This article on The Birth of Mister Dirty can in no way be thought of as a review. For one thing, I was involved in every stage of its creation, from dawn to dusk, and any crude nods toward impartiality would be at best grotesque. For another, the artist Dan McLane has been dead for almost five years now, a glorious candle cruelly extinguished, ultimately another statistic in a godawful stinking crisis. There is no product to promote here, let alone to review. There is simply The Birth of Mister Dirty, Dan McLane’s last creative will and testament and unquestionably highest artistic achievement, and it is finally here; a wisp, a tantalizing suggestion of what could have been, but whole all the same - rendered perfect in its total completion.
Some of you may or may not remember, but between 2010-2017 we had a beautiful little musical collective in Brooklyn called Mama Coco’s Funky Kitchen. Dan was, in many ways, the spiritual pillar of the community. As hundreds of stylistically and personally disparate musicians weaved their ways in and out of the scene, Dan was a constant center; when he was gone, everyone had the same thing to say: “I would walk into a Mama Coco’s party, not know who to talk to, and go find Dan.” His charisma was electric and he was the goofball life of any party - make no mistake, he was a Holy Goof in the total Neal Cassady archetype - but his electricity was generous with its warmth, and his special gift for making one and all feel included eventually turned out to be the glue that was holding the whole damn enterprise together.
Let’s go back a little farther. I fell in love with Dan McLane the second I laid eyes on him. I was 21, still offering pathetically affordable recording in the basement of my parents’ house, on a pathetic rig of taped together prosumer gear. Dan had this band, the Harmonica Lewinskies, who had the worst name I had ever heard of in my life and taste almost as bad to match, but there was something about them: something unforced, unpretentiousness, and honest in its ribald silliness and dirt-under-the-nails rambunctiousness. Dan was most of all to do with that. On stage he was like Blues Brother Belushi and teenaged Hamburg John Lennon combined into some sweating demon child. How can I describe the sensation of hearing him breathe weird, frightening new slithery life into that hoariest of chestnuts “Land of 1000 Dances,” shortly before splitting his pants with a a gravity defying floor drop?
If you missed it, I can not share it with you. Like the flame of the candle, once extinguished it will not be retrieved. But I can offer you time spent with The Birth of Mister Dirty. In the time that I knew Dan, as his producer, collaborator, and finally, friend, I was always urging him to follow his weirder instincts and forge a unique artistic path of daring. I sensed both in his hero worship of famously deep writers like John Lennon and Daniel Johnston, and from the scorched earth intensity of his performances, that there was an artist in there to be reckoned with, busting to get out. As we began to work on his solo material together, I admit that I was hard on him. I abhorred any signs of creative laziness, reliance on cliche, and continuously insisted on challenging lyrical revisions when I wasn’t demanding he throw out songs all together.
I am grateful that Dan and I developed that kind of friendship and trust, that he allowed me to produce him so totally. Rare is that kind of bond. By 2015, we were on the cusp of an artistic breakthrough. Feeling increasingly constricted by the party rock antics of the Harmonica Lewinskies, Dan confided in me that he yearned to create a deeper work. He was also suffering from depression, and although I was too naive to know it, was dealing with the on-again-off-again throes of the addictions that would finally kill him. Recognizing that he was on the edge of a sort of existential crisis, I encouraged him to work it into his music - to write from the heart, with more honesty than he had before, and without relying on the rock and roll cliches of our heroes. Around the same time, during a recording session our mutual friend the musician and comic Michael Goodman recorded an utterly hilarious parody of Dan’s inimitable shouted blues gibberish, coining the “Mister Dirty” moniker.
Many young men would have been offended by this act of parody. It is a testament to Dan’s generosity of spirit and lack of ego how differently he responded: he loved it completely, and asked if he could use it for our project. Thus, Mister Dirty was born. Fleshed out over the course of many late night stoner sessions, we concluded the following: Mister Dirty was a modern day cowboy, a sort of desperado character of uncertain moral character. He was a Robin Hood type, a Che Guevara, a symbol of the people. He had almost certainly killed before, perhaps even in cold blood. He may or may not have been slowly metamorphosing into a horrifying prawn creature. He was to be a Rock and Roll Superhero.
The song cycle The Birth of Mister Dirty arose out of a basic creative conundrum: how does Dan McLane become Mister Dirty? We both intuitively agreed he would have to die in order to emerge, chrysalis-like, as this new super-charged super-being, and we set about telling the story. We derived from Dan’s current batch of songs, revising lyrics to match the story, and developed new material together. We took a ghoulish pleasure in the ironical melodrama of the musical narrative, with its sudden lurches into darkness and sardonic and goofy twists. I continuously urged him to bring the music and lyrics to a knottier, darker place, sensing that we were beginning to scratch at something deeply primordial and real. What I came to learn about what we were scratching at has haunted me ever since.
Dan and I finished recording The Birth of Mister Dirty by the spring of 2016. We had grand, very silly plans for a narrative trilogy. The final installment would be The Death of Mister Dirty and would be hilariously bathetic, every song played at a pathetically slow tempo. We knew the least about what would go in the middle piece, The Life of Mister Dirty, but were exceedingly confident that time would answer any and all questions. All the while time was gazing at us inscrutably.
While he was excited and energized about the release and promotion of the record, Dan was at low personal ebb by that time. Recognizing that his substance use was beginning to take a real toll (I suspected booze and pills as the culprits), my partner Bernadette and I were beginning to have furtive conversations about helping get Dan into rehab. But having no concept of the severity of the addiction he was bravely hiding completely from even his closest friends, we felt he had not scraped a perilous enough low yet to ensure his recovery. A few nights before he died, Mama Coco’s threw a deeply psychedelic party; Dan tended bar and was the life of the night, as ever. His energy burnt so brightly that night I could have sworn he was rounding some kind of a personal corner.
Three days later, a session I was working and in fact the course of my life were painfully and jarringly interrupted by a phone call from Dan’s mother. She had found him dead in his room, taken by a secret heroin addiction. It was a blow to the gut which has lost none of its dull, resentful pain with the passing of time. Countless memorials were held at Mama Coco’s for our fallen brother, the most fervent and devoted believer in the little slice of musical and magical nirvana we were trying to carve out. The ghosts of everyone’s grieving began to stick to the walls. We all drew together tightly, and then inevitably moved apart.
There could be no Mama Coco’s Funky Kitchen without Dan McLane, and so it was recast in the flames of perdition as Holy Fang - from where I write to you today. The Birth of Mister Dirty lingered like a vapor, and for many years I felt unable to face it. For one thing, Dan’s family wasn’t sure if they wanted me to; its content was too raw, too deeply personal. I myself felt deeply haunted by my role in the project, knowing that I had contributed many of the darkest lyrics, the ones that read the most like self-fulfilling prophecy. Were we tapping into some kind of psychic thoroughfare, revealing our deepest secrets to each other beyond literal understanding? Or were we simply trying to make great art, and have the most fun possible while doing so?
Whatever the case, The Birth of Mister Dirty is finally here and I’m in love with it. There can be no better document of the time when Mama Coco’s was jumping with lively characters, with a veritable murderer’s row of musicians cycling through it. Its plot is simple: Dan McLane is brought to the edge of his wits by the slings and arrows of life’s outrageous fortune, until he finally suffers a total collapse, first into bitter hostility and finally into death, from which he emerges, perfected, as the Great and Terrible Mister Dirty. By the end of the story Mister Dirty is at large, wanted by the law, and his followers are rioting in the streets.
Often, but not only in my most desperately sentimental and superstitious moments, I have felt Dan’s warm hand on my shoulder, steering me like a ship, navigating the most perilous of obstacles on my family’s risky journey. I am grateful to have known such a person and to have had such a friend. The Birth of Mister Dirty was a gift to me, and now it’s a gift to you - from both of us.
-Oliver Ignatius