From off the streets to a shot at 'Idol'

Anthony Riley is not that guy - he promises you.

He is not the wide-eyed crooner out to share his message - hope, change, and all that - with the world, not one of the talentless masses harboring little but a passion, a prayer, and a voice that breaks glass.

He is, first and last, a Philadelphian, he says - and, by extension, a realist.

"I may not win American Idol," he acknowledges between sets at - well, near - the Convention Center. "Just top 12, and I'll be cool."

By the end of the summer, roughly 100,000 people across the country will have vied for a spot on the 10th season of America's longest singing audition. None of the others, Riley wagers, ever has taken on City Hall.

And won.

Indeed, to droves of residents and passersby in Center City and beyond, 23-year-old Anthony Riley is precisely "that guy" they remember from the news - the baby-faced street performer arrested for disorderly conduct while singing in Rittenhouse Square on March 27, 2007 (midway through Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come"), jailed overnight and well into the next day for his alleged transgressions, and awarded $27,500 in a settlement that year after Municipal Judge Karen Simmons deemed him innocent.

"It was the trial of the century in community court," says Evan Shingles, the lawyer who represented Riley - and a handful of other street musicians - during a period of acute police scrutiny over public performances that crested with Riley's arrest.

For a street performer used to receiving spare change, the settlement amounted to the tip of a lifetime for Riley, who has used the payout to invest in his singing career - now the sole source of income for him and fiancee Charlene Cobb, 23, also his "business partner."

Raised by his grandmother in West Philadelphia - "a classy lady who paid for her house in cash in the '70s and wore minks" - Riley had often been praised for his voice in school and church, but never thought of singing as more than a hobby.

In 2006, his father, a SEPTA conductor, suggested he join the performers holding court in Suburban Station, coaxing Riley to convert his arsenal of Motown, classic rock, and contemporary pop into a full-time gig.

"I fell in love with it because I was free," Riley says. "But I was also raw."