On the Ground at Asbury Park: Jersey Musicians Rally for Hurricane Sandy Relief
"We're from the Jersey Shore and we missed this huge hurricane that f-cked everything up," says Brandon Asraf at the outset of an online PSA for RebuildRecover. Speaking from the backseat of a moving vehicle, the bassist-singer for Jersey's drum and bass duo Brick + Mortar peers out from beneath an explosion of curls and holds up a hand-written sign to the camera. Asraf (whose push broom mustache would make Daniel Day-Lewis jealous) explains that although his Toms River two-piece is on tour, they want to help their hurricane-ravaged home state.
"Red Cross is doing their best, but they can't do it all, so a couple of friends of ours started an organization to give food, clothing, anything they can do," Asraf continues. "Please contact them on this website that we wrote on this sh*tty piece of paper while we're in the car. Where we're from is the Shore, so it's up to us to make it better."
As a musician who calls Jersey his home, Asraf is making a plea for Asbury Park and the surrounding coastal stretch that's been ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. With thousands of people in evacuation shelters and nearly 1 million still without power, the destruction along the Jersey shoreline is staggering.
People are cold, hungry and often homeless thanks to flooded or burned-down homes. And although the famed Asbury Park—where Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi and the Gaslight Anthem honed their skills locally before going national—fared better than other coastal towns, Jersey's musical mecca is still ailing. So it only makes sense that many of the people pitching in for the relief efforts are musicians who give life to Jersey's cultural cradle.
That's what brought Asraf to RebuildRecover. His friends started the charity organization last week after becoming dissatisfied with the progress of a corporate-sponsored charity. In one week, RebuildRecover has blossomed into a makeshift, yet entirely effective, drop-off and distribution point for supplies.
Operating out of a storefront for a wedding DJ company in northern New Jersey (co-founder Anthony Setaro works there), dozens of volunteers—some of them local musicians—gather each day to sort through donated food, clothing, cleaning supplies, blankets and cat litter (i.e., any and everything people drop off). Subsequently, they reach out to shelters and match up the supplies they have with victims' needs.
"There were plenty of people in the area who wanted to help, but just didn't know how," co-founder Ashley George explains while volunteers toss the latest load of supplies into a pickup truck. Inside the store-turned-distribution center, the shouts of organizers bark over the sound of Springsteen (naturally) playing softly on the stereo. "We're so grassroots, it's silly," George says. "If there's any problem, it's that things are moving at lightning speed."
Volunteers Loading a Truck At RebuildRecover
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