I'm with the Band

I’ve always wanted to say that.
And for the first time, while accompanying my street musician friends to their concert last Sunday morning, I could legitimately claim band affiliation. So maybe I was more of a half-ass groupie (I don’t own an album and I haven’t followed them on tour) than a bonafide musician, but either way I got to ride in the back of the car sandwiched between a Spanish cajon and a Turkish ud (instruments, not people).

I’d always imagined “with the band” to be more of the alternative rock variety. You know, skinny guys in 70’s aviator sunglasses and fading ironic t-shirts, like something with the word hero and a sub sandwich underneath. Maybe they’d even wear trucker hats a la Justin Timberlake copying Ashton Kutcher. All the way from New Kids on the Block to Paolo Nutini (with a young Bruce Springstein, Eddie Vedder, and Enrique Iglesias sandwiched somewhere in between), I’ve wanted to be the girl shaking the tambourine. Okay, none of these people had a girl shaking a tambourine (except maybe Bruce), and to be completely honest I’d rather be the lead singer of my own band. I’ve always had a thing for musicians, or rather, they’ve had a thing for me. The closest I came was having a boyfriend who was the lead singer of a band called “The Dads,” which seemed pretty cool at the time.

Instead, I was with two Turks, teachers by day and musicians by..Sunday morning. They’d recently returned from a street music tour of the Aegean coast, stopping in cities along the way before being chased out by police (no street music without a permit. Pretty hard core if you ask me.

There was no steep cover charge (free in fact), no exclusive club (a few park benches) and no hype (the concert was attended by lots of old people and little kids. Their music is part world beats, part political, part a vehicle for social change. I kind of sort of felt transported back to my college days when I really felt like I could make a difference. I tried to decipher the lyrics as best I could. They made us clap and sing along, so I did, although I had no idea what I was saying. I reveled in the universal language of music, and thought about how you never know which fantasies will come true, even in a small unexpected way.