Family Haircut
My personal photos from Dummy's first US tour + notes on an undeserved pile-on
Hi!
Last week Bandcamp published, in two parts, an article I wrote about going along with Dummy on the first half of their first full US tour in early spring of this year. It’s called How to Make a Watch, after a lyric in the old Excuse 17 song. These are my disposable camera photos from that tour.
To say the piece caused a stir would be an understatement. (For those not terminally online, you can read a summary of the whole meltdown in this very nice review of Dummy’s very nice Sub Pop Singles Club 7” from Aquarium Drunkard.) I’m not going to get into all of it here; but I do want to point out something that was overlooked in all the focus on the “shit-talking,” which is really such a tiny part of the article: Taken in its entirety, How to Make a Watch is not a negative story. It is a love story: love of music, friendship, and community; a story of joy and connection, of what it means to get punk and stay punk, and all the beauty that rushes into your life when you do. I think that is what these photos show, so I am sharing them here.
There’s an added layer of poignancy to these photos now as the van pictured in so many of them recently died completely, leaving Dummy in a financial hole in the midst of their current tour with Horsegirl. They’re making it work in true DIY fashion but if you’d like to support the band, you can donate to a GoFundMe set up by a fan or hit them up directly on Instagram for Paypal/Venmo information.
I’d like to add that Dummy are not only a wonderful band but truly wonderful people who didn’t deserve the amount of shit they received after the article was published for the crime of being honest. Or maybe that wasn’t the crime in the first place. On that note, I shall leave you with a quote from a music writer friend who I think succinctly hit upon the source of the pile-on: “Dummy committed the cardinal sin of being successful without the help of the tastemaking industrial complex.”
Cheers to the sinners.
MT
This is amazing