DISPATCH DVD SENT TO HELP ZIMBABWE VIA MSG SELL-OUTS

Last year indie band Dispatch sold out Madison Square Garden Arena, not once but three times, to benefit Zimbabwe, and now a DVD of it is ready to drop.

Dispatch may be the biggest band you’ve never heard of. For fans that have, their reunion run at the sold-out Madison Square Garden was the second coming. Members Chad Urmston, Pete Heimbold and Brad Corrigan got the defunct band back together for shows to benefit charities in the beleaguered African country of Zimbabwe. After music and video briefly appeared on the internet, Dispatch is readying the release of Dispatch: Zimbabwe – Live at Madison Square Garden on January 29 to further moneymaking efforts for the region.

The band broke up due to internal troubles and we asked Pete Heimbold about the decision to do the concert.

“It’s always hard with this group to kind of agree on anything, so…but we talked about it and we felt like… When I learned more about the situation in Zimbabwe and that people are really in dire need of help — We had a connection with the people of Zimbabwe with a family there because Chad had written a song called Elias and it was about a friend and his experience in Zimbabwe. And so when we spoke about it we felt like we wanted to do a benefit concert and it seemed like this would be a great cause to get behind.”

We asked Heimbold what he felt was the highlight of the night.

“Well you know what was a really cool moment was that in the middle of the show we did an acoustic set, and we played on top of our van. Our van’s name is Wimpy, and we toured with Wimpy for at least 100,000 miles or something like that. That was really cool. We brought the van in, and we had some chairs and they were kind of like bolted down. We did an acoustic set. It was great to be in the middle of the audience and to be around all of our fans. That was the coolest part of the show for me. That and singing with the African Children’s Choir because the children were so full of love and joy. That was really a remarkable feeling.”

Heimbold was asked if they achieved their goals in regards to aiding Zimbabwe.

“Well we set out to put on a great concert for the people that were there, and we also set out to set up a fund. We set up the Dispatch Foundation, and we’re trying to build that, perhaps with other benefit shows down the road, but we wanted to put in a certain amount of money that we could give towards Zimbabwe and just be very specific about what groups that we could locate in the country that we could help people. As opposed to a large sum of money going to something (we don’t know about). We wanted to be specific about what we were spending.”

While there’s no reunion shows for Dispatch scheduled for the foreseeable future, the DVD is well worth the price. It includes 2 hours of live concert footage, outtakes and behind the scenes interviews plus an exclusive 30-minute documentary on the devastation in the African country titled “Tree With No Name.” Inserted in each package will be a DropCard, allowing fans to download audio from the three night run. Fans can contribute to the cause by going to dispatchfoundation.org.