“Spirit is something that no one destroys.”—Howe Gelb, “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.”

So many albums, competing for spins - in your bedroom; in your car.

Not this one.

So many songs, competing for space - on your iPod; on your hard drive.

Not Arizona, Amp & Alternator. Or maybe.

“ Hey, do you have a Mac?” Howe Gelb wonders aloud, sitting at home in Arizona. “I’m just trying to figure out how to drag more than one song in iTunes into a folder without doing them one at a time, you know.”Gelb - the midpoint in an Arizona circle of bands that has spawned his own Giant Sand, The Friends of Dean Martinez, Calexico and countless others in the past two-and-a-half decade - eventually agrees that the trademark “Apple key” is the Windows equivalent of the Control key. That is, Howe, hold down the Apple, click the songs you need and drag. “My daughter showed me how, but I can’t remember exactly,” he laughs.

Gelb is busy compiling the forty or so albums that he’s recorded since 1982. He’s up to about thirty-three now, all filed away neatly on his home Macintosh. Today, he’s especially busy with the project, trying to compile a mixtape - or as he calls it, “their homework” - that will, in two days, become a setlist for a Giant Sand reunion of sorts in Tucson, the city where Gelb has lived or lived near since he moved to Arizona from Pennsylvania to be with his father in 1976.

He’s not quite a native, he posits. “I’m still an alter-native.”
On Friday, the Tucson rock landmark Hotel Congress will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in the city. As part of the festivities, Gelb and his primary, on-off vehicle for about the same time span, will play, bringing in several of the players who have long since moved onto other gigs. John Convertino - Calexico co-founder - will be back on drums for several numbers, and Neil Harry will return to pedal steel with Paula Jean Brown behind bass.

This show won’t be all old friends, though. Lately, Giant Sand has been Gelb and a band of crack musicians from Denmark. They arrived just last night by plane, just in time to catch The Knitters (“X meant more to us than I can express”) set in town.