Local lumineries rally around rocker Diane Izzo
Diane Izzo woke up with a headache. She took a Tylenol. By the end of the day, a neurosurgeon told her she had a brain tumor.
It started with a grand mal seizure. Izzo told her partner, Marco Zas, she was dying. Then she collapsed and passed out. Cell phones don’t work in San Cristobal, N.M., where they live. So her partner dragged Izzo into his truck and he sped 20 miles to a hospital to Taos.
Late last month, Izzo had surgery to remove the growth, the size of which had grown 10 percent in a single day. The procedure is expected to allow her to return to her former life writing and recording music, and touring to promote her albums. The experience, of course, comes with another crippling burden: Izzo estimates the cost of the surgery will total $100,000. Plus, since her collapse in August, anti-seizure medicine costs $300 each month.
So Izzo, who has no insurance, is turning to the ad hoc system many musicians use when faced with a crisis: the benefit show.
To help the River Forest native, Chicago music luminaries Robbie Fulks, Califone, Sally Timms, the Waco Brothers and others are playing “A Big Brain Benefit” at 7 p.m. Sunday at the School of the Art Institute Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan. Tickets are $20.
“This happens probably 100,000 times every year,” said Jenny Toomey, a founder of the Future of Music Coalition, a Washington, D.C., think tank that helps musicians navigate health insurance and intellectual property rights issues. “Musicians are the first people to do a benefit for a friend but are often one of the last people to pay attention to why we need national health care. That’s a real change that needs to happen.”
Toomey said musicians are particularly affected by the national health-care crisis because the time it takes them to learn their craft and to travel to earn money means it is difficult to hold down the type of day job that typically affords them benefits. The labor it takes to shape a life in music is not necessarily compensated and only a small number of musicians make a living. Others find a way to balance creativity with working other jobs.
“Musicians are insanely poor — cash poor and time poor,” Toomey said.
Izzo released her highly acclaimed first album, “One,” in 1999. Her first show in Chicago was a few years earlier, opening for the legendary Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt at the Lunar Cabaret, the former arts space in Lincoln Park operated by the Curious Theatre Branch, whose operator, the playwright Jenny Magnus, organized the benefit. The evening will include a performance by Curious co-founder and Art Institute writing instructor Beau O’Reilly.
Magnus said providing health care is not an option for arts organizations of their size. She and her husband currently pay $1,600 every two months to cover themselves and their daughter. Until recently, that cost was $2,500, which the couple lowered by paying a higher deductible.
“When you’re a little not-for-profit theater company with a budget way under $100,000, it would be way too expensive for the company even if everyone was paying in,” she said.
Three years ago, Izzo and Zas, a painter and designer, moved from Chicago to San Cristobal, a farming community in the mountains known as a retreat for artists — where D.H. Lawrence kept a ranch, where Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, its wide-open skies and natural beauty the inspiration for Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings. Izzo and Zas are caretakers of a 35-acre parcel of 10 homes, where they also keep bees and have started tending sheep.
Although harrowing, Izzo said learning of her tumor was also “transcendent.” Being told by doctors the tumor was located near the part of the brain controlling verbal speech and language reinforced her drive to create music. Next year, she plans to record a new album of songs with Jim Becker, the multi-instrumentalist from Califone, and Eric Johnson, the singer-songwriter behind Fruit Bats and a member of the Shins.
“I went back to whatever that initial feeling was when I first started writing songs,” Izzo said. “It’s a gift for any of us to say, ‘This is what we want to do in life and let’s get to it.’”
Mark Guarino is a Chicago freelance writer and critic.