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Performer Larry Hunt lays down his summer sounds
Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco -- "Summertime," the tenor sax man plays, "and the livin' is easy."
And summertime is the best time of year for Larry Hunt, who plays Powell Street in San Francisco -- literally -- for a living.
Hunt plays the drums -- plastic buckets, really -- does a riff on a street sign, a garbage can, a light pole, the cable car tracks, runs his drumsticks over the bricks in the street. For a quick break, he pours some lighter fluid on a drumstick and plays the drums with fiery sticks, and then eats the fire, big flames whooshing around his face the way they used to do in the county fair sideshows.
The audience is biggest in summer, with crowds on the east side of Powell --
shoppers, businesspeople fresh off BART and tourists waiting in line for the cable cars, shivering in the summer fog.
He has to play loud enough to make it over the competition from the sounds of the city: sirens, car horns, the rumble of the cable cars, the clang of the cable car bells, the cooing of dilapidated pigeons, exhortations of street preachers, crazies and bums, crowds ebbing and flowing past him, talking, yelling, singing.
Hunt pounds out his music on 11 plastic buckets that used to hold industrial products, a tin pot he found in the trash, a couple of cowbells and whatever the street gives him, including the pavement itself.
He's one of a number of street entertainers around Powell and Market. Sometimes it's just him,
sometimes there are two or three. It depends.
Hunt has some admirers. Other people hate him and call the cops. Most people walk right by
.
It's a living.
"I'm a professional musician," Hunt said. "I come to the street every day and make an honest
living. I'm my own boss. This is me."
He says he makes $75 some days, slow days, when it's raining, maybe $200 on good days
. He lives in a Sixth Street hotel with his lady. It's not lavish - - $40 a night, up front -- but it
will do. "I'm saving my money," he said. "I'm going to be a daddy."
Being a father is a first for the 43-year-old Hunt, who has been knocking around the country and playing his drums for years. He's put the news on his cardboard sign, asking for donations, and thinking about parenthood.
"I don't know much about it," he said, "except that babies use a lot of diapers, so I'm stocking up. I have a couple of cases already."
Planning ahead is not what street musicians do. Sometimes Hunt plays at Ellis and Market streets in the evenings, under the California Savings Bank clock with some others: the New Generation Funk Band.
Occasionally, he gets a party gig. Sometimes other musicians, such as tenor sax man Seth Trachy, who's only 19, join him on Powell Street.
For a while, Hunt worked with Edward Jackson, a tap dancer. "We called ourselves the Beat With the Feet," Hunt said.
Jackson became a solo act, and Hunt went his own way, too, adding the fire- eating bit to make his performance a little different.
He first learned to eat fire in North Carolina, years ago. It looks dangerous, but he's careful, and the fire doesn't burn, as long as he doesn't drink alcohol (think brandy flambe) and uses lighter fluid for fuel. He used gasoline once. Never again.
Hunt was born in Kansas, where his father was an Army sergeant. He played the drums since he was 4, went in the Army and the Job Corps, played in the East with some of the big musicians, drifted west, stayed in Richmond for a while, lived on the streets of San Francisco. "I've seen a lot," he said. For almost three years, he's been playing for a living in downtown San Francisco.
In a city where music is all over, in the subway and on the street corners, Hunt is a kind of celebrity.
"He's very good, especially today," said Mike Weber, a cable car conductor who has seen them all in his long career.
"I'm here listening and jazzing with him," said a man named Daryl. "No last name," he added. "I work retail around here."
Retail folks don't much like street folks. "But Larry, he has passion and love," Daryl said. "He's here for the love of music."
Greg Tully, who runs a cafe in Antioch, sat in with Hunt the other afternoon, taking the spare drumsticks and playing. Tully is a musician himself. He's opening a club in Antioch, where a lot of musicians end up, he said. He says he'll book Hunt.
"Most people I've met who become good musicians come up from the streets," Tully said, "It's the intersection of the arts, you know? It's not what you play, it's how you play it."
He leaned forward, listening to Hunt and the sax man riff into "Summertime, " rolling the sounds over the bells and sirens, picking up the tune and moving with it, like a symphony of the streets. All the time Hunt was smiling a kind of megawatt smile you can't get from PG&E.
Earlier, Bill Hamilton, a Calistoga Water delivery man, came by, wheeling a dozen big containers of bottled water down Powell on an office delivery. He thinks the world of Larry Hunt and his act.
"That's why you come to San Francisco," he said.
E-mail Carl Nolte at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 11 Chronicle SectionsDatebookCommentarySportsNewsBusiness
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Websites of Homer D. Klong
Homeless Chamber Music Society
How dramatic!
Huh, what's that? 'Street preachers, crazies and bums.....'? Are these lumped together as one unit, Mr. Nolte?
Good showmanship. I mean, he could probably afford a
decent drum set (and maybe he owns one), but if the plastic tubs work, so much the better.
Powell and Market is prime turf,
of course, a place for street musicians who really have their act together.
All right!! That's the philosophy of the Homeless Chamber
Music Society in a nutshell!!
That's the way a homeless musician should view himself!!
Wow! That's good money, huh! I went over there to the Powell and Market turnaround last Sunday and saw this guy playing with another drummer. He definitely keeps a nice rhythm.
Not lavish! No kidding? I'd rather sleep in the woods in Oakland than a $40 hotel room in San Francisco! But then this guy has responsibilities!
The Correspondence of the Apostle Paul and the Philosopher Seneca
The Slavonic Josephus---Descriptions of Christ and John the Baptist
Dionysius the Areopagite--Pseudo or Not (here comes Klong)
