When I decided to come to Australia, I decided it would be a new chapter of adventure in my life. I wanted to skydive, bungee jump, and all sorts of other extreme (henceforth referred to as x-treme to seem cooler and, you guessed it, more x-treme) endeavors. I soon realized, however, that being x-treme is a bit pricey, and as anyone who has ever watched me gleefully steal pens from banks/anywhere they are stupid enough to leave them on the counter without that annoying tether or rejoice that bread is on sale at the grocery store knows, extravagance is not normally my jam. So when I realized skydiving and bungee jumping cost hundreds of dollars, and that bargain hunting for the cheapest company with whom to entrust my life and supervise me throwing my body from great heights was probably unwise, I knew I would have to look elsewhere for adventure.
Which is how I found myself sitting on a busy street corner in downtown Melbourne with my guitar and my good friend Kara, going to town on our rendition of "You Belong With Me" by our girl T-Swizzle. Yup, busking, or for the uninformed, street performance.
Our road from mild-mannered American students to sidewalk troubadours has been a long one. We first discussed the idea of busking while inspired by incredible talent at Bluesfest, coupled with copious amounts of boxed wine and a couple inebriated renditions of various Boyz II Men songs. We had brief pipe dreams of busking our way around Australia, making enough money to keep us in campsites and bus tickets, but alas scheduling conflicts got in the way (as they do with most great duos) and with less than a week remaining in Melbourne we decided it was now or never.
I met up with Kara outside her dorm at Uni Melbourne. We had discussed doing a quick runthrough of the songs we were thinking about, having never previously performed together, but quickly decided that rehearsal was for pussies. We hit the road and soon found a suitable location for our talent (read: a bench by a tram stop on Bourke St). I feel that I should preface with some background of our musical talents: Kara has a beautiful singing voice and performs regularly with her a cappella group in Chicago. I have been dicking around with a guitar for about four years now, never progressing past the stage of "novice," and have never performed in front of anyone besides my parents (who were supportive. Thanks Mom and Dad).
Needless to say, I was spooked, and trembling hands do not make for smooth chord progressions. Eventually I began to overcome my sheer terror and get into the groove a bit more, yet by ten minutes into our "performance" our guitar case remained woefully empty, the $1.80 Kara deposited into it as seed money glinting forlornly in the fading afternoon light. However, a few more minutes into our patented acoustic version of "Paparazzi" and an older man dropped a two dollar coin into the case. We both immediately dropped all pretenses of professionalism and effusively thanked him, Lady Gaga all but forgotten as we giggled like maniacs over our newfound success. After this initial donation, the funds were practically rolling in. We managed to play it cool after our first outburst, mainly because I realized I can do one thing at a time: play guitar or thank people like an idiot, albeit a grateful one. Surprisingly, only one of these is conducive to successful busking. The rest of the performance went relatively unremarkably, aside from the fact that we were performing on the side of a freaking road in a major city and no one was booing us or actively trying to shoo us away. We did face our fare share of struggles as we battled the sounds of clanging tram bells and an overzealous street sweeper (really sir, the streets are clean enough. Take your loud machine away from us, can't you see we're trying to make an honest dollar?) but our most tenacious foe came in the form of a rather aggressive fellow who attempted to join in our spontaneous performance. This man trundled up to us, looking slightly disheveled, with a guitar slung under his arm. Initially we thought maybe we had taken this man's territory, and perhaps we were in for a busking turf war, but this man had more peaceable intentions. He was merely a fellow musicians, and drawn by our melodious strains, had come to add his tunes to the mix. Only a couple problems: he was terrifying, and it didn't work. We soon realized the reason I wasn't able to figure out what chords he was playing was because his guitar only had 4 strings and the reason he wasn't able to join in with us was because he was insane. Eventually he stuck to drumming on his guitar as we played and bopping his head to the beat. Oh well, everyone needs a Ringo.
Our overall take was 12.60 for about an hours worth of performance. Not too bad, and more importantly, enough to treat us to a split lentil burger for dinner. Guess I'll see you guys on "Behind the Music."
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