Chlo-ish

Craig Casey is a musician by weekend, algorithimist by weekday. This is his story.

Craig Casey didn’t trust me at first. “You’re writing down that I’m not very articulate, aren’t you?” Craig asks as I scribble my observations about him in my notebook. Craig, who enjoys playing his electric guitar in the park on the weekends, was skeptical of being interviewed by a complete stranger. After two hours of chatting I told him that I used to live near the Panhandle, which was where I found him playing on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

“Oh yeah? Where?” He asked.

“I lived on Fulton and Divisadero,” I told him.

“Oh really? Which house?”

“You know the Candy Bar? It’s directly across the street from there. It has the huge blue staircase.”

“Oh yeah, I think I know which house you’re talking about. I actually live at Fulton and Divisadero”

“But you said you lived at Fulton and Baker.”

“I lied before. Actually, I lied about the first five questions.”

“What!? They were all lies?”

“Well, your second question was where do I live? I couldn’t just tell you.”

“I can’t believe you lied to me!”

“I’m sorry. But can we forgive one another?”

His name was another lie. His last name is not Casey. That’s his middle name, a  “stage name” if you will. His actual last name is Bergstrom.   He is a Gemini in his late 20s, but would prefer if I did not reveal his birth in this profile.

In the beginning of our interview he referred to himself as “we.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“We’re going to say Chicago.” Craig said.

Craig plays his guitar every weekend in various parks in San Francisco and sometimes on public transportation. “You take a guitar and a bus,” Craig said, “and ask someone, for example, what’s your favorite state?”

“I don’t have a favorite state,” I tell him.

“Well then I would make up a song about how you don’t have a favorite state and you’re lost and confused and don’t know what you’re looking for.”

One may also find Craig in the BART station. “The acoustics down in BART are kind of amusing.”

Craig lugs around his amplifier in a wheeled cart. “I’m tethered to the amp,” he said. “I’ve got 25 feet.” The first time I heard him he was reclining at the steps of a grandiose statue of William McKinley at the tip of the Panhandle. He was playing his own made up melodies as well as old time favorites like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’  He looked serene in this peaceful park setting. No one bothered him and only a few people were sitting nearby.

Craig is a six-foot-and-a-half-inches (he likes to say half because it confuses people) man with wispy dirty blond hair who appears to be attempting to grow a beard.  His eyes are a bright, youthful blue. On the day I met him he was wearing khaki cargo pants with a dark navy blue zip-up hoodie from Old Navy.  “The hoodie is the superior clothing element. It’s diverse. It’s comfortable. Anyone can wear it. It fits in the palm of your hand. You can trust people who wear hoodies. Well actually, you have the choice to look either extremely creepy or friendly. If you find yourself in the Tenderloin, put the hoodie up, the glasses on and no one will bother you. It’s a valuable skill to have.”

Craig makes no money performing on the street, but making money is not his goal.  “Why do you perform outside?” I ask him.

“It’s better than playing in my house,” he says. “Spontaneous interviews happen.”  He does not ask for money while performing. “Music is something that should be given away for free. It is something that makes people happy.  It costs you a small amount to distribute it, so it makes sense to distribute it and cause the greatest amount of happiness that way.”

Also, Craig has a day job. “I develop algorithms,” he said when I asked him how he makes money. He works for a popular web services company that is particular about its appearance in the press thus its name cannot be revealed, but it rhymes with “soogle.”  “Let’s leave that out, this is the weekend.” Craig said.

On the weekends Craig is strictly a musician.  At home he has six guitars. He keeps four electric guitars hanging from his bedroom wall like artwork. An acoustic guitar leans against one of his amps and a mini guitar is hidden in the corner near the window.  He also has a massive pedal board EFX processor with about six different pedals that alter the sound of his guitars. He can make the sound “punchier” with the graphic equalizer, or my create a screechy sound using the tube screamer. But this piece of equipment is too heavy to haul to parks and subway stations.

The day I met Craig he was playing his mustard colored guitar, Blondie.  Blondie is the only one of his guitars he has names.  As I interviewed Craig, he strummed Blondie, switching from ‘House of the Rising Sun’ to ‘Carol of the Bells.’  Eventually the fog rolled and thes rest of his audience (two men sitting nearby) left.  A homeless man stumbled by and asked, “You still here?” I asked Craig if it was alright if I put my hood up, becuase I was cold but didn’t want to look “creepy.” My finger started to turn numb and yellow from poor circulation.  As I bent my finger to bring some blood trickling back in, Craig asked, “Do you need to take shelter from the bitter San Francisco weather?”

Craig has been living in San Francisco for two years.  Chicago born, he has also lived in Texas, Philadelphia, North Carolina, and Virginia (he is a graduate of Virginia Tech.) He is not the type to stay in a place for too long. He has a list of places he wants to live and things he wants to do.  “I would like to a least stay in New York for a while before I die.”  And just like he couldn’t leave Texas without seeing a rodeo, he says he will not leave California until he tries yoga. But there are some Californian activities he intends to avoid. “Going to therapy is an extremely California thing to do. It’s a little creepy.”

When the weekend is over, he goes back to the life of writing algorithms. On a typical weekday morning Craig wakes up to the sound of “ambient techno” that plays softly on his Bose stereo.  After twenty minutes of this, his second alarm goes off and plays whatever is on the radio. The two alarms together, he said, “are slightly unpleasant.”

For breakfast he likes  a bowl of yogurt with granola, Cheerios, raisins and Reese’s Pieces. He likes to watch the Reese’s Pieces dye the yogurt.  He only tosses in a few Reese’s Pieces because he is mildly allergic to the cocoa plant. “It makes my nose run. I’m a litmus test for good chocolate. Hershey’s is basically wax so my nose doesn’t run at all. But Godiva will make me sneeze. My mom used to work there; this is how I know this.”

After breakfast, he leaves for work in San Jose. He takes his Subaru or the company bus that picks him up in Alamo Square.  He may eat in front of his computer if he has a lot of work to complete, or eat with fellow coworkers.  For lunch he enjoys chicken salads.

“Wait, you’re not a vegetarian?’ I ask in a somewhat snarky way.

“Only in San Francisco would that question be posed that way,” Craig said.

His chicken salad includes spinach (which he belives is the best leafy green) noodles, raisins, blueberries and tofu.

Craig admits he doesn’t cook much. As a result of working for the web services company, which is famous for its free gourmet cafeterias, he says he has forgotten how to feed himself. For dinner he picks up pre-made sushi at Falleti Foods.  Craig said, “The dragon roll is the superior roll because it sounds fierce, emphasis on the fierce.”

After a week of developing algorithms, Craig looks forward to a weekend where he can just play his guitar.  He has been playing the guitar for fifteen years, and first learned from his cousin, “Crazy Carl from Chicago.” One of his earliest memories is being at a piano lesson.  He has had various music teachers, but one that he remembers most was a tall slender Russian woman named Marina, with looks as severe as Anna Wintour’s.

“She taught me Russian polka music. She would slap me with a ruler whenever I got a note wrong. I learned Russian polka that way, but it was not my main aspiration. She did not take well to the American society after moving to America from a Russian bloc shortly after the Berlin Wall fell,” Craig said. “That was a lot of prepositional phrases.”

In high school Craig played clarinet in the school bans.  Craig initially told me that band was full of “lame instruments,” but later retracted this statement as, “a little hyperbolic.”

“The clarinet is not flexible enough,” he said. “You can only make the clarinet sound out of it. The piano is a lot more versatile, but not as versatile as a guitar. Which is why I finally settled on the guitar.” The moment he learned guitar, Craig said, “I gave up the piano basically that day. I still play a little bit of piano, but it’s not very impressive.  I feel like in life you can be mediocre at many things or good at one.”

Craig keeps an open mind about music and just wants to share it with his community, “Kings of Leon, Grateful Dead, Radiohead, The Doors It’s all good. It’s hard to find music that’s not good. It’s hard to find music with no value. I have an open mind about music. Not BBQ sauce. I have a very closed mind about BBQ sauce.”