A Portrait of a Central Park Musician

Just past the dozen or so horse-drawn carriages that line the West 72nd street entrance to Central Park lies Strawberry Fields— an area of the park that serves as a memorial to the late Beatle and peace activist John Lennon.

Located just across the street from The Dakota apartments where John and Yoko resided, Strawberry Fields has been a popular tourist attraction since its establishment in 1985, a sanctuary for those thousands of visitors each year who wish to pay homage to Lennon’s life and legacy and snap a picture with the iconic “Imagine” mosaic. 

Since I moved to New York a few months ago, Central Park and Strawberry Fields have been one of the few places in the city that remind me of home. Cheesy and touristy, I know. But something about taking a pause from the busy day-to-day to sit on a little green park bench, and listening to the never-ending live covers of Beatles classics- “Let it Be”, “Hey Jude”, “Here Comes the Sun”, and, of course, “Imagine”, remind me of the CDs I used to fall asleep to as a kid and the first time I visited New York: I was eleven, and my dad was excited to take a picture of me by the mosaic that he frequently walked by when he used to live in the city himself.

James Dalton Baker, 36, is one of the eleven musicians and musical groups that regularly play at Strawberry Fields. Amongst themselves, they’ve organized an hour-by-hour rotation ensuring that each musician gets an equal share of playing time and that visitors are always treated to live renditions of their favorite Beatles and John Lennon classics, no matter the hour of the day. I decided to sit down with James to learn about the story of how he became one of Central Park’s regulars, and to learn more about the history of live music at Strawberry Fields.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Delaney Wong: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I love coming here and hearing you and the other musicians play.

James Dalton Baker: Yeah, for sure. There are some really talented guys that play here and we’re always learning from each other, that’s the cool thing. We’re always watching each other. And new blood comes in, new musicians— I learn from them, and we learn from each other, you know? Over time, you just kind of figure out what songs work for the crowd and types of crowds, and you get to be able to read the room a little bit. You play the hits when the people want to hear the hits, and play the B sides when you get a nice little niche crowd. And those are actually my favorite ones. I get in a nice rhythm, because I feel like those people maybe appreciate it a little bit more. But you also get the people that just come in for the picture and then they move on, you know? But usually if there’s a group of people, like a family or something, there’s at least one person that really cares about the Beatles. I appreciate that.

That’s so sweet, yeah I really liked when you played Harvest Moon today.  (One thing about me? I love me some Neil Young)

That’s actually one of my favorite songs and I’ve never heard it played here before.

I don't play it very often, really. I don't play a lot of non-Beatles songs here, but I've been finding myself just exploring songs that I've always loved and for some reason never learned how to play. I really enjoy it, I get a lot of joy out playing by myself in my room and I'll try some of them out here. And sometimes they work, sometimes I still need to work on them. It's nice, it's nice. It's cool. 

Yeah, so I was just wondering if you could tell me the story of how you started playing here, how long you’ve been playing here at Strawberry Fields and why you keep coming back.

Hmm. Well, I guess it's kind of, kind of a dark beginning, you know? When I first moved to the city, it was actually kinda like a big deal to go to John Lennon's memorial on his birthday or his death day. In college I went to school for audio engineering at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences (in Temple, Arizona), and we learned just how to work in recording studios, and how to run live sound and work on post production and stuff. I worked at the recording studio, and that's what brought me to New York. I also had friends here that were musicians. I realized I was much happier playing music still.

So I always came for John Lennon's birthday and death day, and I met some really great friends there the first time I went. We ended up being bandmates and roommates, and I ended up meeting a girlfriend who I dated for like three years. I mean, she's technically an ex-girlfriend now, but it was crazy. It was like this vortex. It was just this vortex of good energy and I always felt so drawn to that. 

And so I started walking my dogs here, for this company called Spot that’s just down the road. I would always walk my dogs through here on top of already loving the fact that I met friends here and stuff. I always felt really close to this place, but I eventually stopped working with dogs completely and just, fell into kind of a rough patch. I got scammed out of an apartment, and then, long story short, I had like two days to figure out what I own, what I wanted to bring and what I didn’t, and then throw away all that stuff. I ended up keeping what I could in a suitcase and then ended up just being homeless for the rest of that.

So that was really, really tough.  And so I guess, also to kind of survive, I started playing music here, and I saw other guys playing music here and I tried to get in when I could. It was a lot harder to get in back in those days because there wasn't like an organized schedule and you kind of had to get lucky, talk to the right person, which is this guy Dave— he’s another one of the musicians here.

But while I was on the street, I got hopelessly addicted to heroin, like really hard drugs. I was really hooked hardcore, and I got sick. I got a heart infection from those things. And the doctors said that if, you know, if I didn't stop all the hard drugs, the heroin, cocaine, shooting, then I was gonna die. And I was very close to death. I was in the hospital for two months. Sciatica also happened. It literally paralyzed me for two months, and I couldn’t walk for two and half months and it took me the rest of the year to learn how to walk normally again. I had to walk with a cane. After that I sobered up and I've been on methadone, which is just the medicine you take when you want to stop using that stuff (heroin). It’s like the only thing you can do except for quitting cold turkey, which, with how addicted I was, that probably would have killed me. It gets really nasty. 

But it’s been six years now. I’ve been sober for six years, and I stay out of trouble. I play here and I go back home and play with musicians here and there. That’s another reason, I guess, why I love this place so much—it kept my wits about me. But honestly, that sciatica, the fact that I was paralyzed, I wish that could happen to everybody that wanted to stop doing drugs. It saved my life.

There’s no bigger wake up call than that.

Yeah, it was the most painful thing. I mean, I don’t know if you know about sciatica. It’s this terrible shooting pain that starts from your back, goes through your legs and your upper back and it's like, it was the most pain I've ever experienced. I couldn’t breathe. I had a heart thing, endocarditis, and I couldn’t get a new heart valve because they don’t give those to addicts. Because they worry about you just screwing up that one.

I just ended up being put on antibiotics for two months and I was down to one twenty five, a hundred twenty five pounds. And then not being able to exercise, I got up to two hundred and ten, which is, which is really big for me. You know, I'm only like five nine.

But then I took that whole year and just exercised, healed. And then six months later, COVID happened. I know right. I finally got back to my normal way. I was starting to feel confident. Healthy. And then, boom. COVID. So, you know, I just used it to continue therapy and wellness. I couldn't play here during COVID because there was nobody to play to. Yeah. So I started recording audio books.

Oh wow, that sounds so cool. Putting your audio engineering degree to work! 

Yeah! I did a little bit of audio book work, some with my own voice, some with other people. Editing and orating, that was what I did. 

(At this point in the interview, a dad and a little girl probably around the age of six or seven approach us. The dad tells James that sorry to interrupt, but his daughter was just wondering if he was going to play some more.)

Yeah, yeah. I am. I’m just doing this quick interview and I’ll be getting back to it. 

(He turns back to me.)

That's so cool, man. The Beatles transcend generations, you know?

Yeah, for sure. Wow, that’s just an incredible story. Actually going back to that idea of the schedule, I read that New York Times article that came out a few years ago about how there used to be some tension among the musicians here, before that schedule formed, and how there were some altercations surrounding playing time. Could you tell me a little about that?

Oh god, yeah I remember that. So, before, we had to show up and it was first come, first serve. You had to get here at like seven or eight in the morning to lock in your spot at 10 or 11. But eventually we started having a schedule and we would just kind of organize it amongst ourselves via text message. And we still do it that way, you know?

But yeah, he [Corey Kilgannon] was really nice to us in that article. I remember seeing him around here and thinking, “Oh my god, I hope he doesn’t include any of this confrontational shit”, because we’re all just trying really hard to make people feel welcome as best we can. You know, that’s the most important thing because people that come here for the first time from the Midwest or you know, French Canada, they just seem so scared, like groups of ducks or something! Like, they're all scared, you know?

And the thing I want to do is make them feel welcome, because I've never seen anything get stolen here. When people leave their stuff here, a phone, a camera, each of the musicians, we all give it to the next guy. And if somebody comes for it, they can. We're the ones watching it.

That’s really cool. I feel like you don’t get that a lot here in New York. What would you say is your favorite part of playing here? What does it mean to you to just be here, in this space, at John Lennon’s memorial?

Well, I guess I've always been a big Beatles fan. But also, I feel like music kind of comes down to this very oversaturated thing. It's like, people are just supposed to be content machines now. Just crapping out videos and music and everything just to get everybody's attention. They put out as much as they possibly can, and it's all like, nothing. None of it has a lot to say. 

A lot of it is that we're just trying to be heard, and when we're all told we're so special when we're younger, you know, we all somehow believe it. So I've decided that instead of music being the self-serving thing that I feel like it is for so many people, for me, playing here is the very basis of what music and being a traveling musician is all about. It’s going back down to the grassroots, and people passing by can either keep going if they don’t like it or they can stop and enjoy it. But it’s there and it’s real and it’s special. 

I think that that’s something that you can never get from internet content and social media platforms. And I think that is really the main thing that keeps me going, that keeps me doing this.

It's also a great form of self-expression because sometimes I don't know how to, as you can see, I sometimes don't know how to navigate my emotions. And so being able to play songs or write songs is a great way to provide a catharsis for my own brain, you know what I mean? For lack of better terms.

So yeah, that’s my story. I’ve always been trying to figure out a way to tell it. I would love to go to film school just to learn how to properly do it, to convey it. Or maybe just make friends with some film students or something like that. 

After our interview concludes, I thank James for speaking with me and he returns to his spot by the mosaic where his guitar rests on an open bench and where his dog, Carla, has been waiting patiently, laying in his open guitar case. James picks up his guitar and adjusts his capo and mic stand.

“Thank you all for being here with me on this beautiful day,” he croons into the microphone as he starts strumming the beginning chords to “In my Life”. With just under an hour until the next musician is scheduled to take his place, James begins to sing. 

“There are places I'll remember

All my life though some have changed

Some forever, not for better

Some have gone and some remain…”