Sunday, May. 18, 2008

DMB bags take meaning of fan to a whole new level

“I’d be a roadie if I was younger,” says Rocel Dimmick as she settled into her chair recently in the coffee shop at Hastings in Richland.

The 33-year-old Richland mother of five had her long, curly, brown hair pulled back loosely and she was sporting a khaki Dave Matthews Band T-shirt.

But the logo emblazoned on her chest wasn’t the only thing signifying her devotion to the popular jam band. She was recently tattooed with an ornate representation of the DMB logo on her back, along with a small trail of ants proudly marching across her foot.

You see, there are fans of a band. Then in a category all their own are the fanatics.

Dimmick falls squarely into the latter pack. She has been into DMB since 1998. Her husband Jason played her Say Goodbye in their dating days and she “pretty much fell in love with him on the spot” because of it.

And since 2003, she has camped out at every three-day block of DMB’s annual pilgrimage to The Gorge. She even caught Dave Matthews and his guitar buddy Tim Reynolds at a recent show for the Dalai Lama in Seattle.

If you’re not yet convinced of her fandom, Dimmick also was a former co-owner of Beemer’s Pizza and Ice Creamery in Benton City, where she named one specialty pizza the “Warehouse” and stuck firedancer (a lesser known DMB logo) stickers conspicuously across the restaurant.

It was like an underground code to her first, err, maybe second love beyond her family.

For Dimmick though, unabashedly professing her love for the band by going to every show within her means isn’t enough.

In February, she started making “Roadie Bags” (this includes handbags, messenger bags and beach bags) out of old DMB concert T-shirts. It was an enterprise born out of the firsthand knowledge that the shirts sold at shows often don’t have the non-petite woman in mind. Instead of stuffing those old T’s inside dresser drawers, she thought, “Let’s wear ’em. Let’s start showing our pride for this band.”

With the help of her sewing savvy mom, Vicki Hammitt of Benton City, she started stitching together the bags. Fans from across the country send her their shirts, then she cuts out the logo and any other relevant material and designs the bag around it. So far she’s put together about 70 bags including some pillows and a diaper bag.

“Some people will buy three and pass them to their seatmates at shows,” she said. Some of her sales have even given her inroads to getting a hold of hard-to-come-by tickets to shows, like the Dalai Lama event.

The bags by and large are beautiful, handcrafted from various fabrics she can find for the right price and the T-shirts. A few tugs on the strap show they’re durable. The bags start at $35 and go up to $65, depending on the rarity of the T-shirt design.

Her home operation isn’t sanctioned by the band, but with DMB’s history of allowing fans to record their shows, she’s not worried about being shut down. Besides, she says, “When you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.”

Though we only chatted for an hour, Dimmick could have gone on for days with concert stories of the tight-knit community of “Daveheads.” But the toughest question for her to answer was why she actually liked the band. Not because she didn’t know. I was just hard for her to gather the intensely personal feeling the music provides.

“It’s just ... I can’t even describe it. ... But every song relates somehow to every relevant life experience I’ve had,” she said.

And with these bags, she can help other fans relate to her.

* On the Net: To get a hold of one of these Tri-City originals, go to www.myspace.com/D_M_B_F_A_N or log on to eBay and search “dmb purse.”

* Jeremy Dutton: 582-1525; jutton@tricityherald.com