A group of three college students stopped to check out the sound of his instrument. Two small children danced and laughed along with the music while their parents watched. A dozen other people stood around, simply enjoying the music. On this afternoon in the Boston Common, Stephen Baird had captured an impressive audience with his harp-like instrument, the hammered dulcimer.
For Baird, who has earned the nickname “The Dean” amongst fellow street performers, this is nothing new. A self-described “short little hairy man,” Baird has been taking his songs to the Boston streets for more than 30 years. He certainly wasn’t the first: Benjamin Franklin and Sam Adams sang on the streets of 18th century Boston. Much later, Tracy Chapman famously perfected her performing in Harvard Square.
It hasn’t always been that easy.
“I’ve spent 30 years challenging cities and towns to legalize street music,” Baird said. But today in the Common, he is playing without the harassment of police or other city officials. Things weren’t always so nice.
In 1972, when Baird began performing on the streets for a living, police constantly harassed him.
“They would use every law they had, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, soliciting, anything they could to get rid of you,” Baird said. “Once they arrested my whole audience because they couldn’t get rid of me.”
Boston and Street Performing
Over the years, there has been constant struggle between the city and its musicians. This has led Baird in another, unforeseen direction.
“I was forced to become a legal expert quickly,” he said.
He embraced his role, becoming the voice of the street performers, leading the charge all over the country to legalize street music, helping instrument laws in Cambridge, Chicago, Baltimore and a handful of other smaller cities. It wasn’t something he took lightly.
“I consider the streets to be the place where culture is invented, incubated and grown,” he said, “a place for political, religious and social discussion.”
Street performance has always been a large part of American music. Franklin sang on the street corners of Boston attempting to sell pamphlets for his older brother. Irving Berlin hung out in New York’s Lower East Side singing for pennies at the turn of the century. Street performers have always been at the forefront of cutting-edge music from tap dancing to break dancing, jazz to blues and rock-and-roll to hip-hop.
“Entire new art forms have been developed on the streets,” Baird said.
Boston has always been a popular city for street performance. In her book, Passing the Hat-Street Performers in America, Patricia Campbell called Boston the “Emerald City for street music.”
Baird agreed saying, “This is a college town, so it is more vibrant with ideas and culture.”
Michael Williams Wright, a Boston musician who has been playing the T-stops since 1975, doesn’t argue with that, but said he does think things have changed since he began performing.
“In the ’70s, the Commons was like a carnival. There were jugglers, magicians, musicians and poets,” Wright said, recalling his early days on the scene. “It was more of a novelty thing. There was a lot more interaction between the audience and the musicians.
“But things slowly changed,” he continued, sounding nostalgic and realistic at the same time. The amplifiers got louder and louder, the audiences grew accustomed to the acts to the point that they stopped noticing them and more and more musicians began to play the subways.
“People realized that they could make good money playing the subways and there got to be too many people playing,” Wright said. Of course, he doesn’t blame them.
“You could make a good living down there,” he said. “That was how I survived.”
Baird vs. Boston: Music on Trial
There is a common misconception that every street performer is merely an artistic bum, but this is not the case.
“A total cross-section of our society is down there. Everything you want, you can hear on the platforms,” Baird said.
Gifrants, a Haitian artist who plays jazz music, has used the Boston subways as a place to gain exposure; he has sold more than 30,000 records.
Boston’s history of dealing with street performers and subway musicians has ranged from open-armed to strictly prohibiting. In the late 1970s, then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis instituted the Music Under Boston program, which hired the Boston Symphony and other artists to play at the popular T-stops.
Baird was hired by the city to participate in this program, and Music Under Boston was one of the few successful things that officials have done regarding subway musicians, Baird said.
There were many Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority policies and projects limiting the freedom of subway performers enacted over the next two decades that Baird fought against. In 1989, the MBTA began playing Christmas music over its speakers.
“It was so loud that it blasted all the musicians out of the subway,” Baird remembered.
The program soon ended. A few years later, televisions started to appear in stations. This program failed quickly because, according to Baird, “New-Englanders don’t like television very much.”
Moreover, the trial televisions were easily damaged and repairs were expensive.
These cases could all be seen as a warm-up for what came in late 2003. Subway musicians received notices on Nov. 15 that a new policy banning horns, drums and all amplification would take effect on Dec. 1. This could’ve effectively put every single performer out of business because without amplifiers it would be almost impossible to be heard over the screeching trains. Baird had only a few days to reverse the policy, something he first thought would be impossible.
“It’s hard to organize street performers. They are pretty much anarchists. It’s like herding cats,” Baird said with a smile.
By this time, Baird had become a skilled protester.
“I attacked them from all different levels,” he said. He told his story to the media; he sent other musicians to the Statehouse to lobby their representatives; he sued the MBTA with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union; he collected 16,000 signatures in eight days; and he conducted a scientific study proving that the amplifiers were not as loud as officials suggested.
The parties struck a compromise allowing 95 percent of the artists to keep earning a living in the subways. Under the current system, musicians must pay $25 a year for a permit and play in designated areas on the platforms. The public’s response to the extensive campaign overwhelmed city officials and even surprised Baird himself.
“No one knew, including myself, how well loved the subway artists really were by the population,” he said.
And with the end of that battle, Baird has moved onto the next project, which is to clean up Boston’s street performing laws. Most people who know Baird feel confident that he will win this one, too.
“Stephen, year in and year out, has been combating these forces,” Wright said. “He has devoted all his energies to the cause.” m