Fire, destruction, then hope in making video
Santa Cruz musicians regroup after blaze destroyed recording studio
It was a dream that began at Burlingame Intermediate School in the early ’90s, back when two Metallica-loving students — Chris Jones and Jon Payne — first met and began jamming together.
They hatched a plan to someday build their own recording studio, but it proved to be a far more complicated goal than two preteen boys could have imagined. In fact, the two musicians — who are
best known these days for their work in the Santa Cruz band Wolf Jett — wouldn’t achieve their dream until 2020, when they completed work on their studio at Payne’s house in Boulder Creek.
“We had always been trying to do this — since we were 12 years old,” recalls Wolf Jett vocalist-guitarist Jones. “It was finished a week before the fires consumed it.”
The dream, like countless others, went up in flames during the horrific CZU Lightning Complex Fire. The deadly blaze blanketed 80,000-plus acres during a nearly 40-day run that burned so deep, embers recently kicked up anew, prompting new evacuations. The fires consumed almost 1,500 structures, including the home of Payne and his wife, Elizabeth, on Aug. 20.
“It was shocking and horrifying to see it down,” says Payne, Wolf Jett’s drummer. “The place I loved so much — the place I thought we would grow old in — just to see it gone was heartbreaking.”
The home and studio are gone but, thanks to the musicians’ creative spirit, memorialized in a special way.
Not quite two months after the fire, the band returned to the site to film a music video titled “Garden of Pain” amid the ruins on the Paynes’ property. The song, which some have embraced as an anthem of hope and rebuilding in the aftermath of the fire, has brought much attention to Wolf Jett. It was released as a single from the band’s long-delayed eponymous debut, which landed on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms Jan. 29. (See wolfjett.com for details.)
The song actually was written well before the fire. Payne, Jones and fellow band members Will Fourt and Jeff Kissell had recorded the songs for the new album quite some time ago, intending to release “Wolf Jett” early last year and then hit the road to support it.
“We had three tours booked in March (2020) — three or four festivals,” Jones remembers.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the album release and touring plans were put on hold. Instead, Wolf Jett focused on creating more music, doing videos and honing what the band describes as its “street gospel” sound — an acoustic-driven blend of folk, blues and gospel. It’s a style Jones began playing in the mid-2010s while he spent a couple of years hanging out and busking in Spain and Portugal.
The other thing Jones and Payne worked on during the pandemic-enforced break was their dream studio.
They ended up completing it just days before a lightning storm burst through the Bay Area skies.
“We stayed up all night long,” says Payne, recalling lightning strikes that ended up sparking the fires Aug. 16. “We watched the storm until 5 in the morning. It was beautiful and scary and all that.” Then things got worse. Two days later, the two men were getting ready to do some work in the newly completed studio when, Jones said, “We saw the sky get really smoky.”
“A helicopter came overhead and says, from a loudspeaker, ‘Everybody evacuate immediately. Your lives are in danger,’ ” Jones added. “So we grabbed all the dogs and a cat and, like, three guitars, and threw them all in our cars and we bolted.”
On Aug. 20, the flames finally reached the Paynes’ property and devoured the home and studio. Yet there was one more song to be sung on that site before the hard work of cleaning up the wreckage got underway.
On Oct. 14, Wolf Jett gathered at the site, amid the ashes and the charred remains, to record the video for “Garden of Pain” with help from Oakland’s indiefolk band, the T Sisters.
“Amid this chaos, there was this moment of focus and peace,” Jones said. “And also just a moment to actually feel. I would describe it as a very concentrated, singular moment in time where the world stopped turning.”
For Payne, recording the video represented something akin to a turning point in the grieving process.
“I feel like that was the first step of really kind of moving on,” he says. “It was a tribute to the house and it was a tribute to all the music that got made there. It just really felt good to pay tribute in that way one last time.”
Although the song was written long before the fires, it feels like it was penned in direct response to what the community went through — and continues to go through.
“My songwriting style is about pain and redemption,” Jones says. “That’s what gospel music is to me — it’s redemption from suffering. The song was about having the pain of loss and redemption from that — finding some way to live with this sense of loss and moving forward.
“And that’s what everybody is trying to do right now, who got affected by these fires.”
Payne says he and his wife plan to build a new home on the same site — with a recording studio.
“The studio was a lifelong goal, and we did it,” Payne says. “We built it. But, yeah, life had other plans for that studio. The story is going to have to continue, and we will have to build another one.”