Dan The Man...

Aka Cool "Disco" Dan...

No DC blog would be complete without a Cool "Disco" Dan post. Before I started doing graffiti or at least looking at it in 1988 or 89 I would already see Dan up everywhere, he was a DC institution as much as The White House, Capitol Hill or the Smithsonian. Meeting Dan for the 1st time was like meeting a comic book hero, one of those characters that you don't think really exist but it turns out he does. I remember seeing him often on 9th Street in front of the old 9:30 Club selling Go-Go tapes when I was still in high school and I went to pay my beeper bill and just kicked it with him, a couple of years later Dan ended up crashing at the same spot I was, Ben Exacto's house and if there was one peculiar thing about Dan it was his voice, and that he never took off that wave cap, one night we wake up to Ben's mother's screams, we all rush down and find her at about 3am in her nightgown yelling at top of her lungs scared as hell, she had gone down for something to drink and encountered a lightly dressed black man raiding her fridge, haha, and Dan saying "ma'am it's me Dan". A few years after that Ultra, Halo and me were kind of squatting in the basement of a building on the old 10th and O and we let Dan stay with us, Dan was the eternal homeless, and to this day we have no idea what he did with the soap and the toilet paper, but it was a given that even if you put a new bar and a new roll, when Dan emerged from the bathroom an hour later both things would be spent, we were too shy to ask... Dan was and still is a good friend, he could tell old DC stories and tell you about all these people that made up FFC, his crew, the one thing about that was in all out time we were never able to meet a single one, not Ten Speed, or Boxing Bingo or any others, who knows, maybe they did exist. One time we drove down to Richmond to beat up this kid that had fucked up with one of our friends there, it was Dan, Halo and me and we met with some Richmond kids and went to a couple of houses looking for this kid, when we found him and we are "talking" to him, Dan pull out a pair of camo gloves, puts them on, and starts hitting the kid making those boxing snorting noises, PSSSS PSSSSS, haha, my anger towards the kid turned to laughter as I saw this but the mood quickly changed as a gun fell out while kicking the kid and he tried to grab it causing him to almost get shot in the process, ooops... There are a hundred Dan stories, if I had to describe him, to me Dan was DC...

There is a leech trying to milk his name, I don't support this but you can check out http://www.cooldiscodan.com/ and this same leech is making a movie, it might be worth seeing just for the stories.
 Ps. The leech is not the actual moviemaker but somebody that exploits his name.