i have been trying to get this done for a few months now. :-)
maybe i will get it done this time......the 2002 season started for me in the subway, mostly saturday mornings on the red line......in january, february and march, i would usually do a few hours on saturdays somewhere between davis and park st. on the red line. porter square was usually pretty good to me. there were a couple of unseasonably warm days in march, when i went above ground and played outside in the square. on one of those days, david johnston and i played for a couple of hours, and got ignored not once, but TWICE by sen. john kerry. he walked close enough to me that i could have tripped him, and yet he didn't even glance in our direction. david asked me what i was expecting to do. and i said that he could have at least given us a little something for the effort. i mean, i know he's a senator and everything, but it's not every day you get to see some mother playing a 1929 national steel guitar lap style on the sidewalk. i mean, c'mon, it wouldn't kill ya to give us a nod. at any rate, after mr. kerry had purchased another foofy pair of three hundred dollar shoes, he walked right by again and blew us off a second time. tool.
tool, tool, tool.
are we having fun yet? in april, i was out in earnest, meaning most weekends pretty much right thru november. any photos of me from that time are, as always, at unclescam's website around here http://www.unclescam.org/afolk/folks02.html.... here's some shots of our first day....
http://www.unclescam.org/afolk/41002.html here's a day in june when i brought ye olde funkee greene FIBERGLASS dobro out....woo
http://www.unclescam.org/afolk/lloyd62102.html ...........and here's me and dave rockin out in the fall.....http://www.unclescam.org/afolk/llodav.html which i think i have links to somewhere else....as always blue, thanks for being you, and for all the photos......

i think that in april and may i was down by the brattle florist a lot. so much so that they even came out once and told me to turn down. tools. that word is coming up a lot, huh? i had a good time down there, it was mellow and there was some good shade under the awning of the toystore's window.........a lot of street performers were out in the spring. too many. :-) Bike Boy was out a lot, and the kid from new zealand and that climbs up on the pole. no disrespect to what they do, but it can be tough out there when they are around. they do that whole 'i'm putting on a SHOW" thing, and yell and play loud music to try to get a big crowd around them. that's great and all, but of course, it sort of sucks everyone over in their direction, and makes it hard for the rest of us. it's also a little tricky noise wise, because they are loud, and it can be a pain trying to sing around them. or thru them. i did my best........i think i liked being down on that end of the square because it was kind of mellow and quiet, and i think i still needed to get up to speed and work the kinks out of the new songs i was doing from the winter.......i had played the national tricone in the subway a little, but it was kind of loud for that, so i didn't have too much experience with it thru the amp and stuff, so i'm sure i was still getting used to that too. i seem to remember the ANGEL being out a LOT in the spring. in the summer, he sort of disappeared, but early on, he was there almost every weekend......

i didn't try to get 'the spot' by bertrucci's/the discovery store, because there were usually a bunch of people hoarding around there fighting for it. a lot of times the Blue Horizon folks were out there, camping out, so i would just go around the corner and stay out of the fray. i may have swapped sets a few times, but not much.............i think toward may, and june, i started drifting over more, into the 'action' spot......i did ok. some good days, some bad days. i remember getting bummed out by how loud everyone else was, and not being able to hear myself sometimes though. i also remember one pretty funny/bizzare/twisted day when i swapped off with Eric and we both made about a dollar and thirty nine cents combined for the whole day. Eric was eating those hot dogs from 7-11 all day. ouch.....at some point, i think it was in late june, i started drifting even further off toward the magazine stand, and the info booth, in front of the T elevator. i know there was one sunday i played there, and i had a really great day, and people were really listening, and it just felt great, and i sold a bunch of cd's and people were really responding to what i was doing and saying kind words.......it made me wonder. another day, i played a set there at the T elevator, then went down and played by bertrucci's. it was like night and day. people were aggressively ignoring me at the bertrucci's spot, but at the T elevator, i was a superstar. weird. so, i just couldn't help but move on up to the other side of the street and make the T elevator my 'regular' spot. there were times when someone else was there, or i just wasn't in the mood, and i'd drift back down to bertrucci's or the spot under the awning in front of the coop.....but for the most part, i'd stay up at the T elevator. i have NO idea WHY people gave me more love up there. they just did. like night and day. very surreal.....so that kind of became my place for the rest of the summer and right thru the fall. i played up until the end of november when it started to get too cold........there were also some insanely HOT days in august, where no one was out at all.......so i did miss some time in august because of that. that is actually another advantage of the T elevator spot, is that it stays shady over there longer, and you can actually stay in the shadows of the buildings for the majority of the day........

some other things i remember from this summer were: the day we saw the she-male. the pig parade, the gap protest, the lyndon larouche people, and the Harvard University Marching Band. let's tackle those in order.....the she-male was this 'person' that i saw a couple of times, who was around 6 feet tall, probably weighed close to 250 pounds, and had the physique of a male bodybuilder. the punchline is, that he/she was also dressed as a 'woman', with a wig and woman's clothing on. he/she was usually accompanied by a short chubby fellow, who may or may not have been his 'date'. it was interesting, to say the least. whenever they would come around, it sort of had this ripple effect, as people noticed it, then it got quiet, and then there was sort of an eeirie nothingness that would descend.....the pig parade happened in july. some people say it was the happiest they had ever seen me. i am not so sure about that, but i was indeed pretty darned happy when the pig parade came by. it was in the afternoon, and there was a fair amount of traffic, so they were going pretty slowly. i looked up from playing, and there was this big pink pig car going by.......now some days out there, especially when it's hot, and you haven't eaten, or had enough water, you can see some pretty strange shit, and you're never really quite sure how accurate your perceptions are......so i'm thinking to myself "am i REALLY seeing a big pink car that has been made to look like a pig or?" .....it was VERY surreal........so i stopped playing and put my stuff down and went over to the street, where there were actually THREE pigs, in descending size, a large yellow school bus, and a car with a tree on top of it. very cool. of course, now i can't remember for the life of me where they were from, but i THINK, and don't quote me on this, they were from www.truemajority.com, which rumor has it, was funded by ben and jerry's?? i don't really know. :-) it was some sort of thing, that the government is wasting our money and spending it all on the military instead of eduction. very true. i was really more impressed with the fact that they had made some cars into pigs. YAY!.....i stood there on the sidewalk grinning like an idiot. luckily for me, they did a couple of loops around the square and i got to see them more than once. it really did make me pretty happy. the four year old in me is alive and well. some people who shall remain nameless gave me some shit about it, but that's ok. let them say.

this was followed by the 'gap protest'. i think that was in july too. i was playing by the discovery store and all of a sudden i heard a ruckus(sp?)....which turned out to a good sized group of young folks protesting the GAP. i think they were saying that the gap was unfair to it's employees and or was using cheap labor in other countries to produce their clothing. i'm not sure. what i DO know is those kids were LOUD. they had megaphones and everything. and they were VERY close to me. i tried really REALLY hard to be a patient and compassion soul, but very quickly, they were bumming me out bigtime and giving me the ass.......so, i started making songs up about them. at least I was having some fun.....a few people laughed. most ignored us. oh well. finally the cops came and broke it up. a cheap thrill for street performers in harvard square.

let's skip ahead here to the Harvard University marching band....who somehow, would march thru the square, early on saturday mornings and be playing their shit.....i think this was probably more in the fall, sept, or october.....they weren't on their way to 'actual' football games, i don't think, because they weren't all dressed up in their regalia, they were just 'practicing' i think, but still, they made quite a racket and a scene. of course, at first i wanted to whack them, but eventually, my sense of humor got the best of me and i would just figure out what key they were in and play along with them. steel guitar and marching band. cool.

last but not least, there were the lyndon larouche people. i am not sure when the appeared, i think it was sept, or oct.....but they would have this folding card table, and set it up with all their crap and try to get people to sign their petition and stuff. at one point, a woman came up to me and asked me to move, because she said they had a permit for that particular spot, on that particular day, and that they had been given the permit by the city of cambridge. it was kind of weird, because i had never heard anything about that kind of thing, getting a permit for a specific spot......but fortunately, they just kind of moved around the corner and didn't bug me. i am all for freedom of expression and stuff, but a little bit of those folks goes a long way, as grandma used to say. they were definitely out quite a bit in the fall, and got on my nerves some, but i tried my best to ignore them vigorously.

so, i guess that's about it for now........i feel like the 2002 season could be divided into three sections: march-june, which was when i was kind of working out the kinks in what i was doing, and figuring out how to pull certain songs off on the dobro, what i could do and what i couldnt.......then june july august, where i started to really hit my stride and feel 'at home' out on the street.....and last but not least, sept- november, when i was just out there doing it.......i also feel like i got better at the 'booking thing', which i really really hate......calling people up, and getting your emails ignored and taking shit off people whose actual knowledge of music may be very VERY suspect....it's hard not to take it personal.....but don white helped me a lot with that......thanks don. so i started getting better at doing that crap in late july and august. i still hate it a lot, but i am doing my best.....i haven't done the subway much this winter, mainly because it's been so cold, and because i have been spending time doing all the booking bullshit and stuff, and trying to work on writing new songs, learning new songs, and becoming a better dobro player and musician.....but i really am looking forward to the new season ahead in 2003......hopefully it will warm up some time SOON and we'll be out there....hopefully in april.....so, until then.....i hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.......

ll

RETURN