Advertisement
Hard as it might be to believe, the white-hot rock & soul duo Dangerman have somehow managed to house the whole of New York inside their cramped East Village apartment -- or maybe it just sounds that way. On the outfit's self-titled 550 Music debut, the collaborating team of singer-guitarist-bassist Chris Scianni and drummer-percussionist Dave Borla survey just about every musical style that's wafted by their window over the years, from block-rocking electronica beats to jazzy, Latin-flavored grooves to horn-stoked R&B struts to loping, rough-and-tumble blues workouts. Ask Scianni and Borla about it and they say the album's merely a reflection of their years growing up in the multi-ethnic melting pot of Lower Manhattan, as opposed to, say, Des Moines, Iowa.
"You wouldn't make the same record if you were from [Des Moines]," says Borla, "but you could also make an honest record that sounded like what it was like to be from there. For us, [the album] is an expression of where we've grown up and an expression of where we live. But I think that even though the sentiment begins with New York, it also transcends just being about New York."
Apparently so. Barely a month after the album's first single, the buoyant, Willie Colon-inspired "Let's Make A Deal", was released, Dangerman are in danger of having a coast-to-coast hit on their hands. And on April 20, the band kicked off an opening round of East Coast tour dates supporting like-minded sonic scramblers Citizen King with an expanded lineup that includes bassist Greg Arzab and keyboardist Peter Levin.
"It's a trip," says Scianni of the strong response Dangerman's been receiving. "The other day, I was in the car driving in Jersey, randomly flipping around some radio stations, and all of a sudden, there it was. And I thought it had to be a tape of the tune playing in the deck in the car or something. There's no *way* it could be somebody playing us on the radio."
"It was flattering, to be honest with you," Borla adds. "Because there's a lot of good music out there, and we know that you need a good team to make it all happen. You need people on your side and you need luck to push the music through." Producer-engineer Brendan O'Brien, who's worked with everybody from Bob Dylan to Rage Against The Machine, was one of those people. Immediately after he heard the duo's demo for "Let's Make A Deal" (which Scianni and Borla recorded in their apartment in one day), O'Brien summoned them to his Atlanta studio.
"It was intimidating at first, and I personally didn't know how to react to it," says Borla. "Because we had come from [a small apartment] where we had recorded everything, and then suddenly we found ourselves in a state-of-the-art studio working with the best rock producer in the land." In addition to producing, O'Brien also wound up contributing a variety of the instruments to Dangerman's musical stew, including keyboards, mellotron, clavinet and lap steel.
Nevertheless, the disc retains much of the rough-hewn, organic vibe and street-life savvy that piqued O'Brien's interest in the first place. A few of Dangerman's demos were incorporated into newly recorded songs as rhythmic and melodic loops, and flavorful, Saturday night anthems like "High Heeled Sneakers" and "I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll" -- a sizzling, affectionate homage to country bluesman "Mississippi" Fred McDowell -- sound at once like seamless, natural extensions of a century of music history (that's not surprising, considering Scianni and Borla's description of themselves as vinyl junkies constantly on the prowl for old LPs gathering dust in Greenwich Village record stores).
"Brendan was hip to the whole 'ghetto-style' stuff," Borla says. "He liked that sound and there was stuff he didn't want to get rid of." If anything, adds Scianni, the wealth of studio resources at the band's disposal, "opened up the scope of possibilities of what we could do."
Figuring out how to capitalize on that "anything goes" vibe, however, took some doing on Borla's and Scianni's part. Before committing to what would eventually come to be called Dangerman full-time, both musicians logged time in G13, a hardscrabble grunge outfit that appeared to be going nowhere fast in the mid-Nineties. Around the same time, Borla and Scianni bought four-track equipment with the idea of recording new G13 material and finally securing the major label contract that had been eluding them. But they soon found themselves messing around with tape-loop grooves, hip-hop rhythms and, in general, coming up with loads of material that was decidedly non-grunge in nature.
"We pretty much started Dangerman as a side project and what the two of us basically did was get together all the time and record," explains Scianni. "But the other guys [in G13] weren't into it. They just wanted to be a rock band. But that simplified things really quickly for us. Right away, as Dangerman, we got a reaction from people. And people were reacting because we were finally doing what we wanted to do."
The buzz that's been building around Dangerman is gratifying to Scianni, but also somewhat surreal -- although as far as out-of-body experiences go, it doesn't come close to his stint back in the early Nineties playing guitar in tennis great John McEnroe's band. Say what? "I was working at a camp out on Long Island," recalls Scianni, "and I ran into a guy who had been John McEnroe's doubles partner, and who said he was putting a band together to tour." After word reached McEnroe that there was an able-bodied guitarist immediately available for the job, Scianni soon found himself on a tennis court, talking about touring and testing his backhand against the Wimbledon star. "There I am on Court One trying to keep up with John McEnroe," remembers an incredulous Scianni. Now *that*, he says, "was a surreal moment."
JONATHAN PERRY
(April 26, 1999)