We Baby Boomers grew up when television began its takeover and makeover of American life. Like most of my generation, I rarely saw musical instruments except for the pianos that sat unplayed in schools and some homes of the well-off. My grandmother had one and tried to teach me at age ten, but all I wanted to do was be outside playing baseball, so my piano lessons were short-lived.

Phonographs and radio, too, were in decline, so the only music that most of us heard was what accompanied television programs and commercials--almost all of it simple jingles that stick in our minds to this day: Winston tastes good like a cigarette should! And, See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call!

In a neighborhood evenly divided between Irish-Catholics and Italian-Catholics, we were willing to sing Christmas carols until we reached the age of about 12, after which we laughed at the younger kids for doing so. At that age we began to regard them as simple melodies, much like the ad jingles, done by rote without variation--like coloring books with prepared outlines and coded numbers to show which colors went where.

As both an Irish- and Italian-American, I had double exposure to ethnic music, but even this, in the Fifties and early-Sixties was barely a handful of simple songs confined to the calendar's ethnic ghettos of St. Patrick's and Columbus Day: "Irish Washerwoman," "O Danny Boy," "That's Amore." All good songs, but nothing survives over-use, especially when you have young children belting out lyrics such as, When the MOON hits your EYE like a BIG piz-za PIE...

Before the Beatles arrived in America in 1964, my generation was already waking up to Rock & Roll. The older brothers and sisters in the neighborhood were wooed by Elvis, Bill Haley and Buddy Holley. While in high school, I saw and, yes, idolized The Lovin' Spoonful, The Young Rascals, Chicago, and a host of Motown groups that were as exciting for their dance as their song.

Still, music was something given to us, handed down by television's premier impressario, Ed Sullivan, or television's alternative--long before that word was so thoroughly adopted--Smothers Brothers or the clerk at the record store. As much as we listened to it, the less likely we were to make it ourselves. Even if instruments were in the home, what are the chances of 14-year-olds taking the time to learn basic scales when they can go out and purchase finished products for prices well within their allowance? Younger children might have been more willing to make the effort of so much repetition--and have less money to spend on distraction--but the instruments weren't there. Television was. And was--and is--so easy.

Music, then, was a pure spectator sport for me until the summer of 1971 after my junior year of college. When a cousin called to offer two concert tickets, I was more interested in the idea of a double-date than who was on the bill. The name "Jethro Tull" seemed to suggest that it would be a rock version of the soundtrack for Beverly Hillbillies, a corny sit-com of that era. But as soon as they took the stage, I was taken out of myself; by the time it was over, I was someone else.

Who or what I would become remained to be seen--or heard. That fall I would move into an apartment with a musician who had played guitar and piano from an early age. During the summer, he was a house-sitter for a rich family on a European vacation. There was a piano in the parlour and a flute on a shelf behind it. A week following the concert, my girlfriend and I visited him and, when we began to describe Jethro Tull, he wanted more and more details. He himself got out of his chair to imitate the one-legged stand and kick, and he wrote down titles of recordings he could buy.

Next day, he would take that flute off the shelf and begin to teach himself how to play it.

In the fall, the musician I turned into a flautist would turn me into a musician. But the real ear-opener--what film critics like to call "revelation"--of Tull was not so much the unusual (for rock) instrument as the fusion of musical influences. Within so much Rock & Roll there was Folk, Blues, Jazz, Classical, and within the flute and guitar and piano solos were variations that turned into themes, including God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Pop Goes the Weasle, and Stephen Foster's Camptown Races--a few of those simple, scorned melodies dead from rote over-use that night revived, re-energized with new life.

And for all that, the concert was but a door pushed open into a world I had yet to enter. Nor would I have been prone to enter. More in awe of the two Washington Post reporters who cracked and pursued the Watergate story, I was working my way up the editorial ranks of The Log, Salem State's student paper. That meant I was an English major, part of a liberal arts program, which, at least back then, included a required class called Survey of Music. In lieu of a textbook, this class had us, my roommate incuded, listening to a twelve-album boxed set: Beethoven, Bach, Berlioz, Schumann, Orlando di Lasso...

And so I entered the world of orchestral music, after which the colonies of pop and rock, while still fun, were hardly satisfying. And less satisfying was living in an apartment that was the scene of frequent jam sessions while I was the only non-musician. That would change when another friend, a theater major, asked me to take a role in his children's play.

He had six roles, adapted from a Hans Christian Andersen story, each tailored to the mannerisms, quirks and foibles of a friend. The role of Royal Wizard was tagged for me, an excitable boy in those days, while the role of Royal Mathematician went to a fusty-but-not-old fellow who doubled as an off-stage herald for the King and Princess. He had a trumpet, and in its case, a soprano recorder.

I had to be told what that other instrument was called, which happened at about the same time I tried it out, after which there was no getting it away from me. At every rehearsal they had to send someone down the hall to retrieve me for my scenes because I kept taking the recorder out of their hearing. Hearing of this, another friend gave me a recorder she hadn't played in years. Suddenly I was part of those jam sessions.

Jams serve as great classrooms for beginners. As I would hear explained years later at the Vancouver Folk Festival: "If someone else is carrying the tune, all you have to do is stay in the key and you cannot make a mistake." In time, three notes become five, and then five become an octave, and then you find the higher octave, and then...

Meanwhile, you find that those previously scorned simple melodies serve as tests of how well you can put those notes together. In turn, Christmas carols, because many of them are so close to the scale, serve as ways to learn scales, while offering the satisfaction of playing complete, recognizable songs.

And so I was reborn.

How and why I took up busking is told in "Mile High Attitude" over on Vignette Street, but if that completes the account of how I became a musician and then a street-musician, there's one more event--as unforeseen as any of the others--that made it possible for me to remain in the streets. Though it happened much later, it has had as much to do with my new life as that Tull concert, the musical roommate/music classmate, the role of Royal Wizard, the bus-stop in Denver, the discovery of Turlough O'Carolan, the "Bard Heard in Every Direction." Moreover, it addresses the first thought that many Americans have about buskers, and so I close this account with it:

Most folks who talk or ask about busking begin with a presumption: "It must take very thick-skin to do that." Well, of course! There's the stigma, the distrust, the increasing unwillingness of Americans to make eye-contact, walk past you as if you are not even there. No matter how thick the skin, there's a cumulative demoralizing effect that has to reach the point where you just can't face it anymore.

For me it happened in the late-Eighties.Ê One summer I was suddenly reluctant to busk, and so I took refuge on the beach--even on cooler days more suited to play. I made sure I always had a thick novel, and before long I was reading Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy--Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders. The last includes a couple pages about a magician busking a London street corner.

People often use the phrase "in a world of your own" to describe their impressions of street-performers. That's a logical summary of what Davies spelled out, but his details have as much to do with how the public arrives at such a performance--what Garrison Keillor calls "unlikeliness"--as with the performer. To borrow a phrase so many Native Americans use to describe the books of historian/theologian Vine DeLoria, Davies made me understand what I already knew.

Put simply, it's not so much that we play "in a world of our own" as that we play with an attitude of "take it or leave it." At a glance, that's an arrogant declaration, but in practice it's a generous incentive to perform irresistably.

Once I had that takeover and makeover, busking for me has had little to do with thick skin, but everything to do with opening unexpected doors and making sure the rooms are well-furnished, all instruments ready to play.