Showdown on the Downtown F
Chalk it up as one more reason to stick with our local public transportation absurd entertainment rivaled by no other city in the world. The music on our Brooklyn-bound F last weekend began innocuously enough, with a thin fellow plunking out tunes on his melodica (that’s a keyboard you blow into). Happy Birthday segued into…
Chalk it up as one more reason to stick with our local public transportation absurd entertainment rivaled by no other city in the world. The music on our Brooklyn-bound F last weekend began innocuously enough, with a thin fellow plunking out tunes on his melodica (that’s a keyboard you blow into). Happy Birthday segued into The Addams Family into, well, Happy Birthday again, as our intrepid entertainer blew a medley that continued uninterrupted for three stops a pretty solid showing compared to the one-stop wonders we usually have onboard. Four stops in, however, things took a turn towards the absurd…
The doors opened and who stepped on board but the ubiquitous fellow with dreads and a backpack amp whose repertoire consists solely of Knocking On Heaven’s Door, Redemption Song, and, occasionally, that Tracy Chapman blues tune. He stood awestruck for a moment and then began muttering insults underneath melodica guy’s continuing session of “Name That TV Theme.”
As soon as Melodica Man took a gasp for air, Mr. Backpack Amp broke into, you guessed it, Knocking On Heaven’s Door. Apparently, though, Mr. Amp was so enraged that after less than one predictable chorus, he stopped the song, mumbled an apology along the lines of I don’t usually do this, and began berating the first musician from across the car, calling him an amateur and a handful of other not-so-printable names.
We initially thought this might be a once-in-a-lifetime West-Side-Story-meets-Warriors musical showdown, but a little research has shown that a bumbling panhandler and some mariachi musicians have also mistakenly knocked on heaven’s door only to receive wild reprimands. Anyone else seen Mr. Amp snap?
— Pete D’Angelo
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There used to be a guy on the corner by McCrory’s on Bond St. and Fulton who sad on a siamese standpipe and played “What a Friend We Have In Jesus” over and over and over on a little squeezebox. He’s long gone and so is McCrory’s.
I wonder where somebody like that goes. I also wonder where Eddie the Ft. Greene Sock Man went.
I’ve never seen either of these guys, but have you seen the scrawny junkie-lookin’ boy who warbles out that one song from Pink Floyd The Wall (“Shorter of breath/and one day closer to death”) that I can’t remember the title of because I’m not 14 anymore, and when he’s done with that he launches into a seasick rendition of the Beatles’ “The Night Before”. He has trouble keeping his balance on the train, lurching around with the movements of the car, and he’s very pathetic and sad.
But my least favorite subway busker is the truly crazy man on the downtown Q platform at Times Square, who plays songs of his own devising, often of only one chord, and stamps his (bare) feet in time to his voice. I can count on that guy to be there every time I work late and have to wait forever for the Q on a Friday night.
i saw the harmonica guy the other day. he played the most annyoing songs you could ever think of all in a row, it’s like he was trying to piss everyone on the train off on purpose.
I have seen Amp Man snap. It was the day of the Puerto Rican Day Parade 2006 and I’m heading home on the F from Coney Island. Amp Man gets on a few stops later and begins playing, that is until a man wielding a giant Puerto Rican flag hops on the train. Amp Man stops playing and begins taunting Flag Man, asking if he carried an American flag everyday, since he was an American now, etc. By the time we got off the train at Smith/9th, Amp Man and Flag Man were both loudly accusing the other of being racist, and fists were being brandished, but, to my knowledge, not thrown.
I’ve also heard him play “Roxanne”, which ended up inspiring this cartoon (see the subsequent entry, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas”, for the full story):
http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/archives/000978.html
You forgot to mention “The First Cut is the Deepest,” another old standby in Mr. Amp’s repertoire.