Dan Sartain has chronicled his ongoing exchanges with ‘The Cobras’ – nemeses! – not unlike the constant back-and-forth between his fellow (due to a recent relocation) San Diego band Deadbolt and the creepy, serial-killing transient, Patches the Clown. And ‘The Cobras’ aren’t the only nemeses on Dan Sartain’s shit-list, his brand-new album, ‘Dan Sartain Lives.’
“Who?” you may now ask yourself, are ‘The Cobras?’ 3 3/4” childrens’ plastic effigies with names such as ‘Tomax,’ ‘Xamot,’ ‘Zartan,’ and ‘Destro’? Antagonists from a decades-old cartoon, foiled time and again by dork loins like Quick Kick and errant Village People like Shipwreck?”
As one answers this question, one must keep in mind that Dan Sartain, One Little Indian recording artist from the One Little Indian Galaxy of Stars, is damn near 30 years of age and has been playing his songs and plying his trade in the night life for more than half his life. ‘The Cobras’ are the night-crawling creeps, the burn-outs, the poodle-haired middle-aged sugar-boogered pop-metal bass players, the crater-faced peg-legged cowboy-booted pill-popping sybarites at the far end of the bar at the Nick on a Wednesday night; in other words, every geek, struggler, and sycophant that’s been all over Dan’s ass like a swarm of gnats since he first hit the night spots and, while his peers were just entering high school, showed everybody in his wake that he’s the REAL DEAL.
Fifteen years of creepazoids, weirdos and beard-ohs are in ‘Walk Among the Cobras IV,’ when Dan tells us he’s “…been seein’ snakes and they disguise themselves as men,” and in ‘I Don’t Want To Go To The Party,’ when Dan tells us he’d rather stay in than see more ‘party people’ during his down time because “I don’t wanna see their faces; I see them every day.” And in these fifteen years, Dan’s seen his fellow musicians go a little batty after the first taste of ‘success’ (an UNBELIEVABLY relative concept for musicians), a situation commented on with a sarcasm on loan from Al Jaffee’s ‘Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions’ in ‘Yes Men.’ “I need yes men in my life,” Dan mockingly remarks, “when I’m doing things wrong they say I’m doing ‘em right.” He’s describing the sort of lickspittle familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a washed-up touring musician do a mid-week solo show for fifty bucks ‘and other (probably powdery) considerations.’
“Who else is in Dan Sartain’s crosshairs on ‘Dan Sartain Lives,’” you ask?
Fundys. Round-heads. Prideful know-nothings who wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 at ‘the outside world.’ White, proddy ‘tea baggers.’ ‘Dan Sartain Lives’’ first single is slated to be ‘Atheist Funeral,’ (on account that there’s already a video for the song in the can), a plea to get pushy, evangelical religion out of his private life. But the song that explicitly calls out the metaphysical crap on the carpet is ‘Praying For A Miracle.’ ‘You’re praying to an effigy, a man of straw,’ Dan tells the door-to-door witness before taking a deep breath of bile before smacking the ‘fisher of men’ upside the head with the warning, ‘nobody’s looking out for you; you’re gonna need a miracle,’ and he drives his point home with a jaunty beat and turnaround perhaps on loan from fluff novelty songs such as Gene Vincent’s ‘Gonna Catch Me A Rat.’ And just to be a stylish smartass, Dan ends this hard-hearted act of resistance with a beautiful, melodic solo that recalls Davie Allan and the Arrows, first in Allan’s pre-fuzz ‘High Noon’/’Beyond the Blue’ style and finishes with a generous dollop of Big Muff a la ‘Bay City Boys’ or ‘Devil’s Angels.’
Ever the individualist, Dan explores issues of spirituality off the beaten path in with the kids who’ve already thrown off the chains of this workaday square life and blasted off for Kicksville in ‘Bohemian Grove,’ the song that dares pose the question: ‘Pagan or a druid, what are ya doin’?’ It’ll not surprise you that this song is very much in the style of Boyce & Hart – songwriters who defined ‘snide’ and ‘snotty’, who hit the big time and were the favorite performers of the raven-haired temptress sisters of both Samantha and Jeannie on ‘Bewitched’ and ‘I Dream of Jeannie.’ Dan presents a common-sense, practical-minded and frankly materialist point of view towards the sort of New Age foolishness rampant among beatnik dilettantes, telling the trustafarian, ‘What I respect, your third eye can’t see.’
If I may step out of my ‘anonymous press release writer’ voice and speak my mind, my choice for the debut single would be ‘Ruby Carol.’ Let me regale you with an anecdote, set in a sleazy, rip-‘em off metal club, ten years time ago. There’s three bands’ worth of crap – drums and amps – taking up half the back room of this shitball metal club. A razor-thin young man in a Towncraft jacket and Desi Arnaz’s haircut proceeds to the chest-level band riser with a portable record player. Miking the record player as it spins an album of Latin piano album of cariocas, this kid sings a brand-new, bizarro love song full of possessiveness and paranoia to one of the tunes on this 40-year old disc. I was in Dan’s band at this time; upon seeing this performance I was mildly annoyed that Dan didn’t trust me with the chord changes or melody of the tune he was appropriating, but I couldn’t help but notice that Dan had shut up and rendered speechless a crowd of metal dopes and flame-retarded rockabilly dorks by using the miked record player to re-focus the room’s attention on his verses and his voice. And that, friends, is what makes Dan the REAL DEAL.
So your dumb ass got into Dan Sartain later than mine did; fear not, you can have an experience not unlike the one I described above when you hear ‘Ruby Carol.’ Dan sounds like he picked up a mid-60’s album of instrumental versions of pop hits by, say, the German jazz enthusiast and electronic music pioneer Peter Thomas and the Peter Thomas Soundorchester and wrote a the verses of a new pop love song, full of moonbeams and wishing stars, to fit in between instrumental hooks of electo-organic pings and bleeps. Don’t tell anybody, but it’s synth-pop, and it’s a curious, exciting mix of sounds from the future of the past and the sort of songs Sinatra sang before his throat hemorrhaged.
Dan Sartain’s serious about getting on the radio. Of his experiences opening shows for ‘big names’ such as the White Stripes and the Hives in arenas, Dan says they made him want to write a song specifically timed to work for big venues – one that works with the echo of a cavernous space, slower, more stately than his outright ‘rockers’ to date – the Gary Glitter-inspired ‘Anything I Say.’ The lyrics are as full of rebellion, spite and scorn as everything else he’s written, only this time it’s in the form of a sports-stadium-ready chant. ‘Anything I Say’ has the style in its pop contrivances to sound ready-made for rousing docile groups of sports fans via DiamondVision, but it’s actually a true-enough account of Dan forging his own path, in spite of the prevalence of groupthink. The account of individualism and leadership is sure to be missed by a public that accepts the lefty revisionist doggerel of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ as Hymn to Patriotism. “But it sounds so bitchen,” the Public will say before it asks, “how could it be about anything but Go Team Go?”
Furthermore, Dan’s honest about the price paid for standing up for yourself and being a Grownup Apart From A Peer Group. As on his last album, ‘Join Dan Sartain,’ when he warned his younger listeners that ‘The World Is Gonna Break Your Little Heart,’ on ‘Dan Sartain Lives’ he continues to speak as perhaps the only white man in pop music with iron in his words. ‘Bad things will happen,’ Dan warns Tomorrow’s Young Person Today, ‘but don’t be afraid,’ before promising the tender young listener that bad things will happen ‘… anytime that they want, anywhere you are.’ Shit, Johnny Cash went to his grave a widower and he still wouldn’t tell you that.
This biography was provided by the artist or their representative.
