Athens, Georgia. What comes to mind? Architecture, food, art, music. Pause on that last one, because Athens’ rich music history runs deeper than you might think.
When it comes to the “semi-folk-rock-balladish things” (Peter Buck’s words, not mine) of R.E.M., or the delicious mix-and-match sensibilities of The B-52’s, Athens was fertile ground for some of the 1970’s and 80’s new wave/post-punk/“pile all the genres in there because it works” giants. Think dance meets hard rock meets folk and funk and something entirely unidentifiable. It’s in the air, it lives in the creative minds of the residents of Athens: perhaps the place itself is how the magic is harbored.
Looking back at 1980’s Athens as its musical peak would be a mistake, however; take one walk around of the city’s venues, and you’ll be met with the new generation of world-changing Georgia artists, fighting to not only maintain, but improve the powerhouse of sound that the city is.
When Dusty Gannon picks up the phone for an interview, he’s informed by his work as a firefighter, his service in the army, and most recently his position as frontman of Vision Video. Yet when he picks up the phone, he’s also just Dusty — one of those people you can talk with for hours and have it breeze right by like five minutes, because he’s got enough life experience to fill the grandest library. He’s Dusty — the singer who built a group from the ununderstandable parts of his past, hoping to bring things to light, examine them for all their pain and hurt, and dance, covered in the most blinding glitter, while he’s doing it. He’s Dusty — proud bandmate of keyboardist Emily, bassist Dan, and drummer Jason, all of whom merge to create some of Georgia’s most gut-wrenching, intricate sounds yet.
If you’ve got so much as an inkling of an idea of what Vision Video is now, throw it out the window. It’s so much more fun when he explains it.
The group’s sophomore release, Haunted Hours, is out this October. If you haven’t fallen in love with this band yet, prepare to. We sat down with Dusty to talk all things Vision Video, Haunted Hours, and, of course, a dash of The Cure. For good measure.
How did Vision Video come to be? Could you take me through the band lineup, how you all know each other, and the beginnings of the band?
Dusty: “Sure, yeah! I mean, it started in a way that's very typical to Athens, but is a very special thing with Athens in so far that we all were musicians that lived here in Athens. I had just left the army and had come back to Athens because I wanted to go to grad school at the University of Georgia, and I wanted to play music. Little did I know that I wouldn't go to grad school and become a firefighter instead, but I was working full time at a music venue called the Georgia Theater, which is pretty famous for giving stage to R.E.M. and B-52’s and all that jazz. I had just been basically posting stuff on Facebook at the time. Just like, ‘Hey, this is music that I'm working on.’ It was kind of just a little project at that point. But Jason Fusco, who's our drummer, had seen some of the stuff and he approached me. He was a barback at the venue. And he said, ‘Hey, I really like that stuff you've been posting, and I'd like to put some drums behind it sometime, so you should come over.’ So I did, and we started working on songs together. And then before long, Dan Geller, who's the bass player, hit us up, which was really funny to me because when I was 17, 18, I used to sneak into his shows when he played in a few bands way back in the early 2000’s, and I was too young to get into venues, because I was really into the stuff he was doing. He did a bunch of synth pop stuff in the early 2000’s. He hit us up and was like, ‘Hey, I really wanna play bass for you guys.’ So we brought him over and he just immediately meshed well with us, because his sensibilities are awesome. He built these really poppy, dancey, bouncy baselines that really drive the songs. At that point we were just kind of a three piece, and we put our first show on as a three piece, and basically Emily came into play because we were looking for a keyboard player. I was like, ‘We really need some synth to kind of cement the sound,’ and synth players are probably the hardest thing to find that are really good, because not a lot of people just play, you know? A mutual friend was like, ‘You know somebody that's classically trained in piano,’ and I was like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ So they called up Emily and I talked to her and I was like, ‘Hey, we're looking for a keyboard player.’ And she's like, ‘Well, I've never played keys before. I've played piano for 17 years.’ And she used to do competitive classical piano, but she's like, ‘I've never messed with a keyboard.’ So we're like, ‘Well just come over, and we’ll see what happens.’ So we put a synth in front of her, and I mean she just absolutely crushed it with no knowledge of it, which was just insane to me. That's kind of how we all formed. So I say it's special to Athens because it's so easy to find people to play in a band here. The really unique thing is that the level of skill that you can find here is staggering because there's just so many artists and musicians.”
Yeah, that’s super interesting about Emily. I feel like a lot of the greatest bands have at least one member who was classically trained. What was your musical background like? Did you grow up around a lot of music?
Dusty: “Yeah, to a degree. My parents were huge into music when I was a kid. There was just always music playing and we drove around a lot, went on a lot of road trips and we traveled a lot because my dad was in the military. So I remember a lot of my youth just being in a car going from one place to another. And they listened to a lot of new wave, you know? I remember Depeche Mode and The Cure and that kind of stuff was always on, but a little bit more classic rock too on my dad’s side. They were obsessed with Phil Collins, which I still love to this day. But as far as me learning music, it was a very typical manifestation for everything in my life, which is chaos. Like, I never took lessons. I don't know what I'm doing in a traditional, technical sense. I'm a kinetic learner, so I learn by doing things, and I literally just messed around with guitars and synthesizers long enough to where I just kind of intuit what to do. When people are like, ‘Oh, what key is that in?’ I'm like, ‘I have no idea.’”
It just sounds good.
Dusty: “Yeah! But I think that’s cool in a way, because as I've gotten more experience with it I do feel like I'm in a place where I can say ‘Yeah, I do basically know how to play a guitar to some semblance.’ I think that sometimes it's really good to learn that way because you don't know the rules so you break all the rules, and you kind of create your own way of doing things. And if it works, it works. And I think that's honestly one of the most awesome things about music, is that it's universal. You don't have to be classically trained or super traditionally proficient to make music. If you make sound with anything that moves people, physically and emotionally through that sonic medium, then that's all that matters. Doesn’t matter if you're not some guitar player who can't shred, or drummer who's just absolutely precise all the time. What really matters to me with music in general is music is a medium that transmits a message. And if I'm trying to evoke something, or convey something to you, what really matters is does that emotion or that sentiment or that message, does that get conveyed to you through the medium? Everything else is kind of secondary in my opinion.”
When I talk to singers in bands, they sometimes share that they sing out of necessity rather than because it’s something they're passionate about. Do you enjoy singing, or is it more a role you've taken on because you need to?
Dusty: “I love singing a lot. I mean, I totally agree with the sentiment where it's important to me as an artist to have that cathartic release of emotion and energy, but I just love singing inherently. And I think a lot of that, to kind of hearken back to my origins with music, most of my childhood was in a very rural Georgia area where I was in a town of 200 people, and the average age of the citizen was 55 or something. It’s like 30 minutes from the nearest town, which was Athens, and I didn't have a car. So it was like I was stuck out there, quite literally stuck in the middle of nowhere. I was obsessed with Bowie and Peter Murphy of Bauhaus and Robert Smith and all these icons, and I would just sing in my room because there was nothing else to do. So I just played music and I would sing over the tracks, and that’s kind of how I developed my ability to sing. It was just so much fun. It was such an escapist thing for me to do as a teenager, imagining yourself singing on a stage and belting these songs, and I'm sure I drove my parents totally nuts because they were like, ‘Yeah, you can't escape this rural area, and we can't escape you singing in your bedroom.’”
Hey, at least you weren’t a drummer.
Dusty: “Yeah, exactly. It could have been worse. It could have been way worse for them.”
Were there any other band names in the running, or was Vision Video a pretty clear choice from the start?
Dusty: “There was one that was funny and it didn't mean anything, but Jason had recommended Sexual Rent Control at one point and I was like, ‘That’s kind of cool,’ but it was a little too glammy for what we were doing. We spent two months trying to come up with a name. It was the hardest part of the band so far, to be honest. And when the Vision Video name came up, it was almost like a joke. I don't even remember. I think it was maybe Dan that was like, ‘Vision Video, like the video store.’ And at first I was like, ‘Haha, that's funny,’ and then I was like, ‘Wait a second, it's perfect.’ Like it's literally everything. It's kind of retro. It hearkens back to this thing that we loved that’s gone now, and it's very Athens. If you come into Athens and you talk to anybody that's been here for more than 15 years, and you say, ‘Not counting the band, what comes to your mind when I say Vision Video?’ People will be like, ‘Oh man, Friday night movie rental five for five!’ They had this deal. It was like $5 for five videos for five nights, and it was just awesome. It was just a very organic kind of Athens thing where we're like, ‘We have to do it.’ It keeps the spirit alive of this thing that's gone, that we really loved.”
Well, that’s perfect. Now whenever anyone wears your band t-shirt, it's kind of like remembering two things at once. Your band, and then also this wonderful thing that's gone, but not really. It lives on in some ways.
Dusty: “Yeah, absolutely. When we first started, actually the first shirt that we had for merch was just a black shirt with white text. It just said ‘Vision Video is a band,’ because it was kind of a tongue in cheek thing. So many people were like, ‘Oh, Vision Video like the store.’ It's like, no, it's also a band now!”
Were there any venues you frequented growing up, or venues you play now that really mean a lot to you and the people you live around?
Dusty: “Definitely. So like I mentioned, The Georgia Theater, I guess I technically still work there just part-time as a bartender. The number one spot for me has always been the 40 Watt Club, which is sort of again, another world famous venue that B-52’s, Pylon, R.E.M., and then more recently Drive By Truckers, and then a whole bunch of current wave Athens bands perform at very regularly. My first show that I ever saw was when I was 16, which feels like an entire lifetime ago at this point. I was in high school and my high school girlfriend's mom knew the owner of the 40 Watt Club, and she got us into the 20th anniversary show of the B-52’s. That was actually a really important moment for me, because it was sold out and we were 16 year old kids going in there, and it's a lot of older people. It’s people in their thirties, forties and fifties. As soon as they came on, I think they played ‘Love Shack’ right off the bat.”
Strong opener.
Dusty: “Everybody just went completely insane. We were dancing our asses off too, which is hard to get a 16 year old to do, but it was just such an insane amount of energy. It was so undeniable. That was like one of those moments where this light bulb went off in my head and was like, ‘I would love to do that.’ Just to be somebody that brings so many people together to enjoy this thing so purely and unabashedly was just so cool to me. So yeah, the 40 Watt is super important. Unfortunately a lot of the places that I did love kind of were lost to the pandemic. We had Go Bar, which was kind of the weird, gothy, experimental music place. You could go there on a Tuesday night and it would just be the weirdest thing you've ever seen, but it was cool. Then there was another place called the Caledonia Lounge. We played there a lot when we first started, and it was a great place. It was about a 150 cap venue, but the sound was great and it was really cool. It was a wonderful place for new bands to learn stagecraft and to learn musicianship, like learning how to load in, how to load out, how to settle, all the little granular details that nobody really tells you that you're gonna have to learn as a professional band so to speak, you learned it there. Now we've got a couple places that are still around, and I think it'll come back. It's just a matter of people investing into the scene here.”
I’ve heard people refer to your sound as nostalgic and reminiscent, and that’s totally true. There’s a lot of the bands you mentioned in there, but Vision Video is also a very modern, recent band. It’s about your experiences in the military, as a firefighter, and just living through your recent life. Can you talk to me about Inked In Red? When in your life did that concept come about?
Dusty: “When we first started writing music, I was just writing the instrumentation and I was having kind of a tough time thinking of what I wanted to say with the music, what the spirit of it would be, because there was this one point where I thought about just writing poppy dance songs. But then as we started writing the music it started to take shape, and it started to kind of guide me in a direction that gave me a clear idea that I needed to talk about my weird life that I've lived. Because it's not like I did any of this by design, but I have had very unique experiences in life, especially for somebody that's in sort of the post-punk world of music. Back in 2018, I was having a lot of mental health issues related to Afghanistan, kind of primarily rooted in my experiences there and the stress of that. But then also being a newly trained and out in the field paramedic firefighter and just seeing like death a lot, like a lot. And it was one of those things where as we were writing the music, I started to really dig into the lyrics. I had a really bad mental breakdown basically in the end of 2018 into 2019, and that record was very much so a very disorganized mind trying to wrap itself around this concept of accepting that you're very mentally ill, because for a long time, I was just like, ‘Oh, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.’ And you could tell yourself that until you're not, and then one day it becomes incredibly obvious and undeniable and that whole record, I think in a spiritual essence and lyrically, was about me fighting to survive. Like very literally trying to survive myself at that point. I think that's where it came from.”
That’s such a revelation, that in some ways you're not in control of how the music sounds. It's like something else takes over, what you’ve gone through takes over, and that part of you is just trying to get out. Is writing music healing for you, or does it open up internal wounds? What is that process like for you?
Dusty: “Sometimes it's really difficult because there's a lot of memories that I have from my life, especially in the past 10 years, that I don't like to examine. I remember going into writing our next record, I mean, I straight up told people when I was really digging into writing the lyrics for everything. I was like, you know, because I'm a pretty social person and I like to get out and see people a lot. But I told most of the people that were pretty close to me in my life, like, ‘Hey, I'm gonna be gone for like a month, and I don't want you guys to worry. I'm just gonna be in a weird place.’ I knew that because that's kind of how I felt when I was writing Inked In Red. I just really had to dig into these memories and these sentiments that are extraordinarily uncomfortable. But yeah, I mean it is healing and cathartic because it allows me to sort of bring something painful out into the open, and in a way objectively look at it, and understand it in a non immersed emotional way. I can kind of bring that moment to bear and convey it to other people. But once I've kind of closed the loop on that song and finished the message and evoked what I want to evoke, I think it's helped me kind of put some of that stuff away, but I always tell people when I'm talking about trauma, it's not something you ever get over. It’s so funny to me when people are like, ‘Well, you know, one day you'll get over this,’ and I don't believe that. I think trauma and grief are things that you'll never get over. You get along with them, but you never get over them. But music and this band and all this stuff that we've been doing has really helped me process a lot of things that just don't make any sense and never really will, but have allowed me to at least live alongside those memories and those thoughts for the rest of my life, hopefully.”
There are certain things about what you've been through that will never be understandable, because they’re not things any human should ever have to understand. But when it comes to processing, it's a beautiful way you're doing it, you know?
Dusty: “Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think there was this one really specific moment for me where it all started to kind of make sense. I have the worst imposter syndrome, like in the freaking world. Every day I wake up and I'm like, ‘What are you doing? This is crap and you're horrible and you’re phony,’ you know? And that's all just that dumb voice that everybody has. But there was this very specific moment where it was like, ‘Oh, I get it.’ And it was at the end of our first big tour, and this was October of last year and we were on the road for about three weeks and we were coming back through, Memphis was the last show. And it was like a Sunday night, and it was like a pretty good crowd. It wasn't anything crazy, but we were exhausted. And we were just happy that anybody came out at all. We put on the same show for five people that we do for a thousand people, no problem. But we're getting ready, and everybody was just so bone tired as you are at the end of every tour. And they had opened the doors at this venue a little early, which is totally fine, you know? I'm not one of those people who's like, ‘Please give me my time.’ (laughs) This woman came up to me and she was like, ‘Hey, you're Dusty, right?’ Because I wasn't in any of the makeup or anything. She goes, ‘Hey, I hope I'm not bothering you.’ I was like, ‘Of course.’ She goes, ‘I just wanted to tell you that my brother was a Marine in Iraq, and he did two tours in Iraq and he came back and he had really bad PTSD and he ended up taking his own life in 2008.’ She was like, ‘I just wanted to tell you that listening to your record helped me understand my brother and know him better.’ I just lost my mind, you know? I teared up and I just gave her a big hug and that's when I kind of understood the power of what we were doing was that it transcends anything that appeases me, and it's all about connecting with people who've been through really, really tough times. I think a lot of people know somebody who died in the past couple years from COVID or something, but even if you haven't experienced that, I think we've all experienced this collective grief over time and experience. I feel so bad for people that are between the ages of 18 and 25 right now, because it's like those people have been robbed of this genuinely wonderful time in their life. So we're all sort of experiencing collective trauma and grief and processing that. I take a lot of comfort in our ability to commiserate with people through our music.”
I was reading Will Seargent’s ‘Bunnyman’ the other day, and he was talking about watching Joy Division perform. I’d love to hear your take on this as a frontman: “Ian Curtis is static at the mic, staring, distant, and trance-like, until suddenly some internal button is pushed and he flips his wig.” Do you feel like a different person when you’re onstage?
Dusty: “Yeah, to a degree. I think in between songs when I'm going through banter or whatever, I feel very much so just like myself, and I'm just kind of a silly, goofy person inherently, and I've always been more of a Lux Interior guy than an Ian Curtis guy as far as stagecraft is concerned. I think that especially in the goth and post punk world, people take themselves really seriously a lot of the times, and I'm like, ‘The music is for that, but when the music stops, you're a human. You're not some brooding ghoul.’ That's not to say that people shouldn't do that. Like, if that's your thing and if that's part of the show, 100% do it. For me, the difference is when the song starts, one of the things that I always do with every single song is literally in my head, I go, ‘What’s the point of this song? What’s the meaning of this song? Where were you when you wrote this?’ And I kind of go through that little mental question right before I play it, and I put myself back in that thing. So in a way I'm kind of forcing myself back into a bunch of trauma every time we play. But again, it's cathartic and it exercises that stuff. I'm putting that negative energy into a sort of ritualistic, meditative state instead of sitting in my bedroom drinking too much and just stewing in that trauma, you know? This way, I'm actually putting that energy into something connective and constructive. It’s almost trance-like for me, because I just go into this weird energy or this weird chaotic world that’s so different from literally where you are standing there on a stage. But it feels vital, I guess.”
It’s like church. It’s connecting with so many other people who are definitely not going through the exact same things you are, but there’s that sense of shared purpose. It’s like, ‘Man, we all have something going on, don’t we?’
Dusty: “I've always tried to write music that’s a little, not to say vague, but a little ambiguous as to what the gravitas of the thing is. There's a lot of Inked In Red that Emily had a lot of influence on because she was going through a really bad breakup during that time. Most of the lyrics are for me, but she had her input and I brought her in because I like to bring her in, because she's got a really beautiful, creative mind. So there's a lot of ambiguity to what is going on in the message of the songs, but it's universal in that way. I like to write music that is sort of universal because I want people to infer their own meaning from the lyrics and from the songs themselves.”
