How amusing: The city that treats street musicians like cockroaches — perpetually scattering them from one corner to another — decides to hire its own musicians to perform on the street.
All summer long.
The city that enforces “noise and vibration control,” according to local ordinance, plans to invite high school bands and amateur violinists and, Lord help us, karaoke performers to do their thing.
In public.
Announced last week, the latest brainchild of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs goes by the name Music Everywhere, a term that cultural affairs czar Lois Weisberg apparently takes seriously.
As Weisberg envisions it, from May 30 to Sept. 29 the city will be awash in accordionists, organ grinders, kazoos, harmonicas and “little bongos” that will be handed out — free of charge! — to pedestrians.
“If someone is walking downtown, they can join a group with one of these instruments,” Weisberg said at an annual luncheon of the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau last Friday, where she and Mayor Richard M. Daley unveiled their latest strenuous attempt to replicate the popularity of the Cows on Parade exhibit of 1999.
“You came across the cows by surprise,” added Weisberg. “This summer you will come across something when you are walking down the street or are in a restaurant or in a public building.
“And it will be music.”
That’s debatable. Unless you define the term to include the squawks produced by some yokel who just got off the Greyhound from Topeka all charged up about blowing a kazoo in the big city.
Yet that’s precisely the whom city government has targeted for this onslaught of decibels, with $1.5 million budgeted to promote Music Everywhere across the Midwest.
In strictly political terms, Music Everywhere represents about the biggest civic flip-flop since Daley decided that Meigs Field doesn’t need to be a park, after all.
For this is the town where aldermen bray freely when the subject turns to street musicians. Since the mid-1980s, Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd) has been waging war on the street players, pushing for increasingly restrictive rules governing their behavior and branding them “unhealthful,” “safety hazards” and “peddlers.”
Since Daley announced the city’s new street-music program, however, Natarus — who calls Daley’s program “a wonderful idea” — appears to have changed his tune.
“I never called them peddlers,” he told us. “Do you have me on tape calling them peddlers?”
Yes.
“Well, I call them peddlers, but I don’t use it in a negative way, because they’re on a street collecting money. That’s what a peddler is. They earn a living that way.”
You said they were a safety hazard.
“Well, when they’re playing in front of Water Tower, and the crowd goes into a street, you’ve got a safety problem. . . .
“I’ve only sought to regulate them when they got out of line. Like everything else in society, you have to have a balance.”
Exactly how such a balance will be achieved when scores of would-be kazooists, strolling organ grinders and barbershop-quartet sing-alongs flood the Loop hasn’t exactly been determined, but Weisberg remains confident that it all will work out for the best.
“Everything will be controlled,” she said, acknowledging that the musicians have yet to be hired (which will be done with the help of the Chicago Federation of Musicians), the performance sites determined, the logistics ironed out.
“If you’re going to play a game of musical chairs in a plaza, there will be someone in charge of it,” said Weisberg, sounding perhaps more like a playground monitor than a cultural impresario.
But what if people actually take up Weisberg’s wide-open invitation to join in the music-making, turning the city’s center into an even more ear-shattering place than it already is? What if aspiring guitarists and gangsta rappers and poetry slammers and performance artists actually take to the streets?
“If someone comes down and they’re not union musicians, we’re not going to stop them [from volunteering to play],” said Weisberg. “If someone comes down with his son and they want to play the violin, we’re not going to stop them.”
Double standards
No, that treatment has been reserved for the bona fide street musicians, who pay $50 a year for a permit, which affords them the opportunity to be spat upon by passersby, robbed by pick-pockets and told to get moving by anyone wearing a badge.
Already the real street musicians realize that Music Everywhere was not exactly designed to make use of their talents.
“Basically, the city wants to get rid of us,” said Mark Johnson, who uses a couple of overturned white buckets as a drum set on the Madison Avenue bridge, near the Civic Opera House.
“Some cops make you move before you even set up.
“They don’t want you in the business districts, and they don’t want you playing during the workday,” added Johnson, as throngs of commuters streamed passed him, hurrying to the commuter trains at Northwestern and Union Stations. Occasionally, one of them threw a couple of coins in a bucket.
Weisberg insisted that entrepreneurs like Johnson will not be shoved aside to make room for the city’s performers. But those performers, in this city so beholden to organized labor, will be musicians’ union members (or non-members whose participation is approved by the union).
Though a spokesman for the Chicago Federation of Musicians said that the union does not publish its pay scale, sources say that in the past, union members have received $125 per two hours of outdoor performances.
Street tuba player Aaron Dodd estimates he averages $20 a day. Dodd, who has been cited in the Down Beat Critics Poll for “talent deserving wider recognition,” figures that no invitation will be forthcoming for him to blow his horn on the city payroll.
“I guess they’ll get guys who are already working musicians, not guys like me who make our living on the street,” said Dodd, speaking between tunes, in front of a shoe store at Michigan Avenue and Erie Street.
The designer footwear in the window offered a striking contrast to Dodd’s own black loafers, which long since have come apart at the soles.
“They’ll just try to keep hassling us about our playing,” he said.
A bad break
Dodd probably needs the work more than most. After a group of Chicago Symphony Orchestra brass players bought him a $2,500 tuba a year ago, he thought he was set. But a group of thugs in the flophouse where he was living smashed it to pieces.
He’s now playing a tuba that’s in worse shape than his shoes, his saliva leaking out of the cracks in the instrument. He suspects that the influx of hundreds of city-paid musicians — who do not need to ask for spare change — will not improve his financial prospects.
But Chicago, the city that works, is being transformed into the city that plays — with City Hall promoting the amusements to the tune of $1.5 million (the city’s entertainment events, including the summer music festivals, are budgeted for approximately $7 million).
“Do you know what they could do with that one-and-a-half million?” asked Johnson, the drummer on the Madison Avenue bridge.
“They could pay every street musician in the city a decent wage, and we wouldn’t have to put our hand out for a year.”
