MUSICAL TRIBUTE FROM THE ASHES
Friends, family celebrate the lives of Ghost Ship victims Travis Hough and Chelsea Dolan with ‘unfinished’ song
Easystreet, they say, was a “party in a box.” Easystreet was feathers and fishnets, sequins and spandex, fog machines and face-painting and glitter. Gobs and gobs of glitter. Easystreet was “Italo-disco meets techno meets house with pop sensibility,” said one fan, and “just wild passion — all your dreams combined into this wild, crazy experience,” said another.
Easystreet was Velvet Chang and Michael Blitzen, aka Chelsea Faith Dolan and Travis Hough — two among the 36 who perished at the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland nearly a year ago.
But the Easystreet spirit lives on. Last month, a tearful yet exuberant choir of two dozen friends, family members and fans of the audience-interactive spectacle gathered at a venerable Berkeley soundstage to finish the vocals for an unreleased track. It was one of six songs painstakingly assembled by a bandmate to create a posthumous release that will anchor an Easystreet celebration in San Francisco on Thursday.
“Very shortly after the fire, I felt it was very important to grab all the digital media that they had created over the years,” said Eric Bateman, 36, who performed with Easystreet in its later
years. “We’re taking their art, vision and music that they made and honoring it by elevating it as much as we can and getting it out there so people can hear it.”
Hough and Dolan were known and respected in electronic music circles — Dolan was scheduled to play at the Ghost Ship event as her solo act, “Cherushii,” hours after the fire broke out. Hough had gone to the warehouse to meet her; the two had been disconnected for a period and were going to talk about an acoustic piano ballad they’d worked on together but never finished, said Dolan’s mother, Colleen.
That song was “Places I Will Never Go” — the tune that Bateman pieced together and invited the choir to complete.
‘A fabulous idea’
It’s not as simple as finding an unheard song track nestled away somewhere, said Colleen Dolan; the electronic artists would use bits and pieces of different sound files and merge them live in concert.
“These songs were created on the spot,” said Dolan, who called Bateman’s project “a fabulous idea.”
“I was hoping somebody would help find Chelsea’s music and put it together,” she said. “It was everywhere: on hard drives, on Bandcamp and SoundCloud, on machines, and only she knew where — she never expected someone else would have to find it and consolidate it. … All of us wanted to do something, and Travis and Chelsea had
put together a family of our two families and friends, and we all came together
to honor the two of them.”
Allison Gomer, manager of Fantasy Studios, said the
tight-knit East Bay music community was reeling after the Ghost Ship fire. One artist had to cancel a session at the studio the following day because a loved one was among those missing, and everybody knew someone connected to the horrific inferno — many of the victims were musicians, artists, or otherwise involved in the scene.
“We are all within one degree of separation in the East Bay,” Gomer said. “When Eric called and explained what he wanted to do, I said we’ll do anything we can.”
And so the Easystreet choir assembled for the pro bono use of Fantasy’s Studio A — the same room that’s hosted the likes of Green Day, Journey, U2,
Dave Matthews and Herbie Hancock.
They divided up as sopranos, altos, tenors and basses and went through the parts under Bateman’s guidance. It’s an unusual Easystreet song — introspective, moody and serious instead of an explosive yet earnest call to dance and party. The lyrics stem from a conversation the two musicians had a decade ago when Hough returned from Berlin with a case of the doldrums, feeling out of place, and Dolan counseled him.
“She said, ‘Travis, wherever you are in the world, it doesn’t matter — you’re never going to be happy if you can’t be happy with who you are,’ ” Bateman said. “It’s very apropos after the fire — about just trying to live in the moment and appreciate what you have while you have it, and not letting a yearning or desire for something that isn’t there hold you back.”
Louisa LeMauviel, who was engaged to Hough, said she’d been nervous about the project.
“I was afraid — would it feel like a true representation of Travis or would it feel like an earlier chapter of his life?” she said. “And I think in the end it was stunning. The lyrics seemed to tie together the themes of what he was working on in his later music.”
Together in song
LeMauviel said those themes included creating a community through music, bringing people together in song: as they did at Fantasy.
“Before he died, he was asking me to sing with him. He said ‘I really want you to get up there on stage with me and be a part of this,’ ” she said. “And Eric really made that happen posthumously, for everyone.”
The song and its video will be a centerpiece of this week’s concert and party in San Francisco, but friends don’t expect it to be a somber affair.
“It won’t be the same without Travis and Chelsea there — they were just one of a kind and no one can ever replace them or what they did,” said Josey Rose Duncan, 34, Dolan’s lifelong best friend. “But it will be very Easystreet — everyone’s going to come decked out in their sequins and their glitter and their spandex and their shiny clothes and dance all night. And celebrate Easystreet.”