An employee of Zeitgeist Gallery, which hosts local performances in addition to displaying artwork, says her boss let her off work early so she could attend the meeting. A young woman standing at the edge of the room describes herself as a commuter who has come to offer her support.
Jane Beal, director of community arts at the Cambridge Arts Council, explains that her organization has already undertaken efforts to find an alternative to the new policy.
Moving briskly through the history of Boston street performance—dwelling fondly on the halcyon days of the Music Under Boston program, which promoted subway performance until 1986—Baird began discussing the terms of the new Subway Performers Program, describing the document as “full of contradictions and slander.”
The new regulations ban electronic instruments, “trumpets or trumpet-like instruments,” and drums to ensure that subway announcements can be heard. They were established “to promote safety by establishing procedures that ensure a well-managed and coordinated Subway Performers Program,” according to the MBTA. The rules also contain a stipulation suggesting that other instruments can be banned at the MBTA’s discretion—a clause that many musicians feared could quell their performance opportunities still further.
“It’s not just about amplification, it’s about outright censorship,” Baird says. “It’s not just a musicians’ issue.”
Wagging his finger vigorously in his excitement, he discusses plans to organize efforts to disprove the MBTA’s acoustical suppositions.
“We have to prove them wrong with sound engineers and decibel levels,” he says.
The MBTA gains its authority to enforce rules in the subway stations because of its legal status as the company’s property—a qualification Baird argues is not practically sound.
“How many people in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Emoryville, and Quincy think the T is private property?” he asks. “They’re trying to treat you as employees and charge you admission.”
After an hour of discussion in the Middle East bar, several of the guests move to the establishment’s downstairs club, a dimly lit dance floor with hanging stage lights that smells heavily of stale beer. There, leaders try to coordinate different facets of the campaign: media coverage, public activism, and legal work. Baird reports that he is meeting with the ACLU the following day.
Still, there is a possibility that, with only a handful of business days left before the regulations go into effect, musicians could be turned out of their usual venues.
But Baird has a backup plan should their campaign or an injunction prove unsuccessful.
“Let’s get every college student, every musician, every Berklee student to grab a saxophone and sit-in at Park Street” he says.
Still, the musicians are restless.
Peter Podobry, known to many Harvard Square pedestrians for his amplified guitar stylings in front of Au Bon Pain during warm summer evenings, shakes his head while talking with another musician in his native Russian. He fears the new regulations may force him into another career.
“I’m not rich, but it’s a very good living I get from this operation,” he says. “Next, I’ll just pray.”
Podobry says he was once arrested for playing on Newbury Street—an experience that several of the event’s attendees share.
Jonathan Fixler, who plays the electric guitar in the Alewife Station, says he has been contending with prejudice for years. He blames unfair accusations for the MBTA’s new policy banning electronic instruments on the belief that they prevent passengers from hearing P.A. announcements in the subway stations.
“In all the time I’ve been working in Alewife Station, you can’t hear what they’re saying anyway,” says Fixler, who wears an overcoat and broad-brimmed hat even in the stuffy quarters of the Middle East cafe. “They could just have new P.A.’s in the station and solve the problem right there.”
—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.