Take These Chances Tee

ORDERS OPEN: 6/18/26
ORDERS CLOSE: 6/22/26
TO PRINT: 6/23/26

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ALL ITEMS TAKE BETWEEN 3-4 WEEKS TO PRODUCE AFTER THE ORDER PERIOD ENDS. You will always receive your item unless otherwise contacted. All items are final sale. We are not responsible for lost, stolen, or misplaced packages. 

Under the Table and Dreaming, for many fans of the Matthews Band, who found themselves as fans of the band prior to 1998, remains the preeminent DMB LP. So it usually goes for diehards and smash-hit debuts. The first love is often the hardest fall. Objectively, UTTAD has the purest distillation of what the acoustic-driven sound of the band was at its eager best. By the time the record was released, DMB had already made a self-made debut album, the 10-song, half live/half studio effort, Remember Two Things. 

The legacy of DMB will ultimately be how the band relentlessly toured and established a reputation of its undeniable musicianship, setlist variety and openness to audience taping — while redefining what it means to be a hard-working and insanely profitable tour-first-tour-second-tour-third group. These traits date back to pre-UTTAD days, when DMB was moving from fraternity parties to earning weekly gigs at local clubs to touring Virginia to driving across six states overnight on hope and fumes to expand their name beyond the mid-Atlantic region. Still, the calculative way the band approached signing a record deal, and making that first LP and resisting typical first-album checkpoints — it’s as responsible as the band’s music for why they sustained momentum in American music’s most multifarious and competitive decade.

UTTAD is one of the biggest debut records of the ’90s — from a powerhouse band that’s still steamrolling its way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yet the album’s become a cultural afterthought, a blurry, small star born in a universe of music that was being defined and redefined by the month. Whereas the grunge scene easily birthed a litany of copycats and hunger-dunger-dangers, assembling a band with both a violin and sax player would come off as wannabe more than inspired evolution of the style. Dave Matthews Band encapsulated a sort of macho-troubdadour-ultra-hetero-but-equally-homoerotic-swinging sensibility, both live and on record, truly impossible to imitate.  


At the end of 1956, at the urging of a friend, Touko  (Tom of Finland)  sent his secret artwork to a popular American muscle magazine, but, being cautious in those paranoid times, and anyway thinking that “Touko Laaksonen” was too tough a name for American tongues, he had signed them, ”Tom”. The editor loved them. Touko became Tom of Finland. The rest is history.

The demand for what Tom always called his “dirty drawings” grew quickly, but neither erotic art nor homosexual art paid very well in the 1950s. He soon stopped playing the piano in order to devote the time to his drawing, but it would be 1973 before Tom of Finland was making enough money for Touko Laaksonen to be able to quit his daytime job in advertising. Once he could devote his efforts full-time to his erotic drawing, Tom combined photorealistic attention to detail with his wildest sexual fantasies to produce a body of work that, for sheer homoerotism, will probably never be surpassed.

When Tom’s work was first published, homosexuals thought they had to be imitation women, and spent their lives hiding in the shadows. Thirty-five years later, gays were much more likely to be hard-bodied sun-lovers in boots and leather, masculinity personified. Tom’s influence in that direction was no accidental byproduct of his art. From the beginning, he consciously strove to instill in his work a positive, up-beat openness. When asked if he was not a little embarrassed that all his art showed men having sex, he disagreed emphatically: “I work very hard to make sure that the men I draw having sex are proud men having happy sex!”