Punk/Review Grumbeaux - Now Is Near
Plant something simple in the dirt, like an acoustic guitar and voice, and see what clambers out and what swarm of biota clings to it, each protist adding its own puny but inexhaustible voice. Grumbeaux is what you ate for dinner last night; it’s what stuck to your mother’s sole in the parking lot of Kohl’s; it’s the sound your grandfather makes when his false teeth pop out; it’s the elephant in the room and the lion that keeps you awake at night.
“Now Is Near” by Grumbeaux is a deeply meaningful song shaped by history, remembrance and the determination to restore names and stories to people who were once reduced to a single word: deportees. Created specifically for a documentary following Tim Z. Hernandez’s extraordinary journey, the song forms part of a wider effort to uncover the identities of passengers who died in the 1948 Los Gatos Canyon plane disaster, at the time the worst airplane disaster in California’s history.
The tragedy became widely known through Woody Guthrie’s poem “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” later recorded by artists including Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen and Dolly Parton. Yet the individual passengers remained largely anonymous for decades. Hernandez’s work, documented through “All They Will Call You” and “They Call You Back,” sought to change that by spending more than a decade tracing leads, locating families and reconstructing the lives behind the forgotten names.
Against this remarkable background, “Now Is Near” carries an important sense of human recognition. Hernandez provided lyrics, asking Grumbeaux to transform them into a song for the documentary project. That collaborative origin gives the track a unique role: it is not simply inspired by history, but directly connected to an ongoing effort to preserve and honor it.
The subsequent reading of the passengers’ names at the California State Capitol and the installation of a monument bearing those names at the Fresno mass grave demonstrate how remembrance can evolve into something tangible.
“Now Is Near” therefore stands as a musical contribution to that process of restoration. By giving emotional form to Hernandez’s words, Grumbeaux helps move the story away from anonymity and toward identity, family and memory. It is a thoughtful reminder that behind every historical tragedy are individual lives deserving to be remembered by name.
