Blitzen Trapper hasn’t played a show in 2020, which makes them pretty much like every other artist in this year of the coronavirus. “Holy Smokes Future Jokes,” the Portland band’s 10th album, was still announced in May and came out in September, leaving frontman Eric Earley to promote it on his own and from a distance, with pre-recorded videos, calls to college radio and the occasional social media livestream.
It was a big change for a band — known for its eclectic, combination rock and indie garage jam band with a folky, sometimes psychedelic sound — that once routinely played as many as 100 shows a year, the road providing both a fan base and a living.
But even before COVID-19 was upon us, Earley had begun to carve another path. With no new record to promote since 2017’s “Wild and Reckless,” and with Earley and several other members also raising families, the band did not tour much in 2019 either. And by the time Earley wrote and recorded “Holy Smokes Future Jokes,” he was working full time for Do Good Multnomah, a nonprofit focused on the needs of houseless veterans.
Some of Earley’s friends already worked there; Blitzen Trapper’s last Portland show — and last show until who-knows-when — was a benefit for Do Good at Revolution Hall.
“I just sort of happened upon the job to be honest,” Earley said. “And then I really liked it.”
He started out working the night desk at Do Good’s shelter, which was then in a church basement: four nights a week, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., checking people in, managing the crowds, cooling off inevitable conflicts. Almost like being a bouncer or a road manager, except with greater sensitivity and more de-escalation training.
“The night shift in general is tough,” Earley said. “But I learned a lot in that place from the folks that I was working with. And a lot about myself I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.”
As someone who tells stories about the world and the human condition for a living, Earley found it both humbling and eye-opening, if not surprising, to take in the breadth and depth of experience that brought people to the shelter.
“The general feeling that people have towards the homeless and folks who are on the street, it’s this kind of numbed, inaccurate view of who people are,” he said. “Each and every person has this very distinct story. I would almost say 99% of them weren’t necessarily there because of choices they made that were their own, but choices made for them.”
By the fall of 2019, he’d become a case manager, and he is now a housing specialist with Do Good’s sister organization Greater Good in Clackamas County. In that job, he oversees other case managers, while also helping clients of his own.
“Because I’ve been doing it for a while, I got pretty good,” Earley said. “Figuring out who to call, who to talk to, how it works. I’ve been able to put a lot of guys into apartments in different places.”
Like a lot of people who get into social work or counseling, Earley’s main qualification isn’t formal education — he was a math major in college — but rather, lived experience. In “Wild and Reckless,” the dystopian, semi-autobiographical rock opera Earley and Blitzen Trapper wrote and performed at Portland Center Stage in 2017, one of the characters references Hooper Detox. Now, Earley sometimes finds himself on the phone with the Central City Concern facility, trying to secure a bed for someone (which has gotten even harder due to COVID-19 and the need for social distancing).
FROM 2017: Blitzen Trapper: Rock concert meets theater in Portland
It’s also Blitzen Trapper canon that the band’s two breakthrough albums, 2007’s “Wild Mountain Nation” and 2008’s “Furr,” were written and recorded when Earley was himself a man without a home, splitting time between his car and the semi-abandoned building where the band had its rehearsal space and studio. He has sometimes been reticent to use the term “homeless,” since it was more or less by choice. He hadn’t lost a job, been evicted or spiraled into substance abuse but, rather, was a vagabond for “these weird, nebulous reasons,” he said.
“But at the same time, I know a lot of people who are in that same place,” he said. “A lot of people who wouldn’t necessarily tell you, ‘I’m homeless,’ they would maybe tell you, ‘Oh, I’m just kind of taking a break from the system.’ It’s such a gray area.”
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Earley’s primary inspiration for “Holy Smokes Future Jokes” were the Bardo Thödol, aka “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” and the George Saunders novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” in which President Abraham Lincoln wanders the Bardo — an intermediate state between life and death — mourning his son Willie. The books are something of a meta-narrative throughout the album, which opens with songs called “Baptismal” and “Bardos Light (Ouija Ouija),” and nears its end with “Dead Billie Jean,” where Earley imagines the titular Michael Jackson character in the intermediate state with Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and Lincoln.
“So many of the songs on the record are about people who have died and they don’t quite know that they have,” Earley said. “They’re kind of stuck somewhere. It’s this idea of people hanging onto things in this life that they should be letting go of.”
Being stuck in the Bardo works as a metaphor for just about anything in America 2020 — Congress, COVID-19 lockdowns, unemployment — which gives the record a certain retroactive prescience. Earley said his work at Do Good also influenced his writing.
“I think working in the shelter changed my perspective so drastically, over a relatively short period of time, that I don’t think I realized the impact it had until I’ve been doing interviews,” he said. “In the homeless community and, I think, American society in general, we hang on to so many things: dreams and aspirations and this pride of individualism. The American Dream and all this is an illusion, but we continue to hang on to it. And so I think a lot of that made its way into the music.”
To torture the Bardo analogy for just one sentence longer, Blitzen Trapper has been hanging on and letting go as well. In hindsight, much of the band’s activity since 2016 feels like something of a valediction. There was the 2016 acoustic “Songbook” tour, where Earley and his bandmates shared tales of well-spent youth and musical discoveries, playing both originals and covers, from Neil Young to Pearl Jam to Elliot Smith. Then came “Wild and Reckless,” with its Old Portland setting, while the band closed the book on 2018 with a tour to promote Sub Pop’s 10th anniversary reissue of “Furr.”
What the COVID-19 hiatus obscures is the reality that Blitzen Trapper as we’ve known it — the same five guys onstage playing Earley’s music since 2000 (a sixth member, Drew Laughery, left 10 years ago) — may no longer exist. “Holy Smokes” could have easily been billed as an Eric Earley solo record, but that’s been true of every Blitzen Trapper album, the band always functioning more as a live organism. “Holy Smokes” still features Brian Adrian Koch on drums and Marty Marquis on backing vocals, with several guest musicians, including producer Raymond Richards of The Parsons Redheads, also featured. But when it’s finally possible to play this music live, Koch may be the only founding member on tour besides Earley. Bassist Michael Van Pelt now lives in California, and Marquis and guitarist Erik Menteer have both left Portland. Work and parenting reordered everyone’s priorities, the frontman included.
“For me, the past three or four years of touring, I was sort of trying to come to grips with what do I really want?” Earley said. “And who am I aside from Blitzen Trapper?”
Since finishing “Holy Smokes Future Jokes,” Earley hasn’t really written songs or picked up a guitar. His so-called day job is its own reward, not just something to help pay the bills while making music. He’s also doing visual art: intensely detailed pencil sketches of people at the shelter, as well as a series of paintings inspired by the Central American migrant caravans at the U.S./Mexico border.
“There’s always going to be this element of having to let go of who you wanted to be, or who you were,” he said. “And for me, that perspective has been really helpful in just sort of living day-to-day with not being on stages doing that kind of work. It’s allowed me to feel at peace with the last 12 years of my life — with that life sort of playing itself off in a certain way.”