Steve McGookin emphasized to me that it’s a popular misconception that people become street performers as a “last resort,” but given his own journey leading to his decision to pick up his guitar and join them, I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps for some people, the subway is the last refuge.
McGookin took a severance package from his journalism job at Forbes.com about a year ago, and since then has proceeded to burn through his savings while looking for further employment. Like the thousands of other out-of-work journalists that are trying to find jobs in a shrinking industry, he hasn’t come up with any offers. So not long ago he decided that he wanted to try an experiment: for years he had been fascinated by the culture of performers that roam the underground of New York; he watched them play on his daily commute and sometimes even stopped to talk to them and give them money. What if he decided to join them?
“Coming from Ireland, you obviously have a tradition of playing in public, and sharing songs in pubs and stuff like that,” he told me. “It’s something that’s always there, once you learn to play with people, it always just stays with you. And I think putting the two together, the music and the subway — there’s something about not growing up in New York, not growing up with something like the subway, when you experience it, it’s like a marvel. It’s something that has a sort of life of its own. And the music is something that resonates across that. When I talk to people about what I’m doing, the thing is that everyone has a subway musician story, either good or bad. It’s always there in your psyche, even if you don’t live in New York, if you’ve just visited New York, you know all about the people in the subway, and the musicians in the subway, and it always struck me how great some of these musicians were.”
About a week ago, McGookin launched a blog called The Beat Below the Street and used it to record and reflect on his experience. Every week day he picks up his guitar and play book — he says he has a repertoire of about 200 songs — and makes his way to a different station. His idea to perform in the subway is only a means to understand the musician culture that prevails down there. He spends much of his time meeting and interviewing other performers, using a camera to sometimes record their narratives and performances.
“I want to know more about what this person is doing, why they’re doing it, and it’s out of a natural curiosity,” he explained. “And I thought that all these musicians have a story to tell … If you’re just a passenger and you’re just passing through, you can have a conversation with a musician, but you can just have a nodding acquaintence with them. But if you have a guitar with you it gives you more of a connection to them. And I hope that in a way it allows them to tell their story with a little more authenticity.”
As for how much money he’s making in donations, when you subtract the cost of entering the subway, on most days so far he has come out in the negative. Rather than finding a strategic location that’s good for foot traffic and acoustics, he has wandered from station to station, sometimes playing in noisy sections where passerbys are unable to hear him (and therefore are less likely to throw change his way}. On one of the days he made a dime — though he’s not even sure the coin was intentionally tossed to him — and some days he hasn’t made anything at all.
It was interesting drawing an analogy between the street musicians’ attempts to monetize their music and journalism’s own struggles with the same problem. Both mediums are offering up content for free. The donation approach seems similar to both the “micropayment” ideas that some newspapers are contemplating and the NPR/PBS approach to soliciting money from their listeners. McGookin said that he thinks the performers make most of their money selling CDs, and some of the people he spoke to are approached and offered gigs playing at parties and bars by people who like their music. In this way, the street performance is a “loss leader” that leads to employment offers.
“To extrapolate that analogy, all I will say is that quality content usually will win out,” he said. “In the newspaper world, if something is worth paying for, people will pay for it. If a musician isn’t that good, they won’t prosper. But from an analogy perspective, this is much harder work.”
I asked the journalist if there was perhaps a future book to be written after all is said and done, but he said it’s much too early to decide whether he wants to embark on such a project. For now, he plans to continue on with his experiment for 48 days — one for every year of his life — and to speak to dozens of subway performers in an attempt to blog their story. He recognizes that this journey likely has nothing to do with his future career aspirations, but he compared it to his own experiences riding on the subway: sometimes the journey — and not the end destination — is all that matters.
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