The 17 pianos sprinkled along the 16th Street Mall attract talented tourists playing Mozart, little kids tapping away at “Chopsticks” and downtown workers on lunch break taking stabs at Billy Joel tunes.
And then there are the regulars, the men and women, many homeless, who plant a cup and hope their songs persuade passers-by to open their wallets.
They make music for money but also, simply, because they can. They are musicians without instruments. Playing is at least one way of escaping from a daily grind fraught with headache and peril.
“It’s like riding a wave,” said Nick Juele, 55, sitting before a brightly painted upright piano where Arapahoe Street meets the mall. “The wave is water. Substitute sound, and you have a sound wave. You don’t use a surfboard — you use your brain.”
He keeps his long gray hair in a ponytail so loose that loops of it fall across his cheeks and his dark, skinny, rectangular glasses. When he sits at the keyboard, his sneakers work the pedals, his fingers move quickly, and he focuses on something unseen in space: He loses himself to the music.
Juele, who usually lives in Nederland or stays with friends in other Front Range towns, has worked in the music business all his life, beginning in parochial school in Philadelphia, where a nun taught him to play the piano. Then his uncle, a violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, showed him more, including the importance of practice and attention to technique.
He spent more than a decade tuning and repairing pianos in New York, he said. He has played in several bands, and in Boulder he often works as a busker, playing his guitar for change.
But last year, his $1,000 guitar was stolen from beside him as he napped. Without his guitar — without some way to make music — he feels bereft.
So he comes to Denver, where the pianos are for the taking, and he cranks out classic rock and songs he has composed. He makes about $20 a day in tips.
As he plays, people often stand beside him, smiling. They might clap when he finishes. Some of them stuff bills into his plastic cup.
“Music is my wife — that’s what I tell people,” he said. “It’s like a woman. Give her love, and she’ll love you back.”
There’s lots of love downtown. The Downtown Denver Partnership began placing pianos along the mall in late 2009, said spokesperson Sarah Neumann. All of the instruments were donated; the partnership received many of them just by asking on Craigslist. They started with eight pianos but grew the roster to the current 17. All of them are painted to match the seasons by local artists. At night, partnership employees cover them with tarps and lock them.
Neumann said the establishment of “regulars” like Juele excites the partnership; they refer to regulars as “mall stars.”
Making it personal
Clell Golding, 52, is a mall star who usually plays the same white-with- painted-strawberries piano near the mall’s intersection with Glenarm Place.
He has been homeless for a few years, but for the past month he has been living at Samaritan House, a nights-only place that gives residents at least some degree of stability while they hunt for jobs and apartments.
Golding — with John Lennon spectacles and short salt-and-pepper hair and a trim build — speaks with great articulation, almost professorially, about his predicament, about life on the streets and about playing music.
He plays sad songs, for the most part, the lyrics of which — “Daniel,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and so on — he keeps in a stack of paper attached to a piece of cardboard with clips. When he launches into the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man,” the original’s uptempo beat is vanquished, replaced with something much more heartfelt and somber. Something personal.
“When you are a lifelong alcoholic, you burn up things like you can’t believe,” he said. “It’s so hard to get things done. Alcohol had me bad.”
He has been sober, for the most part, for six years, but his resume — decades of different sorts of mechanical and handyman work (as well as playing music in bands) — doesn’t always sing to potential employers. Since he lost his last full-time job two years ago, doing maintenance for a business near the state Capitol, he has sent out more than 700 resumes. Only a few have turned into interviews; none has brought him work.
He comes to the mall most days, selecting the Glenarm Place piano because it’s a spinet model — the low profile lets him make better eye contact with pedestrians — and because July’s torrential afternoon rains made many of the mall’s pianos inoperable, with stuck keys. The piano he favors, he said, suffered less than most. (The damaged pianos are being fixed, said partnership spokeswoman Neumann.)
Golding grew up in a musical family. His father played the guitar and sang, and showed Golding as a boy where to place his fingers and how to make chords. When his father wasn’t home, Golding would sneak into his closet, withdraw the guitar, and play until his mother gently scolded him. Eventually, they bought him one of his own.
Soon, he and friends in Phoenix had formed a band, setting up speakers and a drum set in neighborhood garages and playing songs by the Monkees and other ’60s groups.
“The little kids would be gathered around while we would be wailing,” he said. “We’d say, ‘Go home to your moms and get nickels and pennies or we won’t play anymore.’ And they would run along and come back with change. We’d go out and buy Hostess Twinkies and baseball cards.”
He believes music is in his DNA, that it’s so integral to his sense of self that without it, he would be lost.
This hasn’t always been a blessing.
Being musical “has its heaven and has its hell,” he said. “It’s tough on relationships. It especially hurts when a girlfriend says, ‘Why don’t you get a real job?’ “
At that, he said, “I’m going to play one for me.” As people filed by in stifling afternoon heat, he placed his hands on the keyboard and began singing one of his sad songs.
“Desperado,” he said quietly, his gaze lifted up. “Why don’t you come to your senses?”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
