Street Musicians Looking To Protect Subway Stages

When Stephen Baird tries to communicate something important, his voice drops to a tremulous murmur and his eyebrows bounce excitedly above the rims of his glasses. Yesterday, his eyebrows danced so vigorously they could have been trying to make music.

Leaning into the microphone in a bar crowded with street musicians yesterday, Baird, executive director of the Community Arts Advocates, railed against a new policy that will prevent many of them from claiming their subway-station stages.

“Some people will become homeless because of this issue,” Baird told the assembled crowd, his white beard and flowing hair standing out against the red walls of the Middle East cafe in Central Square. “Others will just be silenced.”

The target of Baird’s ire was the MBTA Subway Performers program, which, as of Dec. 1, bans amplified performances and several acoustic instruments, imposes a dress code for performers, and establishes 25 other counts of MBTA authority over the musicians. Many street musicians, like Baird, consider this an assault to their professional lives and their personal freedoms.

“I can’t wrap my head around this,” street performer Brian James shouts over the crowd at the organizational meeting of Boston area street performers opposed to the changes. “This is such a part of the fabric of Boston life.”

Markus Nechay, a self-described “jack of all sounds,” who used to perform flute in the subway, came to Boston as a street musician from New York City.

“At first, I thought it was kind of a loser town,” he explains. His exposure to musicians in Harvard Square convinced him otherwise, he said—and made the transition to an unknown environment easier. “It provided a lot of relief for the stress of being in a new city.”

The subway musician Michael Sullivan voices similar sensibilities. “It’s a privilege for the MBTA to have us there, and it’s a right for us to be there,” he cries, turning the conventional phrase on end. The crowd cheers.

A Fight for Sound

Boston’s community of street musicians is an intimate one. Milo Matthews, a veteran bassist at Harvard and Davis Squares who recently extended his performance circuit to South Station, cracks several smiles of recognition as his eyes wander around the room. He says he knows most of the meeting’s other guests.

Squeezing into murkily lit booths at the Middle East bar, which an employee had donated to the cause, the group could be posing for an overcrowded Van Gogh canvas. Baird fusses with poster boards containing his hand-written agenda before taking the microphone.

“Our task ahead is quite substantial,” he says, drawing out the syllables ominously. Though frequently lamenting the brevity of the meeting—the first to be held since the proposal went public Nov. 12—Baird, who has been an advocate of street musicians since he and his audience were arrested during a 1979 performance on Boston Common, sets aside a few minutes for the guests to identify themselves.

Some are veterans of the profession, recounting careers spanning tens of years and several cities. For others, street performing offers an escape from other professions.

A young man who calls himself Fish the Magish spends part of his week working as a paralegal aide. “Then I go out and street perform, because it’s a passion,” he says. By the end of the meeting, the curbside musician is helping to coordinate the creation of a legal brief for their cause.

Several of the meeting’s attendees are simply fans.

An employee of Zeitgeist Gallery, which hosts local performances in addition to displaying artwork, says her boss let her off work early so she could attend the meeting. A young woman standing at the edge of the room describes herself as a commuter who has come to offer her support.

Jane Beal, director of community arts at the Cambridge Arts Council, explains that her organization has already undertaken efforts to find an alternative to the new policy.

Moving briskly through the history of Boston street performance—dwelling fondly on the halcyon days of the Music Under Boston program, which promoted subway performance until 1986—Baird began discussing the terms of the new Subway Performers Program, describing the document as “full of contradictions and slander.”

The new regulations ban electronic instruments, “trumpets or trumpet-like instruments,” and drums to ensure that subway announcements can be heard. They were established “to promote safety by establishing procedures that ensure a well-managed and coordinated Subway Performers Program,” according to the MBTA. The rules also contain a stipulation suggesting that other instruments can be banned at the MBTA’s discretion—a clause that many musicians feared could quell their performance opportunities still further.

“It’s not just about amplification, it’s about outright censorship,” Baird says. “It’s not just a musicians’ issue.”

Wagging his finger vigorously in his excitement, he discusses plans to organize efforts to disprove the MBTA’s acoustical suppositions.

“We have to prove them wrong with sound engineers and decibel levels,” he says.

The MBTA gains its authority to enforce rules in the subway stations because of its legal status as the company’s property—a qualification Baird argues is not practically sound.

“How many people in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Emoryville, and Quincy think the T is private property?” he asks. “They’re trying to treat you as employees and charge you admission.”

After an hour of discussion in the Middle East bar, several of the guests move to the establishment’s downstairs club, a dimly lit dance floor with hanging stage lights that smells heavily of stale beer. There, leaders try to coordinate different facets of the campaign: media coverage, public activism, and legal work. Baird reports that he is meeting with the ACLU the following day.

Still, there is a possibility that, with only a handful of business days left before the regulations go into effect, musicians could be turned out of their usual venues.

But Baird has a backup plan should their campaign or an injunction prove unsuccessful.

“Let’s get every college student, every musician, every Berklee student to grab a saxophone and sit-in at Park Street” he says.

Still, the musicians are restless.

Peter Podobry, known to many Harvard Square pedestrians for his amplified guitar stylings in front of Au Bon Pain during warm summer evenings, shakes his head while talking with another musician in his native Russian. He fears the new regulations may force him into another career.

“I’m not rich, but it’s a very good living I get from this operation,” he says. “Next, I’ll just pray.”

Podobry says he was once arrested for playing on Newbury Street—an experience that several of the event’s attendees share.

Jonathan Fixler, who plays the electric guitar in the Alewife Station, says he has been contending with prejudice for years. He blames unfair accusations for the MBTA’s new policy banning electronic instruments on the belief that they prevent passengers from hearing P.A. announcements in the subway stations.

“In all the time I’ve been working in Alewife Station, you can’t hear what they’re saying anyway,” says Fixler, who wears an overcoat and broad-brimmed hat even in the stuffy quarters of the Middle East cafe. “They could just have new P.A.’s in the station and solve the problem right there.”

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.