Busker Days: Trevor West - I Have To Smile

I had to smile after I walked away from Trevor West and our recording session at Montgomery BART. He was great to hang out with and new to the station. In fact, this was his first busker outing ever. So I felt lucky. We recorded several songs, two originals and one a cover of a song by a certain artist / wife, and I enjoyed them all. This one - the first recording we made - is loosely based on a Frank O'Hara poem and is called I Have To Smile. Trevor comes to us from Morro Bay, a town somewhat south of the Bay Area along the coast, and I'm glad he made the journey and I hope he gets the exposure he deserves. Enjoy.

See you on the Flip-Side!

Top 5 Busker Days posts!

Not long after On The Flip-Side got started with its Songs Of The Week, I was prowling the streets and stations of San Francisco and Berkeley, looking for street musicians to record.  The first Busker Day post went up on December 3, 2008, and since then some 25+ busker posts have graced these pages.  In celebration of this blog's five years, today we look at the Top 5 clicked on Busker Days posts:

5. Nick Stillman -- Cumberland Gap [original post here] = 408 hits

4. Jesse Morris (RIP) -- True Red Blood [original post here] = 410 hits.

3. Craig Ventresco - Hoosier Sweetheart / There Ain't No Land Like Dixieland To Me [original post here] = 513 hits.

2. The Jonah Kit - Pancho and Lefty [original post here] = 540 hits.

And the number one Busker Days post, the late great Jesse Morris:

1. Jesse Morris - Six Pack [original post here] = 554 hits.

Enjoy and see you On The Flip-Side!

Song of the Week: The Violent Femmes - Gimme The Car

Listen - The Violent Femmes perform Gimme The Car

I was listening to the archive of Flip-Side posts the other day and really honed in on some of the busker posts Jack Hayden has been putting up recently. The Human Condition and the three posts featuring The Brough Brothers really grabbed my attention the most. That led me to think of my favorite buskers/turn pro band. I am of course talking about the Violent Femmes who, while busking on the streets of their native Milwaukee, were discovered by The Pretenders' Chrissy Hynde and were soon swooped into micro-stardom.

We've already written about The Violent Femmes and their brilliant but unsettling homage to insanity in rural America, Country Death Song. But today, we spin the flip-side of their debut single which dates back to 1983. The song is Gimme The Car and it is just as unsettling as Country Death Song, but with a different disturbing theme. A theme of teenage angst and sexual frustration. A boy being driven by rage and hormones but unable to explain his base feelings. Moral values are thrown out the window when our frustrated protagonist is driven by personal pain and a driving urge.

The ominous lyrics in Gimme The Car remind us of a more cynical play on kid frustration as illustrated in this song of pubescent (pre-pubescent?) need to break free.

Busker Days: Craig Ventresco "Margie Medley"

A few days ago on my way home I noticed a new (to me) person with an interesting acoustic guitar setting up at Montgomery BART. It was enough to make me linger a bit. He started right in with some well-rounded, well-articulated ragtime song. And with rag being one of my true joys, I knew I had to stick around.

Craig Ventresco for the last five or so years has been playing at an SF restaurant, I gather with at least one other musician. This night that gig ended and he decided to try his hand with the commuters. Here we have what he calls the Margie Medley, comprised of two popular songs from the early '20s, Margie and Singin' The Blues. Both tunes were written in part by J. Russel Robinson and Con Conrad. In 1919, Robinson, a ragtime pianist and composer, would join the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a seminal jazz group that recorded these tunes for the first time - also in medley form - in 1920 for the Victor label. Margie would prove to be a hit, and in time become a standard that was covered by many including the cornetist Bix Biederbecke in 1927, and later, John Coltrane. Craig is playing a custom made Fraulini guitar.

Busker Days: "It's Only Make Believe"

When I enter the Montgomery BART station in San Francisco’s financial district on my way home from work it’s a game of busker roulette. Sometimes there’s a guy delivering inspired gospel, clapping the beat in the main station, while other times I hear a distant garbled guitar and vocals in the opposite pedestrian tunnel. Many times it’s silent, save the shoeshine guy’s radio or the sudden BART agent announcements. Yesterday a scrawny weathered guy with cowboy boots and hat was swooning in tagalog (my guess) and recently there’s been an old man playing an erhu, a two string traditional Chinese fiddle. You never know.

If I’m real lucky, a couple of guys, one on a Gibson mandolin, the other on a Gibson LG1 or J200, will be plying their trade down in the tube station. Their musicianship is solid with the mandolin offering thoughtful fills and leads, but the showcase is the guitarist’s voice, in particular his upper register. When I hear it, inevitably my first thought is ‘liquid gold’ followed by the thought ‘get this man an agent!’ I always feel compelled to stop and listen (and donate, of course).

Recently I came with my digital recorder ready and asked the duo for permission to record, which they readily gave. The mandolinist prefaced the song by warning that it didn’t adequately showcase his partner’s voice. I beg to differ! Give a listen to their rendition of the first number 1 hit by Conway Twitty, It’s Only Make Believe, a b-side released in 1958.