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ino was a prodigy from the Jersey City-Hoboken area, making the scene in his early teens, learning from the jazz greats like Krupa and Buddy Rich who played regularly at the Metropole, a very adult Club in New York City where the management took a shine to the young star-in-the-making and set him up with a cot in a dressing room years before he made it big. “They had vision, knew something was going to happen for me.” Young Dino held a daytime gig at the Metropole with a rock and roll band, travelled to New Jersey sometimes at night with his drum kit, performed with Lionel Hampton when he was fifteen years of age. “I was watching these people like a sponge, absorbing it all.” I was into music, women, the normal rock and roll vibe, watching the jazz players at night, going down to the Village. Agents would call up say ‘I need three guys, four sets, $25 a man.’ I would pick up guys—we all knew the same songs, people weren’t writing a lot back then—we were playing top 40 and R & B obscurities. One of the guitarists was Jimmy James. He went to England and became Jimi Hendrix.” After a while, Dino went to New Orleans, came back to New York, met Felix, joined him for a gig in Las Vegas, returned to New York and with Gene and Eddie, the Young Rascals were born. A few years later, they were headlining at the Wollman Rink in Central Park; the Jimi Hendrix Experience was the opening act. “We took a long intermission,” said Dino of Hendrix’s incendiary set, but the Rascals were second to none. On their finale, Do You Feel It, the interplay between Gene, Felix and Dino, with Eddie on percussion and Felix singing lead, was more than memorable. It seemed like Dino wasn’t just twirling his 46 • Fine Art Magazine • Spring 2011
Mean Streets
sticks, he was tossing them back and forth to Gene and not missing a beat. “That never happened, but it would have been a nice trick.” The Young Rascals officially became the Rascals with the release of their third long player, the concept album Once Upon A Dream in 1967 which launched Dino Danelli, Artist. It came about in a kind of metaphysical fashion. While Dino was ensconced in his apartment creating, quite literally boxes of dreams, Felix and Eddie were writing songs for the album, the Rascals answer to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “The songs were similar in subject matter to what I was putting in those dream boxes. It had to be mental telepathy,” said Dino. “We were connected somehow, spiritually. As I was building that sculpture, those two boxes of things I made and found, it was full of our dreams from that time, things we were hoping to see happen in the world.” Neshui Ertegun, Ahmet ’s brother, oversaw the label’s visual presentations and “he had some art collection, the real deal. Surrealism galore—Magritte, Dali, Picasso, Victor Brauner, Yves Tanguy, Bretton, Man Ray, everybody. ‘Dino,’ he said. ‘Let me show you on the wall.’ He brought a projector into the office at Atlantic Records and I was bowled over by his slides. Seeing those works made me speechless.” When Neshui saw Dino’s assemblage, he immediately proclaimed it the cover of the new album. It won an international graphics award and was reproduced all over the world. Dino had carte blanche on The Rascals album jackets after that, overseeing the covers, photos, layouts. Later on, he did two covers for Fotomaker (a band he formed with Gene in 1973), one quite controversial. The nocturnal energy felt in that image can be seen in many of
Urchin
Danelli’s drawings such as Nurture, a photo shot of a young couple at 3 A.M. in Tribeca, Vogue 1-2-3, depicting androgynous clubbers at the Danceteria in downtown NYC, Dancers I & II, inspired from a photo shot at the infamous Cat Club. Danelli’s people as image are seen moving through the water of the night dreamscape, pushing almost to a point of turbulence, producing visual noise, conducting and creating the essence of ‘elegant roughness.’ Dino started out making large iron sculptures at David Smith’s place in Bolton’s Landing in upstate New York. “David was a colorful character who died in a car crash before his time. He covered all ten of his acres big works. I have a couple of my smaller ones from those days in my garden apartment in Manhattan.” With smaller quarters, Dino began doing design work, paring it all down to pencil and paper drawings which are what he will be exhibiting at Artexpo New York and beyond. Primarily influenced by the early Surrealists, the Austrian and German Expressionists also struck a chord with Dino. “I just love emotions and portraits of people so it came quite naturally to start looking around and drawing things with which I was familiar. I was also greatly influenced by the fashion designer Antonio Lopez. He had a big impact on how I drew.” A force majeur in the fashion world in New York and Paris, Lopez “crossed the lines. He was a fine artist who could draw like Picasso and remained in the fashion world because that’s where all the pretty people were. He was a real influence for me, but above and beyond everybody, Picasso is my guy. There was nobody like him. Until the day he died, he never stopped creating art.”