“It wasn’t him who went over the hill. It was the people with their shallowness and nitpicking,” he says. “You shouldn’t judge a man like that. You should look at the man in an overall way... That’s the way I thought of him.”

Though more than 20 years his junior, Rlickman impressed the older man with stories about the places he had been and his many adventures.

“He taught me the street smart stuff,” Hamill says.

And the first lesson of street smarts was that “the masses are asses.”

“In other words, he could go up to them and get money from them like that,” Hamill explains, snapping his fingers. “They don’t know how to say no. They don’t have the integrity... He taught me how easy it is to exploit the masses.”

In return, the singer befriended the clown. When Rlickman was looking for a new place to stay, Hamill even found him a low-rent basement room through a landlord he knew in Allston.

Packing up a little before 6 p.m. Tuesday, Hamill stands on Brattle Square in his sandals, green pants and faded red and orange striped shirt, his pitch pipe tied around his neck with fishing line.

Mention of Perri the Hobo has reminded him of something, and he grabs a black leather pouch off the back of his bicycle.

“I got it right here,” he says, opening the bag and leafing through his well-worn sheet music. “I just sang it.”

He arrives at a 1940s tune called “Nature Boy” that was first made famous by Nat King Cole. The song reminds him of Rlickman because the clown’s stay had been “short and sweet.”

There was a boy

A very strange enchanted boy

They say he wandered very far, very far

Over land and sea,

A little shy and sad of eye