Let the Music Play

For songwriter Rosanna Lee, the random acts of kindness were the rewards. Trying out her gentle folk-pop tunes on the sidewalks of Newbury Street, in front of the old Mystery Train record shop or the CVS near Fairfield Street, she was moved by the thoughtfulness of strangers. "Somebody leaves flowers or brings you a water bottle," she says. "So many nice things happened when I was learning to tie my shoelaces."

A former school tutor who started in music by founding a small record label - she put together an award-winning compilation of local artists - Lee lucked into her own recording career during her sidewalk apprenticeship. Tom Dube, a music producer who has worked with Martin Sexton, was riding his bike on Newbury when he came across the dark-haired young woman strumming her guitar. He did a lot more than bring her water. With Dube's help, Lee recorded her first album, The Girl With the Red Guitar, in 2002.

But if that girl with the red guitar was moved by the kindness of strangers, she was also moved by the police. Newbury Street isn't all fond memories for Lee, who now lives in Venice, California. (Visit Rosanna Lee's website.) Though she sold plenty of CDs and made good money during her busking days here, she also had some unpleasant exchanges. A couple of apartment dwellers ("grouchy" people, in her words) didn't appreciate her serenade and called the cops. They were a minority, but they were enough to frustrate Lee with Boston and its historically grouchy attitude toward street performers.

In December, the city finally buckled after more than 100 years of hostility toward singers like Rosanna Lee. Facing a federal civil rights suit brought by a coalition of street musicians and their supporters, attorneys for the city told US District Judge Nancy Gertner that police officers would be instructed to let the music play. It was an enormous victory for the buskers and their supporters. Perhaps Boston, the city where a young Benjamin Franklin once tried his hand as a balladeer and the Museum of Fine Arts counts among its collection Manet's Street Singer, had finally recognized the cultural value of street performances, both for the acts and for their audience.

But now, with Boston's buskers back out enjoying the spring, some can't help but wonder whether the news is too good to be true. For more than a century, street performers had to navigate an archaic maze of restrictions. Musicians were forbidden to play on Sundays. They were not allowed to perform in the business district until after 6 p.m. Technically, Rosanna Lee was breaking the law just by showing up: In the most egregious and oft-cited example of the antiquity of Police Rule 75, women were forbidden to play music on the streets of Boston without male accompaniment.

Then, with one sweeping motion, the city wiped the books clean of all references to street performance, reaching back to the mid-1800s. "So you've won," Gertner told lawyers for the musicians when the city agreed to rescind Rule 75 and its corresponding ordinances.

But if the musicians have won, they're a bit reluctant to strike up the band. That's partly because the case remains open, and it's unclear whether the city will be writing new rules. Where once there was too much structure, now there is none. When, they want to know, will the police feel the need to intervene? Common sense would tell you not to blow free jazz on your saxophone on a North End street corner at 2 in the morning. But who will decide which kinds of public performance are acceptable and which are not? Are amplifiers OK? How about drums? Can you set up near an outdoor cafe? Can you play after dark?

Or will it be the same old song?

"Playing in the street is the most pure form of performance there is," says Martin Sexton, the acclaimed singer-songwriter who played the Orpheum Theatre in December. "There's no corporation between the artist and you, the listener. No middleman." Sexton, a familiar figure in Harvard Square in the late 1980s and early 1990s, says busking - playing in public for tip money - can be an invaluable experience for a budding performer. You learn to make do. An unexpected distraction like the clank of machinery can become an impromptu rhythm. On the subway platform, "if someone sneezed," Sexton says, "I'd put the words 'God bless you' into the next verse, and they'd freak out. I still do that."

Sexton is part of a rather illustrious tradition of performers who got their start in the streets of Greater Boston. Joan Baez sang in Harvard Square in the early days of the folk revival. A painfully shy Tufts undergraduate named Tracy Chapman learned to engage an audience along the Red Line commute. So did future Grammy winner Shawn Colvin.

Across the river, Cambridge opened up to buskers more than a decade ago. Sexton, who was active in the musicians' movement there, met his future partner, lawyer Dianna Stallone, while he was singing in Harvard Square.

"She dropped a note in my case," he recalls. In it Stallone apologized for not tipping him -- she only had a $20 bill on her. "I guess I wasn't that good," Sexton jokes. But their subsequent relationship (it has since ended) soon took them to the forefront of the legal battle in Cambridge, which resulted in, among other things, an extended curfew (11 p.m.) and permission for performers to sell their own recordings. The Cambridge Arts Council now supervises the city's street musicians, issuing permits, monitoring sound levels, and settling disputes. The community polices itself, says Jane Beal, the council's director of community arts. Performers who play too loudly or get in people's faces only do themselves a disservice. "The marketplace tends to take care of itself," Beal says. "If they're behaving in a way this community doesn't embrace, they don't get supported."

In Boston, though, even musicians who played by the rules were often made to feel as though they were breaking them. From the 1850s - a bygone era when an "itinerant" musician might have played a crank-driven barrel organ - the city severely curtailed the activities of musicians. Police officers were more or less free to enforce the law as they saw fit.

"We're trying to take the 19th century into the 21st," says Stephen Baird, a musician and activist who began fighting Rule 75 in the early 1970s. "We're going to skip 100 years."

A longtime street performer, folk-music promoter, and newsletter editor who helped rescue Cambridge's Club Passim in the mid-1990s, Baird was once hailed as "the buskers' dean" in People magazine. Besides helping to revise the Cambridge ordinance, he has worked over the years on landmark cases on behalf of street musicians in cities including Chicago and Alexandria, Virginia. Those cities are much more amenable to street performance today than they once were. But his hometown remained his toughest battle. The case of Rosanna Lee, Baird says, was the last straw.

What was most frustrating about her troubles on Newbury Street was the fact that no one - not even the police - could give her a clear set of guidelines. At first, the patrolling officers were apologetic. They would tell her that there had been a complaint. She would produce her performer's permit. Some of the cops said, "Oh, you've got a permit. No problem." Others told her the battery-powered amplifier would have to go. Then Lee would suggest that she play a song so the officers could determine for themselves whether she was too loud. "I can't tell you how many times they said, 'Sounds good to us,'" she says.

But a couple of the complainers persisted. "From that point on," Lee claims, "the police were under orders to make me stop."

The law, critics contend, was always confusing. Although Rule 75 and its amendments had never expressly prohibited amplification, performers say that any use of an amplifier, however muffled, raises an automatic red flag. On the Common, several musicians (including Baird) say that park rangers occasionally claimed they require a special Parks Department permit to play there, even though no such permit apparently existed. (The city did require a $10 annual permit fee, briefly raised last year to $60, before being abolished with the rest of the rules.)

In busy Downtown Crossing, while some performers have played without incident, others have had run-ins with cart vendors and the merchants' association. And at Faneuil Hall, the jugglers, acrobats, and musicians must audition to get into the tightly monitored program, where they can draw hundreds of onlookers even in inclement weather.

"This is not just an academic exercise of constitutional rights," says John J. Cotter, who was the lead attorney in the lawsuit until February. "This is their livelihood. This is how they make money, how they improve their skills and entertain the public."

"The streets are where entire art forms are created," says Baird - from doo-wop to hip-hop, tap-dancing to break dancing. The strolling performer was a familiar figure in Shakespeare's plays. Louis Armstrong sang as a boy on the streets of New Orleans. Blind Lemon Jefferson became one of the first famous bluesmen by roaming Texas towns in the 1920s.

Mary Lou Lord, the singer from Salem who was a friend to Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith, still calls the streets her home. (Visit Mary Lou Lord's website.) She was studying at Berklee College of Music when she first got the nerve to play in public. Traveling abroad in the late '80s, she picked up a busker's guitar in a tube station in London and strummed a few chords. Someone threw a coin in the guitar case. She spent the next year there, earning rent money with her music.

Back in Boston, Lord became perhaps the best-known face of the Hub's street performers, her petite frame bundled in a fuzzy winter coat on the Park Street platform. Even today, after several album releases (including one on Sony/Work label) and the birth of her daughter, she still returns a few times a month to play in the subway. "I would never have been able to continue unless the audiences of Boston supported me," she says. She claims she still suffers stage fright, but only in nightclubs, where she feels expectations are higher. "At a club gig, they've already paid, so you have to be good," Lord says. "I've always had the mentality, 'Can we just put out a hat at the end of the night?'"

Lord's favorite haunt, the MBTA system, recently worked out a compromise with musicians who play underground. In 2003, Baird led a petition drive to protest impending changes in the T's policy, which would have included a ban on all horns and amplifiers. The effort, says Baird, collected 16,000 signatures in eight days, the T listened, and now, the only instruments forbidden in stations are drums and trumpets. Otherwise, musicians who have paid the T's $25 license fee are welcome to play in designated areas, as long as they keep the sound under 80 decibels.

That compromise "was the best demonstration of democracy at work I've seen in years," says Bill Meehan, a tuba player who tends to favor the headlong rush of Park Street Station. Meehan can also be found blowing his oompah version of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" on warm summer days on Boston Common, near the baseball fields. Like a lot of performers, he goes underground in winter: "The tuba doesn't respond well to the cold," he says.

"I like to play early in the morning, around 6:30 or 7 o'clock," says Meehan, 63, a former teacher who suffered a bout of depression that left him temporarily homeless several years ago. "It's amazing how much activity there is down there at that time of day.

"You see the same people every day - 'Hey, how you doing?' It's almost a ministry, in a way. It makes people happy. Where I have a history of depression myself, if I can put something positive out there, what I find is it comes back to me tenfold."

There are countless variables - weather, location, whether the Sox win or lose - but most musicians say they can bring home decent money. They might average $10 or $20 an hour. "I'm sure if any of us could do it for free, we would," says Mare Streetpeople, who has been making music in Boston-area parks and subways for 30 years. "But everyone has to make a living." (Visit Mare Streetpeople's website.)

She was born into it; her family surname, Ulicne, actually means "street people" in Czech. On an unseasonably mild autumn afternoon near Cambridge's so-called Jugglers' Alley, in front of Hidden Sweets on Brattle Street, Streetpeople entertains the lunchtime flow with old ballads by Cat Stevens and the Everly Brothers. When a little girl in bangs toddles up to plunk a dollar in her canvas bag, the singer grins.

"Maybe some of these grown-ups will catch on," she says with a conspiratorial smile.

Like many of her peers, Streetpeople says she treasures those little moments more than the crumpled bills. "People want you to reach into their hearts," she says. "I know that."

The late sociologist William Whyte, author of The Organization Man, praised the serendipity of street performance in his 1988 book, City. When passersby encounter a musician, he wrote, "Their smile is like that of a child. For these moments they seem utterly at ease, their shoulders relaxed. People enjoy programmed entertainment, too, but not the same way. It is the unexpected that seems to delight them most."

The good will makes the rest worthwhile - the competing noise, the lonely quarters in the bottom of the guitar case, the first sign of rain. Self-esteem is perhaps the biggest challenge for buskers, according to Gerry Mack, a blind keyboardist and soul singer. For 15 years he rode the commuter rail from Providence to Boston every day to perform Stevie Wonder and George Benson covers at Downtown Crossing. These days, he makes a living playing for a hotel in Atlantic City.

Because street musicians play for donations, he says, the public sometimes perceives them to be "one step removed from a Skid Row bum," Mack says. And not just in Boston, says the musician. On occasion he has tried his luck in New York, whose prickly history with buskers parallels Boston's. "During the Giuliani administration, they treated us like cockroaches," Mack says.

The perception that playing music on the street is akin to begging doesn't sit well with John Bigelow, a classically trained guitarist who had a handful of run-ins with police in the 1980s and '90s while performing in Boston with his wife, vocalist Lorraine Saltre. Many people assume, he says, that busking is "something you just don't do, unless you're down and out."

The cultural value of the performance, he says, should make the distinction clear. "Would you hire a beggar for your private event?" he asks. "Would you suggest a beggar should be doing what he's doing at Carnegie Hall?"

Bigelow resents the notion that talented musicians are somehow slumming when they play on the sidewalk or in a train station. "People come along more or less astonished to find music of the caliber and nature of what we're doing on the street. They'll say, 'What are you people doing here? You should be playing somewhere.' Well, we are. We're playing here."

Baird, too, has had some squabbles with authority. The first ones, back in the '70s, inspired the campaign for performers that has become his life's work. Sitting in his Jamaica Plain apartment, he looks like a budget-minded professor in brown bucks and a well-worn corduroy jacket. A red bandanna hangs out of his pocket. The midday sun shimmers on the dulcimer hanging in his big front window. The space is a one-man beehive for Community Arts Advocates, the umbrella group Baird established in 2002, which includes the Street Arts and Buskers Advocates. Every inch is taken up by computer hardware, office supplies, and file cabinets.

An elfin man with long, thinning white hair, Baird has spent a lifetime grappling with municipal powers. He's still dismayed by the security clampdown that surrounded the Democratic National Convention last July. "They took all the life out of Boston," he says. "You couldn't see the oldest constitution in the world. It was locked up in the State House. I find this intellectually bankrupt."

Though he was once a pied piper of sorts, authority problems have eroded his enthusiasm for performing. He rarely gets out now. Five years ago, Baird was being filmed speaking with a camera crew from the Discovery Channel when, he says, a Boston patrolman threatened to arrest him before he even began playing his guitar.

"This stuff makes me shake," says Baird. Confrontation, he says, is not in his nature. "Normally, I run in the opposite direction. I'm just a short little hairy guy. I will back down every time."

But he didn't back down in Cambridge, and he didn't back down with the T. And now he has finally achieved a breakthrough in the city of Boston.

He is, he says, cautiously optimistic. He is pleased that the city will no longer require a musician's permit. Yet he is anxious about the way the city seems to have washed its hands of the issue. In Cambridge, street artists subscribe to a code of ethics. Until Boston comes to some consensus, Baird says, "there could still be a problem when you don't have guidelines for the police."

For now he will try to look on the bright side. "Hopefully," he says, "it will be a brand-new day, and the landscape of Boston will be more joyful."

The musicians have no choice but to wait and see. Cotter, the lawyer, says, "The street performers I know would prefer there be an orderly system set in place. Obviously, if it turns out in the long run that there are no issues with allowing performers to perform, then great. But based on past history, people aren't convinced there will be no problems."

Park rangers on the Common have been letting musicians perform without incident since the court ruling, according to Mary Hines, a spokesperson for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department. She says that musicians in the parks are now subject to the same rules of conduct that would apply to any other visitor. "The rangers understand perfectly," she says. "We follow the letter of the law."

On the other hand, Officer Michael McCarthy, a Police Department spokesperson, says the department will not hesitate to intervene when an officer determines that public safety is an issue. "Our attitude is the same," he says. "We understand they have a right to be there and [play music]. But if they're breaking the law by breaching the peace ..." One example, he says, would be to impede traffic by attracting a crowd. Officers, he says, are also concerned when neighbors make complaints: "With Boston, unlike other cities, no matter where you set up, you're in close proximity to residents."

As Baird sees it, Boston's long ambivalence toward musicians led to an unfortunate talent drain. Like Rosanna Lee, Renee de la Prade is one that got away. An aspiring hard-rock singer, she is also skilled on the button accordion. During her time in Boston, she often put her hair in pig-tails on sunny days and headed to Downtown Crossing, where she would set up beneath the statues of the Irish Famine Memorial.

Preparing to move back to her native Northern California last November, she played for some travel money on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco during a visit to see her parents. When two police officers approached, de la prade worried that they might ask her to stop. But they just wanted to know whether she was playing traditional Irish jigs. "My kid is taking step dancing," explained one.

De la prade remembers watching performers on the Paris Metro. "Two Greek guys played bouzouki and sang," she recalls. "It definitely impressed upon me what a great, open city they have. They were making the city more appealing to tourism."

Why can't Boston be more like that? she wonders. To her, the connections that street performers make "are like soulful, person-to-person advertising" for the city.

Last fall, in the second-floor gallery of Cambridge's City Hall Annex, the Arts Council hosted an exhibit on the secret history of "sound systems" - the mobile dance parties of 1960s Jamaica, the Bronx of the 1970s, and London in the 1980s. Boston "has yet to put itself on the map with its own 'sound,'" read an accompanying essay, despite the city's youth, diversity, and abundant resources.

It was an open challenge - one that might have a chorus in Gerry Mack, Renee de la Prade, and countless others who have played music on the streets of this city.

"The world is in Boston," the exhibit proposed. "Can Boston show this to the world?"

James Sullivan is a freelance feature writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of a forthcoming book on the cultural history of blue jeans. E-mail him at jassullivan@earthlink.net.