A dozen Tucson bands playing everything from rock and blues to country and cumbia will perform on two stages at Hotel Congress on Sunday, Oct. 1, to benefit Tucson’s unhoused community.
“Tucson Musicians Care,” a coproduction of Hotel Congress and concert promoter Jim Travis’s VIBZ-Arizona, will feature live performances on Congress’s outdoor Plaza stage and inside Club Congress from 2 to 9:30 p.m. Each act will perform a 40-minute sets with DJ Jahmar Anthony keeping the Club Congress stage warm between sets.
Proceeds from Tucson Musicians Care will benefit the non-profit Hard Hitters for the Kingdom’s Unhoused Mobile Shower Project.
“I want to see this come to fruition. It’s an opportunity for our city to do good things,” said Travis, who was instrumental in organizing a memorial concert for the late Tucson bluesman George Howard in May. “It’s a big issue.”
Hard Hitters, founded by homeless advocate Danny Ayala to provide food for Tucson’s unhoused community, wants to roll out the mobile shower in January, but it first must raise enough money to cover at least six months of the $10,000 monthly operating costs, Ayala said.
Robert Thornton, executive director of the Phoenix-based Cloud Covered Streets, said his non-profit would donate the $60,000 shower trailer providing Ayala’s group “takes the necessary steps — they have a team there to run it, a place to store it and enough money on hand to show they can sustain the operation,” Thornton said.
Cloud Covered Streets, which Thornton started in 2016, has been providing clothing and a mobile shower program for the unhoused in Phoenix since August 2020. They launched a program in Fort Worth, Texas, in January 2022.
“Our goal is to have it down there (Tucson) in January,” Thornton said.
Ayala’s longtime friend Jeff Daniels, bass player and founder of the Tucson blues rock band Black Cat Bones, came up with the idea of holding a concert to benefit the mobile shower project. Daniels said he was inspired by a woman he met in a fast-food drive-thru who was homeless after her mother died and the bank took the family home.
Daniels said he tried to help her, “but one person against the entire homeless problem is insurmountable.” Then he told Ayala about the woman and the two friends started dreaming out loud of ways to help the unhoused in a meaningful, lasting way.
Ayala pitched his mobile shower idea, which would serve people living in areas not often served by other Tucson advocates, including people living near at major freeway underpasses and washes.
Daniels said he saw the idea as “something we can do that will be bigger than just handing somebody a dollar and buying them food.”
“This would be a chance to really make a difference,” he said.
“We can’t do everything, but we refuse to do nothing,” added Ayala, repeating the mantra that has motivated him since he launched Hard Hitters six years ago.
Daniels’ band, which has been together since 2004, was part of the memorial concerts for blues singers Anna Warr and Howard, two events that “got really big turnouts and they raised a lot of money,” said Daniels, who posted the idea for a benefit concert on Facebook.
Travis, whose VIBZ-AZ promotes local musicians and their live shows, said he named the event “Tucson Musicians Care” because “every musician I talked to said, ‘Oh, yes, we’ll do it. We care’.”
Thornton, who supports the Phoenix project through donations and his own money, said his group of volunteers bring out the mobile showers three times a week, providing showers, laundry service, clothing and toiletries to as many as 7,000 people a year.
The Texas operation serves between 5,500 and 6,000 people, he said.
But showers isn’t the mission, it’s the pathway to reach the unhoused “and show them kindness, compassion and love,” Thornton said.
“Our goal is that when they leave our trailer, they know that people care about them. Our main purpose is giving hope to people,” he said. “Without hope, there’s no chance of getting off the streets. Our goal is just to let them know that … your current situation isn’t your forever situation.”
