KATRINA Five years later: Tell us your stories!

[Bennyboy]

(The chronological order might be off, but this is my memory)

The night before Katrina was to hit New Orleans I was at a show featuring a friend's band ( Stymie and The Pimp Jones Love Orchestra) with Buckwheat Zydeco as the headliner.

Before he took the stage, I was talking to BZ about why he was there, in Sacramento, with Katrina bearing down on The Gulf and New Orleans. He told me, he had to be there, if he had gone home, he would have lost out on his booking fees already paid and probably would not have been able to resume touring. He was afraid for his family and hoped they would be alright, but he felt that he had to keep out on the road to keep making money so his family would be able to recover post hurricane. Had he not, he might have lost his gear, his band would have scattered and his family might have done the same. He told me he was scared, that he had never seen anything that bad before.

He put on the best show ever, i thought. Pure emotion, it was as if his life depended on this one performance. (of course he is almost always like that!).

After the show we were sharing in some post show treats and we all got together and prayed for his family and everyone in the gulf. Very moving moment....

The next day Katrina hit. The videos etc were horrifying. All I could do was cry. It seemed to me that this was the last thing I had, the wonderful city of New Orleans, and now that too was gone.

For a couple of days, I just sat around watching the news about the tragedy unfolding there. Even though I lived in CA, I felt a sense of loss unlike anything I have ever felt. I couldn't work, I cancelled all my appointments for a few days after. I was in shock.

Then on Thursday I was listening to my local community radio station (KVMR.org) and they were talking about Katrina.

Then it came to me, why not put on a pledge drive for Katrina victims and musicians especially? I know the one thing the gov't would not provide was instruments that were lost in the tragedy. So I called the station (I SO LOVE COMMUNITY RADIO!!!) and suggested that they do a pledge drive over Thanksgiving to benefit musicians and more specifically Tipitinas and the Preservation Hall musicians funds. The idea was met with such positivity!

I posted it here, and at first we thought we could get all community and public radio stations involved. I received a lot of input from Zydekitten (who lived in the Sacramento area then, I think), Jeff PapaFrog and many others here on this board. Myself and the guys at the station all got together and we were dismayed by the fact that, according to FCC rules, radio stations could only raise money for themselves and not for any other purpose.

I had contacted a ton of stations about having a nationwide benefit but none of them could agree on the date of the pledge drive nor the purpose or the recipient of the funds.

But the seed was planted and the guys at KVMR along with other stations, got the FCC to change their rules for a one time only pledge drive to benefit Katrina victims. Kvmr board decided that it was too narrow for them to only have recipients be limited to the music, so they instead made it so the money went to the general Katrina funds (to this day, I think that opportunity was wasted) instead of the Tipitinas and P Hall musicians funds..

KVMR had their pledge drive for Katrina and on that weekend we raised over 70 thousand dollars for Katrina charities.

Even though my involvement was kind of limited to planting the seed and seeing the first little sprout come out of the ground, I am still am pretty proud that I did something and got a lot of people to think about how they could help....

I didn't come back to New Orleans till last year. (or on this board much) In the time between Katrina and 2010 my life too was like New Orleans. Pretty much in shambles. Taking one step up and two steps back. Parent dying. Getting ripped off in business. Dealing with my insane Father. Housing market crashing. Losing everything at least once or twice. Homelessness. Chronic pain.

But I knew that if I ever got back to New Orleans, I would have made it back, all the way back. I tried to book a flight the week leading up to the Super Bowl, I really wanted to be in The Quarter when (and there was no doubt in my mind) the Saints won the Super bowl. A Huge victory for New Orleans. But that wasn't to be. Couldn't get one cheap enough, so I set my sights on making it back to Fest.....

And when I got off the train in New Orleans that day, I knew that not only would I be okay, but that the city I loved would be okay too. It was a HUGE personal victory for me.

Yes, the city still has a lot of recovering to do, as do I. Some things are very different now for the both of us. Some are much better.(the Rockin' Bowl most notably) and some things are bad but not as bad as then.......

But we are both back and plan to be around for many years to come.....
__________________
"In any given situation there are way more dumb people than smart people" Ken Kesey

[azureblue]

1. I could tell mine

But my story is so small, and Spike Lee says it way better. People, if you have not seen "If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise", take time to watch it. For New Orleans. It's da truth..

My wife, though, lost half her stuff, almost all her memorabilia, and the album she was working on, well, the studio flooded and they lost the computers that held the masters....

[Bennyboy]

2. bump....

[SargeUNN]

3. I have many as one would guess, but here are two

I was doing my radio show on Nova M at KPHX here in Phoenix. My guest was suppose to be a woman from New Orleans whose brother-in-law was in studio with me. We never heard from her and we got worried which prompted her brother-in-law to call several others to find out what had happened. They found her dead and the time of death was fixed during my show. It was certainly one of the lows in my radio experiences. I also had another listener that called to express concern that his life was in danger because crime was so high and he had to be on medicine that the dealers would love to get. He was a Vietnam vet who had barely survived a pit there and the meds were needed to keep him going. 2 weeks after that call he was found murdered and his new supply of medicine gone.

Note: I am a Katrina Survivor and about a year and a half after Katrina, I was offered a radio show on Nova M to cover Katrina.