Music

Have no fear. The Latest Shipment is here.

by Christiaan Mader

With The Latest Shipment, Caroline Helm is introducing Lafayette to four new bands and its newest venue, in one nerve-racking race to the finish.

Fear is Caroline Helm’s best friend. As a homespun MC and consummate buyer and seller of new musical talents, fear drives her incessant entertainment innovation. Fear of inadequacy in the face of Lafayette’s dense per capita musical talent. Fear of doing the same thing. Fear of her limitations. Fear of falling flat on her face when she rolls out a new idea. It’s fuel for her ambition, a quality she wears casually like a worn in pill box hat. For The Latest Shipment, her newest event going down August 22nd, she’s doubling down with her ramshackle cocksuredness, rolling out four non-extant bands in the nascent and untested grandeur of Warehouse 535, Mark Falgout and Nicole LeBlanc's stunning event Mecca currently on a crash course with completion in Freetown.

The whole thing is tumbling joyfully to the finish. Helm is rounding up media coverage, checking stage plots, practicing her own material, popping in for site visits at 535 and keeping her eye on the prize. Meanwhile, every day of construction at 535 is another closer to driving in the golden spike. No doubt hosting an event in an as-yet to be completed space would send any promoter into conniptions, but Helm seems energized by the challenge. Much of her career as a presenter has been precisely about forcing people into action, turning cocktail hour wishes into realities, making performers out of introverts and back-up singers. Turning fear into fuel for greatness.

“Someone believing in you can really go a long way,” says Helm.

Like the Nue Moon Revue before it, The Latest Shipment began as a conceit to Helm’s ambitions as a closeted songwriter. She’s been taking piano lessons and generally trying to make sense out of life étude by étude, and the exposure to a new instrument has given her a new lease on creativity and a new lot of songs. She dreamed tiny. An opening slot for Johanna Divine perhaps. A backing band. A happy hour chanteuse. But the opportunity to take her little performance to 535 changed the scope of her ambition. With a new space (a new gorgeous space I might add) came the chance to make a mark on what will hopefully become a community lynch pin. For Helm, the venue became the inspiration.

“Seeing the space caused me to go the piano a thousand more times than I would have. The space calls for quality. It’s making every body step up. There’s vulnerability all over the place. New music in a new space,” says Helm.

Because it wouldn’t be enough to set up on stage and shred her new piano chops, Helm set out to condense some more hot air from her pals.The four bands are newly minted and fresh out of the shrink wrap, and fronted by women who, for the most part, have talked a big talk about getting downstage and strutting their talents in earnest. Offering up 535’s immaculate performance space and the buzz of a well-promoted and free inauguration forced those ladies to lay their cards on the table. The results are disparate in style but impressive in caliber. Helm herself will front At The Helm, her first foray (believe it or not) in taking center stage as a songwriter; The Pistolettes featuring Leah Graeff backed by her Kind Cousin affiliates (one of whom is your sheepishly exuberant correspondent); The Outskirts, a three-headed monster of talent fronted by sirens Megan Brown, Julie Williams and Sabra Guzman; and The Boyfriends For Now, a baseball-team sized all-star doo wop outfit fronted and conceived by Julie Bordelon.

The Latest Shipment will serve as open house for 535, a chance to test drive Lafayette’s latest big league performance space. The event is free and open to the public with doors opening at 8 PM and the show soon to follow. With the opening of any new business there’s reason to be anxious about what’s to come. But with Caroline at the helm in such an immaculate new space, there’s really nothing to be afraid of.

For more on Warehouse 535, read our July 9 article, "Setting the Stage at Warehouse 535."