All posts tagged with: Dispatch
Dispatch
July 14, 2007 | Filed Under Main, Music | No Comments
Last night, my son Chris and I saw Dispatch at Madison Square Garden on the first of their three night stand to benefit Zimbabwe. Dispatch is a jam band - part funk, part jazz, part rock, part reggae. All three shows are and have been sold out (though rumor has it you can still get tickets somewhere). Up until two years ago, I had never heard of them and I was not familiar with their music. But two of Chris’s friends turned him onto the band and they would learn some of the songs to play around the fire on some of our camping trips. So when I stumbled across the show one day in March, the friends told Chris they already had tickets to every night of the concert. Knowing there might be a ticket drop, I signed up to the bands website and won an auction for a pair of tickets. (Hey- it’s all for charity.) Needless to say, since Chris’s friends are also teenagers and teenagers are not to be trusted (or believed), they never did have tickets.
The show was excellent. This band had disbanded in 2004 after a free concert on the Esplanade in Boston that pulled over 100,000 people. My guess is they have never played this big a venue in NYC - let alone sell it out for three nights. AND there are only three of them! A jam band with three members! They switched instruments, they all sang in perfect harmony. The sound was amazing! Occasionally they brought out a horn section or another percussionist. But these three guys whipped-up a rabid teenage/college-age fan base without benefit of airplay, hit albums or even being around the past three years. And where did they get started? VERMONT!
Their connection to Zimbabwe is that some member lived there for a while and they have family and friends there. Thus the band was amazingly quiet on the real reasons for the current horrendous poverty and economic failure in this country. Current President Robert Mugabe was never mentioned and he alone has killed this nation. Another petty politician who won an election in 1987 and decided to crown himself King. In his attampt to divest the country of all white people - many of whom ran the farming industry that had this country known as the “bread basket” of Africa - he destroyed much of the nations farmland and turned the land over to people who could not sustain it. Now the country is literally starving. However, I’m sure fear of retribution and a hampering of Dispatch’s efforts to help have kept them from pointing fingers.