when I was about 13, I refused to play in a band because they had a keyboard player and at the time I just thought “I don’t want to be in a band with a keyboard player. I like guitars and drums and that kind of stuff”. How silly I was, because piano is such a fundamental in all kinds of music, a very versatile instrument, so I mean everybody kind of grows and learns when it comes to music, and that’s why I think it’s important to not really have a bias against any music.

CD – Who are the musicians that have influenced your style?
Micah – Probably Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Django Reinhardt, Neil Young. I would say I’m influenced by a lot of musicians that maybe wouldn’t be coming out through my music much, like, if I’m busking in front of Eddie Bauer and getting traffic of mostly people over 40 years old, I’m gonna play a lot of Neil Young and stuff they’re gonna want to hear. I’m not gonna play Metallica or something in the morning in front of Eddie Bauer.
Tristan – My grandpa got me into bluegrass when I was about 7 years old, and that’s where I started playing guitar, and I kind of resented it ‘cause it was the first music I learned and he was kinda forcing it on me. But it always kinda stuck with me, and I’ve been playing more of that. When I started to really find music for myself, I really liked Bob Dylan, and I got into Neil Young, and my mom showed me some of the older records from the ‘60s and stuff like that, and I really liked them. But nowadays, I definitely go on Neil Young and Radiohead, and I’d say Elliott Smith is probably my biggest influence ‘cause he’s a solo singer-songwriter.

CD – Do you do any songwriting?
Tristan – Yeah absolutely. I’d say my brain is always kinda tinkering in a way that I can help convey something to myself, just trying to figure things out and make sense of them. It usually happens if I’m on the bus or walking down the street and I think of something in my head, and I kinda put it into a pretty little package of words that explains it well, and then I think of the melody, and before I know it, I‘m singing a song in my head that I’ve never played on the guitar before.

CD – Have you ever written anything together?
Tristan – We wrote a song with Micah’s brother Julian. We’d been listening to a lot of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, and we were just kinda trying to play some shows, and we thought it would be good to have a song that we all collaborated on. Julian was just getting into playing fiddle at the time, and it sounded pretty bad when we jammed it, we didn’t really have the timing down and the fiddle was all screechy for the most part, but since then we’ve played it a lot and it’s kind of turned into its own. But, as for sitting down and writing a song with words that we both sing and jam to, I don’t think we’ve really brought a song from the ground up, just the two of us.

CD – Do you ever do your originals out on the street?
Tristan – I don’t want to say it’s a waste to play your own songs on the street, but I think a huge part of busking is people recognizing the song and relating to it. If someone in their 40s or 50s walks by, and I’m singing a song about what it’s like to be an 18 year old from Victoria, they might not really relate to that, so I kind of feel like I’d love to play my music for people, but only if they really wanna hear it.
Micah – Yeah. If you’re playing a song that is personal to you and nobody’s heard it before, they kinda need to stand there and listen to it. A lot of times when we play covers and people appreciate it, they may ask us for our own stuff, “Oh I like what you did with that song. If you have any of your own material, we’d be interested”. Then they’re in a position where they’re receptive. At the same time, if I wake up in the morning and I’m feeling blue, maybe I’ll sing one of my own songs and I don’t care if anybody’s ever heard it or not. It always changes.

CD – Do you have any CDs?
Tristan – No.
Micah – Got no CDs, got no job, got no extra packs of strings, got no women, got no plans, yeah, we got nothing.
Tristan – Hopefully, we’re gonna get on it soon.

Over the last couple of weeks since our interview, I have had the opportunity to listen to Micah and Tristan do some great covers of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr.Soul”, Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Tell It To Me”, and Neil Young’s "Everybody Knows That This Is Nowhere”.
The song that really blew me away though, was their version of Townes Van Zandt’s “White Freightliner Blues”. With a slowed down tempo, some added lyrics, heartfelt singing and harmonizing, and some excellent picking, they served up what was without a doubt, the finest interpretation of that song that I have ever heard.
I hope that whenever the guys get around to recording a CD, that whatever they decide to put on it, that this song will be in the mix.

You can check out some of Tristan’s music at his website.

Happiness Is What You Enjoy: chat with Jean Bedard

2009-10-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

Prior to 2005 when the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority took over the oversight and management of the inner harbour causeway, the buskers who played down there needed to get a street entertainer licence from the City of Victoria. Since that year, the GVHA has been licensing the 30 street musicians and entertainers who perform on the causeway.

Every spring before the prime busking season starts, if there are any vacancies after the previous year’s buskers have had an opportunity to sign up, then auditions are held to fill them. In the spring of 2007, guitar picker & singer Jean Bedard was one of the hopeful applicants who decided to come down and try out for a slot, which he successfully won.

A couple of weekends ago, I had just finished a set on the causeway and wandered around to the Wax Museum spot, where I found Jean packing up after his set. We found ourselves a bench, and with the tempting aroma from the adjacent waffle cart wafting through the air we sat down and chatted.

Originally from Hull, PQ, Jean moved with his family in 1964 to the Comox Valley, where his father was stationed with the RCAF. Through his adult years he has worked at many jobs including logging and driving as a courier, and he has also managed a courier business, and owned his own pizza restaurant. Finally, the day came when he decided he was at the age where he just wanted to do something that he enjoyed.

He took his first stab at performing on the streets, in Courtenay three years ago. This is his second year busking here in Victoria, where he spends most of his playing time at Barb’s Fish & Chips at Fishermans Wharf, but, also can be found on the causeway below the Wax Museum. To collect his tips, Jean’s girlfriend designed and built a miniature wooden guitar case, about a foot and a half long, that sits on a stool in front of him as he plays.

CD – What made you decide to try busking?
Jean – I started playing little bars and lounges and stuff like that and I had enough songs together that I thought “Yeah, okay, I could do that”. It was just a gorgeous day once and I thought “Why not? I’ll try it”. It really was kind of scary at first because you know you’re gonna see your friends that know you downtown, and they’ve never seen you busk before, and they’re probably thinking “What is he doing? So down-and-out that he has to busk”. (laughs) But I really enjoy music, so, I just thought “I’m gonna do it, I don’t care what people think”.
I played outside of Mudsharks, which was a little coffee shop up in Courtenay, and it was right next to a bank, which was really good because people got money when they come out of the bank. So yeah, that’s how it started, I guess.

CD – Do you have a favorite spot?
Jean – Yeah, it’s got to be the wharf. You’ve got a captive audience there because they’ve got to wait at least half an hour for their food, they’re almost half an hour in the lineup sometimes, so you’re with them for a good hour, and you get to play quite a bit of your repertoire. I have quite a variety of songs and I’m sure I’m gonna please somebody, right? And yeah, I do pretty good there. I like the atmosphere, it’s just such a quaint place where people can sit down and eat. I really like it in the evenings in the summer when the sun’s going down and there’s no wind, and there’s not that many people there, and I can play my instrumentals and people get it, they really enjoy it. The atmosphere’s just really nice and that’s when I seem to make the most tips.

CD – So, how would you describe your style of music?
Jean – Eclectic. I do cover tunes, everything from Sting to James Taylor, to blues like Keb’Mo. Jack Williams, a lot of people haven’t heard of him, but he’s just my favorite singer-songwriter. I booked him here in Victoria to play and I sold tickets for his concert by actually singing his songs and it was just such a hoot having him here, and people really enjoyed it, and at the end of the night, I got to actually play with him, so that was neat. Yeah, I like so many different types of music so I just pick the songs that I like to do. I like classical guitar too, I love Bach, and playing stuff like that, but I just don’t have time to do that now.

CD – Who are your musical influences?
Jean – Chet Atkins and Tommy Emmanuel as far as the finger style picking goes. Jack Williams, Lyle Lovett, those guys were definitely influences on me. Steely Dan, I like their stuff. Elvis. When I was a kid, 6 years old, that’s the first thing I heard, was Elvis’ first gold album and I wore that sucker out.
CD – I love your version of Don’t Be Cruel, That is so cool, the way you make it sound like two guitar players.
Jean – Thanks. Yeah, I like it too. You know, it’s fun, because I start off with Old Fashioned Love Song, and it’s a drop-D tuning, so I managed to figure out how to do Don’t Be Cruel and added it on, and I think Tommy did it, I’ve never heard him do it, but I read somewhere that he did the combination, so I thought I’d try it and do it my way.

CD – Okay, tell me about one of your memorable busking experiences?
Jean – Well, I recently had a couple from Holland who were listening to my music and they really enjoyed it, and they bought me a coffee, and then we met the next day at the Moka House and they decided to go to Butchart Gardens, and they asked my girlfriend and I to come along, and they paid for everything. Then they dropped me off to do my busking and picked us up at 7:00 and took us to Spinnakers, bought our meals for us. Then on their last day here, they took us on a horse carriage ride, and to the IMAX Theatre and then they took us to Topo’s Restaurant downtown for a great meal, and they insisted on paying for everything. They were just the nicest people.
CD – This basically started with them hearing you play?
Jean – Just heard me singing, yeah, down at the wharf, and the neatest thing about it was, we had so much in common because of our age, we’re about the same age, just the nicest people, That’s great when stuff like that happens.

CD – What has been your worst busking experience?
Jean – That was just last week. I was three songs into my set, the thing that gets me about this, I did some of my best material. I did my Jack Williams, I did the Don’t Be Cruel thing, and this woman walks by and she said something to me, and I could’ve sworn I heard her right, but I was singing at the time, so I didn’t want to stop. She went to get her food at Barb’s there, and as she was coming back and I had finished my song, I could tell she was trying to avoid me and go around these people, so I stopped her and I said “Excuse me, would you mind repeating to me what you said,” and she says “Well, how much to get you to stop playing?” (laughs) I was really floored, didn’t expect it, but I thought that’s what she’d said, and I wanted to make sure. So she repeated herself, and I give her that, she’s got guts. Then I said “Well, look, I’m just down here to please people and have fun and hopefully people enjoy my music.” And she said “Well, I think people would enjoy it better if it was quiet and they could just enjoy the scenery in peace and quiet”, and blah, blah, blah. So, I said “Well, if you don’t like it, you can leave”, and she said to me “Well, you could leave.” I said “Well, that’s not going to happen.” And now I’m getting a little agitated, my voice is starting to raise a bit, right? I said “Look, there’s plenty of people here enjoying my music, I’m sure”.
So she finally walked away, and I apologized to my audience for the disruption, and the next thing I know is people who weren’t clapping before the confrontation began clapping after all my songs and were giving me tips like crazy, and the people at the table next to me just shook their heads, they just could not believe this woman. Later, she and her friend they actually went and sat far enough away from me so they couldn’t hear me of course, and when they went to leave, they were plugging their ears as they were going by. The people at the table beside me, they looked and just started laughing as she was going up the ramp.
Anyway, this girl comes up to me and says “What did that woman say to you?” and I told her, and she says “Wow, you wouldn’t believe the way she was talking about you, with your hair, and the way you look, and the way you play”. This woman just had her head so far up you-know-where, (laugh) nothing could have pleased this girl. So, yeah, that had to be one of the worst, absolute worst.
CD – But it turned into something good.
Jean – Well, it turned into something great, yeah, it was probably one of the better nights I had there and I walked out with a bit more money than I usually do. It’s funny though, because everybody said “Jean, you’ve got something going here. Get somebody to come by and criticize you every once in a while, so you can make more money”. (laughs)

CD – What was the strangest thing anyone ever threw in your case?
Jean – An avocado. (laughs)
CD – Seriously?
Jean - Oh yeah. A woman, I guess she was walking along the wharf there and somebody’s grocery bag came loose or something and an avocado fell out of it, and so she was looking for the person that lost this avocado (laughs) and she couldn’t find him, so she gave it to me.

CD – Do you have any sort of seeding practice when you start your set?
Jean – I just put in a loonie. That’s all, and I have my little sign that says “Happiness is not what you have, it’s what you enjoy”.

CD – Anything else you’d like to add?
Jean – This is just so much fun, I wish I had started busking when I was younger, like, when I was 30, ‘cause if I’d lived in a town like this I think I could have survived and really enjoyed it, and probably still be doing it. Yeah, well I’m 52 now, and I’m enjoying it now, and I’ll just have to take it from here and see where it goes. Yeah, I guess that’s it.

Reggaebilly & Buskers For Peace

2009-09-24T01:56:00.000-07:00

I am in varying stages of preparing 3 interviews for upcoming posts, so, here are a couple of items to tide you over ‘til next week.

What do you get when you cross the sounds of the Caribbean with backwoods country-blues music? Reggaebilly, of course. This new musical genre made its debut on the causeway back in the summer of 2007, when longtime street musician Dave Harris began doing some sets with steel drum player Swan Walker. Since then, Dave and Swan have gotten together numerous times to play their entertaining mix of country-blues, reggae, calypsos, old ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s pop, rock and soul tunes. (More on Swan in a future post)

I will leave you with a link to a really cool video that was e-mailed to me. It was produced by an organization called Playing For Change, whose goal is to "inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music". The producers took their mobile recording studio and film crew to Santa Monica, where they recorded a street musician performing the foundation track. They then traveled to New Orleans, Amsterdam, New Mexico, France, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Venezuela, The Congo, South Africa, Barcelona and Italy, where they had local musicians add their voices and instruments to the same song. All the tracks were then mixed together for the video.

Julian Walker & Dylan Driscoll

2009-09-17T00:58:00.000-07:00

A week ago Saturday, I was on my way down to play on the causeway, when I ran into two of the newer street musicians that have been making their presence known on Government Street the last few years. Julian Walker and Dylan Driscoll were playing Led Zeppelin’s Going To California, when I stopped to tip them, before continuing down to the harbour. Finding it too windy for busking, I hung out for a while and then decided to head back uptown to catch up with Julian and Dylan. I found them playing at Murchies and sat and listened to them for a while. It was a casual performance in which they did a couple of songs together including the traditional Reuben’s Train, then Dylan took a break and wandered off and chatted while Julian did, Neil Young’s Tell Me Why, and a song by Portland band the Decemberists. Then Dylan was back playing Bob Dylan’s It Takes A Train To Cry while Julian took a break.

After they finished their set, we headed down to Market Square where the guys could get something to eat at Green Cuisine, and we got down to the interview.

Originally from Peterborough ON, Dylan, 23, came out to Vancouver in 2006 and bounced around between Vancouver and Victoria. Julian, 20, grew up in Fort St. James and a few other communities in the interior of BC, before coming to Victoria. They’ve been hanging out, playing their guitars and singing together, along Government Street since the summer of 2008.

CD – I saw you this morning playing at Eddie Bauer, and then later at Murchies. Are these your favorite spots?
Dylan – I think my favorite spot in the morning is definitely outside of Eddie Bauer just ‘cause it’s kinda quiet and it’s a nice place to sit in the morning. In my experience, Murchies has been more lucrative in the afternoon times and there’s more people walking by. Really, my favorite spot to play is definitely down on the harbour. I had some really good times there.
CD – And probably more people.
Dylan – Yeah, a lot more people for sure.
Julian – As far as busking goes, I like Murchies and Bastion Square, and I do like Eddie Bauer if it’s raining ‘cause it’s got that overhang. But as far as acoustics go, I really like playing in the courtyard at the library. It sounds really good.
CD – Great acoustics in there. I’m too loud for in there myself.
Julian – (laughs) Oh yeah?

CD – Have you busked anywhere other than Victoria?
Dylan – I’ve done some busking in Vancouver, Peterborough, Toronto and Calgary.
CD – Okay, so how do Peterborough and Toronto, say, compare with Victoria?
Dylan – Well in Peterborough, most people know you, and you play music with them, which is not so much different than here, but yeah, Peterborough’s a lot smaller so you’ll see everyone that you see everyday, and in that way it can be good but then it can also be “Oh, there’s so-and-so doing that,” and they’re not really interested as much as they would be in bigger places.
CD – How big is Peterborough, would there be a lot of buskers?
Dylan – Uh, no. There’s like a couple here and there, but no, the music scene in Peterborough’s definitely more in the bars, not on the street so much. And Toronto, people are definitely a lot more receptive and warm in Victoria. I haven’t really experienced much in the subways, but I’ve played around Queen Street West and the downtown area, and it might’ve been the days I went out, but people were in their own bubble and just kind of set on where they were going and didn’t really seem to stop too much and listen to music, but I think in the subway is where it happens.
CD – What about Calgary?
Dylan – I actually had a pretty good experience there, ‘cause I just started playing on the street and then this girl asked me if I had a licence and I said “No," and she said “Oh come, I’ll buy you a permit that lasts for ten days,” or something like that, it was twenty dollars. I didn’t really make any money, but then I ran into my friend who was passing through Calgary at the time and we made a little bit of money. He had a mandolin, I had a guitar.
CD – And you mentioned Vancouver?
Dylan – Yeah, Vancouver. I’ve had some pretty good luck on Commercial Drive playing around there.
CD – I used to do the liquor store there back around ’87.
Dylan – Yeah, that’s a good place, and the Skytrain stop right on Commercial & Broadway was usually a really good place as long as there’s not some drunk person threatening you unless you move out of their spot.
CD – How ‘bout you, Julian?
Julian – Um, I busked in Vanderhoof. (laughs)
CD – Oh wow! I’d bet you were the only busker there.
Julian – Yeah, for sure. There’s like a little co-op kind of grocery store strip mall and in the winter I’d busk in there, but I didn’t know any Rolling Stones at the time. I hadn’t been playing guitar for that long and most of the cats up there like the Stones, and most of them are half-cut and I didn’t make too much, but I made enough to eat and I don’t know, $10 now and then, but not like down here. And I busked in Vancouver, I don’t even know what street it is, I think it’s Robson, by the art gallery and then you go down towards the water? That was pretty good, except I broke strings to the point where I couldn’t fix them anymore, ‘cause the silver was past the nut into the first fret, and so I only had four strings but still managed to make like $48 or something.

CD – Okay, what kind of music do you play?
Dylan – I like playing the old traditional folk songs, the old blues songs and stuff like that, but really, I think we like a lot of different stuff, so whatever we can think to play, whatever we feel like playing, sometimes that can be more modern, some of the bands we like that are around now.
CD – So, a bit of a mix
Dylan – Yeah, definitely a mix.
Julian – Like folk, pop, rock, to melodic, like, rockabilly or Billie Holiday…
CD – Billie Holiday, really!
Julian – Like old school stuff, or just straight-up s---kicking wasted country, old-time songs or whatever.

CD – And, who are your musical influences?
Dylan – Everybody, definitely the Beatles, all the classics like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and CCR, Zeppelin, I think pretty much all the greats.
Julian – I don’t know, I like a lot of newer stuff.

CD – Do you write your own songs at all?
Dylan – Yeah, we both do.
CD – A lot?
Dylan – It comes in waves, sometimes you’d write a good handful of songs and sometimes you might not think to write a song for a month or so, then spend a week and get a few songs. So I like to try to always be writing.
CD – And do you do any of your original stuff on the street?
Dylan – Sometimes, yeah, I’ve played a couple of original songs.
Julian – Yeah, I usually do that when my set is running thin or I want something that’s more upbeat, that kind of snaps people out of their day to day walk.

CD – What do you enjoy most about busking?
Julian – Eating. (laughs)
Dylan – Eating and drinking afterwards.
CD – (laughs) That’s a good one.
Dylan – What I think about busking specifically, it’s seeing the people that actually appreciate it ‘cause there’s so many people that just walk by and really couldn’t care less, but then the people that do, you see actually appreciate the music and they give you money, and even if they don’t give you money, they at least nod at you or smile. And I think that just the fact there are certain people, a fair amount of people around Victoria that recognize what you’re doing as like an actual performance and not just as like asking for money on the street. And I think that’s what I enjoy about it.
Julian – I like it when girls come and give me their phone numbers. (laughs)
Dylan – Yeah, I like that too and it tends to happen from time to time.
Julian – It does actually and it’s always nice.

CD – Do you have a memorable busking experience?
Dylan – I think I’m fortunate enough to have a few. There was one day where Mack (Jonsson) and I were playing down at the harbour on the lower part of the causeway, and we weren’t really paying attention, we were just playing the songs and just kinda playing amongst ourselves and we both looked up and there was just like a complete crowd congregated, you know, and there were people up on top. At that point we got kind of nervous and we were just like “Oh, we actually have to entertain now,” and then suddenly there was like a whole bunch of people watching, and big smiles, kids dancing and stuff, that sort of gave us a boost, and we had a lot of fun with that, but things like that, that happen are really nice you know.
Julian – There’s been a couple of times where people have come and approached me and offered me projects, like this one guy came up and he makes independent short films and asked me if I’d do a soundtrack on part of it. Or people who wanted me to come to Vancouver and do opening shows at the Railhouse, or just like, you know small stuff, but it’s always really nice.

As Dylan mentioned, he has also done some playing with Mack Jonsson (fiddle/vocals), who I am hoping to catch up with in the near future for an interview. Julian’s brother Micah (guitar/vocals) also busks in a duo with Tristan Teal (guitar/vocals). I sat down with them on Tuesday, and will post the interview in October.

You can check out some of Dylan’s music at his website.

Making Music With My Friends

2009-09-10T01:44:00.000-07:00

If you were to ask many street musicians, they would probably tell you that some of the most fun times that they’ve had busking were when they were joined by other musicians. That has certainly been the case for me. There are times when I’ve been busking when I have found myself “playing to the wall” as longtime busker Dave Harris puts it in one of his songs. If this happens when you’re alone, it is very hard to find the energy to continue. The great thing about playing with someone else is that even if there is no connection with passersby, you have the person you are playing with to interact with and that extra boost of energy flowing back and forth between each other makes the music more fun. It is also a great opportunity to expand one’s repertoire and learn some new songs from other genres.

My first experience busking with another musician occurred back in the spring of 1987 after I had moved from the westend of Vancouver over to the eastside’s Little Italy neighborhood. I’d managed to find an apartment on Commercial Drive, where I got free rent in exchange for doing caretaking work around the building. Between the painting, cleaning and fixing-up, I also managed to find some time to try out the busking on the drive. Across the street and down a couple of blocks was a liquor store where I began playing weekday afternoons and Friday evenings.
Earlier in the year I had met a banjo player named Kempton Dexter at one of the local guitar circles I’d been attending, and when we found that I had moved into his neighborhood, we started jamming together at his place. It wasn’t long before we decided that we would try busking together on Friday evenings at the liquor store. Our repertoire was an eclectic mix of traditional folk tunes that Kempton was familiar with, along with the rock and pop tunes that I was used to doing. Kempton was an energetic banjo player with some flamboyant Eddie Van Halen like moves which made for some pretty rockin’ sets. Most of our tips were from people who were usually on their way out of the store after purchasing their beverages, but we also did draw some small intermittent groups of passersby who’d listen for a few songs, maybe tip and then move on. Calling ourselves the Fölked-up Fellöws, we also played a few gigs around town as a trio with Nathen Hohn on bass.

One of the memorable highlights of my years busking occurred in 1999. I was playing on the causeway one day, when a guy who’d been sitting and listening to me for most of my set, came up after I was done and introduced himself to me. Larry Stevens told me that he’d really enjoyed my music, and that he played dobro and was wondering if he could come down the next day and play with me. I said “Sure.” The next day came and we took turns picking the tunes and had a great time playing together, and I got my first taste of playing some uptempo bluegrass tunes. It was so much fun that we continued busking all that summer calling ourselves Mile Zero. We usually did a lunchtime set on the harbour and then we’d go uptown to play at Murchies or Bastion Square for an hour or so, and then back down to the harbour where we’d wait to do an early evenng set below the wax museum.

Prior to playing with Larry, I was pretty low-key about my performance, mostly just playing the songs and not talking much other than to introduce the song or thank people for their applause or tips. This changed as we began having some fun and I started loosening up and getting a little banter and joking going between Larry, myself and our audience. I learned that this actually helped to break the ice with the listeners so they might feel that they were a part of what was going on.

Anyway, one day in August, Larry asked if he could bring a couple of friends down to join us. Again I said “Sure.” The next day Larry showed up with Alan Law (guitar/vocals) and Mike Kraft (banjo). When we all met on the causeway just before 5 pm, we ran into Dave Harris, who was camping for his 8:00 evening spot. (This was back in the days when you had to do a lot of waiting around to make sure you got a prime spot. More on this in a future post).
Anyway, it turned out that Dave had done a lot of playing with Al and Mike, so he asked if instead of us going to the wax museum, we wanted to do the empty 6:00 spot in front of him, so that he could join us. He quickly drove home with his wife Jane and brought down his upright bass.
Next thing you know, a couple visiting from Long Beach, CA, who had been spending a lot of their time listening to me and Larry, saw us getting ready to play. The gentleman, Tom Harmon mentioned that he just happened to have brought his fiddle with him to Victoria, and he asked if he could sit in with us. When we said “Sure,” off he ran to his car to get his instrument. So in the matter of not too much time we had ourselves an impromptu six-piece combo.
For the next two hours that we played, we each took turns taking the lead spot on a song. As we played, people started to gather and take photos and videos. People were clapping hands and tapping toes to the music. The case was filling up with coins and bills. At that point, it was the largest crowd of people I’d played for. It was one of the most spontaneous and fun times I’ve had, and without a doubt one of the highlights of my busking career. The next day when they saw us, the Harmons told me and Larry that Tom’s playing with us was the highlight of their visit to Victoria. (The photo at the top of this post was taken by Tom’s wife Kathi)

Through the years since this set, I have played quite a few times with other musicians. In the summer of 2000, Larry returned with T-jac Townsend (guitar/vocals) and we named ourselves the Wandering Boys after an old Carter Family tune, and spent the season playing a couple of sets a day.

The following couple of years I played on my own and then for about three summers starting in 2002, Dave Harris would bring his banjo and mandolin and join me for a set a couple of times a week Sometimes we’d be having so much fun that I’d get a little carried away with the banter and Dave would often say that I had taken my “goofy pills” again.

Larry Stevens, Alan Law and Mike Kraft went on to form their bluegrass band the Clover Point Drifters with Dan Parker and George Robinson. I have been honoured to have them occasionally come down to the harbour and join me for some fun evenings of music. (more on Larry and the Drifters in future posts).

Once in a while, I’ll still get a phone call or visit to the harbour from Larry or Dale Manason (guitar/vocals) to ask if I want some company, and I always respond with my usual “Sure,” ‘cause just like Willie Nelson sang in his song, “the life I love is making music with my friends.”

Conversation with Dave Harris

2009-09-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

I first met longtime Victoria busker Dave Harris in the summer of 1989, after I moved to the island and began busking on the inner harbour causeway. After a few years of crossing paths, we eventually started hanging out and we became good friends. For a few years in the early 2000s, we would occasionally do a set together, and became known as the "Daves Of Our Lives" to a few of our causeway fans. A man of many instrumental talents, Dave also produced and played on my two CDs.

A few weeks ago, after the story about how I got started busking in Vancouver in 1979, Dave posted a comment in which he mentioned that he had also done some busking in Vancouver around that same time. I thought that this would be a great starting point for a conversation with him.

DH – So, early busking days, I guess for both of us. Unfortunately we never met back then but I guess we were both sort of part of the same scene. You were more of a full timer than me, I was just coming over for a few days at a time and staying at my buddy Paul Creasey’s. He was a recorder player and we had played here (in Victoria) and then he moved to Vancouver, so I’d come over and we’d play at the Medieval Inn in Gastown in the evening and then in the afternoon we’d go out and busk, and we played quite a bit at the Orpheum, because it had such great acoustics. In those days you could go right into the entranceway and it just sounded so great and the recorder particularily, ‘cause it would just echo and it just sounded great in there.
CD – Yeah, I loved the Orpheum, until they closed it up with this gate that pulled down from above. I guess to keep guys like us out. And now recently, maybe a few years ago, they put in glass doors.
DH – Oh really! I remember the gates but I didn’t… wow! … glass doors.
CD – So that’s a lot different. The acoustics in there though, I remember I’d set my case out on the sidewalk and just go back in there and kinda wander around a bit while playing and then come back out on the street for a while. I loved the acoustics.
DH – Yeah, it really was special. We played before a Joan Armatrading concert, Paul and I, and people were going in and tipping us and enjoying it and waiting to get in and we were doing quite well and we kind of just stayed and kept playing, and then when they were all coming out after the concert we actually had a couple of ladies, maybe they liked us, I don’t know, sometimes other things are involved in people’s impressions of people and stuff, but they said they liked us better than the Joan Armatrading concert, so that was pretty nice. I took it with a couple of pounds of salt, but it was still a nice compliment.

CD – So what years were you there?
DH – I’m thinking it was about ’79, maybe it was fall of ‘78 going into ‘79 maybe it was in that period somewhere right around there. We were sort of peripherally on the scene with Diamantose, because I remember playing a gig where I believe they were the headliners and we opened for them at the place on Fourth Avenue…
CD – Soft Rock Café?
DH – Right. I wanted to ask you if you’ve ever met or remember Harold Head? He was a banjo player.
CD – He’s the guy that that the comic book was based on.
DH – Yeah, that’s why I asked. Harold Head Comics. I have that and I believe I got that before I even moved to BC in like maybe about ‘75 or something, I’m not sure when it came out but I’m pretty sure I already had that when I moved here, so that was sort of my introduction to the whole Vancouver busking scene in a way.
CD – Yeah, I’d seen him around quite a few times but never actually spoke with him or talked but I knew him to see him. We were talking about the Orpheum and I remember I saw Long John Baldry busking out front there one time, like in the early ‘80s.
DH – Okay, probably when he first moved to Vancouver. Yeah that’s neat. I know its funny, you know for how unappreciated buskers are in a lot of ways, how many sort of famous people have actually done it, usually at the beginning of their career, but in Long John Baldry’s case, obviously, that would have been more the middle of his career. Right? After his real heyday. That’s kind of interesting.

CD - Any other locations that you played?
DH – We also played down in front of the bus stops down at the corner of Granville and Georgia, there’s a big covered area where it was bus stops there right on Granville just off of Georgia and we’d play there, does that ring a bell?
CD – Was it maybe the overhang of the Hudsons Bay store?
DH – Yeah I guess that’s what it was.
CD – Yeah I played there a few times.
DH – And we’d play there because sometimes it would be raining, which it seemed like it was quite a bit and I think this was mostly around Christmas time and in the winter months so it wasn’t summertime it was the off-season you know, but we found that that was a very busy location a lot of people and they’d be standing for a few minutes waiting for a bus so it was nice to have a little entertainment, so we found that to be a good spot and we’d play there quite a bit. We also played over in North Van at a liquor store, Lonsdale I think, and that was very good too. The other place we used to play was Granville Island. In those days it was just basically a free-for-all and it was really quite good ‘cause you could go and you could set up and you didn’t have to move. I think now they’ve got like 40 minutes or something, it’s quite regimented I believe. It was busy and the money was good and it was a fun place to play and you’d play in one location in the market for a while and you could move to another location and we were very portable ‘cause it was just guitar and recorder, and spoons too. I’d sing a few songs, but mostly we were playing Celtic fiddle tunes and things like that.

CD – So, how about a thumbnail account of your busking years since the time we’ve been talking about?
DH – After that period, that would have maybe been my second or third year busking, and mostly I was working as a solo, but I did things with Paul. And Dale Mitchell was another guy I used to play with. After that I kinda hooked up with Jimmy Sinclair, Mike Kraft and Jeremy Rogers and we played up at the Captain Cook statue actually as a really big band, nine piece at one point.
CD – Wow!
DH – But then we moved into the Shmoes period through most of the ‘80s and then in the early ‘90s that had fallen apart by then and I’d sort of gone back to being a solo, but I would play sometimes with a bass player and we were electric for a few years in there too.
CD – That’s when you had, I think he played drums for you, a guy named Jamie and I'd actually met him before in Vancouver when I was playing at the open stages at the Classical Joint in Gastown.
DH – Oh, James, he played drums and bass for me. He was very brief, maybe a month or two. Sherm Sheldon, Mike Nitchie, these are people I played with in that era. My friend Matthew Lavers, he was an acoustic country-blues guy, we did a duo for a couple of years and then I kind of got a little disgruntled about ’94 when the licensing and all the regulations came in and I hardly busked for a year or two and then ‘96 I went full tilt with the one-man-band and that has basically grown into my present show. There have been a few occasions where I’d play with other people along the way, but that’s pretty much the thumbnail.

With Dave’s 30 plus years of busking, there is so much to chat with him about. Unfortunately, I’m noticing that the posts are starting to get a little on the long side, so I will try to get together with Dave again this fall to talk about the local Victoria busking history.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in more on Dave Harris and his music, you can check out his website.

Memorable Busking Experiences: Part 2

2009-08-27T01:41:00.000-07:00

In last week's post, I shared some of my memorable busking experiences. This week I thought that I would ask a few of the other street musicians that perform along Government Street and down on the inner harbour causeway about some of their memorable busking moments.

Marty Field (guitar/vocals) is a longtime causeway and uptown busker: “Well, I guess one of the most memorable moments for me busking was a few summers ago I had an Elvis impersonator join me for a few songs and he was awesome, it was great, and it was the closest I ever got to the King. So that was a great day for me.”

Sarah Tradewell (celtic fiddle) has been busking on the causeway for two summers and was pretty excited about sharing her experience:
“One day I was busking and a photographer came and took my picture and he said he was from the Victoria Daily Photo blog and he was going to use my picture for photo of the day. So, he put the photo up, and coincidentally that day there had been a writer who had come on the harbour and had seen me play and she was writing a book about a fiddler and when she had seen me, she said ‘Oh my goodness, that is the main character of my book in person,’ and so she walked away never expecting to ever see me again or hear me play again. She found the photo blog of this photographer, Benjamin, and found my picture and she said “Well, that’s the girl, how do I get in contact with her?” And so she asked him for my contact information and she found me, and we’re actually going to Gabriola (Island) to visit her and to take some photos for her book trailer, ‘cause her book’s going to be coming out in May of 2010 and its called ‘Restoring Harmony’. And we’re also doing some recording for her for publicity and stuff so I’ll be singing and playing with her husband. Isn’t that cool, I thought that was pretty sweet.”

Jean Bedard (guitar/vocals) performs mostly at Fisherman’s Wharf, but also plays on the causeway, where this story took place: “Just recently I’m playing down here and there’s a choir from London. Anyway, seven of them gathered around me and asked me if I knew how to play a certain song and I didn’t, but we finally settled on Stand By Me and so I found out the key that they do it in and I sang it with them and it was like right away a crowd of people just gathered and the vocals were just super so that was fine and then they left. About half an hour later, the rest show up and I said ‘Do you guys want to do the song Stand By Me? So we started doing it again, now the crowd of people builds and what happened is, the (first) seven were down around the corner, so they all come running over. Now I’ve got twenty of them… and we’re singing this song and I got a bit of it on video and all the harmonies and the different things that they did vocally, it was just incredible. It just sounded so neat. That was a highlight.”

Dave Harris (one-man-band) has busked on the streets of Victoria for the past 33 yearss: “The obvious one about the little kids, I mean when little kids come along and it’s probably the first time they’ve ever seen a live musician, and they just kind of gawk up at you sort of unbelievable, they can’t believe it, they’ve never seen something like that before, and you can see this amazement in their face, and then they start moving their head and moving their body and then the crowd will start getting into it ‘cause you know there’s nothin’ like a kid right? So that’s kind of a good one.”

Tristan Teal & Micah Walker (guitars/vocals) are two of the newer buskers along Government:
Tristan – “Well, there was one time that I was busking with Micah, here I think, and a woman whose job it was to go out for record labels and kind of do scouting for musicians on stage and stuff, she listened to two or three of our songs and she was pretty cold, like she wasn’t super warm about it all, but she said really if we believe in ourselves, and we have what it takes to really do that and to really spread the word with that, so that was pretty cool ‘cause it really seemed like she knew what she was talking about.”
Micah – “There’s thousands of people doing what we’re doing and you gotta make sure that you separate yourself from them, you know, you gotta explain through your music why you’re doing it, why it’s real for you. It’s good to hear positive feedback like that.”
Tristan – “So, that was probably one of the better busking moments was having that encouragement and just inspiration from someone who’s around that all the time.”

Ian & Jonathan Bennetts (guitars/vocals) are veteran buskers who have performed in Paris and New York City’s Greenwich Village, and the last 4 years in Victoria. Here, they share a couple of their Parisian tales:
Ian – “Around the late ‘50s, ’58 or something like that, what happened is that my brother and I would sing outside of a café somewhere in the Latin Quarter of Paris and we’d do two songs, and then my brother would go around with the hat and while he did that I would sing ‘Summertime’ and at that time back then a long time ago I had a very sweet soft voice and I would sing ‘Summertime’ and I’d usually aim my eyes towards a pretty young woman and sing the song as if I was singing it to her, I learned that trick as a busker early on, and so I did very well in the romance department by singing romantic songs.and that was like a really good experience for me.”
Jonathan – “I was on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and we’d always had competitions to see who made the most money in an evening or in a session and I was singing away and this individual came up to me and he said 'Do you know 'Don’t Fence Me In?’', and I don’t really know it but I knew the tune so I said ‘Yeah, sure.’ So, I sang 'Don’t Fence Me In' and chucked a few French words in there and it turned out he was a Cuban sugar millionaire, so he gave me a hundred dollars for that. Then he said ‘Do you know 'The Yellow Rose Of Texas?’' and I said ‘Absolutely!’ He gave me two hundred dollars for that and I ended up getting, I think it was $550 from him which was a huge amount of money in those days, it must be worth about three or four thousand dollars in today’s money. I had a photograph taken of me holding all these huge notes up and I won the competition. it was pretty amazing and especially ‘cause I didn’t know the bloody songs. I knew the tunes and I was making up the words, so, I got away with it. So, yeah that was a pretty memorable experience”

Hank Engel (guitar/vocals) has busked in Edmonton, Toronto and this summer on the causeway in Victoria: “The first memorable busking experience that leaps to my mind is one time I was playing on the streets of Edmonton and an elderly couple stopped and they were celebrating their anniversary. It was probably a momentous (one), probably their 50th or something like that, and they asked me to play a waltz for them and I did, and they danced and a big crowd gathered round to watch them dance. That was the first one I could think of. I mean I’ve probably had other ones, but that’s the first one.”

Ginger Jam – Curtis (guitar/vocals) & Daniel (trumpet) are new to the Government Street scene:
Curtis - “Our interesting busking experience performing on the street, we were accompanied by a man that I would like to call ‘Spoons’. (He) came out of nowhere with some spoons strapped to his backpack and he had a seat next to us and well, yeah, played the spoons with us and accompanied us and I think that was pretty interesting. He was rather intoxicated and it made the show even more entertaining and yeah, overall it was a really great experience.”

Shanna Dance just started busking on the causeway this summer:
“I think some of the most memorable experiences that I’ve had down here have just been seeing all the smiles on people’s faces when me and Aurora were dressed as lobsters. All the little kids coming down and coming up to us with big smiles on their faces, either that or being afraid and running away. We had a lot of people who actually danced the other night when I was here people actually started ballroom dancing in front of me which was a really good experience and just the whole atmosphere on the inner harbour all of the other buskers all the people here really encourage me to come down and busk. And make me feel very welcome and very warm here.”

This has just been a sampling of what are undoubtedly hundreds of stories that Victoria’s street musicians could tell about the stuff that makes what we do a little bit more fun. As this blog progresses, you can count on this question being asked as I interview other street musicians for future posts.

Memorable Busking Experiences: Part 1

2009-08-20T04:24:00.000-07:00

When I first became a street musician, my main motivation was just to make some money, but over the years, I began to discover that there was more to busking than just the money, that there were also moments of spontaneous interactions with passersby, that made what I do a lot more fun. I thought that this week I’d share a few of these stories.

All buskers will have stories involving kids. The kids are always the most spontaneous and uninhibited in their responses to live music. Just last week I was in the middle of a song when a young boy (about 4 years old) came up and started dancing to the song that I was playing. It was really amusing watching him doing his energetic version of the twist, and it wasn’t too long before passersby were stopping to watch and take photos of the boy, while I continued to play. After about six songs he and his family were off to the rest of their vacationing, and I had chalked up another fun episode.

Another time a mother and her young daughter (I’d guess about 8 years old) were walking by as I was playing Peter, Paul & Mary’s 500 Miles Away From Home. The girl stopped while her mother was pulling her hand saying “We’ve got to go.” It was apparent the mother was in a hurry to get somewhere, but the girl was intent on hearing the song. She tugged back a few times on her mother’s hand and said “I want to listen to the song. It sounds so sad.” Finally, the mother relented and waited until the song was over, at which time the girl said “Thankyou for the song,” and then they were off.

I was playing an early set when a group of kids (about 6 or 7 years old) on a day-camp outing stopped by to eat their lunches while listening to some tunes. One of the boys sat himself down on the pavement in front of my guitar case and proceeded to separate all the coins into piles by denomination. He was having a great time giving me between song updates on how much was in the case. I commented that he must be wanting to be an accountant when he grew up.

Sometimes an audience member may become an active participant in the music making. A number of years ago I was playing on the harbour when a Scottish soccer team stopped by. They were on the island for an International High School Soccer Tournament that was being held that year in the Cowichan Valley. Taking a break between games they decided to check out the causeway and found themselves sitting and listening to me play. One of the guys asked me if I knew 500 Miles” by the Proclaimers. After I said that I didn’t, another voice said “Let Fraser play it, he knows it.” Then a few more voices urged their teammate on. I handed my guitar to their friend and went to sit down with the rest of the team. With encouragement from all of us, Fraser started strumming the guitar and singing, and all his teammates and I started singing along with him.

Another time a guy about seventeen came up and asked if I knew Country Roads and if he could sing along. I started the song and he joined in with some incredible high lonesome bluegrass harmony. That was a lot of fun. When I noted that it sounded like he’d been singing for a while, he told me that he’d learned to sing harmonies with his mother since he was small.

Sometimes there’ll be a day where nothing is happening, and I’m thinking of calling it a day, and out of the blue something happens that energizes me. On one such day I was playing and try as I might, I just could not seem to make a connection with anyone. No eye contact. No smiles. It seemed I was invisible. I was in the middle of a song near the end of a physically draining set, when a lady and a golden retriever were walking past. The dog which had been leading on its leash stopped in front of me and yanked the lady back as she kept walking by. The dog sat there at my feet staring intently up at me while I sang my song. I said to the dog “I like you!” It turns out, as the lady told me, that the dog’s previous owner just happened to be a guitar player. That momentary connection with the dog brightened what otherwise was a slow day.

My most memorable experience happened one afternoon in the summer of 1999 when fellow busker and mandolin player Earl Purvis and I got together to do a set in Victoria’s Bastion Square. We were playing the classic 1940’s country song Ashes Of Love when a young couple, maybe late teens or early 20s stopped to listen. I noticed that the girl was singing along, which I thought was pretty cool considering the age of the song. I then noticed that she was also writing. When we finished the song, the girl tossed something into the case, and then walked off with her friend. At the end of our set when Earl and I were divvying up the take I found a folded up piece of paper. When I opened it up, a toonie dropped into the case, and written on the paper was the following note:

“dear mandolin & guitar men, thanks for your music!
my dad played in a bluegrass band before he died and they used to play ‘ashes of love’ too. thanks for reminding me. keep up your awesome spirit and tunes! from someone with an appreciative ear.”

It was hard not to tear up while reading the note, and when I showed it to Earl, I said “Man, this is what it’s all about.”

Next week: Part 2, when I’ll ask some of my fellow street musicians about their most memorable busking experiences.

It Just Might Be Worth Something: interview with Devon Floyd

2009-08-13T02:17:00.000-07:00

After the peak busker years of the 1990s and early 2000s when Dave Harris, Shillelagh, Jay Garnett, KC Kelly, Marty Field, Jim Meighen, Julian Vitek, myself and others were vying for the prime spots on Government Street, it seemed that for a few years there was a bit of a lull in the uptown busking scene. Occasionally, you’d see someone playing at Murchies, but for the most part, the regular buskers had moved on down to the inner harbour or just moved on.

The last couple of years, however, as I walk to and from the causeway, I have noticed a bit of a resurgence with some new faces filling in the old spaces. This is the first of what I hope will be a series of interviews with some of these new buskers.

The first thing that set 24 year old singer/songwriter Devon Floyd apart was that he was probably the sharpest dressed busker on Government. The second was that every time I walked by and nodded or stopped to tip, he always had a friendly spontaneous smile, a valued but sometimes rare trait among buskers (myself included). What really drew my attention though, was hearing Devon singing Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna. While it has been much speculated that every street musician does at least one Dylan song (in particular Don’t Think Twice, It's Alright), I had never heard anyone do Visions before.

Devon grew up near Melfort, Saskatchewan, where he learned to play piano and guitar. He currently lives in Regina.

In May, he came out to Victoria for the summer to do some busking. Outfitted with his guitar, harmonica and foot-operated “kickdrum pedal & tambourine” gizmo, he began playing two, or sometimes three sets a day on Government Street, alternating between Roger’s Chocolates, Murchies and Eddie Bauer.

CD – How did you get into busking?
Devon – I played in a folk-rock band for about a year, and hadn’t made a dime and figured I might make more money busking, than in the bars where we’d just sit around hanging with the patrons and then end up playing for only twenty people. I started busking in 2007 off and on, then in 2008 I busked weekly mostly along the Scarth Street mall or at liquor stores. There were only a couple of buskers in Regina, so it wasn’t too competitive.

CD - What made you decide to come to Victoria?
Devon – I’d been living in Regina for about six years. It was a pretty small town. I finished my degree in political science at the University of Regina, and decided this would be the last chance for some freedom. I heard Victoria was a busking town. Didn’t know it then, but found out that just meant there were lots of them.

CD - What was your first day like busking in Victoria?
Devon – There was one busker who told me to move to another spot, that I wasn’t allowed to play where I was. I found out later that wasn’t true, and that he was just wanting to play there.

CD – Have you found a favorite spot?
Devon – Outside Roger’s Chocolates. I figured if people were going to pay $8 for a piece of chocolate, they might just toss me a loonie when they came out. It’s also a shady spot which I think is the most important part.

About a week before this interview, I was on my way home from a set on the causeway, when I ran into Devon playing at Murchies and stopped to chat. I bought one of the CDs he had on display in his case. It was a pure DIY affair. The disc was safely tucked inside the loosely stitched inside fold of some recycled cardboard, on the front of which, the eponymous title had been hand-stamped in blue paint. On the back, the song titles were hand-written. The whole thing was tied up Christmas ribbon style with a piece of twine. The seven songs were all written by Devon and recorded by in his basement, and he also played all the instruments and sang all of the vocal parts.

CD – Do you write a lot of songs?
Devon – Not as many as I’d like to. That’s what’s incredible about Dylan, He’s written thousands of songs, he’s staying true to the life of an artist. Me, I’ve written two songs in five or six months. Maybe four songs a year.

CD – I know that you’ve said that the style of music you play is folk, but in listening to your CD, I also picked up on a little bit of alternative country.
Devon – Yeah, that too.

CD – Which artists would you say have influenced your style?
Devon – Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst. I worked for the Regina Folk Fest for a year as Artist Services Manager and had the opportunity to chat with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who had also done some busking in his early years).

CD – What are the songs that you really enjoy playing?
Devon – Visions Of Johanna, not a real money maker, but most musician’s favorite songs are not necessarily the ones that the public wants to hear. Too Far Gone (Neil Young), The Weight and Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (The Band).

CD – What’s your favorite line from a song?
Devon – “There ain’t nothing like a friend, who can tell you you’re just pissin’ in the wind” (Ambulance Blues Neil Young).

CD – What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had thrown in your case?
Devon – Flowers, someone threw a rose on Mother’s Day.

CD – And your most memorable busking experience?
Devon – In Regina, this super cute girl threw a toonie in my case and walked away. Then a couple of minutes later when I was in the middle of another song, she came back and grabbed my face and kissed me.
CD – Your reaction?
Devon – I just turned red and grinned like an idiot.

This interview was done on July 30th, two days before Devon flew back home to Regina.

CD – So, how was your busking adventure here in Victoria?
Devon – I wasn’t disappointed. It was an awesome experience. I got to meet some of the most interesting people this side of the Rocky Mountains.

Then he added as an afterthought, “This side of Douglas Street.”

While preparing this interview to be posted, I’d been listening a lot to Devon’s CD. I also did an internet search and came across the following quote that he’d made:

“…I think I play folk music. It's hard to say what folk is these days, some people seem to think it's out of tune guitars and a whiny, gutless voice, both of which whether I like it or not, I seem to possess. But beyond that, I think that folk music is something that helps people realize that it's all the same struggle. And if music, poorly tuned or not, can help people feel each other's pains, as well as good times, then it just might be worth something.” (source: www.saskrecording.ca)

It really conveys in his self-deprecating and modest manner what music is or should be about. After many listenings to his CD, I believe that Devon is indeed striving for this standard in his songwriting and performance.

For more on Devon and his music, check out his website.

Beginnings

2009-08-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

The first thing many people will ask when they meet a street musician/busker is “How did you get started?” The answers, depending on the busker can vary from financial reasons ie: paying the rent, tuition, etc; to just wanting to play for the public.

So, this then is how I got my start in Vancouver back in the summer of 1979 at the age of 24.

A friend and I had been spending some time hanging out on the Granville Street Mall when we came across a group called Diamantose playing in front of the Orpheum Theatre. The three musicians Jacques St-Laurent, Remy Tremblay & Sylvie Loiseau did a nightly show of French-Canadian and popular folk songs, and we soon became regular front row audience members. (more on Diamantose in a future post)

After about a week, my friend suggested that I, being out of work, might find busking to be a good source of income, and that I should get a guitar and give it a try. I got up the next morning and went over to San Francisco Pawnbrokers on East Hastings Street and purchased the least expensive guitar I could find. When I walked out I was $65 lighter, but I was the proud owner of a 1972 Yamaki Deluxe acoustic.

I then got myself a large spiral notebook and spent a day writing the lyrics and chords to about 25 songs in large print (so that it could be read from where it would lay on the ground in front of me when I played).

The next evening I headed out to Granville Street and found myself a vacant entrance way to a small shoe store between the Capitol 6 and Orpheum Theatres. I immediately opened up my cardboard case, slung the guitar over my shoulder, laid my songbook at my feet, and nervously started into my first song. I followed that with my second, and then my third, and slowly began to relax and have some fun. As the evening progressed some of the movie goers began tossing coins into my case, and when I did my count at the end of the night I had enough to pay for a couple of night’s rent at the SRO that I was staying at. I began to believe that this busking thing just might work out.

In the early weeks I spent most of my days adding new songs to my notebook and the evenings on Granville playing into the wee hours of morning.

I continued to cross paths with Jacques, Remy & Sylvie when I was on Granville, and as I began venturing out to try new spots I met a few of the other musicians that were busking around town, including Gary Webstad, a guitarist/singer, who I shared a spot with at the Robson Street liquor store near Denman; and another fellow, I can’t remember his name , but, we’d usually play up the street from each other on Hornby Street. They were all a very friendly, supportive lot, who were more than willing to share a few pointers like how to project my voice over traffic, etc.

Eventually I figured out the spots that worked best for me and had gotten into a pretty regular routine. Mondays through Thursdays, I would usually play outside the liquor store on Alberni Street at Thurlow from about 3:30 to 5:30, and then head back to Granville where I’d play into the night. On Fridays and Saturdays, I would do the liquor store set, grab a coffee at the neighboring McDonalds and head over to Hornby Street, in what was then the nightclub district, and set up between Gary Taylor’s Rock Room and Honey’s Deli, and play another set from 8:30 to about 1 a.m.

Of all the spots I played at, outside Gary Taylor’s was my preferred location. It was pretty busy with lots of people on the town checking out the nightclub scene. Besides the money thrown into my case, I would also sometimes be the recipient of other bonuses, such as cans of beer (on several occasions), tickets to see an act at the Cave across the street, etc.

At that time, Hornby Street was the stroll for the working girls. One night I was just finishing Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night” when the cameraman with a CBC News film crew doing a news segment on prostitution, came up and asked me if I could do the song again for the film. I never did see the segment. I don’t know if it become my first television exposure, or if I just wound up on the cutting room floor.

In October of that year, I fell into a job working for the City of Vancouver at The 44 Club, a downtown eastside drop-in center. I continued to busk Friday and Saturday evenings on Hornby Street until just before Christmas, when I decided that I would bring the curtain down and focus on my newly acquired job. That last night, I had an overly exuberant group of visiting Mexicans who heard me playing “Feliz Navidad”. They threw a $20 in my case and urged me on to play it about 12 more times, while they all joined in singing along. What a raucous ending!

My first taste of busking had lasted only about 7 months. It was a time that I’d come to enjoy, meeting new friends, learning new songs, getting more proficient with my playing, and making a bit of cash. But, as it turned out, it would not be the last, as I would return to this endeavor again in the late 1980’s in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive neighborhood and more recently on the waterfront in Victoria, BC.

Write About What You Know

2009-07-30T01:30:00.000-07:00

Well. here I am venturing out into new territory with my new blog. "What am I going to write about?", I ask myself. Well, someone once said that you should write about what you know. So, as I am familiar with the life of a street musician (busker), that's where I'll begin. I'll be sharing some (hopefully) interesting stories from my many years of busking.

Being a musician/busker, I obviously associate with others of that ilk, so, there's bound to be a profile about one of my musician friends, or one of the new buskers that I come across in my travels.

I will also try to have some stories about other acoustic music related stuff, such as festivals, open mics & jams that I may attend.

So, let's start from there, and see where this thing takes us.