Busking 11 11 11

Last night’s street drumming was as lucative as the last, plus I had my own show to watch across the street
The evening started off at 7:30 pm when I showed up at “MY” spot and found a parking space about 50 yards away
SCORE!
The meter even had 40 minutes on it
Unfortunately some kid with an acoustic guitar was in “MY” spot and he was not very good
Worst version of “Last Dance with Mary Jane” I ever heard
I sat in the van and glared at him for about 15 minutes when he got up and walked away
That’s when I pounced on “MY” spot
I managed to get up and running around 8pm

Last week’s street kit was designed to be as muffled and quiet as possible because of my anxieties over police hassles
Last week’s positive cop experience gave me lisence to bring a much better sounding drumkit with a full snare, real floor tom and wide open/un-muffled heads
It was much easier to play, plus I could hit them lightly and still get a big full sound
Hitting lightly helps when you are playing for 6 hours

The night was quite eventful
The club across the intersection was in for an interesting night when a steady stream of taxis and about 5 or 6 tour busses dumped a large number of young douches who were there for their “White trash pub crawl”
That’s right, a sea of douches (and douchettes) all dressed up in their arrogant stereotypical costumes clogging up the intersection and impeding traffic by standing in the middle of the street talking on the phone
Out of the hundreds of “them” I would say only a few actually tipped
The rest just walked by and screamed WOOOOOOOO at me
The cops soon showed up and started to corral the douches onto the sidewalk
I decided to switch to hot-rod sticks which are bundles of small dowels
The volume is somewhere between sticks and brushes
One of the cops recognized that I was taking the volume down while they were doing crowd control and gestured to me that he was appreciative

My cop anxieties are easing greatly
One walked by and I asked him about the electronic rig I planned on using and he said that I could technically get a ticket for a noise violation just for acoustic drums but this was Deep Ellum
The added component of electicity wouldn’t attract any more attention from a cop
Basically, he said the cop would have to be pretty stiff and I would have to be argumentative if asked to move along to get a ticket

I had the Zune with me this time (for some reason it started working again) and I played for a while with music in my ears
However, I noticed that the parts sounded boring out of the context of the music so I went back to just winging it
I did a lot of the double bass “warmup” stuff as well as some Latin, Dancehall and Drum n Bass
The thing that is different abut playing drums on the street is that the normal parts you would play in the context of a song sound really boring by themselves
The benefit of playing drums on the street is that you have to think in different directions in order to affect people

I brought the video camera but never used it because I was playing
I am going out again tonight and might bring someone with to document things
And to watch my drums when I take a pee break