Dispatch

And yet music’s healing power wasn’t strong enough to keep Dispatch from calling it quits at the height of its popularity. What was it that prohibited these three guys—all humanitarians, all dedicated to making the world a better place—from getting along with each other? Why couldn’t they make it work? Their answer is simple: the same idealism that connected them also led to their demise.

“We always said we’d stop playing when the band, as a business, got in the way of our friendships,” Urmston says. “We maintained it on the power of genuineness with each other. We wanted to stay honest. But when we stopped in 2002, that honesty and sincerity were around the corner from walking out on us.” He attributes it to the vast transitions people undergo between those early college years and real-world adulthood. “We grew into different people from age 19 to 27. Different personalities, different ideologies, different career goals. We were an equal partnership, but we weren’t in the same boat. We didn’t have a captain. It was time to stop.”

Today the guys live in different cities—Corrigan in Denver, Heimbold in New York, Urmston in Boston—yet they remain close. They keep up with each other’s families. They’ve been known to sit in on each others’ gigs when their traveling and performance schedules match up. They briefly reunited on stage in late 2005, when Corrigan invited State Radio and Heimbold to contribute tracks to The Relief Project, a live benefit CD and concert he put together.

“All of us still love and support each other, but we appreciate our differences,” Corrigan says. “Zimbabwe is so off-the-charts in terms of the need there, we can set aside those differences for three days.”

While a Dispatch reincarnation or reunion tour has never been something the guys seriously considered (“I don’t want [the cast of] Seinfeld to get back together either,” Corrigan says), the success of their farewell concert made them aware that, as a band, they had a lot more power than as three individual artists. “The Boston show blew our minds. What kind of money could we raise if we got back together?” Urmston says. “Initially, I was up for it as long as it was for a good reason.”

They found that reason in Zimbabwe, through their connection to The Elias Fund. “The three of us have friends there,” Corrigan says. “They tell us what they’ve seen.”

“We’d all been keeping up with the atrocities happening in Zimbabwe, and the lack of humanity there,” Heimbold adds. “I read almost every day about the inflation, the starvation, the disease.” Separately, all three are able to list the sickening stats that have piled up during the last few years of Robert Mugabe’s rule. Skyrocketing inflation and unemployment rates have resulted in severe poverty and near-starvation for millions. Coupled with recent droughts and the spread of HIV, a once-prosperous country has become a desperately poor one. “After Rwanda, we said this kind of thing would never happen again,” Corrigan says, “but no one seems to be intervening. We totally have the ability to swing a spotlight over there.”

And it may not end with Zimbabwe. All three band members indicate that this may be the first in a series of Dispatch reunion concerts—one, perhaps, every couple of years—for a greater cause.

“Music is so universal,” Urmston says. “It’s a gateway. It lets us start a dialogue about issues that are important to us, that need to be discussed and brought to the surface.” Along with his good friends and former bandmates, he’s hoping Dispatch: Zimbabwe will have that effect. “But if people just like the music, you know, that’s cool, too.”

For more information, visit EliasFund.org.