Busking

“Yes, what is it? Is there a problem?”

A person slowly approached, drawing the murmuring audience’s attention.

An oversized Adidas windbreaker, black bootcut jeans, and a layered cut falling past her shoulders, its damp hair only roughly dried.

A girl exuding a decadent air of unknowable origins.

In truth, she had worn the best outfit she owned, but all she had were clothes meant for a young woman (which, technically, she was).

“Ah, no! You came from Mule, uh… right?”

“… I’ll just set up.”

Rather than cobbling together an explanation, Myeongjeon chose to start setting up.

The unexpectedly cold tone made the two men’s expressions stiffen, and murmurs rippled around them. Myeongjeon, however, continued setting up without a care.

The amp was set to a clean tone with just a little drive. On top of that, he had a wah pedal and a Fuzz Face. It wasn’t as complete as his old full rig, but it was more than enough for busking.

He would make up the rest with his hands.

Myeongjeon lightly clenched his hand, then tried forming a few chords. His mind knew the chords, but he could feel the muscles in his hand screaming at the unfamiliar movement.

‘Metal-style shredding and the like aren’t going to work.’

To draw attention in a place like this, shredding—Canon Rock, for example, which kids often played—would be ideal. But if he played something like that with these hands, he would surely manage only two or three songs.

“Um… student.”

“Yes.”

As he thought that and spent a moment loosening his hand, someone spoke to him from behind.

“By any chance… We were actually, uh… planning to play a song we know. Do you happen to know anything familiar?”

Even as he said that, Jaeshin thought, ‘Someone like this probably doesn’t know any old songs…’

He probably knew only truly popular songs—Stairway to Heaven or Smoke on the Water, for example—and was unlikely to know the song he and his younger brother had planned to play.

“Um, I know most of them, more or less…”

Myeongjeon, on the other hand, thought it was absurd. Even if he was an old man, he made a point of keeping up with current trends as a musician. BTS and Blackpink, for example.

With their thoughts slightly out of sync, Jaeshin spoke.

“Then, for now, why don’t you play something you know, student? If it’s a song we know, we’ll follow along.”

Jaeshin yielded a step.

“I don’t think there’s much I don’t know…”

‘You don’t know much? How ridiculous…’

Then came Suyeon’s mutter. The drummer found it absurd. There was nothing she didn’t know? Even he, who plainly looked older than her, had countless songs he didn’t know.

‘Come to think of it, it’s guitar, bass, and drums.’

Myeongjeon brushed his hair back and played a famous riff. Drrr-dun, dun, dun, dun-drrr, dun. Then came the drum fill that was supposed to follow.

But it didn’t.

Myeongjeon looked at the drummer in confusion. The drummer wore a flustered expression.

“You don’t know ‘Sunshine of Your Love’?”

“… Huh?”

“Then what about ‘White Room’?”

He didn’t seem to know that one either. Thinking, This is driving me crazy, Myeongjeon tilted his head back slightly. What was happening to the world? How could guys who went around saying they made music and played in bands not know…

“… Oh! Eric Clapton! Cream! That’s what you mean, right?”

“Cream?”

The bassist finally caught on, while the drummer still had no idea. Seeing Myeongjeon’s contemptuous expression, Hyeongtae thought:

‘Does she even have enough skill to make that face?’

Jaeshin had said there would be no problem, but Hyeongtae found that hard to believe. She had shown up with some secondhand Fender she’d picked up God-knows-where and a couple of junk effects pedals, cosplaying as a ‘rock-boomer high school girl.’ His antipathy rose on its own.

“Then do you know this one?”

“That one… I know.”

When he played the riff lightly, she answered that she knew it. Myeongjeon let out a deep sigh. Even the audience watching all of this had begun to grow hostile when…

A famous riff began.

This time, the drums and bass came in properly. After passing through the intro and scraping the pick across the strings once, Myeongjeon began playing with a clean tone—a song that anyone interested in music couldn’t fail to recognize.

A chorus of “Ooooh” spread through the crowd.

Was it because they hadn’t expected to hear this song? Or because so many people were more familiar with its acoustic version? Or simply because they were excited for the performance to begin?

He might never know why, even in this lifetime.

“Layla!!”

The song’s title burst from the audience.

Blues rock might not have been familiar to young people, but a classic was a classic. The crowd began stomping their feet to the lively melody and responding to the music.

Applause rang out from an unknown source. The clapping, echoing in time with the beat, multiplied in an instant.

People hurrying by, people idling with nothing to do, and people merely looking around for something interesting all began drifting toward the gathering crowd.

‘This is really something…’

It had truly been a long time since Myeongjeon had taken on vocals. Other than during album production, he had never sung. This was his first time standing before others as a vocalist.

But for his first time singing to be in a woman’s body… Feeling the irony, Myeongjeon entered the solo section.

As the drum fill ended, the guitar cried out in a clean tone.

It repeated bends and vibrato without pause, creating dynamic notes.

“Woooooo!!” the audience roared. The stomping grew louder, as did the applause. A few audience members even shouted things like “Whoo!” in fervent support.

‘I’ve never played an improvised solo like this before.’

As his fingers moved busily, Myeongjeon thought. He was the type who meticulously planned every performance. Solos that seemed like ad-libs and the techniques in the middle were all things he had planned in advance.

But in this session, for some reason, his hands were moving of their own accord. And in a very positive direction.

“This is insane!!”

Just as he finished a roughly one-minute solo with a variation on the main melody, a man’s booming voice rang out. Laughter erupted at the intensity of the reaction. The awkward responses they had shown before the song began were nowhere to be seen; everyone was simply waiting for the next song.

“Wow… Student, have you been playing guitar since you were, like, four?”

The bassist asked Myeongjeon immediately after the performance. Who knew? He couldn’t even remember when he had started playing…

“Not for very long.”

This body, ‘Suyeon,’ had first encountered a guitar that morning. Myeongjeon answered honestly.

But who could know the circumstances? To the drummer and bassist, it simply looked as though ‘Mr. Slowhand’ had descended.

* * *

People continued gathering. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the crowd swelled, pulled in by an unknown force.

“Next song! Next song! Next song!”

Most of the people gathered had no idea what songs had just been played—whether it was The Police’s Every Breath You Take or Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. Of course, some people recognized Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.

“You play guitar so well!!”

“You’re pretty, miss~!!”

“Look this way~!”

But it didn’t matter if they didn’t know what song it was. That wasn’t what mattered to the people here.

What mattered was that the guitarist right before their eyes was putting on a truly genius performance.

“Play Jimi Hendrix!!”

After the song ended, the atmosphere entered a brief lull… and the voice of a young boy broke the silence. It was followed by a burst of laughter. Judging by his age, he was probably too young to know even John Mayer, let alone Jimi Hendrix.

Hearing that voice, Myeongjeon asked the other two a question.

“Do you know any Hendrix songs?”

At that, the two of them felt as though a teacher were sorting out which students had failed to do their homework. Despite being much younger, she somehow created an atmosphere that made them start offering excuses.

“Uh… I know most of them, more or less.”

Unlike the bassist, the drummer answered, “I only know a few.” He rattled off a list of songs he knew. Myeongjeon named one of them and picked up his guitar.

And then Voodoo Child began to ring out.

The guitar sounded as though it were echoing inside a cave. As the wah-wah guitar switched to a fuzz tone, the drums entered in earnest.

“Whoa…”

The audience murmured in low voices, as though amazed. Once again, they had no idea what song it was. Since someone had shouted ‘Jimi Hendrix’ earlier, they could only assume it was one of his songs.

A psychedelic sound poured from the wah pedal. Just as the Fender amp’s volume began to numb the crowd, the vocals shoved their way in, blunt and heavy.

Dreamlike… but not sweet in the way a dream was. It was closer to confusion and numbness.

Some of the people sitting in front had already lost their grip on reality, while others clapped and waved their heads around as though their souls had left them.

And some felt as though their minds were expanding along with a faint sensation of floating. It was precisely the state psychedelic rock had pursued.

In that very state…

A razor-sharp solo attacked the half-hallucinating crowd.

It was like a splash of cold water over drunk people.

But what awaited them was another sound shrouded in purple haze.

“Wooooooaaaahhhh!”

The people who had been clapping and cheering only minutes earlier were now swaying drunkenly, intoxicated by the performance and showing symptoms of acute intoxication.

The song itself had already ended long ago.

But the performance did not.

From here on, it was time for an improvised performance that ran endlessly toward somewhere, without knowing where it was going.

There was only the bass and drums repeating the same rhythm, and the guitar delivering a performance that would never end.

One by one, people stood up and began twitching like zombies. Their movements looked like Hongdae at three in the morning on a Friday night.

“What the—?!”

Among the passersby who had been walking along without a thought, those who exercised a little pointless curiosity had already become psychedelic zombies and begun wandering around.

The zombies whose brains had already been eaten were caught between muscles crying, ‘Please make it stop…’ and hearts that desperately wanted it never to stop.

Yet there was one fact they must not forget.

Music had to end someday.

Because music created peace,

while public authorities created busking-zone reservation schedules.

By Hongdae’s solemn code, a drum fill announced the end. And with a sound of everything crashing to pieces,

“Thank you!”

The performance was over.