Reporting from New Orleans -- Like a lot of out-of-towners who came to New Orleans in the years after the levees failed, Chris Joseph found that the singers John Boutte and Paul Sanchez spoke to the city's post-Katrina trauma better than almost any other artists.
Like his fellow visitors, Joseph felt frustrated that he couldn't buy a CD of the cathartic songs the duo was singing in the city's nightclubs -- numbers such as the infectious original “Good Neighbor" or the radical rearrangement of Paul Simon's “An American Tune" as part folk confessional and part gospel hymn.
Joseph, a Santa Monica resident who prepares environmental impact statements for a living, was a member of the Threadheads, a group that already had proved that music fans could be proactive. The Threadheads met in the chat room on www.nojazzfest.com, but they evolved into an organization that put on shows at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Beginning in 2005, the annual Threadheads Party booked Louisiana bands for a backyard soiree, and post-Katrina, the party morphed into a fundraiser for the New Orleans Musicians Clinic. It was after Boutte and Sanchez's set at the 2007 party that Joseph approached Sanchez and asked when the duo was going to release an album.
“It was an innocent question," says Joseph today. “Paul said, 'We would if we had the money.' This light bulb went off in my head, and I said, 'How much would it take?' I expected him to say $100,000, but when he said $10,000, I told him, 'I could raise that.' I knew all the Threadheads had been touched by the show, and I figured if they had enough money to go to Jazz Fest, which is not a cheap vacation, they would kick in some money for this."
The concept was simple: Fans usually pay for records after they've been made by purchasing them in stores or online. But if the fans put in the money upfront, they could make sure that the records they wanted to hear got made.
