Dan Deacon
Words: Marshall Dickson
Photos: Marshall Dickson

Appeared:
June 4, 2007
New World Brewery, Ybor City

“There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues?”  There is:  Dan Deacon!

With timber beams, a wooden deck, and an idyllic outdoor courtyard, New World Brewery is not your typical venue for a summer’s night dance party.  Dan Deacon, along with a heaping helping of Tampa Electric’s finest product, converted this most pedestrian of concert venues into his digital playhouse.  The quintessential one man band, Deacon flipped the switches on his Lo-Fi light show while he adjusted & tweaked a table full of effects, including guitar pedals, vocal modulators and a small keyboard which he used to motivate the crowd of curious onlookers to Dance! Dance! Dance!

Positioned in the middle of the room with the audience enveloping his gear desk, Deacon coaxed the standing-arms-crossed-and-feet-planted folks to get down and bogie after just one song.  His trick?  Kill the lights, save for an assortment of bulbs & a “Trippy Green Skull” stuffed with a strobe light, and offer the crowd a choice: either stand there and watch him like some sort of funny YouTube video, or cut loose and enjoy oneself.

Bringing a one manned show to stage requires a fair amount of shuffling and preparation between numbers.  Filling the inevitable pauses between his songs with daft yet sincere stand up comedy routines, the pied piper led the room into a spontaneous ska dance contests and recounted a meandering dream adventure involving Peter Parker, Gandalf and a police pullover gone mad.  This enchanted June evening, Dan Deacon created a solo artist multi-media installation / performance piece that had the whole crowd laughing, dancing, taking keepsake pictures of each other, and simply having a wonderfully splendid time. 

His album, Spiderman of the Rings is out now.  Try “Pink Batman” for a taste of sweeping arpeggio whimsy.