Among folks who've been writing professionally about music for a long time, the name "Cary Baker" is bound to provoke a smile and nod of recognition. As the proprietor of venerable indie PR firm Conqueroo, Baker assisted countless artists over a period of many years — and before that, he worked in publicity for a long list of record companies.

The long and the short of it is that music is in Cary Baker's blood, and that lifelong love is vividly reflected in the pages of his recently published book, Down On The Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music. Cary was kind enough to take time out for a chat with us about his experiences writing this addictively readable musical history, as well as his perspective on the ways in which the immediacy of busking intersects with the 21st-century listening experience.

You had a very long career in the music industry, and I think for people who know that about you and hear you published a book, the first assumption might be that it's a story of your time working for various labels and doing PR for various artists. But you didn't go in that direction. Was it ever a thought for your first book?

Well, you know, I started my career as a writer. I was a music freelance journalist pretty much from the time I was 16 all through studying journalism in college, editing a local alt-weekly and writing for Cream and Trouser Press. And I did that till about 1984. I was then about 28 years old. And I got an opportunity to move to Los Angeles and work for my favorite record company at the time, which was IRS Records. I mean, who could say no to that? It was the middle of winter in Chicago; I moved to L.A. in two weeks. But hey, I was single and renting and had a benevolent landlord who encouraged me to do it and family who said, you know, you'd be a fool not to do it. So within two weeks, I changed my direction.

I felt the label was musically credible, with artists like R.E.M., Concrete Blonde, the Go-Go's, the Alarm, Let's Act, and Fleshtones, so I didn't feel that I was going to the dark side, per se. I then proceeded to go to five other labels — and, one could argue, the dark side. And then I ran the PR firm Conqueroo for many years, until my wife and I made a decision to close the company. She'd worked for me after being an editor at the LA Weekly herself.

We did that in 2022, and the goal then was to go back to writing, pretty much on my own terms. You know, writing a book was something that I had long wanted to do. I didn't have this busking book in mind for years or anything. It just sort of came to me at the right moment as I was looking for artists perhaps to write a biography about. I happened to go to college with the person who now manages the estate of the late Ted Hawkins. Ted Hawkins, of course, being a busker, a street singer from the Venice Boardwalk who was discovered by Geffen Records vis-a-vis the A&R rep who signed Beck. Didn't sign Guns 'N' Roses or anything, but he did sign Beck, and he signed Ted Hawkins to the hottest label of the day, which was Geffen.

I had a little bit of dialogue with an academic publisher who I ended up not using. I called him one day and said, "How about a biography of Ted Hawkins?" And this guy was in Texas and didn't necessarily know who Ted Hawkins was. I said, "Well, he was a busker, a street singer." There was a silence, there was a pregnant pause. And all of sudden, he says, "Well, what about a book about buskers?"

Plural. Street singers, plural. I could do that. I had first seen a street singer on Chicago's Maxwell Street, which goes back to the days of Muddy Waters and Little Walter and Robert Nighthawk. And then I interviewed the Violent Femmes for Trouser Press. There wasn't time to get me a record; Trouser Press needed the story yesterday. They were in New York, the label was in L.A., and I was in Chicago going to Milwaukee, so I just went up there blind. I figured I'd figure out what the band did, but no, they played for me out on the streets of Milwaukee under the marquee of the Oriental Theater, which is where they were discovered by Chrissie Hynde and the late James Honeyman-Scott from the Pretenders, busking.

And that's what led them to Warner, the Warner-distributed Slash Records. So I had that sort of trifecta of seeing buskers: Maxwell Street, Ted Hawkins, the Violent Femmes, and I'd been to New Orleans a couple of times, and at some point, I'd been to about 30 South by Southwests. So I'd seen my share of street music. It was a subject I felt like I could tackle. I knew a few street singers. I knew of a few people who had started that way.

I think even for people who know a lot about music, there's a temptation to see busking as a sepia-toned artifact from the past. And if you hear that somebody wrote a book about busking, I think it would be somewhat fair to assume that it's kind of an academic text. But you immediately make it clear that it's part of your origin story. You went to Maxwell, you saw a performer that you kind of fell for, you cold-called the Chicago Reader and said, "I've got a story about this performer." And then you were essentially the A&R guy for their first album, by reaching out to a label and saying, "How do you feel about putting out a record by this guy?" All while you were still a teenager. I think that's a really remarkable way to set up the skin that you've got in the game with this subject.

Well, and Arvella Gray, the guy who I wrote about for the Chicago Reader and ended up not really producing — I just kind of made it happen. You know, Arvella Gray played a big role in my life. He brought me utter, unvarnished authenticity. It was a world that I'd read about. It was right here. I'd heard a few Lead Belly records, I'd heard Muddy Waters and a few other things on early FM rock radio in Chicago. Freeform underground rock. And I knew Chess Records was in Chicago, but it really was seeing blind Arvella Gray clanging on, you know, steel bottleneck slide on a metal guitar. You could hear this for blocks. There was just something about it. He changed my life in a lot of ways, and I hope I changed his.

I think one of my favorite parts of that story is that your father, when he took you to Maxwell Street, said, "This is the only time you're ever going to want to come here." And he was completely wrong. Was he happy that you were bitten by the bug, or was he like, "Shit"?

I was not an A student. I was too busy doing extracurricular things, working at the high school radio station, features editor of the high school newspaper, freelancing for the Reader. I think my parents were wise enough to think, "Let's stay out of this kid's way. He seems to know where he's going. We don't get it, but he does. Let's just stay out of his way."

Again, I think the temptation for a lot of people is to think of busking as a thing of the past, and something that happened within the folk scene or whatever. But you make it very clear very quickly that this is music that is national, and also touches a whole bunch of different musical genres. I love that you incorporated doo-wop. I'm sure it was an obvious choice for you, but I don't think it would be obvious to everybody.

Absolutely. Music that I never got to see, and there are very few survivors of it, but I actually found one. Jay Siegel of the Tokens. I just happened to know Daryl Hall's manager and I called him one day and said, "I know Daryl wasn't like a doo-wop singer. I doubt he was old enough to have been singing on the Philadelphia streets, but did he ever sing any?" The manager said, "Probably not, but I happen to be friends with Jay Siegel of the Tokens." Jay was very helpful. He told me about singing on Rockaway Beach, which reminded me a lot of Ted Hawkins on Venice Boardwalk. And I later found people, Satan and Adam for instance — not that they were doo-wop — who played on the streets of Harlem. There's a whole chapter on Washington Square.

I spoke to Ramblin' Jack Elliott, I spoke to the people who signed Oliver Smith, a blind street singer who appeared one day in Manhattan, he was gone the next, but made an album for Elektra in that space of time. And David Peel, jumping ahead a few decades, singing about marijuana on the streets of Greenwich Village. By then the beatnik riot had taken place in 1961. Busking was a lot more legal, or at least permitted, or at least not scorned by then. 

I think one of the really nice things that the book makes clear is that as much as I think a lot of people would assume that busking is something that artists do when they have no other choice, for quite a few artists, it is a choice. You tell all kinds of stories about the things that these artists get from busking, like the story about Peter Case having the overflow crowd outside his show, and he just grabbed his guitar and went on the sidewalk, because he knew he could do it. He had done it before.

It's the way that a lot of artists started. From Billy Bragg to Poi Dog Pondering to Old Crow Medicine Show to Loreena McKennitt to Madeleine Peyroux to Mary Lou Lord. And, you know, it has various rewards. In the case of Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who never really depended on being a busker, but busked for fun, he was busking and although he's an artist from New York, he was in the London Tube. A lot of Americans went to the London Tube. He was one of them. So in the '60s, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, then a younger folkie, is playing the London Tube and he looks across the tracks at the other platform in the subway and there's a group of schoolchildren. And about 30 years later, somebody comes up to him and says, "Hey, I want to just shake your hand. You were playing, I was part of a school field trip. We were in the subway and I heard you playing. And by the way, my name is Mick Jagger." 

One of my favorite stories in the book, though, is Fantastic Negrito, who did not start as a busker. In fact, he started as a, he was going to be a star. He signed as Xavier to Interscope Records, and if you signed to Interscope, you were gonna be a star. Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Dr. Dre, the list goes on and on. 

Anyway, he managed not to become a star on Interscope Records, and they sent him back to his native Oakland from L.A. "Your services will not be needed here at Interscope any longer." So he went back to Oakland and became a pot farmer, which of course is legal here in California. He was farming pot, but just for the sense of purpose, he went out and played guitar. He wasn't looking for money. He was making his living selling cannabis.

He discovered that he was not Xavier, this kind of R &B, Prince, hip-hop kind of artist at all. He was a folk blues artist, so he changed his name to Fantastic Negrito. Mid-life — maybe not mid-life, maybe a little younger than mid-life, but certainly mid-career — he suddenly found out who he really was by busking. It gave him a really authentic, spontaneous voice. He didn't have an A&R director from Interscope saying, "Do this song, do it this way, do this arrangement." He did it his way and he has since won Grammys, Blues Music Awards, Americana Music Awards, et cetera.

I like the quote from Tim Easton about how he thinks instead of how some people think that busking should be more like professional concerts, he thinks that more concerts should be more like busking. It made me think about how the way we experience music has changed so much in the last 25 years. 

It's become so frictionless. You can access what feels like anything ever recorded with very little effort, and I think there's a growing sense that people are starting to respond more to music that is not that easily accessible. That when you're talking about something like busking, it's just a moment, and if you're not there for it, then you don't get to experience it. And when you experience it, it's still just a moment that you can't keep in your pocket. I think there's something elemental about that that people are responding to on a gut level.

Well, busking certainly does lend authenticity in the era of Spotify, you're right. You can find just about anything on Spotify or Bandcamp or Apple Music or so many other platforms right now. YouTube. And you can post them and share them and hopefully you're subscribing and hopefully the artist is making some money on that. Less money, of course, because it's not a delivered, dispatched, distributed product anymore. At a time like that, busking is even more authentic. But I'll go one step further to say that busking is saving downtown sections. They're giving people a reason to go to Main Street, to go to the mall, to go to the beach, you know, just to get out. They're giving something spontaneous and eye to eye and never the same twice. 

And of course, buskers nowadays don't just rely on spare change. In fact, who carries cash? What's cash? There are QR codes, there's Venmo, there's PayPal. You don't leave home without your iPhone. Just scan the barcode, you know, and pay the guy this way. So people are trying to make a living that way. And of course there's social media, where you can say, "Hey, I'm going to be out at the Morro Bay Farmer's Market or the San Luis Obispo Farmer's Market Friday at four. Come see me at the corner of Aguera and Broad Street," or something. 

Really, that's how this flourishes. You know, you would know that Arvella Grey played at the Englewood L-Stop train station in Chicago on Fridays, the Jazz Record Mart on Saturdays at 7 West Grand Avenue in downtown Chicago, and Maxwell Street on Sunday. He would have to be very sick for him not to be there, but he kept hours. So these people are professionals, and I really tried to treat them as professionals, not as some little quaint artifact, but as human beings who really didn't wait for booking agents or record deals or anything. They got out there and started playing. Maybe some good things happened to them. So many of them lived and died as buskers. Some probably went to the poorhouse as buskers. 

But others, like Billy Bragg and so many others — Billy Bragg now plays festivals and theaters and he's remained an activist all through it. But very often, he told me he'll play a festival and they'll say, "Mr. Bragg, you wanna do your sound check now?" And he says "I'll go up there and we'll work it out inside of a few seconds. It won't be perfect for the first few seconds, but let me just go out there and we'll do it." He takes busking to heart, even in his post-busking professional life as kind of a rock star.

It's the ultimate DIY. It's the ultimate taking your career into your own hands and really entertaining people who are starved for entertainment and starved for human interaction.