Subway Musicians

I haven't looked into the details of how it works, but the City of New York has some sort of procedure for licencing subway musicians so as to avoid turf wars. I think there might even be some kind of audition where you actually have to prove that you can play something. (I remember visting New York in the eighties and seeing all these homeless guys who had somehow gotten ahold of Casio keyboards, and would set up on the sidewalk, turn on one of the automatic rhythm accompaniment routines -- "Marching Band…Bossa…Cha cha cha…" etc -- and doodle out "When the Saints Go Marching In" or whatever with one finger. It was pretty excruciating to listen to and apparently somebody decided to put a stop to it. If Giuliani had anything to do with it, for that, I'd be willing to give him some credit). Clearly, you don't have to be able to play that something well, just passably, which is fine since I guess you’d be playing professionally for a paycheck instead of in the subway for change if you could really play WELL. Still, it's a little disappointing to realize that the myth of struggling young talents, or forgotten old ones, playing their hearts out to unappreciating commuters is just that, a myth.

Some are worse than others. I have the misfortune to have one of those Peruvian pan-flute players stationed at my regular morning-commute platform. He’s quite well outfitted with a microphone and PA and even has a little synth-string recording he plays along with. If he were just doing "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail" it would be one thing, but I think he's been inspired by the incidental music on "Survivor" perhaps, and he's prone to dramatic dynamic gestures like pausing for extended periods while the synth-strings languidly wheeze away in a kind of prelude, and then abruptly honking out glissandos that end in piercing overtones that distract you from your magazine and probably freeze all the subway rats in their tracks. The fact that he works the heritage routine so hard, with a multcolored pancho pulled over his head and his shiny black hair pulled into a tight braid, only reinforces the impression that he’d be much more welcome at say, Epcot, with a rain stick and some bird calls added to the soundtrack, than on a Brooklyn subway platform.

Although he's the most annoying subway musician I come across regularly, he is not the least talented. That distinction belongs to the young white guy on the G train platform who chops out Velvet Underground songs – exclusively, I think – on an acoustic guitar but instead of too-cool, spare Lou Reed style vocals, he sounds like Jandek, or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Gilbert Grape, with lots of volume but no real relationship to pitch. Coming down the stairs to the platform, you can't even hear the guitar, just the sound of some guy hollering like he's been hurt.

Easily the saddest case is a middle-aged asian guy who plays on the 4-5-6 at Union Square. He clearly has some classical training, because he’s always playing Bach or Mozart or sometimes tunes from Italian opera, but he can't afford a real instrument and so he does it all on this wretched little battery-powered synth-saxophone thing that makes even well-executed classical sound like a wino playing a boosted Casio.


There are some that are actually good. The first guy I ever gave money to was an old gent playing some kind of exotic asian or middle-eastern 3-stringed instrument. The music wasn't much technically, but on a Sunday morning, the meandering atonal rasp seemed meditative and filled up the empty Bedford Ave L station and made me feel like I was in an underground sactuary in Istanbul or something, instead of in the subway eating a bagel.

There are sometimes whole bands, and one group of young guys who sounded like Liquid Soul had the 14th Street station bumping with a trumpet soloing over a repetitive-but-definitely-funky riff from a drum, guitar, and electric bass rhythm section. More peculiarly, on Friday I saw a band made of all black girls, that sounded exactly like a white frat-rock college band.

The closest thing I've seen to real, undiscovered talent was a young guy who looked like a motheaten Ben Harper and had just a stunning voice – Seal's timbre and depth with Jeff Buckley's range and vibrato – playing rambling, pentatonic melodies of his own composition. He apparently had some appreciation of his own talent, as he was the only subway musician I've ever seen selling his own CD's.

He was probably the best, but still not my favorite. My favorite was a guy actually playing on the train (which I don’t think they're supposed to do). He was playing one of those things, I don’t know what they're called, that you blow into but has a little piano-style keyboard; it sounds like a toy organ. His repertoire consisted entirely of teevee theme songs, and some of the all-time best ones: I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Hawaii Five-O. It was hard not to get into a good mood listening to him, and by the time I got off the train, a fair number of riders were snapping along to The Addams Family.