#2 First Inkling...

Photo courtesy Photos8.com

The third effect that performing on the street had on me was the curious notion of memory. That all nights were the same night. To explain, when my fans would come up to say 'hi' and request a song, I really couldn't tell when I had last seen them. Could've been last night, last week, last month or 10 minutes ago. Almost always remembered their song though.

As a direct result of this, I also couldn't seem to place memories relating to those nights in order either. So busking became one long, glorious night in my memory. It still is if I stop and think about it. I guess it's totally normal, like when you try to remember ever being with an old girlfriend, it's all just snapshots in your mind and a general feeling of what life felt like at that time. Which is GREAT if your ex-girlfriends are as crazy as most of mine. Lots of things I'd prefer not to be able to remember without effort.

After busking for about 2 years, building up a following of a couple of thousand regular visitors who'd come to see me every week, I decided to see about putting together a solo acoustic show (busking indoors more or less) and getting some pub work. I canvassed all the most likely pubs in Perth only to find that most of them go through an agency - the SAME agency. So I gave them a call.

3 months later my call had still not been returned and I had been given the "we'll call you soon" run-around, a number of times. This particular morning I woke up with a bad attitude. Maybe I was hung-over, maybe I had had enough of my ex-girlfriend complaining about her lifestyle that I was paying for, or maybe it was a whole lot of things combined. Either way I called the agency.

"Hi, Just a quick call. Please go ask your boss if he's wasting my time. So I can just go with another agency. Thanks "

The receptionist assured me he'd call back straight away.
My reply: "Whatever."

30 Seconds later the phone rang. The agent apologised profusely, then told me if I was serious about playing gigs, I would need a decent PA system as a lot of the pubs and parties he'd be sending me to didn't have their own. And then of course I would need to come in and audition - with my brand new audio equipment.
I said: "Give me 2 weeks."

1 week later I strolled into my favourite music store and spent every last cent in my bank account on a brand new, very decent PA system. Powered speakers, mixing desk, stands, leads and spare leads - the works.
I walked in knowing nothing about any musical gear that required electricity and walked out with a great setup and a hefty discount. Thanks to the couple of hours the salesperson Greg spent with me, explaining every last detail of how the components relate to each other and exactly what I would need and NOT need.

Just as I was walking out the door with the last piece of new, shiny equipment, Greg stopped me.

"Hey look. I don't normally do this but... um, would you like me to come over and teach you the basics of audio engineering? For free of course. Yeah, I don't EVER do this kind of thing, it's just that... well, I've never had a customer with your kind of self belief before. You just seem to be like a force of nature, like if noone helped you, you'd still find a way. I like that. What do you say?"

"Hell yes, that would be awesome. Saves me reading flat out and trying not to blow things up for the next week. What sort of beer do you drink?"

So Greg came over that night and we spent hours, working on training me to engineer my own audio through a mixing desk that looked ridiculously complicated and had a million shiny, light-up buttons tempting me to press them all at once and risk some sort of space-time continuum implosion. (Now I know what most of them do, it doesn't seem nearly so dangerous).

In the alcoholic stupor and rampant philosophy that followed the real work, Greg peered over with half-focussed eyes, first through his beer bottle, then around his beer bottle (which seemed to work much better once he'd blinked his eyes into focus) and said: "You know, I think you might be a Shaman."

"Whadd'ya mean?" I replied swaying backwards and forwards on my seat, trying to remember who this guy was and why we'd gotten absolutely smashed.

"Hard to explain" He replied, gesturing wildly, spinning to his feet and slurring: "Thanks for the beer" as the momentum of standing, forced him into a walk. Straight through the back gate of my flat and out onto the street, where he quickly disappeared from view as his feet took him on some drunken journey.

I was in no state to follow.

"Thanks for all the cosmic knowledge, cosmic space fish." I yelled after him, paraphrasing Gonzo from "Muppets from Space", and giggling like an imbecile.


This was to spark off a week-long bombardment of the word "Shaman" into my life, from just about every imaginable source. That's when I had my first inkling that something was up.

NEXT TIME: "The fourth effect of street performance on the individual" and why the Gonzo may actually be a Shaman. (Forgetting for a moment that Gonzo is made primarily of foam).

The Beginning Of My Journey...

A baby Jaguar. Seems like a good symbol for where I am now. The beginning of my shamanic journey. And it's CUTE!!!

ahem.

No. This story really began a couple of years ago, when I was toward the beginning of my career as a solo musician and the middle of my career as a busker. Street Performer for those of you unfamiliar with the word Busker. I think the word is of British origin, the Irish definitely seem to know it (they love a good busker), and it's common in Australia where
I am now. Perth to be exact. A place where it's usually cheaper to fly to Asia than to fly to other cities in Australia. Supposed to be the most isolated Capital City in the world. So they say anyway.

So there I was, making a living, or at least surviving, doing what I loved to do. Playing my acoustic guitar and belting out songs in my now ridiculously powerful voice. In pubs, paid gigs at parties and on the corner of Lake St. and Francis St. in Perth's nightclub district, every Friday and Saturday night without fail. Rich times, well rich in experience anyway, and I got by financially.

Performing on the street has a few unique effects on a person. For me it resulted firstly, in the effortlessly booming, rich voice I already mentioned, because if you can't be heard over the traffic, nightclub sounds and varied street sounds, it's likely noone will donate money to your cause. The cause being: to make it possible to do it all again next week and not have to resort to a "day job." (Seems a bit circular in retrospect)

Secondly, with enough practice, the handful of regular favourite songs that the nightclubbers ask for week in and week out start to not require any real thought whatsoever. Neither does guessing which song any particular person wants. It either falls into the category of remembering the last time, sheer intuition or plain old showmanship. (It's hard to complain that someones only playing your third favourite song, when they're belting it out on a street corner at 4am with the energy of a guy dueling with the Devil.) So, more often than not in the midnight to dawn marathon of performance, my mind was free to just observe.

To observe the people, and their behaviours. Which people make friends, which people pick fights, which guys manage to actually pick up girls (and usually why), which ones dance and sing and so on. With thousands of clubbers flowing past every night, some stopping to dance, request a song, make new friends, vomit or flirt with the other waylaid travellers, it eventually all becomes a pattern. A vastly huge pattern with millions of smaller patterns making up the larger ones. Patterns inside patterns inside patterns.
All seemingly generated by the random behaviour of drunk individuals. All dressed to impress and make their mark on the world, via it's smaller representation in the weekly street festival of drinking.

They say the mind gravitates toward patterns. Seeing order in chaos, or imposing order on the seemingly random events that occur to it. This was definitely the case for me. All in one night, within the hundreds of meandering drunken conversations, I would start to hear the same word or phrase 10 times or so. A word or subject that you don't usually hear bandied about often like - synchronicity (ironically enough) or stability or some random '80's show like "Diff'rent Strokes"or Pythagoras, Arizona, Dragonflies, Gender Reassignment Surgery, Yorkshire Terriers, UFO's, Yoghurt etc etc etc. But only one of these at a time, and from very different varied people, all with a different outlook or reason for mentioning whatever the days chosen topic seemed to be. Curioser and curioser.

The truly magnificent thing that emerged from me paying attention to these subjects recurring over and over again was that at some point in the night, someone would speak to me at great length about whatever their alcohol numbed mind was interested in at that second and would say the nights code word. This person however would be the last time I would hear anything on that particular subject for weeks or months. And without fail the last person to mention it would seem to get some sort of peculiar closure or new understanding or literal instruction from talking to me, and walk away highly satisfied (usually nothing to do with the pesky, repeating word or subject).

I too always magically found some great insight, epiphany or necessary mundane learning encased within the general banter, which left me feeling justified in having just taken a 1 hour break from earning money and entertaining the masses. Always something which had been of immediate concern to me or great necessity. But they couldn't possibly have known that before staggering up and waffling on and on and on about whatever was rattling around in their brain!

The coincidences started to leak out into my everyday life. The universe or whomever was to blame, using more and more varied ways to get the word bouncing around in my world, so as to grab my attention. People, the internet, TV, radio, family, friends, strangers on public transport, beggars, books, billboards, all broadcasting the same word or subject to me over and over in a short space of time, then stopping dramatically after a highly unlikely, mutually pleasing, random conversation.

This was eventually the method used to tell me that I was to become a Shaman.

NEXT TIME: "The third effect of busking on the performer" and Why I use words that start with similar letters toward the end of lists of things. (hopefully there's a non madness related reason)