Posted in

Keith Richards sat on a Dublin pavement next to a homeless musician — 2 hours later, 400 showed up

by Bien Tap Vien•

Keith Richards sat on a Dublin pavement next to a homeless musician — 2 hours later, 400 showed up

"
"

Declan Byrne had been playing guitar on Grafton Street for 3 years. He played for coins. He played in rain and in cold and on the days when nobody stopped and the case stayed empty for 2 hours at a stretch. He played because it was the only thing he had that was entirely his. On a Tuesday evening in July 1989, he was midway through a song when the man walking past him stopped.

Most people who stopped dropped a coin. This man crouched down beside the open case, looked at the guitar, and said, “Where did you learn to bend a note like that?” Grafton Street in Dublin runs from St. Stephen’s Green in the South to the edge of Temple Bar in the North, a pedestrianized strip of shops and restaurants and foot traffic that has been one of the city’s main commercial arteries since the 18th century.

By 1989, it had become one of the better streets in Europe to busk on, enough foot traffic to generate a reasonable income on a good day, enough cultural sympathy for street music that the council had never seriously attempted to clear it, and an acoustic environment created by the buildings on either side that did something generous to the sound of a guitar played without amplification.

Musicians came from across Ireland to play it. Some of them had been playing it for decades. Declan Byrne had arrived in Dublin from County Clare in 1986 at the age of 22 with a guitar he had owned since he was 16 and no clear plan beyond the understanding that Clare could not hold him and Dublin might.

He had found work intermittently, building sites, kitchen work, a 3-month stretch in a warehouse in Tallaght that paid regularly and drove him slowly out of his mind. The guitar had been the constant. He played it in whatever room he was renting. He played it in pubs that would let him set up in a corner. He started playing Grafton Street in the spring of 1986 and discovered that the street paid better than the warehouse and required less of the parts of himself that he needed for other things.

By 1989, Declan was sleeping rough some nights. Not every night. He had a sad tune, the mass in two that urban air. He had a network of floors and sofas that he moved between with the practiced logistics of someone who has learned to occupy space without requiring much of it.

But some nights the network was full or unavailable or Declan had simply run out of the social energy required to ask and on those nights he slept in doorways. He was thin. His guitar had a replaced tuning peg on the B string that never held quite right and required constant adjustment. His case had a photograph of his mother taped inside the lid and beside it a set list written in blue Biro that he updated every few weeks as the repertoire shifted.

He ate when the case was full and skipped meals when it was not. He knew which cafes on Grafton Street would give him a cup of tea if he came in after the lunch rush when they were quiet and the staff were in the mood to be generous. He knew which doorways on the side streets off the main strip were sheltered enough to sleep in when the weather came in from the west which it did regularly in Dublin regardless of the season.

He had developed a particular relationship with a city that comes from knowing it at ground level and at night. The relationship of someone who has no buffer between themselves and the place who cannot retreat from it into comfort at the end of the day. Dublin was the texture under his feet and the sound of rain on stone and the smell of the Liffey and the specific light of a July evening on Grafton Street when the tourist traffic thinned and the regulars came out and the city became briefly and recognizably itself. He was 25 years old

and he could play. This was not a small thing. Grafton Street in 1989 had no shortage of musicians who could play competently, people who had learned their chords and their repertoire and could deliver a recognizable version of a song with enough accuracy to satisfy a passing audience. Declan could do something different.

He had developed in nine years of playing without formal instruction a style that had absorbed the traditional Irish music he had grown up with and the American blues records he had found in a second-hand shop in Ennis at 15 and the soul music he had heard on the radio and processed in a way that combined all three into something that was identifiably his own.

He bent notes the way blues players bent notes, but with a vocal quality that came from somewhere else, from Sean Knowles singing, from the specific way melody moves in traditional Irish music, from something in the relationship between his left hand and the string that no teacher had given him because no teacher had been present.

Most people walking past on Grafton Street did not consciously register the difference between what Declan was doing and what the other musicians were doing. They felt it without naming it. The case filled faster when Declan played than when the people on either side of him played. He did not know why. He had never thought about it analytically.

He just played. Keith Richards was in Dublin for the Steel Wheels tour. The Rolling Stones were playing RDS Arena the following evening, a sold-out show that the Dublin press had been covering for 3 weeks with the specific excitement of a city that took its relationship with rock and roll seriously. Keith had completed the afternoon sound check and had 2 hours before the tour schedule required him anywhere.

He had done what he usually did with free time in a city he liked. He had walked out of the hotel without telling anyone where he was going and headed in a direction that seemed interesting. He was walking north on Grafton Street moving at the unhurried pace of a man who has nowhere to be for 2 hours and is using them well when he heard Declan Byrne playing 40 ft ahead of him.

Keith Richards had heard 10,000 street musicians in 50 years of walking through cities. He had a finely calibrated internal filter for the difference between competent and interesting and that filter operated automatically the way all deeply trained perception operates below the level of conscious decision. He heard Declan’s playing register in the filter and passed it without stopping.

He had passed a hundred musicians on a hundred streets in the past month alone. The tour had taken him through cities where music was on every corner, London, Paris, Amsterdam, cities that had been producing street musicians for generations. His filter had processed all of them without interrupting his forward motion. Then Declan bent a note.

It was the kind of note that exists at the intersection of technique and instinct, the place where a player has learned enough that the learning disappears and what remains is just the music moving through them in the most direct available path. Keith Richards had been chasing that intersection his entire career.

He recognized it instantly when he heard it, the way you recognize a language you grew up speaking even when you have not heard it for years. It was a specific note in the bridge of a song, not a song Keith recognized, something original. Bent a quarter tone past where most players would have stopped and held there for a fraction longer than the rhythm strictly required.

Read More