Why is my last name Bermúdez? My father used to say that our old ancestors were pirates near Bermuda! I’m from Madrid. My family moved to Benalmádena, not far from here, when I was about 12. I’m 30 now. My dad was born in New York City and moved here when he was 2 years old, but then he went to the US to study at Emerson College for a year or two and began working in concerts and on the road, which is where he made most of his experience. He was a roadie. My dad used to run concerts. He did technical stuff - sound and lights for concerts. He was on the Bon Jovi tour, with Motorhead, Black and Blue tour of Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult. He played the electric guitar and had a band when he was younger, but he never talked much about it. My dad came back to Spain in the ’80s and got a lot of work in Spanish TV and concerts. He got a job as the director of the municipal theater in Benalmádena. We were only 7 years out of the dictatorship and people had no clue. My dad came and knew how to do things that people didn’t know how to do. My mom came from the north of Spain, Cantabria. They met in Madrid. My mom studied piano and singing in conservatory. I never heard her play, and she died, so I never will. Maybe she went to conservatory because back then maybe it was an appropriate thing for a girl to do. She died last year.

I started playing guitar when I was 16 or 17 years old. The guitar I play now was gifted from my dad then. I always liked music, and my dad always played a lot of music at home. I grew up listening to David Bowie, Prince and stuff like that. In fact, I would say I grew up a little separated from the Spanish music because we had so much American music in the house. I was always interested in heavy metal. One day, I was alone at home with my sister, and I found a guitar in a case in my dad’s closet. It had like 3 strings, rusted to hell. I asked my father for lessons. At first, he was negative and said, “You’re going to break it. It’s a very expensive guitar.” It only had three strings, and I know Jimmy Hendrix learned how to play with two strings, but I didn’t have the patience. I wanted to play, so I had to take the train to another town to find a music shop to buy some strings to be able to play. My dad gave me some bullshit exercises on the fret board, which wasn’t the worst but was boring as hell. I think he was trying to demotivate me. He had many worries. This was 2009/2010. The recession was in full force and my dad lost his job. We had to move to a worse house.

Basically, I taught myself. I would look up videos on YouTube, just tutorials. I learned how to read tablature and try to make the sounds with my hands on the guitar. I don’t sing much, and I can’t sing and play. I can try to sing, or I can try to play, but I can’t do both at the same time.

In high school, I tried to form a band, but everyone had a fuckin’ guitar! So, we didn’t really have a band. I tried to play with some people, but I was more serious than them. We were a lot into metal and heavier than metal, but I had my own direction. I was more into classical metal. Back then, the softest stuff I would listen to was Metallica. If I want to go to sleep, I listened to Metallica!

Initially, I wanted to be a programmer for video games, but my parents didn’t believe in video games. They thought it was a waste of time. My mom convinced me to become a lawyer. My second option was studying philosophy and becoming a teacher. My whole motivation for originally wanting to be a teacher was I had good teachers who helped me out in a rough time in my life. I wanted to be one of these great teachers, but I don’t have the patience. I don’t have the emotional resilience. Being a teacher is complicated.

Finally, I had some problems when I was 17. My whole life went to shit. My parents separated. My dad left the country. My mother was never the most stable person, and she was spiraling out of control. There were some violent episodes, and I was left here on my own. The court ordered that she couldn’t live with us. With the money I got from the state for studying for university, like 2000 Euros, I tried to make do with that. I went to the University of Málaga to study philosophy because the law school positions filled very quickly, and it didn’t go well. The country was completely fucked economically. I couldn’t find a job. I rented an apartment, and I couldn’t pay the rent. I would play a little guitar for fun, but I couldn’t imagine it would be a way of life like the way I do it now.

I studied for almost three years, but it was very fraught, and I didn’t finish. I had to try to find some work and make money. And I had some psychological problems from being abandoned. I have like 8 or 9 uncles, and nobody cared. That shit marked me, and I knew then that I was alone.

I didn’t have a job. I had to leave university basically because of money. I would have stayed if I had money. I made money to pay my rent during school basically selling weed and using some of the state money that I got. And then without that money, I lived and slept on the street. I never touched hard drugs. All my mom’s brothers had problems with heroin, and she had friends that died from it and AIDS, so this was never a problem for me. I lived on the street in Málaga for 6 months. I got a job, but it was far away, and I had to go by bus. I worked in a restaurant as the guy who talks to passersby and shows them the menu to bring them in. And I spoke English, but the money was terrible. Forty hours a week for maybe 500 Euros a month. I had to quit. It was crazy. That was the situation back in 2011. The recession was horrible here.

The guitar came back in this time. I even pawned it for money because I had nothing. And then I met a friend from high school who was working the night shift in a hotel as a receptionist. He told me, “We have some people here like volunteer workers doing some cleaning and stay here for the bed and we give them breakfast as well.” I said, “Oh, I would like to get into that program.” So, he got me in and staying there I met a classical guitarist, a Belgian guy named Jean Luc. He actually plays right around the corner here. He showed me what he did and said he could make some good money. And I met another guy who was a juggler. He used the contact ball. You know the crystal ball that doesn’t move but he moves around the ball? These two people told me, “Well, you play the guitar. Take the guitar and go out and play. You never know. You might make some money.” I had a cheap amp, a Roland Microtube, and they lent me money to get my guitar back from the pawn shop. And I went out to play. This was like 2016. I went out to play for the first time in front of the Tobacco Shop near Plaza de la Constitución. I got a folding seat. I was not good playing standing because I was used to playing in my room. I had this guitar case that looked like a coffin! It was a pain in the ass to carry. It was an airplane case. It must have weighed 5 kilos. I remember once in the Barcelona metro I went in with this coffin and said, “Make way for my little brother!”

I was fucking terrible, but I made some money out of pity. I was playing heavy metal shit on the street because that’s what I knew how to play! And I met a German girl who was doing this volunteer job in the hotel, and we began dating, and she wanted to keep traveling. I had nothing here so I said, “I might as well go with you.” I had a bit of money and sold the rest of my belongings for some money. We went to the north of Spain. We lived in France for almost 8 months. And I was playing guitar, and that’s when I realized I can play anywhere and make money. I got better and better playing in the street. I remember I was talking on the phone with my dad, and I told him I was doing this, and I asked him what songs I should play because I’m playing this heavy metal shit. He said, “You should learn songs like Carlos Santana.” I learned some more classic rock stuff and stepped out of the metal sound. My girlfriend at the time would say, “Can we listen to Pink Floyd please?”

When I started playing in the street, I hated it. I was so shy. I’ve always been a very insecure guy. And it was really hard to put myself in front of people. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing like shit, that I’m a fraud, but I would do it because I needed the money. I started to get more confident when I began to make good money. When I moved to France, it was way better. People were more receptive to music in the street. There were not so many restrictions. Spain is fucked up in that way. It's the heritage from the Franco regime because they had laws to prevent activities in the street.

I traveled around for a while, like a year and a half. We went to Germany and Switzerland. It was fun. Then we went to Barcelona for a couple of months. I would try to play on the street, and it was not so easy, but I would find some places that I could play. But then, we talked about going back to the south and we rented a room in Granada. And in Granada, I met a lot of buskers. There is a real busker community there, very international. I had been busking for two years without a backing track. Can you believe it? I didn’t make bad money, but I didn’t know how to put on a proper show. And all these buskers teach me how to put on a proper show. I met a guy named Claus from the Midwest of the US. We learned some songs together, and I learned how to do this in a more optimal way. I credit those folks to teach me how to properly play towards the public. And I also learned some proper techniques to play classic rock. It was a cool experience.

After that, we moved to Málaga because summer was coming. It was so hot, and I wasn’t making any money. We had to sleep on the beach near Pedregalejo in this eucalyptus forest. We got robbed. I hated sleeping on the beach. All that fucking sand getting in my ass. After a couple of months of rough camping on the beach, my mother gave me a contact, and we rented an apartment. I would play at the terrazas in El Palo. I did that for about a year until my life with my girlfriend went to shit, and in the process, I got depressed and had so much anxiety playing in front of people. For a couple years, I couldn’t busk. It was really hard. I tried to get a job as a receptionist at a hostel. I moved back with my mom. Then after the worst of the pandemic, she evicted me, and I was forced to live on the street again. She was unraveling. I slept a week on the street and through my ex-girlfriend, I went to a hostel, and I started to go out and busk to make money to pay for the hostel. It was after confinement, and people had to wear facemasks. For me the whole face mask thing was really good because I had all this anxiety. When I went out to play, I felt so shy and so ashamed, so the face mask was actually quite good because no one could see my face. I had lost my confidence. I would go to play near the Roman Theater and relearn my repertoire. I lived in that hostel for a year and a half in a room with 14 beds. I reached an agreement to pay 90 Euros a week. When I got to meet the hostel owner well, I made friends with him. He would lend me a bathroom that was out of use to go with my computer using a broken washing machine as a desk.

Business began picking up slowly but surely as confinement ended and travel restrictions were lifted. I ended up making good money and I began saving to rent my own room and pay the up-front costs. I found the room I’m staying at, really cheap. I only pay 225 Euros in the City Center. Can you believe that? And it’s nice. It’s fine and clean and a good place to live. My landlord doesn’t want to be a leech. I’m very lucky to have a landlord with morals.

For the last 4 years, busking is my job. I make more money for less hours. In Spain, most of the jobs are horrible service jobs. By the Roman Theater, I was making like 35 Euros an hour. I’m really fastidious about how much money I make and how many hours I play. I have Excel sheets with all the money I make, where I play, how long I play. I can go back to 2019, and I have tracked all the money I’ve made. Don’t tell the tax authorities! I’m really into the economy of busking. I know which songs people like at which time of day! I have always been systematic in that sense.

What I like about busking is I like to connect with people. I feel like my purpose is connecting and communicating with people and expressing our humanity with each other – the good, the bad and the ugly. When I am playing something they like or they recognize and they look at me and I see that look, it’s nice. Sometimes people come to me and talk or ask if they can play the guitar, I oblige always. Even just to talk to me, I think I am making everybody else’s time a bit better. I guess I feel appreciation. I feel validation. I don’t see the passersby as rejection. That’s something I have to teach myself. I am a naturally insecure guy, and I tend to see rejections everywhere when they are not. When I started playing the terrazas at El Palo, where you go up to people and ask for money and people reject me to my face, that was hard for me. I took it as a hard rejection, I have a tendency to feel rejection from other people’s indifference, but I learned that is indifference not rejection. Sometimes people come to me very negative and tell me, “Stop playing. I don’t like this song.” One guy came to me when I was playing Stairway To Heaven and he said, “Stop playing that song.” And I just thought, “Dude, buy a Walkman! This guy thinks I’m a record player.” I learned that it’s not really rejection. People have a lot in their heads, and a lot of people don’t have an appreciation for music. They just don’t have it. It’s sad as fuck, and I don’t understand it. I guess if you don’t grow up in a family with music, they don’t understand it.

Busking has helped me to be more resilient and feel more secure. Absolutely it has given me more security. The moment I learned I could make money out of this, it was a great weight lifted off my shoulders. Come on, I had been fucking struggling living in the street, and I was fucking desperate. So, suddenly I can work anywhere I go. I make my own hours. I make more money than most jobs. I have a skill set, and I make it work economically. I have been learning to play guitar since I was 16. At the end of the day, I didn’t go to a school or an academy, and I don’t know all the scales, but I know how to play this instrument. I have been doing it almost half my life. I was focused so much on getting a formal education, but at the end of the day I have been educating myself not in a formal way but in a functional way. It works and functions perfectly. I make really good money nowadays. It changed my outlook on things completely.

I have a little more detached attitude and it helps. Nowadays, I don’t give a fuck. Sometimes I practice on the street! I’m learning a song, and I might be playing it like shit, but I’m going to play it on the street, and I don’t care. I’m going to practice on the street. I want to learn this song, and I don’t want to go back home, and the people go by in a minute anyway. Literally, I get paid for practicing! Something I’ve learned over the past 4 years is we musicians we take for granted live music, or in my case, the sound of an electric guitar. People don’t really experience live music in their lives unless they pay money and reserve a night to go to a concert. People appreciate what we do a lot. You don’t have to have the best set up or sound system. If you are playing and you sound decent, a lot of people are going to appreciate it because they don’t have it in their life. People are surprised that we just go out in the public and play. Maybe 60% of the job is having the guts to put yourself out there in front of people and maybe 20% skill and 20% stage presence.

I never stop feeling like a fraud, even nowadays. I still feel I should be way better, but at the end of the day, I learned to realize that my level is good enough. I’ve been hired for private parties from people I meet on the street. Last year, I played at the inauguration of a medical clinic. I played 4 hours, and I charge 50 Euros an hour. That’s a bunch of money, and it’s enough. I don’t need to be Steve Vai. I try to improve, and I steadily improve learning new songs.

Validation. It matters to me. I’ve always craved validation from others, and this does help. My guitar has given me a way of life. I don’t know if I will busk forever because I have other interests. I’m really interested in animation and cinematography. I’m studying now on-line courses of 3-D design and animation, and I’m considering the possibility of going back to University in Sweden to study animation because in Sweden, university is free for all European Union citizens. I’ve been learning on my own for so many years – guitar and animation - I want a real fucking teacher not a fucking YouTube video! I feel that people don’t appreciate that so much. I don’t know how the busking is there. Even if it’s illegal, I can make it work.

Even in Málaga, the laws are changing for busking. I’m in the work group of street musicians trying to get changes to make it more open. I am the guy that goes to the offices and does the demonstrations. We are maybe trying to do a sit-in to protest the laws.

One undercover police once stopped me near the Roman Theater and said, “I’m secret police and you can’t play here.” But he wouldn’t show me his badge. So, I said, “Do you know that impersonating a police officer is punishable up to 2 years in jail?” Then he showed me the badge. I think I have PTSD from the blue lights and the sirens of the police! When I see a blue light, I want to escape!

I decided to live here because I like it, and I know how to make it work. I know that I could go to many other places in Spain or to Italy, any place in Europe, and I will be making more money. That’s also why I’m so involved in this musician struggle and go to all these meetings with the city council. I’m kind of a political person, so I’m going to be fighting for this. If not, I’m just bitching about it. You need to put your money where your mouth is.

I make good money and I don’t need much. I prefer to have time than money because I have all these other interests, and I’m lucky to have a cheap room right in the city center. I know people who play and then go home and play another 5 hours at home. That’s not me. I sometimes feel a bit guilty about it, but it makes me happy. I try to keep the balance.

I remember when I moved back to Málaga with my girlfriend at the time, I was able to go and busk. I went to the city square, and I was playing Europa by Carlos Santana, and this lady comes to me with tears and crying. And her husband came over and she said to me, “With this song, my husband made me fall in love with him.” They were crying. Moments like that are memorable. I’ve made some friends busking. There’s always someone like this pretty much every day who enjoys it and makes it known. It doesn’t matter that it’s people I’m never going to see again. In that moment in that place with that music, we really feel connected and that’s enough. Connections come in many ways. Even small connections. If you look at it in context, it’s something extraordinary. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter, but it’s valuable on its own. It’s something. I try to appreciate more all the extraordinary that is in the things that we consider ordinary because we overlook so much. We can be masters of overlooking. Sometimes we need to stop the clock and suspend time and look at things from outside ourselves and see things as they are and step away from the daily grind. People live so much with blinders on like a donkey, and over time that degrades you as a person. Any aspect of your human condition that you don’t observe and you neglect, you are going to slowly lose it. Music is a catalyst for this reflection. It is like a contamination of the space in which you live that only allows for a limited range of experiences and attitudes and actions. Busking is great.

I wanted to learn guitar as a child, and they wouldn’t let me. As a child, you really rely on your folks to guide you, but sometimes your own parents don’t think about what the kid wants. At the end of the day, you need to look at your child and think, “What do they want? What are their interests?” to make it something worthwhile instead of just dismissing it. Don’t just dismiss your child and go back to preconceived notions of how people should live and what the proper jobs are. No, listen to your child. If not, you are going to alienate them from themselves and then they’re going to be miserable. My parents just told me to do what was the typical thing that people need to make money – go to law school. You need to teach your kids to take chances and to jump on opportunities. Ask, “Do you think you can make it work. If so, Godspeed.” If you teach them fear, you are crippling them to be able to change the direction of their lives.

Two things helped me overcome this. The first reason I developed my mindset and worked out my stuff is because I studied of philosophy. That gave me the tools to understand the world and myself and society. I learned that I lived like shit not because of my own shit but because of systemic causes. But the other thing that helped me question my parents was my parents were total failures. At the end of the day, they left me on the street and my sister with foster parents. It’s easier to question them when they completely and utterly failed.

When my family went to shit, I spent a couple of years wallowing in misery and self-pity because I didn’t feel loved. I felt like they abandoned me, and I felt like I deserved it in a way. I had to learn no child is responsible. It was hard. I had a lot of anger. I began smoking weed when my family went to shit, and it was a way to separate myself from my feelings and not be confronted with them because it was overwhelming. I didn’t have the overview to really process all those feelings of abandonment. I have to learn to be kind to myself and to have the generosity and kindness that I have towards others. I’ve always been an emotional and empathetic person.

Part of me is very fierce, and I think that comes from my mother. I actually lifted myself back from nothing three times. I met a lot of people who gave up. Living in the streets, I met a lot of people like that. But there is something in me that just refuses to back down. It’s not constant. It’s not always there. It’s not permanent. But it comes whenever I see myself down, and I feel completely desperate and hopeless, something in me says, “No, I’m not going to let this happen.” I can proverbially pull myself up from my bootstraps. It gives confidence. It can’t be understated.

I still struggle with things like depression. Sometimes I have bouts of depression and stay one and a half weeks just in my room doing nothing and feeling miserable. Playing music makes me feel better.

I felt suicidal a couple of times, but something else affected me in my life. There is something, a life experience I didn’t tell you about that actually marks me a lot. When I was 17, my last year of high school, a kid in my class killed himself. He was a good kid, kind of popular. I felt he was a healthy kind of guy. He was open. He was outgoing. I never associated him with depression. He was nice with everybody. I liked him. He wasn’t my best friend or anything, but he was a nice guy. In our philosophy class, we would play checkers. It got me thinking. This guy had a good life and a good future ahead of him. I don’t know what his problems were, but it doesn’t matter. He made a terrible fucking mistake. I realized that death is no solution. Regardless of what else happens, you can find a way. He was 18 years of age. People appreciated him and loved him. He had a lot of friends. He could have come to me, but I guess it’s so hard to be vulnerable. I guess he didn’t know he could have come to me. This really marked me. Sometimes we don’t realize our options. I will never make a decision like this. When I felt suicidal, I didn’t do it. By losing his own life, I think he saved my life. No matter how much we suffer, nothing will ever justify this. I make an effort to live because I feel like I owe it to him.

I missed a lot of experiences in my twenties. I didn’t hook up with many girls. I didn’t go to concerts. I was very poor and kind of fucked up mentally. My thirties are going to be my new twenties. My mom was fond of this saying, “Life is not about who gets there first, but who goes farther.” It’s not about doing everything and run through life. I don’t want to reach a point and get stuck like so many people. Some of my friends at 23 finished their university careers and got good paying jobs and got married. I can make it a decade later. It’s not about the milestones. What are you going to do with them afterwards?

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