Six songs into the day’s set list, busker Derrick El-Sumadi, a.k.a. D-Adi, rips into Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” on the drums. It’s Opening Day at Busch Stadium, and D-Adi and his homemade stage are posted beneath a flickering BALLPARK VILLAGE sign at the corner of Broadway and Walnut. The sick beats catch the ear of a man in a light-blue Nolan Arenado jersey. He approaches the rolling rig, turns his backside to D-Adi, and starts twerking. D-Adi (pronounced “dee AH-dee”) laughs as he keeps the beat. An hour earlier, though, while the sixth inning was crawling along, the mood was different. D-Adi inhaled another drag from an Aura cigarette. “Are we into the seventh inning yet?” he asked. That’s when fans start trickling out of the ballpark, and he can begin his nightly set.
I thumbed through the MLB app on my iPhone, monitoring Cards player Tyler O’Neill’s progress at the plate. “No,” I replied. “Still going.”
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“Gahhh,” D-Adi cried. It’s approaching 5:30 on this brisk, gray evening, and the threat of precipitation is making him anxious. His drumming is just as impacted by the vagaries of weather as baseball. The speakers and electronics he carries with him can’t get wet, and folks are much less likely to spare a couple bucks while they’re running from rain.
If you’ve attended a Cardinals or Blues game in the last nine years, chances are you’ve heard D-Adi jamming to classic rock tunes and modern chart-toppers on the sidewalks outside downtown venues. Maybe you’ve stopped at his familiar yellow drum set to slip him a dollar or two. What D-Adi does is kind of like karaoke, but with drums: He plays the hits over his speakers, but adds his own percussive spin.
When the seventh inning finally arrives, he starts rolling through his playlist with technical precision. The songs are catchy (and loud) enough to capture the attention of anyone strolling by. His show starts with Toto jams “Africa” and “Hold the Line” before moving on to the Commodores’ funk favorite “Brick House” followed by the Def Leppard banger “Photograph.” As usual, he plans to play until a half-hour after the final out.
What D-Adi does is kind of like karaoke… He plays the hits over his speakers, but adds his own percussive spin.
The 45-year-old percussionist’s busking career began at the urging of a friend, Mike Bell, who recognized how much the St. Louis native wanted to play drums for a crowd. Because Bell had equipment like battery-powered speakers, he took D-Adi downtown and set him up on a sidewalk on the east side of Busch Stadium. The first night didn’t net a financial windfall, but it did show D-Adi that he could do this more regularly.
In those early days, D-Adi would fill a large, faded green outdoor garbage bin with the pieces to his drum set, haul it downtown, and assemble it wherever he could find a good spot near the stadium. The assembly process took upward of an hour—and sometimes even longer. To cut prep time, D-Adi built a rollable stage out of three-quarter-inch plywood and two-by-fours. It has four wheels on the bottom, and his drum kit, speakers, and deep-cycle batteries are attached up top. Now, it takes him only 20 minutes to unload it from his 23-year-old Ford conversion van and push it to his chosen location, and have it ready to rock.
In 30 years of drumming, D-Adi has played in nearly a dozen bands. He likes bar shows but prefers the simplicity of a one-man-band life. He plays on his schedule and chooses songs he wants. “Bands are also so hard to make money with,” D-Adi says. “Bars don’t want to pay them, unless you’re one of the top bands. Those are hard to get into.”
Not that busking is much more lucrative. D-Adi says the tips he receives from passersby are his main source of income. The rolling stage has a giant tip jar, as well as D-Adi’s Paypal and Venmo information for the more tech-savvy tippers. D-Adi declined to specify how much he makes in tips, though he admits it’s not enough. (He’s thinking about getting into cryptocurrency to fill the gaps.) And lately, the busking business has been worse than usual. “Inflation,” he says, “is hurting everyone right now.”
On Opening Day, the tips are a little sparse—perhaps the cold weather is causing folks to keep their hands in their pockets. And yet, like on the 200 or so other days a year when he hits the skins downtown, D-Adi is still eager to offer service with a smile. The tips are important, but if it were just about the money, he’d be doing something else.
“It’s cool to see people having a good time,” D-Adi says. “That’s when I know I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”
In the middle of the eighth inning, D-Adi puts down his sticks and steps off his stage, phone in hand. “Gotta check the weather,” he says. The sky was spitting on him during his last song, Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band,” and the last thing he wants is to get stuck pushing his rig in the middle of a storm. The radar confirms his worries, and he decides to call off the rest of the day’s performance.
“I’ll be back this weekend,” he says.
The set is over, but D-Adi’s summer-long residency on the sidewalks outside Busch is just beginning.
