Street Performing Quotes

I've been arrested many times for illegal high wire walking and illegal street performing.

I grew up in a really rural town, Stratford, Ontario, with 30,000 people. There's a big festival thrown in the town. A lot of people travel from all over the world to see it, and growing up, I actually used to busk on the street. I'd play my guitar, sing, and people would throw money in the case.

I'd go to the farmers' market in Santa Barbara, and I'd put out my guitar case, and I'd test out these little ditty songs that I would write, and I would get a couple of avocados, a bag of pistachios, and, like, fifteen bucks. That was a lot of money for me.

Performing outside is always kind of strange. Usually, you can't hear something, whether it's your voice or instrument, but it's a fun challenge.

Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing - actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals.

Street performing can be a great teaching ground and a barometer for what you're doing. It's rough and unforgiving at times, but it can be wild and fun and a real open canvas for your creativity.

Originally the dream was about traveling and developing a job that would permit me to travel. And I decided to go into street performing because it was a traveling job; it would let me go around the world.

I started off as a juggler. I used to do a half-hour show on the weekends to make money as a kid. Then I went to Cleveland, Ohio in 1983 to the international jugglers competition junior division and came second. So that was my first job, being a juggler.

In a typical day, I would wake up about 8 A.M., pile all my stuff into my mom's minivan - my guitar, my amp, CDs to sell, a table and a rug - drive it down to the street, and unload it all. I'd wait until about 12, then play for two hours. You could only play in two-hour intervals, so then I would move it all somewhere else.

Busking taught me so much on so many levels, not just about being a musician or writing songs - actually about growing up and being a human!

When I started playing music at East Tennessee State University I would sit on a stool with a tip jar in front of me and play four hours a night at a college bar called Quarterback's Barbecue. I wasn't thinking about doing it for a living. I was just making enough money to go to Taco Bell every day. People were eating chips, drinking beer and not listening to me. I'd had three or four years of people ignoring me, and I'd kind of gotten used to it.

I've never had much and I've never needed much. If I had only two bucks in my pocket, I knew I could spend it because I could always do another show of some kind, even on a sidewalk.

I was living in my van, playing on the street for almost two years.

My mum pushed me to get a normal job when I finished school, and I just wasn't into that at all. So I hit the street and started busking and making my own way.