They’re Singing in the Streets : Homeless Find Therapy in Music

It’s hardly your mainstream musical group, this band of 20 singers, a keyboard player and the fellow playing the bongo that performed Sunday at Balboa Park.

One of their songs, “Dark Night,” admonishes the audience, “Don’t act like you don’t see me.” Another, “One World,” rallies their peers to form a political voice.

The group is called Curbside Singers, and that’s just a partial clue to who they are: street people. To one degree or another, they’re also mentally ill.

Some have been scarred by drugs. Others were frazzled in Vietnam. A few are schizophrenic. Some are manic depressive. But on Sunday, they were all musicians, and their director called them nothing short of magical, and miraculous.

“One was so severely schizophrenic that he didn’t make verbal contact for three years when we first encountered him,” said Kerry Warren, himself a semi-professional musician who is office manager of the Friend to Friend Clubhouse, a downtown San Diego day center for mentally ill homeless people.

“But one day after we formed the group, he just came in and stood with the chorus. Then, one day, he asked if he could sing with us. It was the first word he ever said to us. Now he’s singing solo. We can’t shut him up.”

Said Warren of his musical misfits, “There’s some sort of magic going on with them. We can’t put our finger on it, but we know it’s there. These are people who weren’t taking care of themselves. They had no self-esteem. Now they’re cleaning themselves up, they’re taking their medicines, and they have dignity. These were

people who use to blow off everything in their lives but now they’re showing up two or three times a week for music practice.”

They’re people like Jason Snyder, a 21-year-old who normally would sleep in his mother’s back yard--because she won’t let him inside--if he can’t scrape enough money together for a motel room. He says he is manic depressive.

“I’m a recovering addict. Crystal meth (methamphetamine). But now music keeps me on a natural high. This group keeps me going. It makes me believe in myself,” Snyder said.

He still fights depression, though. It’s born out of irony.

“I’m out here singing, playing the role on stage of a homeless person in some of the songs,” he said. “But, I’m stuck in that role, in real life. I am homeless. It can get depressing.”

Indeed, when the group was through performing Sunday, most of them simply stayed at the park--where they live in assorted nooks and crannies.

“For all intents and purposes, these people are performing in their own living room,” said Sharon Everson, who use to be the executive director of the Friend to Friend Clubhouse when the Curbside Singers were formed two years ago, and remains a volunteer helper.

“When I watch them perform, I’m not at all surprised by their talent. But I’m moved by them, and affirmed. I’ve been in the (mental illness) field for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this in California.

“They are their own solution. They have found it within themselves, through music. There are no medical models that allow for that,” she said.

The Friend to Friend Clubhouse is a nonprofit program sponsored by Episcopal Community Services, providing laundry and kitchen facilities, personal lockers and other necessities to downtown’s mentally ill homeless people. It’s goal is to give people some of the tools and motivation to help themselves better their condition.

“We want them to become their own advocates,” Everson said. “When they come in to us, we don’t ask them what they need. We say, ‘What do you have for us? What do you have to share? Because, we assume they are worthwhile as soon as they walk through the door.”

Warren was initially a volunteer at the program, offering to spend time every week with one homeless man “so he could have fellowship with someone besides another homeless person,” Warren said.

He noticed an interest in music among the people he was encountering, so one day two years ago he brought in his keyboard. In time, as many as 20 people were meeting with him after work to practice singing. Then, practices were held two days a week. Then, three days a week. And, somewhat to his delight and amazement, these people who might otherwise have trouble functioning in a society that has little use for them, were showing up like clockwork, committed to learning more music.

So committed, in fact, that they were missing free dinners offered at downtown soup kitchens. In time, volunteers would bring food over to the Friend to Friend Clubhouse, to feed these people after their music practice.

Warren gets wide-eyes and grins broadly as he recalls the growing success story of the Curbside Singers. They performed earlier this year at the National Mayor’s Convention at Seaport Village.

“All we ask of them is that they be committed and enthusiastic,” he said. “We’re real serious about this. And these people are incredible. They’re taking the risk to sing in front of a microphone about something they believe in.”

A 19-year-old who called herself Susie joined the singers two months ago. “It gives me something to do,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d just stay home all day at a friend’s house.”

Sharon said she was 40 and probably the group’s oldest member. A manic depressive who’s been off of crack cocaine for 74 days, Sharon says she’s now “very high, very happy. They tell me I sing really well.”

Larry, 35, distinguished by his crew cut and buck teeth, said his role in the Curbside Singers has “given me a sense of self-worth, that I can accomplish something with my life. Homeless people and mentally ill people are worthwhile people, you know.”

Larry wrote his own rap song:

“Slam Jam the homeless man. I did a tour of duty in Vietnam. I was one lean, mean killing machine. I had a four-wheel drive and an M-16 . . . “

He performed his solo on Sunday, tapping his feet on the stage floor in a rhythm that was nothing close to the keyboard’s percussion beat. And when he finished and the keyboardist kept playing, Larry bowed to the audience, and bowed again, and bowed a third time, until finally the music stopped.

Another song, written by musical director Warren and called “Dark Night,” started with one of the troupe’s members shouting out different names used to describe homeless people. “Hobo. Bum. White trash. Case number.” The chorus yelled back, “Invisible!” Then the one singer answered, “Homeless? Let’s just say I’m real outdoorsy.”

“Something to Carry Me Home” is a song about a schizophrenic who leaves his home for San Diego’s warmth, runs low on his medication and gets homesick, only to learn that his family has since moved and left no forwarding address or phone number. This man sleeps by day and flies a kite at night, hoping it will somehow carry him home.

As the rest of the troupe sings the lyrics, one of the men unabashedly performs an interpretive modern dance to accompany the song, caressing his newsprint kite and crying in anguish when he realizes he has no hope of returning home.

“I’m Dreaming” goes: “If I had one more chance to make it home, you’d still be there to greet me, girl. I don’t want to be dreaming. I don’t want to be dreaming.”

By most appearances, Sunday’s performance went well and with virtually no glitches. That fact was itself an accomplishment.

“These performances can be real logistics nightmares,” said Everson. “Until show time, you never know if one of them is going to show up, or be in a hospital, or in jail. For every solo part, you’ve got to have a backup singer.”

For his part, Warren is nervous with each performance, like a director at the premier of a new Broadway musical.

“Don’t review us too harshly,” he asked after Sunday’s show. “This was the first of the new season.”