The corner of Elm and Main, governed for as long as anyone can remember by a single unwritten rule, was the site of a two-hour acoustic standoff Saturday afternoon when an out-of-town accordion player set up twenty feet from the town’s regular guitarist and declined to move.
The rule — first troubadour to the gazebo gets the afternoon shift — has never needed to be written down, because it has never been tested. Saturday it was tested twice. The guitarist, who has held the Elm Street corner for nine years, arrived at noon to find the accordion player already established across the street, mid-polka, with a folding stool and a hat containing $6.40. Neither man would yield the block. What followed was, according to several witnesses, less a competition than a collision: forty minutes of 70s folk rock played directly into traditional polka at escalating volume, a mashup that carried the length of Elm Street and reportedly reached the counter of the produce market.
“Four Times, Before Noon”
Jackson Belleville, who owns the produce market, was the first to register a formal complaint. “I have two crates of heirloom tomatoes that are not going to sell,” he said. “I will throw them at the next person who plays ‘Dust in the Wind.’ It is not a threat, it is a plan.” Mr. Belleville clarified that his objection was not to the song itself, which he described as “fine in October,” but to its frequency. “That man played it four times before noon. I counted.”
Foot traffic on the block had fallen to a standstill by one o’clock, as pedestrians stopped to work out where the folk rock ended and the polka began. Two were seen crossing Elm against the light. A stroller was reportedly used to reach the bakery.
A Fourteen-Point Ordinance
By two o’clock Selectman Taylor Doose had convened an emergency outdoor hearing on the gazebo steps and was drafting the Acoustic Decibel & Instrument Distance Ordinance, a fourteen-point framework that would cap amplified and unamplified performance at sixty decibels measured at the gazebo rail, require a hundred feet of separation between competing performers, and establish a seasonal permit window with a fifty-dollar fee. Mr. Doose, who produced a laminated map of the square, described the draft as necessary, overdue, and “not personal.”
“This is not about music. This is about the orderly use of a public corner.”
The ordinance was still under debate when the dispute resolved itself. Shortly after four, the guitarist moved into a descending progression in D, and the accordion player, without appearing to notice, did the same. The two parts locked together mid-block, and the street went quiet in the way a room does when something is about to be very good or very bad.
It was, by all accounts, very good. The men played together for another hour as the light went, drawing a crowd estimated at two hundred — the largest that corner has seen — and selling out the produce market’s tomato supply at full price. Mr. Doose attended, took notes, and has not withdrawn the ordinance. “It remains in draft,” he said.
The troubadours have agreed to alternate afternoons pending a formal review in November. The corner, measured Tuesday, read sixty-one decibels.