Drummer Rick Adams uses street performance to supplement his job and add flavor to his life and his listeners.
Saturdays are busy at Rent-A-Center in St. Petersburg. When customers make one of 116 weekly payments of $34 on a 56-inch Toshiba, they usually do it on Saturdays.
On this Saturday in early July, there are a dozen or so TVs on the wall playing music videos between Rent-A-Center commercials asking, “wouldn’t it be nice if everything in life came with a worry-free guarantee?”
As advertised, the atmosphere in the store is loose, casual. Employees know some of the regulars by name, and co-workers give each other plenty of good-natured ribbing to stay relaxed.
The job is a perfect fit for Rick Adams, 45, who’s about as laid-back as it gets. He only works at Rent-A-Center by day so he can afford to indulge his passion — playing drums for strangers on a downtown street corner — by night. He wants nothing more than to get through the daily grind to the nightly jam.
His boss, Sandra Szabo, notices Adams lingering as his lunch break starts, and asks if he’s punched out. When she learns that he hasn’t, which she knows already, she tells him she thinks he needs to manage his time better.
“Rick is a great multitasker when it comes to music,” Szabo teases. “Music, sports and women.”
“You see all the grief I get at work?” Adams responds. “That’s why I play music. I gotta go and beat it all out on the drums.”
The day before, though, Adams is chillin’ in baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt on the couch in his modest one bedroom apartment in Woodlawn. It’s Independence Day, and he’s enjoying a rare Friday off of work.
He’s having some green tea and relaxing to the sounds of saxophonist Sam Rivers coming from Pioneer speakers connected to a record player that’s surrounded by crates of vinyl LPs.
“I always try to keep something musical around me,” he explains.
He has a couple of hours to kill before heading out to the corner, so he’s barbecuing with a few friends: Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
He covers his shaved-bald head with a camouflage hat, steps out onto the balcony and sets a match to a bag of charcoal in the rusty Weber grill next to his apartment. As he waits for the coals to heat up, he talks about the importance of improvisation in his life, both as a jazz drummer and a salesman.
“The art of improvising adds color and taste,” Adams says. A life without improvisation is like eating the same thing over and over, he says, but “variety is all around us. We just gotta take advantage of it.”
Five hamburger patties sizzle as they hit the grill; Adams will have leftovers for days. He heads back inside, but the lock has slipped and he’s locked out with no spatula.
Like any good jazz musician, he improvises. He gets a flathead screwdriver and jimmies the lock open before the Andrew Hill record stops spinning.
“It’s a good thing I’m from New York,” he jokes as he gets the door open.
Adams moved from his native South Carolina to New York in the 1980s to study at Manhattan School of Music, but finances forced him out. He eventually moved to St. Petersburg and started jamming with local artists.
He played in a band called Destination Out for a few years during the ’90s, and self-produced a few records. The group did gigs in clubs, but Adams got fed up with working for club owners who could control the band because they signed the checks.
One club owner wanted the band to turn down the volume on its playing.
“I was like ‘let him know we’re not a radio,’” Adams recalls. “That’s the one thing that pisses musicians off.”
The band drifted apart as bands will do. But a few of the band members began playing outside the downtown Starbucks, with the store’s blessing, until, one by one, they moved on to other things.
Now Adams is the only one left on the corner.
The sun has begun its descent. A mass of people floods the streets of downtown St. Petersburg.
They carry chairs and push strollers and pull red wagons full of children. They smoke cigarettes and cigars and buy food from the vendors that have set up shop on the corners. They walk dogs big enough to ride or small enough to pocket. They whoosh by on bikes or skateboards or scooters.
Rick Adams pulls his mid-‘90s Volvo up to the curb at the intersection of Second Street South and First Avenue and pops the trunk. He unloads his Remo drum kit and deposits the pieces on the corner, where they will sit unattended until he’s parked his car.
People bump into people they know, talk a few minutes and go off to wherever they were going. Baby boomers dance to the hip-hop beats blasting from Jannus Landing across the intersection.
There are cops in squad cars or golf carts or on Segways. It’s the Fourth of July, and First Friday, so they’ve blocked off Central Avenue between Second Street and Third Street.
“Traffic was horrendous,” Adams says. “It took me much longer than it normally does to get out here.”
It is taking him longer than the five minutes it usually takes to get set up. This time he’s locked his keys in the Volvo. He’ll have to improvise again.
Adams goes into an ice cream shop down the block and returns with a wide hanger. Again he jimmies the lock and drives off to find a place to park.
He quickly returns. He’s found a parking spot, free no less. He’s been playing this corner for six years and knows about parking spaces that others don’t.
Within minutes, Adams is set up and drumming. He changes rhythms spontaneously and seamlessly. He calls it “interacting with the street.”
At nine o’clock, concussions from the fireworks display rip through the city, but Adams doesn’t miss a beat.
Women dance when they pass him.
Children stare at the drums. A group of teens gather on the corner and dance and curse and smoke. They wear tight pants and short dresses, and their hair is wild in a way that probably requires hours of effort.
None of them drop any money in the open drum case sitting next to Adams, which is fine; he doesn’t do it for the money.
On an average night Adams takes home about $25. On the Fourth of July, by the time Starbucks closes at midnight, he’s earned about double that.
He works at Rent-A-Center for the money; playing drums is his fix. “I’m okay financially,” Adams says. “I’m not rich but I have enough to take care of my necessities.”
In the past Adams has been a full-time musician, playing in clubs with various bands, and he says it’s a hard way to make a living. There’s no way to avoid working for “The Man.”
“I think it’s a trade-off either way. If you can find work that’s not too strenuous you can do what you want to do musically,” Adams says. “I’m just doing what works for me.”