new orleans

Update on the NOLA rebuild

Great great great news. With only 17th days of warning, the New Orleans Rebuild program that we asked you guys to support raised $54,470.03, 91% of the $60,000 goal which would allow them to finish rebuilding eight destroyed homes. That is awesome! What’s so impressive is that it was hundreds of small donations that brought them so close to their goal. Just thought you all would be interested in knowing that.

From Kenny:

“This means that seven families will be moving home after almost five years of displacement by Hurricane Katrina. I’m astounded by what good can be accomplished when people work together toward a goal of this magnitude. I am so thankful and proud of everyone!”

If you did not get a chance to donate and would like to, click the link below. We are still a bit a short of our $60,000 goal.
Click Here To Donate

New Orleans Rebuild program raising $, need your help by May 1!

A wonderful non-profit house rebuilding organization that we work with in New Orleans has run out of funds, and the grant money that they were awarded at the beginning of the year still hasn’t come through. If they don’t get it by May 1st they’re going to have to stop the work they’re doing, and it may take a while to get the ball rolling again. So Achachay! is trying to help them raise $60,000 by micro donations from people like you and me.

Before

After

It is a lot of money, until you consider this:

April 15th they’d only raised $5000

April 20th, they’d raised $15,000

April 22nd they’ve raised  $18,005.84

Regular readers of our blog will remember that on more than one occasion, we’ve volunteered with this organization rebuilding houses after shows (and breakdowns) in New Orleans. We got involved with the Episcopal Community Services Rebuild project through our good friends Julie and Kenny, who coordinated volunteers there for almost a year. I’ve heard amazing story after amazing story about their work there. From Kenny:

“My first day on the job last March, I volunteered with a group of college students from Iowa putting in drywall for a women whose house had been rebuilt and then burned down after squatters in a gutted house next door accidentally started a fire. The homeowner who had just sent pictures of her rebuilt house to insurance was waiting to hear back about her coverage. After her uninsured house was burned down, our program was her last hope; she at this point had no more money to rebuild again. We completed her house in July.”

I helped install this counter and Caulk it

Can you believe that New Orleans is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina? It’s no longer on the news, but people are still living in FEMA trailers, hoping to save up enough money to rebuild their (sometimes twice) destroyed homes.  These are good people who have been hit by the hardest of bad luck.

TO DONATE, CLICK HERE.

Listen to Julie’s inspiring encouragement:

“Raising this amount of money may seem like an impossible task.  $60,000 by May 1st?  You may be thinking, “Julie, that is never going to happen.”  Well, if there is anything I learned while working for ECS, it’s that a lot of little good deeds and a lot of little donations can really add up to something huge and meaningful.  I remember all the days my volunteers and I spent completing seemingly small construction tasks–scraping the grout lines of a tiled kitchen floor, hanging a door, or painting the inside of a closet–but each of these little tasks helped move our rebuilding work forward and get the homeowners that much closer to coming home again.  I really believe in the power of little acts to create something big, and I really believe in the mission of this organization.  ECS and the homeowners in New Orleans need you, and you can help with a donation!”

Before

She’s right. We’ve been there and spent hours trying to just get a doorknob properly installed, or whiled away an afternoon caulking.  These tasks seem so small, but with hundreds of volunteers doing small tasks over the course of hundreds of days, the program has gutted over 900 houses and rebuilt over 60! I can hardly believe some of the finished product pictures.

In the time our friends worked there (around nine months), they managed to finish rebuilding 10 homes with a total staff of only 17 people, lots of volunteers, and a very limited budget. When the Episcopal Diocese told them it would stop funding the project, they worked hard to earn a grant from the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency.  Unfortunately, these funds have still not been made available to the program. $60,000 will help ECSLA finish eight homes currently under construction or in need of inspections so that their families can finally move back home.

For more information about this amazing organization and to donate online, please go to http://ecsla.org/.

After. Achachay! sheet rocked the ceiling of this house after playing in New Orleans

If you wish to send a cash donation, checks may be sent to 1623 7th Street, New Orleans, LA 70115.  They should be made out to Episcopal Community Services with Rebuild in the memo line, to ensure that the money reaches them.  May 1st is the deadline to donate!

Feel free to share this email with your friends and family, and thank you so much for your support!

(For more pictures click here:http://picasaweb.google.com/edolarebuild )

4 days in the gulf coast; lafayette, nola, pascagoula, mobile

Facebook event invites for New Orleans and Pascagoula!

Thursday April 15 @ Artmosphere in Lafayette, LA

Friday April 16th @ Coach’s Corner in New Orleans, LA (technically in Metarie), 10P – 2A

Saturday April 17th @ The Celtic in Pascagoula, MS 10P – 1A

Sunday April 18th @ Alabama Music Box in Mobile, AL 9P

I’m really excited that for the first time, someone else made a Facebook event for our show without us even knowing about it! Our friend David, who we met through Couchsurfing and christened Ryan as “Hooch” back on our East Coast tour in 2009, took the initiative to make the Pascagoula show packed. This is our third time there, so it should be charming.

In general we’re pumped to take a little weekend jaunt out on I-10, play some great places in Louisiana and Mississippi, and play in Mobile for the first time. We’ll be seeing old and new friends, and we’ll be playing a few songs that have never been heard in these states. Hope to see you there!

That New Orleans Voodoo: Rolling an ankle

Friday at the Frat House in New Orleans we played a great show, with one exception. I rolled my ankle. Really hard.

Achachay and New Orleans have a rich and storied history. On our first tour, the Ho Bus’ transmission failed as we tried to cross the Slidell Bridge heading out of town (see this post, and this one). The second time through, we had to get towed 190 miles just to arrive (also see this post). Hell before the band was even formed Ryan rode out the devastating Hurricane Katrina in a nearby hotel where he was marooned for days. I suppose it wasn’t a surprise when that New Orleans voodoo funked up our performance yet again.

I was jumping like crazy when I landed on a large, black, and unfortunately positioned power supply square. I crumpled to the floor, barely managing to keep the song going. The pain throbbed with intensity. Thomas and the other owners were pretty liberal with their shots, so the combination of adrenaline and liquor kept me going through the next two sets.

By the time we finished, all I could feel was the pain of my ankle. Nothing else entered my consciousness as I squinted and tensed all my muscles in a feeble attempt to … i don’t know feel something else I guess. “Hey man you know that couch is pretty dirty? Vanilla Ice literally had sex on it a couple weeks ago” Randall let me know. “Sure man. I guess I’m already on it so …” I couldn’t muster up much more of a response.

Julie and her crew-cheif friends, who energized us by dancing at the stage during the entirety of our three hour set, stopped backstage to congratulate me on a good show and say their goodbyes. I wanted to thank them for coming, for enjoying it and getting into the show, thank Kenny for getting me ice earlier, to hang out a bit but mostly my ankle screamed that I shut the fuck up and pay attention to its demands. It was huge, swollen to what seemed the size of a baseball.

That first night was dark one, but in the past few days I’ve been recovering fairly well. I focus on RICE: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. The Ryans are really helpful, picking up the slack in loading up equipment and driving. I mostly hop because it’s a lot faster than hobbling, and for the first time ever sat on a stool on stage. Of course that didn’t last long because I couldn’t STAND it (hehe), so ended up imitating a flamingo-rocker. Only less pink.

After the show, which really went over quite well, we got to chill a bit and really enjoy the company of Frat House owners and staff. They’re good people. Good show, good fans, good venue – with or without the New Orleans voodoo interfering with our best laid plans, we’ll be back.

Volunteering in New Orleans

It is amazing to see the destruction still ravaging the city of New Orleans. Mansions rest peacefully next to tattered shacks, and spray painted body counts still adorn boarded over windows. Some neighborhoods remain reduced to concrete steps and slabs, surrounded by empty streets and six foot grasses.

Who is going to move back into a devasted neighborhood when they don’t have a car and no grocery stores nearby? What grocery store is moving back into a neighborhood without neighbors to buy things? The situation is quite complicated, much more complicated than I could possibly detail here. Unfortunately it’s not just free market forces that are keeping these houses from being refilled or flipped. Corruption is rampant. Some say even basic services can’t be counted on. Much to my chagrin, no one recycles.

Needless to say there is a lot of opportunity to make the city a better place. Which is why Achachay!, a band known more for staying up until sunrise than rising with it, donned our work boots at 7AM after our fantastic show at THE FRAT HOUSE (we’ll be back there December 4th). Three young men can hardly scratch the surface of rebuilding demand in such a tragically beautiful city, but hell if enough three person teams join together and keep coming, shit gets done.

In the seven hours we spent at Mr. H’s house, we personally sheetrocked the ceiling of one room. Between the twenty something volunteers present, the entire house went from frames to walls and ceilings, so that by the end we were stuffing insulation in the attic. It was hard work; it was fun.

*For more on rebuilding neighborhoods and communities, please see the Neighborhood Story Project.

Day 2: Becoming electricians + Joy in New Orleans

messing with fuses

Today we got up, ate breakfast and went straight to O’Reilly’s Autoparts. I worked on fixing our portable veggie oil filtration pump, while Michael and Ryan jimmy-rigged a system to get power on the bus (The cigarette lighter doesn’t work, of course). 

Before this morning if you’d of shown me a flat fuse versus a round one, and told me to wire it in to something, I’d have stared at you with consternation and asked for more directions. Now I can be the one directing. The pump works. 

Michael and Ryan devised a clever system for accessing the battery – necessary for the inverter- using jumper cables and duct tape. It just reminds me that musicians, at least the kind trying to get famous the way we are, cannot just be musicians. You can’t just play your instrument and walk off stage. You have to don gloves, grab a screwdriver, and start splitting some wires. You’ve got to get a copy of Photoshop and Illustrator, download new fonts and watch videos about how to make the old T-shirt effect. You don’t just see a flyer; you see layers, you see opacity, you see hours at Kinko’s, you start calculating costs, you wonder if you could utilize the same color scheme, you critique the size and readability of fonts and laud simplicity.

I keep forgetting to take pictures, so here's a stock photo

Yeah so the show was great. The other two bands, Fallen Trees and Dirty Bourbon River Show, were all nice guys and great musicians. I’m sure we’ll be playing with them again. The show went crazy late – and no one cared cause that’s how it goes in New Orleans apparently. When we were setting up at 10 (the time the show was supposed to start) the sound guy complained that he shouldn’t have taken that bong hit right before work. He also told us about how he had to bail to Mexico because some people tried to kidnap him to get to his landlord a couple of years ago. 

 Anyway . . . Julie, my girlfriend’s older sister, brought a posse to the HI HO ready to party. They felt the groove and started the dance party before we even finished “I Feel Fine.” They catch on quick and were singing along as we played. Eventually the whole crew ended up crammed together in this cage right by the stage. Ryan’s buddies seemed pretty impressed too. It was awesome meeting them, meeting Julie’s friends, catching up with my old friend and meeting her girlfriend. I love that about playing – I love the people. I love seeing my friends in a such a positive space, meeting their friends, and sharing my feelings and passion with them.

Another positive side note – the booking agent who made this show far and away the most difficult and time consuming one to nail down wasn’t there to sour the mood. He should be happy because I guarantee you they made money at the bar. Hell I even paid for a couple whiskey cokes.

Also – got to see another sunrise.