Tight-Knit Blues community amid LA: The blues, let’s face it, was created to help people: Video, Photos

It is often in times of tragedy that communities pull together to help those in need. As wildfires continue burning in Los Angeles, Calif., the collection of artists who dedicate their careers to the blues are no different.

“The blues community is pretty tight-knit,” said Tommy Castro. “Any one of us needs help, everybody comes together. And it’s really cool. It’s like having our own insurance policy.”

Castro, a California-based musician from San Jose, said he feels “pretty blessed to be a part” of that community. When the wildfires began tearing through parts of Los Angeles County in early January, Castro said he “reached out to as many people as I know personally that live in the area” to check on their safety.

“I am the kind of person that, every time I hear about a tragedy, I can put myself in that situation,” Castro said while reflecting on the deadly fires. “I go right there. It’s so heartbreaking.”

The two largest blazes, the Palisades and Eaton fires, began burning in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood and nearby Altadena on Jan. 7. Thousands of structures were destroyed in the fires, with many people losing their homes as firefighters battled difficult weather conditions in what has been, even for Southern California, an unusually dry January. Both fires were still burning a week later, with the Palisades Fire burning more than 23,700 acres and the Eaton Fire burning more than 14,100 acres as of Jan. 15.

Though Castro acknowledged that natural “disasters” like wildfires aren’t new, “this kind of disaster didn’t used to happen this way.”

“Things like climate change have to be taken seriously,” he said. Castro, who is gearing up for the February release of his new album Closer to the Bone, was scheduled to perform south of the Palisades Fire at The Venice West in Venice, Calif., last weekend. A couple of days before the concert, he announced on social media that the venue was “closing for the weekend to focus on safety and support for those affected,” with his Jan. 12 show there canceled.

Looking ahead, Castro predicts there will be benefit concerts “in the near future” to help those who have lost their homes and businesses in the fires, “and I will definitely participate in that.” For other recent shows in Southern California that went on as scheduled, Castro said he also “offered up some tickets” for people “who might have been hanging around a hotel while their house burned down, and just sitting there with nothing to do about it.”

“The blues, let’s face it, was created to help people get away from their misery, not to increase it,” Castro explained. “So sometimes listening to the music, or getting away like that, could help out.”

When it comes to handling life-altering events, Castro said he attempts to find a “balance of the suffering and the joy.”

“Tragedies are always going to be an ongoing thing in our lives, and you can’t let that derail your joy—and it wants to,” he said. “It wants me to just kind of sit there and go, ‘How can you possibly have a good time, or talk about having a good time when these people are going through this right now, as we speak.’ It’s really hard to pull away from that and just go about your business and do what you do. But we have to.”