Interview: Dusty Gannon (Vision Video)

When Dusty Gannon sings, it’s wise to listen. An infantryman during the War in Afghanistan, the Vision Video vocalist channels those experiences through such raw lyrics as “Did you see the broken bodies lying there?” and “We'll remember every act and wander the desert 'till we die” on “Kandahar,” and it’s next to impossible not to tune in.

Over the past year or so since Vision Video emerged onto the scene as one of the best new post-punk bands with its 2021 debut album Inked In Red, a lot of ink has been devoted to Gannon’s background as soldier and his subsequent career as a firefighter and paramedic in Athens, Ga., during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who wouldn’t be drawn to the story of a hunky goth paramedic whose own ghastly real life military experiences are buried deep into the catchy hooks of unabashedly poppy post-punk songs?

Although it’s a major part of what makes Vision Video’s music impactful, just as important is another aspect of Gannon’s personality: his desire for positive change. For as much as his sullen lyrics draw from a deep personal trauma, the frontman isn’t just moping. In the upbeat moments of the goth dance pop, there’s a subtle sense of hope — a feeling that likewise held true in a recent conversation with Gannon. Far from downtrodden via his unenviable relationship with trauma, he proved incredibly amiable and upbeat even as he spoke candidly about more melancholic topics. This positivity shouldn’t have come as a surprise, particularly seeing as Gannon has achieved a sizable following on TikTok, in part for his rather silly Goth Dad persona.

For as much as Vision Video is Gannon’s baby, Emily Fredock (vocals/keys), Jason Fusco (drums), and Dan Geller (bass) all play integral roles in bringing his vision to life, producing a tight package of goth pop that harks back to the precedent set by The Cure and Siouxsie and The Banshees.

Currently on the road, Vision Video’s tour reaches The Grey Eagle on Wednesday, July 13, with support from Blood Lemon and Cold Choir. 

Dusty Gannon: Hey Jonny. I was just doing an interview — this really cool girl's doing an article for MTV.com about goth subcultures on social media. And that's a whole can of worms.

Jonny Leather: I hope you're not all talked out.

DG: You'll probably find very quickly that I can talk about anything ad nauseam, forever. So, I'm more than happy…

JL: Which is great. That's the ideal scenario here. Obviously, it's been a week…

DG: Right. Yeah, we were really digging into social media as a tool against authoritarianism, and just sort of the underground movement, which is what subculture is at its heart is all about. It's not just a bunch of weirdos wearing black makeup and listening to The Cure. There's real implications of what's going on in subculture via goth, punk or whatever you want to call it. This stuff matters, and it matters in a big way.

JL: Totally. That's kind of what I want to talk about. Something that’s always appealed to me about music is how it can help to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Your music is doing that for you, and for the people who listen. You're providing a perspective that people haven't experienced.

DG: Yeah, absolutely. It's awesome you say that, because music, to me, it’s a form of communication inherently at its heart. If you really break down what music is, we're using this artistic medium to create a message. And that message may be something simple, like a pretty day or a beautiful memory or whatever, but it can also be something complex and multifaceted — something that requires nuance and a sort of granular texture to describe and to accurately depict. I think that's where music for me, and for a lot of people, finds a lot of power — in its ability to storytell and to evoke complex things that you can't just be like, "OK, here's this thing, here's how this feels," through just normal words.

JL: Right. I think that although not everyone realizes it, music is a form of therapy for everyone. And so, with you, you're processing pretty severe trauma…

DG: Yeah, it feels that way sometimes. When I write music, I go into a very specific mindframe, into places that are extremely painful, uncomfortable, dark, weird places that I don't love dwelling on — but I have to get myself really present in those memories, those emotions, and those concepts to bring out the meat and potatoes of what I'm trying to convey and communicate. And it's kind of funny because I forget after the fact — until I'm actually performing the song again, it's sort of like, "Oh, that's just the song I wrote about this thing."

But then when I'm out performing, it's like I'm right back in it again. It can be a very jarring, emotional thing, especially when you're on tour and you're performing the songs every night. I have to get to that mindset again to really emotionally convey, through singing and through guitar playing, what that moment in time was like and what that feels like for me.

JL: You're also doing it with this great pop hook, adding this fun energy to it.

DG: Definitely. I think that's always been sort of by design to a degree. It sort of catches you and brings you in at first because it's just a glance — it's just sort of a post-punk, gothy kind of pop, and sort of dancey and fun sounding — but then if you really read into the lyrics of some of the stuff I'm saying, it's like "OK, there's more to it." And that's kind of my magic trick, I guess, that I've always tried to do with this stuff — bring them in with a sound, because I think that, inherently, you can have the most wonderful, meaningful, incredible message in the world, but if you can't be drawn in by the music, nobody's going to hear that message. So it's a little trick, but it's a fun trick. 

JL: Yeah, I feel like that trick started being utilized around the late '70s with Elvis Costello.

DG: Love Costello! He was so good at that. And then on into obviously Morrissey with The Smiths. You know all of their songs were so saccharin sweet, kind of bouncy, bubbly little songs for the most part. But then it's like, "Holy shit! This guy is really upset about things!" Same with The Cure. I think most of my favorite music, through any time period, is music that's got sort of a wistful but happy kind of danciness to it, but is also pretty depressing.

JL: I think I'm drawn to the same thing. That's what really drew me to The Cure when I was younger. What was your gateway into the whole goth sound and culture?

DG: So, my sister was kind of a goth kid, and she's six years older than me. I looked up to her. But she was into it when I was too young to really get it. I just remember being sort of in love with her friend, who was this really beautiful girl named Anna. She was super goth, and I was always so taken aback with her — how she looked — because she was always really done up. That was probably my first little interaction with it. 

When the light bulb really turned on for me was when I was 14. I was flying up from Atlanta to Boston, to go visit my aunt and uncle that live in New England. It was the first time I'd ever flown alone, which is kind of a fun moment anyway. It's an exciting thing to do when you're a teenager. This was back in the days of old when they had the little armrest radio station, where you plug in the headset.

For whatever reason — I don't know why, or who decided this, or whatever, and I wish I could find out the story behind this — there was a literal goth and post-punk radio station on this Delta flight, and the first song that came on was the "Dear Prudence" cover by Siouxsie [& The Banshees]. That was followed by Grace Jones’ "Warm Leatherette” cover, and then that was followed by "Disorder" by Joy Division. I'll never forget it as long as I live. I was like "What is this music?!" It sort of hit this nerve and this chord in my soul or whatever. “This music sounds how I've always felt, about me, about everything, about the world.” 

There's something about it. I had a not insanely rough childhood, but just not an easy one by any stretch of the imagination. So I grew up fast, and I saw a lot of bad things when I was really young, and it was just like, “OK, whatever this is, whatever this radio station is playing, is what I'm into and I'm into it 100%.”

The internet was very fledgling at that point, still like America Online dial-up. I remember going into forum boards, and early Yahoo!, searching Siouxsie and the Banshees, poorly spelled, and just finding out, "Oh, this is what my sister was into years ago. Oh, OK. This makes sense." I knew there was a reason why I was attracted to the aesthetic and this whole thing. It was just mind-blowing — this whole subculture, this world existed with this history and culture attached to it. So, from there it was like, “Game on!” I was fully in.

JL: That's such an unusual story, discovering that station on a commercial flight.

DG: I want to know — somebody at some point was like, "Alright man, well, I guess you can have a radio station on this flight. Put whatever you want, just don't have any cursing on it or whatever." And that person was like, "Yes!" and they just loaded it with so much good music — and they probably got fired afterwards.

JL: One day we're gonna end up finding out that it's someone from a major band or something.

DG: That would be so awesome. I mean, it's no wonder, because that music, while it fits into the sort of goth post-punk mold, it's also pop. Siouxsie and the Banshees had several massive pop hits. The Cure had massive pop hits. Joy Division was a big band. So, these weren't obscure creatures of the night. These were huge performing artists, and some of them still are.

JL: And those songs still live on in all different ways now.

DG: Yeah. We played "Transmission" [by Joy Division] the other night — we covered it, and it's actually going to be on our next record. It's one of my favorite songs that I've ever performed in front of people. It's just timeless. When you get to that chorus and he's [Ian Curtis] like, "Dance dance dance," you know what to do. He literally tells you what to do in the song.

JL: You haven’t had an opportunity to play out much as a band until recently.

DG: It's been a bizarre past few years for us, because we started in very late 2018 — really more like 2019. We were writing our first record, just starting to cut our teeth on performance. I was pretty new to it. I've been playing music for a long time, but I'd never seriously given it a real effort to form a meaningful band or anything like that. It was just kind of quiet songwriting at home, for my own purposes. 

This is a very Athens story. We all found each other through the service industry here. There's just this wonderful music scene, so it's pretty easy to find musicians. And then we were working really hard on writing, and performing, and just learning — we were in that kind of awkward baby band stage where you're sort of like a toddler that's just learning how to run around. When we started to really get our legs under us, boom, the pandemic hit. It's like, “Oh shit!” 

I've been a paramedic and firefighter for the past five years. So not only was this big aspect of my life of the things that I enjoy doing gone — and my ability to express myself seemingly gone — there was also just this, "Oh, shit. I'm a paramedic, in a pandemic. I'm like literally the first person that shows up.” I'll never forget, right when the lockdown started and all the medics — because they were cross-trained as firefighters and paramedics — it was like, “We're gonna die.” That was the pervasive mentality before we understood the pathology fully. It was just like, "Well, we're all gonna get this and we're all gonna die. So be ready.” But fortunately, it did not express that way. 

For the time of the lockdowns — it was such a bizarre thing, because I was just so utterly isolated because I was constantly exposed. I didn't want to get anybody sick. The only person that I really saw was Emily because she had to keep working, because, of course, Georgia never really closed. So she was forced to work in a bar. So, I was like, "Well, you're just as exposed as I am, so I don't feel uncomfortable seeing you." That was it. 

We just really dug into building visibility for Vision Video online, through social media via TikTok and Instagram, and all that stuff. And it worked well, because I'm not good at a lot of things but I'm good at telling stories, and I'm good at talking at cameras, I guess. It's like a weird salient skill to have. As it grew, the numbers grew, on followers and on silly stuff — but it feels like it's [happening] in a vacuum. It's grueling. 

It didn't really hit us until post-vaccine, post-lockdown. It was like, "Oh, people know who we are. We have fans in other cities that are not Athens." So being able to get out of Athens was amazing, just being able to play and go on tour and have people who are like, "Man, I've been listening to you guys since the lockdowns and you really helped me process that time." I was like, “Wow, this is powerful. This is really cool. This is an awesome experience.” 

So, we kind of skipped this bizarre middle ground. But then it’s also very uncomfortable, because now we have an audience in different places, but we haven't played together. We still had to get good at playing. We did a couple tours in the past year. We did our first big one last year in September-October, and then another one in March-April this year. We learned a lot, and got a lot better. We just performed AthFest, which is our big music festival here.

JL: Yes, AthFest rules!

DG: Yeah, It's such a great, wonderful experience. I had people coming up to me saying "Man, I saw you two years or three years ago. You guys are a different band now." It's so satisfying to know that we had the chops to actually put up the good music that people thought it was gonna be. It was a little terrifying as we were like "Well, now we have to not suck, so let's get really good." That speaks to the insanely high work ethic of every single member of his band. Everybody is really, really, really passionate and really worked hard to make sure that it's an experience and not just like another gig.

JL: And your bass player was in I am the World Trade Center, wasn't he? I loved them. 

DG: Oh yeah! There's actually a funny story about that. So, when I was like 17 or 18, and I was too young to get into Go Bar, which was where he would always play, I used to sneak in there as often as I could. And I would go watch his shows. That was one of those things where I was like, "Man, I would love to do this one day." Little did I know that, 15 years later, I'd be playing in a band with Dan. 

But Dan's kind of our local bassist and he writes for the band. We have a touring bassist, because Dan's a professor at UGA and he cannot get away from that line of work so easily. We have a really wonderful touring bassist named Tom Ashton, who was in a band called The March Violets in the ‘80s, which was a huge post-punk and goth band. They did the soundtrack for Some Kind of Wonderful, the [John Hughes-directed] Brat Pack movie. Tom has been amazing. He's our producer as well. He's just been a really good friend to have along the way. He's just such a great guy to have around because he's so experienced and he's such a calm, well-tempered guy, when we're all kind of rambunctious and crazy. 

JL: I've been wondering about the origin of your band name and if it had any connection to the Christian film company.

DG: No, but I love that. We get that all the time. "Is this some stab at this weird Christian company?" I kind of wish it was, but we weren't even aware of that. 

Vision Video is the name of a local Athens video store that operated from about 1984-2017. It was sort of the punk rock Blockbuster. The big thing was that they had this huge Employee Picks wall, and they updated it every week — and you had your person. It was a very community-based video store because it was locally owned and it was all the college kids. A lot of them worked at the radio station.

They were just kind of movie nerds, you know, and they would be like, "Hey man, it's good to see you. I know you watched The Thing last week, you should check this out. Check out this Cronenberg movie. You'll like this.” It felt like being at an event, more than just walking into a Blockbuster and perusing the aisles. They would have the weird, bad-taste or crappy ‘80s horror movies. They had it because they were obsessed with the same kind of thing. So it was just very rock and roll. They'd always be playing like good music. It was just fun. 

We spent a long time trying to figure out a name. I think Jason, our drummer, almost jokingly was like, "It could be Vision Video." And I was like, "Actually, that's kind of perfect." It was, at that point, closed, and it had been closed for like a year and a half. It's kind of retro, it's got this cool alliteration, and it pays homage to Athens. We all love it here. It's such a wonderful city — the music scene, and the college. So it's just kind of our little love letter to this town.

JL: Athens is great. One thing that I really noticed about your scene recently is that it all interconnects, no matter what type of music you're making. I recently interviewed Linqua Franqa, and they had so much to say about collaborating with different types of musicians.

DG: Yeah, Mariah [Parker] is awesome. They're one of my favorite people in the scene, and I love how they tie in everything regarding their politics into their music as well. We have such a diverse scene here, which is surprising. There's a really flourishing metal scene. We've got a number of post punk and goth bands that are doing really well from here. The hip-hop/rap community is thriving, as it has for the past 20 years. But then there's also country and folk music and everything. It's just such an awesome place, to be able to go any night of the week and find something new that you might not find in a lot of other towns of the similar size.

JL:I think it's a lot like Asheville in that way. And on that note, you're going on tour with Secret Shame. How did you all get connected?

DG: I found them via social media during the lockdowns, or maybe even before. I was just super into their sound — they're phenomenal musicians. I've tried to take a very cooperative role with social media. I think a lot of musicians view other bands and other musicians as competition or something.

One of the best pieces of advice that I ever got, when we first started to kind of get serious about Vision Video, was from Dan: "Don't look at this as like a zero-sum game. Everybody can succeed. But the people that will succeed are the ones that work really hard. In fact, it's contrary to try to pigeonhole yourself away and be antagonistic to other bands. You want to build relationships, you want to make friends and go play." And that's the whole point. There could be a little bit of competition that's fun and playful, but it's better to build bonds. 

So, I spend a lot of time sharing people's music as our social media platforms have grown, because that's an interest of mine. "Hey, this is this music scene. Here's some great goth rock bands, or post-punk bands that I really love that I think you'll really love if you like our music.” And they are one of the best, in my opinion, of this current wave of that genre of music.

I met them for the first time when they came down here to play a show with a band called Tears for the Dying, which is another great death rock band. It was a really great show, and at the end of the show, they were like, "If anybody has a place for us to stay..." and I was like, "Hell yeah! Come to my house." They came over and we got late-night pizza. We had a great time. It was just really fun getting to know them all, and putting faces behind the name. Then we basically played our first show of our tour in September in Asheville at Static Age [Records] with them. It was such a fun show. 

So yeah, we're gonna be taking them on as support for some shows in the Northeast and into the Midwest. I'm so excited, because I get to see one of what I consider to be one of the country's best bands every night for several nights in a row.

JL: Will you be touring in the hearse?

DG: No. I wish we could. Maybe one day, resource permitting, we'll just do a complete conversion of the hearse into a proper touring vehicle. But no, it only really seats two — three if you count the casket in the back. My hearse Charlene is a 1990 Cadillac Brougham Supreme Coach with only 80,000 miles on it, funny enough. She's in really great shape, but I would not ever want to take her out of town, because you get 14 miles per gallon if you're lucky. So yeah, not a comfortable ride.

JL: I think the initial reason that I even listened to Vision Video was because I was drawn to the artwork for Inked In Red. Can you tell me a little about who designed that album cover? 

DG: The original designs for the first record and all the singles that corresponded to it are from a really fantastic artist and musician named Ryan Dunn. Ryan's up in Indianapolis; he plays in a really great band called Hyper Tensions. It's kind of this punky psych rock band that's so much fun. He did the first record and all those singles. 

We have another artist working on the second, because we kind of just want to do something a little different, mix things up a little bit. His name's Derek Setzer, and his stuff is more monochromatic. It's very black and white; very, very stark. Ryan's just an absolutely amazing artist and graphic artist.

JL: And you're working on the new album now?

DG: It's done [available October 11]. Our first single from the second record [Haunted Hours] releases on Thursday, [June 30]. It's called "Beautiful Day to Die." It's kind of exactly what we were talking about before. It's almost a shoegazy song: it's got this shimmery, almost weird folksy element to it, or, like a Southern vibe to it. It's got this pretty veneer, but then it's about mortality and experiencing existential dread because of me seeing a lot of death over the last five years — just sort of me just trying to evoke that emotion to the forefront. It's a very simple song. Lyrically, it's kind of sparse, actually, but it's just this kind of condensed emotion of that dread, but then also realizing the duality of it. There's these beautiful moments that you catch when you're paying attention. 

I've had to tell a lot of people [that] a loved one is dead over the past few years, and, you know, it's extremely sad, obviously — it's never good. But there's beautiful moments that happen in the cracks of the moment. For example, just a few weeks back, we worked a cardiac arrest that just was not viable. Basically, we tried to do resuscitative efforts with CPR and emergency drugs and whatnot, and it just was not going to happen, so the efforts were terminated on scene. I had to tell this woman that her father had died. She was upset, obviously very sad, but there was this really wonderful moment when she was telling me about his life and all the struggles that he'd been through, but all these things that he'd overcome like extreme alcoholism, and how proud she was of him for getting through all these hard things in his life.

And that was just like one of those beautiful moments where it's like, I won't call this a good thing — they're experiencing something that we all have to experience at some point or another, and there's a healthy way of processing things, and I think that's as good as it can get. We could take comfort in that. That's what the song’s about.

JL: I feel like what you've just described is this human connection that people are kind of lacking in society today, because we're always behind screens. Even though what you experienced was something really sad and hard to deal with, you also got a glimpse of humanity, and we don't see humanity nearly enough anymore — which is why we don't empathize with people. 

DG: Absolutely. We're so stuck in these little condensed echo chamber worlds. When something like that happens, it's almost unreal — "Is this really happening right now?" — because it's so simple and human. When those things do happen, it’s like a dream, and that's kind of what I was evoking with the song. I wanted to make this very dreamy sort of pop. A lot of this record is very different from our first record, and I think it's gonna surprise a lot of people. I think that our fans are gonna still really enjoy it, but they're going to see another layer of depth and complexity to what we have to offer. Some of the songs are a little slower, a little darker and shimmery and ethereal. 

JL: Change is good.

DG: Yes, definitely. That's why I love The Cure. It's my favorite band of all time. And it's specifically because they maintained a voice and an identity but they changed completely over 40 years. And who knows what the next record they put is gonna sound like?

JL: How much has playing live influenced what the new record sounds like?

DG: Playing live definitely made me understand a need for some slower material. If everything is fast, there's no contrast. If everything's dancey, there's no contrast. So, it kind of gave me some ideas. I remember coming off the first tour, I was like, "I kind of want to write a couple slower, almost ballady songs." There's one song on the record called "Burn It Down" — it's almost like an anthem ballad, but from a very real place, a very bad place in my life. It's a very honest song, I think. So, yeah, coming out of touring just kind of gave me an idea — especially seeing bands that can perform something really pretty in between really chaotic or really dancey and fun songs. It just kind of gives the audience a break, too — [they don’t] have to be constantly expending energy.

JL: Yeah, I think some bands kind of forget about dynamics. 

DG: We just put together our set for AthFest and for tour, and it's super fun. It's all a build, essentially — some slow stuff in the beginning, and then it gets a little bit heavier tempo, higher tempo. And then by the end of it, it's like, boom! This explosion for the last three or four songs. And that's kind of unusual for us, because we haven't really had the material for something like that.

IF YOU GO

Who: Vision Video + Blood Lemon + Cold Choir
When: Wednesday, July 13, 8 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $15

(Photos by Scarlet Lewis)