A Dan Zanes concert can get pretty crazy. Fans hurl themselves around the mosh pit. They climb all over the seats. A few start screaming and rolling around in the aisles. Most of them stay up way past their bedtimes.
It's the rock-and-roll life, man -- except that a Zanes concert usually doesn't start later than 6 p.m., the audience has an average age of about 4, and the main attraction, the man at the center of all the fan frenzy, plays a banjo instead of a Stratocaster.
Dan Zanes with daughter Anna. Zanes turned to "all-ages music" after his stint with the Del Fuegos ended. He performs Sunday at Strathmore.
(Arthur Elgort)
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Zanes is one of a growing number of longtime rockers who have found successful second acts as purveyors of kiddie music -- or what goes now by the more inclusive term "all-ages music." On Sunday, Zanes will play the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda with another popular all-ages act, Trout Fishing in America, a duo who used to be in the band St. Elmo's Fire. Both bands will find out that same night whether they won a Grammy for best musical album for children: Zanes for his album "House Party" and TFIA for a holiday album, "Merry Fishes to All."
Zanes and Trout Fishing in America have built something of a national following, but there are plenty of local acts working the field. Washington, for instance, has the RTTs (also known in their grown-up incarnation as the Rhodes Tavern Troubadours), whose latest cross-age hit is "Turn It Up, Mommy!" Their slogan is "Rock 'n' roll music for kids . . . or the kid in you." Last week they won two Washington Area Music Awards (Wammies), and the band's guitarist, Dave Chappell, won two more.
The parents of Zanes's current fans may know him from their own younger days, when he was lead singer of the '80s band the Del Fuegos. Born in 1961 in Exeter, N.H., Zanes is well into aging-rocker territory now. No leather or tight jeans for him; he likes to perform in a big brown corduroy suit. That garb, and Zanes's wild dandelion mane of hair, give him a kind of dusty boxcar glamour, as if he'd stepped out of a long-gone America in which lonesome hobos belted out "The Wabash Cannonball" as they rode the rails.
A lot of the music he plays does come straight out of the Anglo-American folk-bluegrass tradition: not only "Wabash Cannonball" but "Froggy Went a-Courtin' " -- Zanes's version is catchier than Bob Dylan's -- and "Maire's Wedding," a Scottish foot-tapper also covered by Eric Clapton.
"So many of these old songs are totally vital," Zanes says. "They give your mind so many places to go." And in Zanes's hands they rock. Zanes's band features not only his vocals and banjo, mandolin and guitar riffs but also the musical stylings of longtime collaborators Barbara Brousal (guitar and vocals), Cynthia Hopkins (accordion, saw, spoons) and Yoshi Waki (upright bass).
To keep things fresh, Zanes and crew reach out to other musical traditions and performers as well. Dan Zanes and Friends, as the performers on his recordings are collectively known, are a mix of rock celebs, New York folksters and world beat stars. On a DZ disc you might hear Benin-born singer Angelique Kidjo (also a Grammy nominee this year) doing "Jamaica Farewell," Deborah Harry's "Waltzing Matilda" or the Brooklyn-based rapper Rankin' Don (aka Father Goose) doing a hip-hop medley of Mother Goose rhymes.
Making all-ages music looks like a graceful way to grow old, or at least a little grayer, if you're a rocker with a few touring miles on the frame. There comes a point when you don't want to spend your life on the road or playing late-night gigs in smoky clubs -- especially once you start a family. For Zanes and other rockers who've added all-ages music to the repertoire, "it's a natural progression of their relationship with music. . . . It's essentially the same stuff," says Jake Flack, a guitarist with the Rhodes Tavern Troubadours, "but you get home a lot earlier."
The Del Fuegos broke up in 1990. Zanes got married and had a daughter, Anna. He moved to New York and started making music with some of the other dads he hung out with at the playground. Some of them got together to form the Wonderland String Band, which played easy-to-strum-and-hum American folk classics like "The Crawdad Song" ("You get a line, I'll get a pole, honey . . ."). By the time he put together a proper band, which he called the Rocket Ship Revue, he had reinvented himself not only as a purveyor of all-ages music but also as a traveling minstrel, a Seeger for the new millennium, bringing what he calls "handmade" music to people across the land.
"Rocket Ship Beach," the band's debut album, came out in 2001 and featured the talents of some buddies from Zanes's Del Fuegos days, including Sheryl Crow. (You haven't fully appreciated Crow's vocal talents until you've heard her lung-busting rendition of "Polly Wolly Doodle.") Several more CDs have followed, including "House Party" and -- a bold choice, given Zanes's family fan base -- last year's "Sea Music," which features sailors three sheets to the wind and ladies drinking gin, as well as such salty classics as "Strike the Bell," sung by some very tired seamen "just a-longin' for their bunks."
It's nice to be adored by the very young, but does entertaining preschoolers really measure up to being a rock star? Zanes doesn't seem to miss his Del Fuegos days. "What took the air out of being in a rock band for me," he says, "is when I felt a wall went up between us and the audience. For me it doesn't even count if people aren't singing along and dancing."
Zanes gets his audience on their diminutive feet, but he also has a vision that goes beyond the stage. He can wax lyrical about his hope that we'll re-create a culture in which everybody makes music every day and in which there are work songs that help you get the job done -- walking the kids to school, taking the bus to work, whatever -- the way "Strike the Bell" helped sailors get through their watches a century ago.
"I try and envision a society in which there's just more music integrated into daily life," he says. Look at old photos from 150 years ago, he points out, and you see "a total madhouse of music" -- each person with an instrument in his or her hands.
Zanes's idealism feels genuine, but his segue into all-ages music also turns out to have been a good career move for a rocker who'd had some success but never hit it stadium big. "None of these guys are enormous names in rock music," says Kathy O'Connell, host of the "Kids Corner" show on Philadelphia radio station WXPN.
"Being able to give yourself another audience, open yourself up to another audience," O'Connell says, "is a really good thing to do from a financial point of view." She describes Zanes as a "steady-ender" -- someone who gets a lot of listener requests but not as many as an act like Trout Fishing in America, whom she describes as "the Beatles of kids' music." According to Soundscan, which has been tracking music sales since 1991, Trout Fishing in America has chalked up 107,000 release-to-date sales; Dan Zanes and Friends have about 42,000.
"The thing I love about Dan Zanes," says O'Connell, is that he's "keeping alive and introducing audiences to songs that he might have known growing up. And he's not hard on the eyes, either" -- though it's the hair and the energy, not the face, that are likely to make an impression on Zanes's younger fans. In schools, O'Connell points out, "music is getting less and less attention, and here comes somebody like Dan Zanes to take up the slack and become one of those people in the community who steps into the role of music teacher."
So put away the iPods, get out those ukuleles and strike up the family band. Zanes thinks we could be on the eve of a musical grass-roots revolution. "I really feel it in the air," Zanes says. "It's just so easy to sing together. I'm an uptight WASP from New England. If I can do it, anybody can do it."
