Sound of the streets
Toronto’s homeless musicians who sing like stars get the spotlight in new documentary
Inside Spadina station, Katt C. Budd sings Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan covers over the squealing subway rails. “Somebody hates it, somebody loves it,” she shrugs. “It goes from zero to 10 every day.”
Commuter critics don’t rattle her. Budd has enough anxiety trying to maintain shelter for herself and Flipper, her huskyshepherd pup. The 29-year-old has been homeless off and on for years, her two children living with their father and his family.
There might not be a lot to celebrate about homelessness, but Budd will say this: It’s made her a wicked musician. In addition to subway busking, she sings with her “folk punk” band Stinkbox.
“The better you are, the more money you make,” she says, brushing a lock of her purple hair, blond at the root, back off her face. “It’s kind of like a survival instinct.”
Lorraine Segato, the singer, songwriter and activist famous for her 1983 Parachute Club hit “Rise Up,” calls Budd’s fearlessness “extraordinary.”
“I have to go to a psychological place to sing where I allow myself to be vulnera- ble, to be open,” she says. “I’m not one of these people who lives to perform. I’m never going to whip out a guitar at a kitchen jam and go ‘WOOOOO! Let’s sing along!’ ”
She met Budd through the documentary Lowdown Tracks, Shelley Saywell’s portrait of remarkably talented homeless musicians in Toronto. After premiering at Hot Docs in April, where it was the runner-up for the audience award, it will have its broadcast debut at 9 p.m. on Saturday on TVO.
“This is a chronic condition,” says Saywell, whose 2000 documentary about “honour killings” in Jordan and the West Bank, Crimes of Honour, won an Emmy. “It’s a condition that happens when people are vulnerable. It’s very difficult to get out of and it’s very easy to get back into.” Though Budd had found a home during the two years of filming Lowdown Tracks, she will have to move again Dec. 31. Budd says she was house-sitting for a friend whose parents are hospitalized, but someone in her building got her evicted for subletting the apartment illegally.
“They got (my friend) kicked out and me kicked out in one stroke,” she says. “I have two kids, his mother is on her deathbed, and his father is in the hospital too. I had nowhere to go. He said, ‘I need someone to watch my house. Let’s do this.’ I don’t understand why that can’t happen!” She laughs. “Not allowed!”
“I’m so shocked that the homeless or unsheltered people that we’ve met are not angrier than they are,” says Segato. “Every direction that they turn, a door closes because of some bureaucratic this or that. Everywhere these folks turn there’s a door that’s shut that has to do with a law that was made up by people that don’t live the experience of these people on the street.”
The documentary culminates with a studio session between these street-cor- ner musicians, Segato and a five-piece band. For Segato, it was the pinnacle of an experience that encouraged her to let down her own barriers as an artist.
“I learned so much from these people in terms of how open they were with us,” she says.
“It reminded me that I needed to be more open in the world. The judgment that I would not want them to endure, I need not be judging myself for the same reasons.”