My Strange Journey with Dispatch
Fuckin’ Dispatch. Last night was the third night in a row I had to work these weird concerts for this band that sold out three shows at the Boston Gahden. The music was starting to piss me off and get on my nerves by now. All I could hear was bad screeching guitars, but nothing that remotely appealed to my musical tastes. These guys sounding like a college band at amateur hour and If they were in a bar I would’ve asked them to turn down the amps cause I thought their music sucked.
But everywhere I looked there were really young college kids who were here for a band that neither I nor anyone I know ever heard of and they came in droves. I’ve worked a lot of concerts and I’ve never smelled so much bud burning in one place before and people so excited for a band. Beautiful ladies everywhere and lovable stoners, a crowd I would have otherwise adored and I just didn’t fucking get it. The music so obviously sucked. What was I missing?
So last night after I get home and start a sesh, I decide to look Dispatch up. These guys are from Vermont (I didn’t think anyone was ever really from Vermont) and were one of the first modern indie sounding bands so to speak that broke up nearly a decade ago and was on the last leg of their big reunion tour (still doesn’t explain all the hot 20ish year old chicks who would’ve been about 10 years old last time this band was together). I think I was in the elevator alone with one of them and talked to the most hippie-ish looking guy that looks kind of Carrot Top’s brother, but I had no idea who he was. Anyways, I found this youtube video somebody made and though I haven’t heard too much more from them I do kind of get it now:
There was something about WWI that’s always fascinated me and but it makes me sad to think about it too long and this song and video go perfectly together. It was a war that so few people think about or care about any more and was important in shaping the modern world obviously, though nobody knew exactly what the hell it was about or what they were fighting for then and still don’t really today. Gallipoli in particular is a battle that has a hold on me when Winston Churchill sent lots of good Australian, English and French men out of the trenches and into the machine guns of the Ottoman Turks who mowed them down like grass as the generals just kept pushing them into a certain death hoping for different results that would never come for a campaign that would fail and ultimately give no advantage to either side but left plenty of corpses. I feel for the poor kids that lived almost 100 years ago now that were screamed at and by their commanding officers and generals, being called cowards and disgraced because they were hesitating to participate in something that everyone knew amounted to nothing more than suicide. This song makes me wish I could go back there, kick their generals in the balls and tell those guys to stay in their trenches or go home. Can’t think about it too long though, because you begin to realize that you can’t keep up with it all and that it happened countless time before and after in different ways. Some wars have been necessary, some haven’t been. The unnecessary ones are inexcusable.
In any event, I do genuinely like this song, so it turns out I guess I do kind of like Dispatch. A minor lesson learned, not to write things off before you try to understand them a bit. Turns out the stoners and hot chicks were right again, as always.
