For those who value views from the proverbial "man in the street,"
a book-length account of one who has played music on American
streets for over 35 years will be irresistible. Pay the Piper
offers a wealth of street scenes ranging from cheerful to
infuriating, delightful to confrontational, heart wrenching to
joyous. Several such as "Slip-Jig for Flute & SUV" and "The
Shout Heard from the Curb" have appeared as guest columns in
newspapers north of Boston where author/busker Jack Garvey has
honed a wry, conversational style peppered with word play since
1983. A memoir/manifesto that invites both reflection and debate,
Piper is peppered as well with commentary. Accounts such as "The
Transformative Power of Day Jobs" and "A Fifth of the First
Amendment" are for anyone hoping for a return of civility and
vitality in public places, for exchanges of good cheer and honest
attention rather than the robotic, "Have a good one" and "No
problem." Garvey began busking when city and town centers across
America began losing business to the controlled environments of
shopping malls, privately owned and always off limits. As for the
Muzak broadcast in malls, his suggestion to find and encourage
buskers raises a compelling question: "Who, after all, ever says
'thank you' to a loudspeaker?" This book traces America's
transformation in time-from his earliest accounts in Denver and New
Orleans up to the present in the New England tourist towns that
Garvey has busked since 1982. From Salem, Oregon, to Salem, Mass.,
narratives such as "The Only Prohibition Is Inhibition" and "In
Need of No Microphone" are served with more observation than
opinion, flavored more with satire than rhetoric. Up to the recent
turn of century, the most vivid and frequent account any
street-performer could offer to describe a busking day was that of
the child who stops and stares, curious with wonder, and the parent
who then stops to explain and usually encourage the child. Today,
as Garvey reports--and as fellow buskers often tell him--they more
often watch the child stop and stare only to be hurried along by a
parent on a cellphone, too preoccupied for a child's curiosity. A
call to put the concept of public back into that of public place,
Pay the Piper seeks to recapture that attention and curiosity by
illustrating how it is done. To borrow the title of an early
chapter, Pay the Piper is "Busking in Red, White, and Blue."
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