About Dispatch
Dispatch is an American indie/roots band. The band consists of Brad Corrigan and Chad Urmston . The band's original bassist, Pete Francis Heimbold, left in 2019.
The band, which is based in the Boston area, was originally active from 1996 until 2002. The members then announced a hiatus, which would ultimately last for almost a decade; during this period, the band came together for reunion concerts in Boston , New York City , and Washington, D.C. . The hiatus ended at the beginning of 2011, when the band announced a national tour. In May of the same year, Dispatch released an EP containing six new songs, their first all-new release since 2000. The band released both their first studio album in over a decade, Circles Around the Sun, and an iTunes session in 2012 and toured North America that summer in support of the album. On April 22, 2013, Dispatch announced a double-disc live album called "Ain't No Trip to Cleveland Vol. 1", released on June 4, 2013. After a long hiatus, Dispatch returned with their new album, America, Location 12, released on June 2, 2017.
Hermit Thrush and Woodriver Bandits merged into an all-acoustic band in the early 1990s as One Fell Swoop. They soon changed their name to Dispatch after a dispute with another band of the same name. Chad Urmston, Brad Corrigan, and Pete Heimbold, who were all attending Middlebury College, comprised the band's lineup throughout their entire schooling. Their music drew upon several genres, such as acoustic folk-rock, reggae, and funk. They did several concerts in their early years both in and around Middlebury, gaining a name for themselves at the college.
However, even with their Middlebury roots, Dispatch's first show was not near their home campus. They first performed at Cosmic Cantina in Durham, North Carolina, while on a trip to visit the younger sister of one of the band members at Duke University.
After graduating from college the members of Dispatch relocated to the greater Boston area to continue the strong touring effort that would characterize their sound. Their live show progressed through the years to include extended jams, guest appearances, and mash ups of their songs with other popular artists' songs such as Sublime and often found themselves playing on the jamband circuit. The musicians displayed their versatility at live performances, with each member of the band switching instruments throughout the set. Dispatch gained much recognition outside of New England, without any help from a label, thanks to peer-to-peer file sharing programs such as Napster, as well as word-of-mouth. During their rise to indie fame, they put out four studio albums, which progressed from acoustic albums to full band records with electric guitar. After the release of their last album, Who Are We Living For?, painted and designed by artist William Quigley, they began to tour extensively nationwide. Tensions began to run high between the band members, and they announced an indefinite hiatus in 2002 after a performance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
The band eventually scheduled a farewell concert to their fans, in order to get closure on the Dispatch portion of their lives. The free show was performed at the Hatch Shell in Boston on July 31, 2004, and was called "The Last Dispatch". The original prediction of the turnout was between 10,000 and 30,000. Fans flocked from Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia among others, making up an estimated total audience of 166,000. Corrigan told the fans near the end of the performance, "Somebody said, downstairs, that we were shooting for, I don't know, 20,000, 30,000 people would be considered a huge success. And um, we were kind of excited about the idea of trying to get enough of you guys in here that they'd start shutting down Storrow Drive. Well we got our wish." The performance was released as a three-disc set later that year, entitled All Points Bulletin, along with recordings from a warm-up show in Somerville, Massachusetts. Special guest appearances at the Somerville performance included Craig Dreyer on saxophone and Brian Sayers on drums. For some of their songs at the Hatch Shell, Dispatch shared the stage with Phil Keaggy , Paul Tillotson , Brian Sayers , and Reinaldo DeJesus .
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