Friday, January 16, 2009
Songs of shelter
A Roanoke musician with personal experience of homelessness teams up with others to help.Send us your giving news Your Community, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, VA 24010 or e-mail yourcommunity@roanoke.com.
Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times
Guitarists Robbie Booker (left) and Sean of the Dead rehearse with the Black Curtain Renegades, a local punk band playing a benefit concert for Trust House this Sunday.
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Of the many good neighbors who have wanted to help homeless shelters in the Roanoke Valley, Robbie Booker is one who understands -- from experience -- what it's like to need help.
He's a Roanoke native, he's 26, he plays the guitar in a punk band -- and for several weeks in 2008, he was homeless. He lived, he says, without knowing what he would eat, where he would lay his head at night or how he would get to work the next day.
On Sunday, Booker's band, Black Curtain Renegades, is playing a concert to raise money for Trust House, a Roanoke organization that helps people in the situation Booker once faced. The show is hosted by the Refuge, an alternative Christian congregation, and includes local acts Thresher, the Situationist and Honor Amongst Thieves.
"It's sad to see that some people can't find help," Booker said recently. "But nobody can do it alone. You need help."
The show is an intersection of a local faith group that wants to help people in the community, and artists who have for years been looking for ways to help their friends and neighbors.
The congregants of the Refuge have been meeting since September, when Johnny Mason and his wife, Angie, started the gatherings on Sundays at the Water Heater, an event space in Roanoke's Old Southwest neighborhood. Their nontraditional Christian services have included poetry readings, and on the fourth Sunday of each month they've done what Johnny Mason calls "helping ministries."
For instance, he said, they held a coat drive at the beginning of the winter and a toy drive for the infant son of a local man who died.
"There's a lot of things going on next door, and we feel some of those things are being overlooked," said Mason, a Lexington native and longtime Roanoke resident. "We want to make a change at home now instead of working somewhere else later."
Meanwhile, local bands have put together benefit concerts for the families of artists who have died, or for other musicians who have lost their equipment in disasters.
It's a tradition that dates at least to the early and mid-1980s, when local punk bands were singing nonsensical or politically conscious lyrics.
The groups like the ones playing at Sunday's show, like Black Curtain Renegades, now sing about movies and friends and at least in one instance about homelessness. In the song "Struggle," Booker sings, "Living in a cardboard box for the rest of your days/ I never expected anyone to want to live that way."
He explained that the song is about "staying healthy," and that he got help from his family to get a roof back over his head. But after being in a situation like the one he describes in "Struggle," he said, he wanted to help others.
That's why he got in touch with his friend Angie Mason, and how his band and four other ones wound up on a punk and rock bill to raise money to benefit Trust House.
"If we can raise money, we want to do our part to help in the community," Booker said. "So why not use our talents for good?"
