When the rapper Tony Obi, who performs as Fat Tony, left his Altadena home the night of the Eaton Fire, he didn't think he'd be gone for long. The winds were fierce, but the wildfire was still small, burning out in Eaton Canyon. So he grabbed a laptop, a couple changes of clothes and a bottle of mezcal, and headed to his girlfriend's house.
"We thought, all right, we should get out of Dodge so that the fire department can do their thing," he recalls. "But it was so far away that it truly never crossed my mind that the fire could reach my home."
Two weeks later, standing in front of the charred wreckage that used to be his house, he says it felt like he'd never lived there at all — his Altadena dream was dead.
"I was thinking that I'd go in there and maybe I'd rummage through and find some stuff," he says. "There's nothing. The only thing left standing is the fireplace, which I loved. I had a lot of wonderful moments at that fireplace over the holidays. And I'm grateful for that. So grateful for that."
The fire claimed all his clothes, including a prized 1996 Tori Amos tour shirt, with "Recovering Christian" written on it in big, bold letters. It burned up his collection of the Japanese men's fashion magazine Popeye. And it incinerated the 20 years' worth of music equipment he'd bought to support his career.
"I couldn't see myself going out to the store and buying everything again. That just feels so daunting — I don't even want to think about doing that."
The January fires in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades killed at least 29 people, and destroyed more than 16,000 homes and businesses – disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of Angelenos. And because Los Angeles is one of the global hubs of the music business, hundreds of those displaced by the fires, like Obi, are working musicians, singers, composers, producers or engineers. Their homes are often integral to their work — it's where they collect their synthesizers and guitars, practice and record their music and store unsold merchandise. So when the fires roared through their neighborhoods, the flames took not only their homes, but entire livelihoods.
Tim Darcy, who sings and plays guitar in the post-punk band Cola, managed to save two guitars and a hard drive from his Altadena home before it was destroyed.
"But I lost everything else, like my home studio and my pedalboards for touring and a bunch of effects units and a tape machine and all that kind of stuff," he says. "I didn't have a multi-million-dollar studio or anything like that. But it all just adds up so quickly."
Darcy says he feels lucky for the support he's received so far from his band and the broader music community. Guitar Center and Fender each replaced one piece of equipment he lost in the fire. His label sent a note to fans, asking them to support Darcy's GoFundMe. And he received a $1,500 grant and a grocery card from MusiCares, the charity founded by the Recording Academy. The charity has been providing financial assistance to working musicians, along with other services like mental health care and rental assistance.
There's little time to regroup and recover, though. Cola has a European tour coming up in May, and Darcy is trying to rebuild his collection of equipment in time for that. It's good to keep busy, he says, but there's a certain split-screen reality to pushing on without a pause.
"There's this kind of weird, mercurial quality to the grief aspect of this, where one day doing something totally unrelated to what happened feels really good," he says. "It's like, 'Wow, it's so nice that for 20 minutes, I just didn't think about the fact that the house burned down, and all of our stuff is gone.' Then another day you can do something distracting and be like, 'Wow, it feels really messed up that I'm not thinking about this, you know?' "
The audio engineer Jake Viator, who's worked with artists like Julia Holter and Lee "Scratch" Perry, has been busy dealing with insurance and government agencies since his Altadena home burned down. So he says he welcomes the distraction to dive back into his work, mastering albums at Stones Throw Studios. "I'm as back to work as can be. Can't stop won't stop. And in this business if you can't do a job you might not ever do a job again."
Viator says he lost loads of equipment in the fire, like cables, connectors and electronic parts. "Having to buy that stuff at 2025 prices is a huge financial loss for sure," he says. And there are plenty of things he can't ever buy again: amplifiers and speakers, made by small-time electrical engineers.
But his vinyl collection is what he's grieving the most, he says. When he returned to his home in the weeks following the Eaton Fire, suited up in hazmat gear, he found remnants of his 1,500 records among the debris. He recalls one lost title in particular — a 1968 live recording of Philip Cohran & the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, playing a tribute concert to Malcolm X.
"There's a few hundred of these in existence," Viator says. "I looked for years for this, and finally got the record in good condition. It's a literal historical musical document. Those are the ones that are really painful to lose."
In addition to prized music memorabilia and special equipment, artists have lost their creative work in the fire, too. The pianist and composer John Carroll Kirby was out of the country when the Eaton Fire began to rage. He tends to keep new song ideas and demos saved on his laptop, so before leaving town, he intentionally backed it all up on a hard drive. "And I intentionally left the hard drive in my home studio," he reminisces, "thinking if I lose my laptop or my bag, I have this backup at home."
His laptop failed on his trip. But he was reassured that he had a copy of his compositions back home. The night of the Eaton Fire, his landlord called letting him know they had to evacuate, and asked if there was anything he wanted her to grab. He was on a flight, and the call went to voicemail. By the time he got the message, his home — and the hard drive in his studio — had been destroyed.
"So I've been piecing together this piano album from little videos I took of myself composing, and I'm relearning some music," he says.
But he's trying to put his experience to use the way he knows best. "Music has always been therapy number one for me. Whatever I'm going through, music has always been there to help," Kirby says. "A lot of great music comes out of suffering. And having experienced my own loss, and experienced this loss for my community, has been a source of inspiration and has been a source of new music."
A suitcase full of hard drives was one of the few things the composer Celia Hollander was able to save from the Altadena home she shared with her partner Evan Shornstein, who performs as Photay. She says those archives of live shows and older musical ideas have taken on a different quality for her now.
"It's actually made me more interested in going back into past recordings in a way that I wasn't before, because now it has more significance to me," she says.
Hollander and Shornstein have contributed one of their past recordings, a live duet taped in Elysian Park a few years ago, to a new 98-track compilation put out by Leaving Records. The album is called Staying, and it's meant to benefit artists impacted by the LA fires. The album joins at least half a dozen other benefit compilations that have gone on sale in the wake of the wildfires, just one example of the music community's push to raise funds. Artists have turned out to play benefit concerts too, like last month's FireAid, which raised more than $100 million for wildfire relief. And this year's Grammy Awards, broadcast from LA, centered heavily on fundraising and the impact of the fires on artists.
"You know, you make music or you make things sort of in isolation, and sometimes it's hard to understand who's hearing it or just understand the extent of the community you're a part of. And it's really large and it's really loving," Shornstein says. "I feel like when this first happened, I turned to Celia and I was like, 'you know, we have more people than possessions, more people than objects, in our life.' "
Tony Obi, the rapper, says in the immediate aftermath of the fire, he thought he might hang up his music career, and close that chapter of his life. But he says his fellow musician friends DJ Sun and Toro y Moi reached out and donated some music gear to get him started again. And the other day, he was making beats again.
It's all contributed to a sense of gratitude, he says. He's alive. He's safe. He has support from FEMA, and his GoFundMe. And he's moving into a new home. So despite losing nearly everything he owned just weeks ago, he's already performing at benefits for fire victims — another reminder that the ties of community run deep.
"I have opportunities to rebuild my life, and I think that I'm lucky to be a somewhat public person, to be an artist — I'm more visible than many other people in Altadena or affected by the Eaton Fire — and I want to put a spotlight on them," he says. "Now that I'm a little more settled, I'm ready to get right back to helping others."
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