"And this kid just said 'Oh, so you haven't heard of Napster yet?"'ĭispatch's varied sound became popular on college radios. "As soon as we jumped offstage we were, like, 'What's going on here? How do you guys know our music?"' he said. "By the end of the gig, at least two-thirds of the kids were singing along to all the songs." "There were 1,200 kids there that were waiting for us and when we played our first song, on the opening chord, they all started cheering as if they knew the music," Braddigan said. They had low expectations: a couple of hundreds of fans and maybe selling 20 CDs. The band first saw the reach of underground music when they traveled to a college in Pomona, Calif., for their first show on the West coast. Fans, however, tapped into the Internet to spread their music as the indie band performed at prep schools, colleges and local music joints. They had neither mainstream radio play, a publicity operation nor a deal with a major record label. The band was initially sustained only by the artists' joy in playing under their own label, Bomber Records. "We had guitars, we loved to sing and we started playing music as that transition out of school." "We were these three guys who were coming to terms with finishing up college and finishing up with sports - all three of us were athletes," Braddigan, 32, said by telephone from his home in Denver, where he was recording his latest album. Their remarkable evolution follows humble beginnings 1995 in a dorm room at Middlebury in Vermont.
Madison Square Garden officials say Dispatch is the first independent band to headline and sell out for three straight nights. "It is an unbelievable thing when you realize your gift as an entertainer in one culture is the difference between life and death in another culture," said Braddigan, Dispatch's vocalist, drummer, guitarist and percussionist formerly known as Brad Corrigan.īraddigan will reunite with Chad Urmston and Pete Francis on Friday through Sunday for concerts to raise awareness and money for people hit by worsening political and economic conditions in the southern African nation of Zimbabwe. Now, three years after the members of Dispatch - an underground band formed in a dorm room at college - went their separate ways to pursue careers in Boston, New York and Denver, word of reunion concerts to raise money for charity spread so quickly, they sold out New York's Madison Square Garden for three straight nights, in just 30 minutes per concert. Their 2004 farewell concert brought some 110,000 people to the banks of the city's Charles River - even though the band never signed a record deal, filmed a music video or even hired a booking agent.
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