Excursion #2 "Security" 12.16.08 union square

They don’t have bathrooms on the subway platforms, and I couldn’t leave my bulky instrument alone for a trip above ground to the nearest coffee shop nor could I carry it with me. The subway elevators seem to be the location of choice for the people who actually live down there, but that’s not really my style. Luckily, I had my Chief of Security around to keep an eye on the vibes while I made a run for daylight. It did, however, make me nervous for the day I’ll have to go & my Chief of Security isn’t around. What if I can’t break down the vibes, carry them up three flights of stairs & find a coffee shop fast enough? I guess it’s just one of the job hazards. Lesson learned: Go before you leave the house; don’t drink 2 hours before the performance, but bring water with you and start drinking an hour before the performance ends.

Once I had that taken care of, I could get started. There were a lot of buskers (“busking” is the verb for street musicians) in the subway at this particular time and I needed to carve out my own little sonic territory. The 6 downtown platform was peaceful but desolate—not enough traffic to make it fiscally worthwhile. The 6 uptown was jumping, but a Bucket Man was already rocking that crowd. I thought it would be fun to set up next to him and do a duet performance, but I suspect that is usually against the unspoken busking code. In the center of the mezzanine a really loud (but really amazing) brass band played with drums behind them. (Possibly the Hypnotic Brass group that Matt Ruddy mentioned in his comment). They were rocking that area, but their space sat right above two subway lines and projected onto them, so that nullified all those spaces as quiet vibraphone zones. The choice location of the day was the L platform. You get the uptown & downtown crowds on the same platform, plus it’s three stories downstairs from the mezzanine which avoids brass/bucket sonic interference. I had secured a location.

Not a minute after I started playing a guy peaked his head around the corner and said, “Hiya! I’m the guy who paints graffiti on cardboard! I’m right around the corner from you. I thought you were my friend, the red headed guy.” The funniest thing is, I knew who he was talking about—there is a guy with red hair that plays vibes in the subway, I saw him once. He’s really nice and he has a cd called Alone. I wondered why he named his album that. Befriending the graffiti cardboard man made me feel good- as if I had just entered into the delicate web of relationships that buskers(et.al) have with other another. I settled into playing once again.

Not a minute after I started playing a guy peaked his head around the corner and said, “Um, Hi!” This was not cardboard-graffiti guy. This guy had curly red hair and he seemed annoyed. “I’m playing right down there,” he said.
“Oh,” I replied. “I can’t hear you from here.”
“Well. I can hear YOU.”
“Oh, I’ll try to play a little quieter.” My first confrontation!
A few minutes later, another guy with a guitar on his back and long black hair (probably friends with red-curly-hair man) walked by and said, “It’s really not cool to set up on the same platform where another musician has already set up.”
“But, he’s like three walls away- I can’t even hear him from here,” I defended myself.
“Well, it’s not cool. Just so you know for next time.” Then he hopped on the L and was gone.
I wanted to say, “Well, it’s not cool to interrupt a performance in the middle of a song.” It was weird—people just kept coming up to me and talking to me right in the middle of a song. I had this horrible feeling—had I done something wrong? The L platform was so long, it could easily fit three musicians who would not sonically overstep each other. In fact, by the time I left, graffiti man and red-curly-hair man had left, and there was a classical trio playing amplified holiday music, and a little farther down an accordion player had set up.

Say there is a code where you don’t play on the same platform as another musician… maybe the L is an exception because it goes uptown and downtown—it seems greedy that one musician can get both the down and uptown crowds at such a busy station. If the code is true, I’m terrified at the thought of carrying my vibes down three flights of stairs only to find another musician there and have to carry them up the stairs again (and the pee elevator is out of the question). This platform code might not be the best for me because my instrument is so heavy, but I see why it exists. Having a 1-man-alone-on-a-platform code seems to be a way of making the jobplace a little more secure in a profession where there is little security—a jobplace where each of us is essentially Alone.

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Things people said to me:
“Do you know What Child Is This?”
“Yeah xylophone!”
“Hiya! I’m the guy who paints graffiti on cardboard.”
“That sounded Monkish.”

And, in my change bucket I got a business card for herbal health supplements for weight loss.