DAN ZANES & FRIENDS

Dan Zanes was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1961, and spent time being a kid, first, in Texas and then in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he can still remember enjoying ice hockey and Gordon Lightfoot. He ended up living on the edge of Concord, New Hampshire, where there were ponds and fields, and where today his mom, a photographer, still runs a soup kitchen.

He picked up the guitar when he was eight and began taking Leadbelly records out of the public library as soon as he was old enough to get a library card; according to his mother, “He was always very musical.”

But it was not until one night in junior high school while babysitting at a house that had some old Chuck Berry records that he fell in love with rock and roll. He was soon in a rock and roll band, the name of which he declines to recall, and when he won a scholarship to Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, he was in another band for “about five minutes.”

In 1981, Dan went off to Oberlin College in Ohio, where his number one goal was to start a really cool band. In the breakfast line on the very first day at Oberlin, he met Tom Lloyd. Zanes and Lloyd took their breakfast back to the dorm and right then and there started a band and soon left school and headed to Boston (“It was between Boston and Austin,” according to Zanes), where they became known as the Del Fuegos. The Del Fuegos played in lofts, bars, small art galleries, clubs, barns, college dining halls, fraternity houses, gymnasiums, auditoriums, and, finally, big theaters.

Rolling Stone named the Del Fuegos “Best New Band” in 1984. Once, Bruce Springsteen jumped on stage to play “Hang on Sloopy” with them. As a Del Fuego, Zanes made several records—The Longest Day (1984), Boston, Mass (1985), Stand Up (1987), Smoking in the Fields (1989)—and had a hit single, Don’t Run Wild. In 1987, Zanes married Paula Grief, the director of the video for the Del Fuegos song, “I Still Want You.”

In 1991, after the Del Fuegos had broken up, Zanes and his wife moved to Cornwallville, N.Y. in the Catskills. There, Zanes grew chard, chopped firewood, and listened to a lot of gospel groups from the forties and fifties, including some of his favorites, Dorothy Love Coates, The Swan Silvertones and The Five Blind Boys from Alabama. He learned how to record music on his own and made a solo album called Cool Down Time.

When he and his wife, Paula, had a baby, they all moved back to New York City. Dan subsequently began playing music with a bunch of fathers that he had run into on West Village playgrounds while they were all playing with and/or standing around and watching their kids. The fathers playing music together eventually became The Wonderland String Band, which played at parks and parties and on a tape of songs that Zanes started to record at home.

The tape was a hit locally—i.e. on the playgrounds where he and his daughter played—and Zanes realized that he liked making music that families could enjoy together, as opposed to music that is just for kids or just for adults. So, he added a small number of women to his band (“I realized I was ignoring half my audience,” he recalls), renamed it the Rocket Ship Revue, and began making a full-fledged homemade CD, enlisting the help of some people he’d met when he was a Del Fuego—Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, and Simon Kirke, the drummer for Bad Company, for instance.

The CD, Rocket Ship Beach, was also a hit. The New York Times Magazine called it “cool,” and added, “Mostly, though, Zanes kids’ music works because it is not kids music; it’s just music—music that’s unsanitized, unpasteurized, that’s organic even.” The second album, Family Dance (2001) is comprised of dance songs from a wide variety of musical traditions and features Loudon Wainwright III and Roseanne Cash. Dan Zanes and Friends’ most recent effort, Nighttime! (2002) is a little bit more mellow; on it, Dan collaborated with Aimee Mann, Lou Reed, John Doe, Dar Williams, and others.

The forthcoming House Party (October 7th, 2003), is a rambunctious 20-song collection with a diverse instrumentation that, in addition to the usual guitars, banjos, upright bass and drums, includes such wild instruments as tuba, accordion, pump organ, djembe and saw. It’s an album brimming with songs—the way a house party brims with people—in part because Dan invited friends and neighbors and all kinds of people to drop in and play and sing. The album’s raucous first track, “House Party Time,” outlines the concept:

Ring ring, doorbell, ring
It’s House Party time
Everyone’s invited
All gonna rock and sing and dine
Come on in the kitchen
It’s filling up with food
There’s music in the hallway
Everybody’s in the mood.

Some of the people who ended up dropping by are: Deborah Harry, Angelique Kidjo, Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, English folksinger David Jones, and Philip Glass, as well as the Rubí Theater Company, Rankin’ Don (a.k.a Father Goose) and others.

More than a single celebratory event, House Party evokes a state of mind, indeed a whole worldview—or at least how Dan was feeling right after the party was over, just before he went to bed. Either way, Dan is hoping that people will feel the way he feels about people getting together and making music after they hear House Party. He calls House Party “the musical version of the world I want to see all around me,” which is pretty much an all-inclusive world filled with friends and gatherings and gardens and lots of fun and food and, of course, music.