Concert T-shirts cut up to make face masks in Covid-19 fight, and The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir is among musicians donating unsold tees

US T-shirt company Everywhere is making face masks from unsold band shirts and donating them to charities and facilities in need
When members of The Grateful Dead and Widespread Panic heard about it, they donated about 5,000 T-shirts for the operation, which has distributed 20,000 masks

Coronavirus pandemic

Associated Press

Published: 10:15pm, 27 Aug 2020

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If not for the coronavirus pandemic, concert venues across the world would be alive this summer with the sounds of music.

But Covid-19 pressed pause on most live performances, leaving live-streamed gigs as the safest way to connect musicians and fans. While concert tickets can be rebated, concert T-shirts are sitting in boxes, some unsold from past shows, others made in advance of now-cancelled or postponed spring and summer tours.

So US T-shirt company Everywhere, which makes concert tees and other products from recycled material, began making face masks from its material and donating them to charities and facilities in need as the pandemic continued.

Everywhere, which is based in Chicago in the US state of Illinois, had been making shirts for the summer tour of Dead & Company, which includes former members of American rock band the Grateful Dead including singer/guitarist Bob Weir. After Weir learned about the project, dubbed Music4Masks, he told friend and Widespread Panic guitarist Dave Schools about it; both donated shirts and enthusiastically talked up the project to other musicians.

A mock-up of a Music4Masks design for masks made from concert T-shirts.

“We have all kinds of T-shirts from all kinds of tours that had never got sold. This is something to do with them,” Weir said. “I suppose we could have just given them away to homeless folks or something like that, but right now this seems to be a more pressing issue.”

Collectively, the two bands have donated about 5,000 T-shirts. “It doesn’t wind up in a landfill and each shirt can make five or six two-ply masks and they give them away,” said Schools, who is the bass guitarist and vocalist for Georgia-based Widespread Panic. “We thought that was a really good idea.”

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Everywhere gathers materials and helps get it to central locations and distributed to local mask sewing groups, organised by Sewing for Lives and Frontline Fabric Masks, which together have more than 10,000 volunteer members making masks at their homes.

Some volunteers create “no-sew masks”, made by cutting and constructing the cloth, while others sew masks, which are more durable and were initially donated to hospitals and medical facilities, but are now being sent to food pantries, women’s shelters and other sites.

So far, the operation has distributed 20,000 masks to hundreds of organisations. Musicians and bands can donate shirts on the Music4Masks site.

An unsold Grateful Dead concert tee being cut up to make masks. One shirt produces five masks. Photo: Bob Weir

“The concert industry has taken a big hit because of the pandemic,” said Everywhere co-CEO Irys Kornbluth. “While live music and events are offline, we are reaching out to artists and building a different sort of platform, spreading a positive message of how wearing masks can make an impact.”

Also in the works: a way for artists to have unused merchandise upcycled into masks they could sell to fans. “Especially now in the absence of live concerts, artists can benefit from having more merch to sell online,” Kornbluth said.

Back in April, trade publication Pollstar estimated that the music industry would lose as much as US$20 billion, not factoring in all venues.

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For musicians, the best result would be more people wearing masks, which would hopefully slow the spread of Covid-19 and perhaps accelerate a return to live music, the musicians say.

“That is what we do. That is what we are here for and we can’t do that now. Everybody help each other get this virus under control so that we can get back out and do what we do,” Weir said. “If we had done that to begin with we might even have had some concerts this summer … or at least autumn concerts.”

Schools can empathise with music fans missing live performances. “With some time to think about it these last few months, it becomes something like a basic human need … no matter what scale it’s at, whether it’s a stadium for a concert or a sporting event or a nightclub to see a band that’s a buzz band,” he said.

“But there’s no point trying to do something in person until we can get this thing under control and at least get more knowledge and understand the spread.”

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