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The first two things you’re bound to notice in a conversation with Dan Finnerty are:
1) He’s funnier than most.
2) He really does like swearing.
This should come as no surprise to anyone at all familiar with the Dan Band singer’s work in three Todd Phillips films that define his pop-cultural currency.
First, he played the leader of a wedding band slinging F-bombs through “Total Eclipse of the Heart” during Will Ferrell’s dance with his new bride in “Old School.”
Then, in “Starsky & Hutch,” he turned in a brilliantly age-inappropriate version of “Feel Like Makin’ Love” at a bat mitzvah.
And this year marks the 10th anniversary of “The Hangover,” which featured Finnerty’s disturbingly lascivious rendition of the 50 Cent song “Candy Shop” to hilarious comic effect.
The road to “The Hangover” started, fittingly enough, with a night of drunken karaoke.
“I was in the show ‘Stomp,'” he recalls. “We were touring. And when it was my last show, the cast took me out to this bar in Toronto, and I got up, and I sang ‘I Am Woman’ just to make my friends laugh.”
It was shortly after this that Finnerty was asked to open for a friend’s band in Los Angeles — to make it look like she was headlining.
“She was like, ‘Just come sing anything,'” he says. “So I sang, ‘I Am Woman,’ ‘You Light Up My Life’ and ‘Flashdance.’ People were like, ‘That’s so cool that you did all girl songs.’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah.’ It hadn’t hit me that it was all girl songs.It was just songs that I thought would be funny.”
After their set, a man walked up and asked for a flyer.
“I’m like ‘For what?’,” Finnerty says. “He goes, ‘Your next show. When is it?’” As it turns out, that guy booked the Viper Room and offered him a 30-minute slot.
“So I borrowed my friends band, and we played the Viper Room,” he says. “The guy that booked it was like, ‘How many people do you have coming?’ I’m like ‘Nobody. I didn’t invite anyone. I don’t know what the (expletive’s) gonna happen.’ That’s when I learned that you’re supposed to actually bring people to your show. I was too embarrassed.”
How Hollywood came calling
As luck would have it, the Pussycat Dolls were set to hit the stage at midnight, and one of the Dolls was dating “Charlie’s Angels” director McG. He caught the Dan Band’s set and invited Todd Phillips to see them when they got a steady gig at Largo, the LA nightclub where Tenacious D started.”
“Todd came and he’s like, ‘Well (expletive), I actually need a wedding singer for this movie I’m doing. What would you sing at a wedding?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I’m working on a medley of ‘Total Eclipse’ and ‘Private Dancer’ that’ll break your (expletive) heart.’”
From there, McG landed the Dan Band a development deal with Warner Bros., and Steven Spielberg signed on to executive produce a concert special directed by McG for the Bravo network called “Dan Finnerty & The Dan Band: I Am Woman.”
Finnerty laughs and says, “Every time something big happened, I was like, ‘This is so stupid, you know? A couple wine coolers and karaoke.'”
After signing record deal, the Dan Band hit the road at their label’s insistence.
As FInnerty recalls his first reaction, “I’m like, ‘Who the (expletive’s) gonna go see us outside of New York or LA?’ But they were like ‘You’ll see.’ By then, ‘Old School’ had happened, and the TV special had aired. So people came. And that was 15 years ago. Now it’s the 10th anniversary of ‘The Hangover.’ So it’s like, ‘That’s crazy. That was fast.’ But yeah, we’ve been whoring this out for a long time.”
Where the (expletive) started
Finnerty credits his parents for his reliance on colorful language.
“I was brought up so Catholic,” he says, “in this small farm town in upstate New York. So the minute my parents dropped me off at college, as the car pulled away, I just started screaming ‘(Expletive)!’; you know what I mean? Because I finally could.”
When he went in to film the scene that sent him on his way in “Old School,” he figured he’d clean up his act for the big screen.
“I did the first pass of ‘Total Eclipse,'” he recalls. “And Todd Phillips came up and was like ‘Hey, are you gonna swear like you do in your show?’ I was like, ‘Am I allowed to?’ ‘Yeah.’ So I was like, ‘Well, buckle the (expletive) up.’”
This should be a lesson to parents, he says, who don’t allow their kids to use that kind of language.
“Now I make a living swearing in a band,” he says. “When my daughter was little, people would say ‘What does your dad do?’ She would say, ‘He sings girl songs and swears in a band.’” My dad was a judge. It’s ridiculous that this is what she grew up with. But it’s funny.”
Anything for a laugh
And if there’s one rule the Dan Band seems to live by, it’s that if it could be funny, then it’s definitely worth a try.
“The older and fatter we get, the funnier the songs are,” Finnerty explains, “Like to see us try to get through ‘em. There’s a lot of choreography. When ‘Single Ladies’ came out, I was like, ‘We’re doing that. And it’s only gonna to be funny if we learn exactly the choreography.’ We had a friend who’s a choreographer, and we asked him to break it down. We’re like, ‘Let’s have a couple rehearsals and have him teach it to us.’ We had seven three-hour rehearsals. It was 21 hours it took our (expletive) (expletives) to learn that song.”
At the final rehearsal, Dan Band backup singer Gene Reed tore a hamstring while doing a high kick. “And the show was like the next night,” Finnerty recalls. “I’m like ‘You’re doing this song. Ice it up ‘cause this is happening.'”
When Pink did her aerial silks at the Grammy Awards, he knew they had to get in on that action, too.
“It’s the first time people saw her hanging from circus things,” he says. “My wife kept watching me rewind the video of her on the awards. She’s like ‘What are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I am doing this next week at the show.’ I Googled ‘circus trainer in Los Angeles’ and found some girl. I walked in in sweats and Converse sneakers and was like ‘Can you teach me how to do what Pink did?’ She’s like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a lunatic in the gym.’ But the next day, I called my backup guys. I was like ‘Get to the Valley. We’re learning that Pink song.'”
Their version of her aerial ballet was only two feet off the ground, but they did it at their show that next week. And the crazy thing, he says, is that Pink saw a video of their performance and invited them to join her on stage at the next year’s American Music Awards.
“It was when she did ‘Raise Your Glass,’ and she was pregnant,” he says. “So she had all this mayhem on steroids – like skateboarders and break dancers. So they just thought it would be funny to put us up in the aerial silks, but they just weren’t getting that we don’t really do that. They were like ‘Just have the backup guys be upside down and we’ll raise the silks in the air.’ And we were like ‘Are they going to be strapped to anything?’ They’re like, ‘No, you just bend your knees, and you won’t fall.’ The look on their faces when they go, ‘There’s this button we push, and it just shoots them into the air.’ And they shot them up into the air. So yeah, that was ridiculous. But it was funny.”
A wedding in the lobby?
The Dan Band’s Van Buren performance this weekend has been billed as an actual wedding with cake, a bouquet toss and a champagne toast. Wedding attire is encouraged.
“You know, I saw that,” Finnerty says, when asked about the wedding. “I called my agent, and I was like, ‘Is this really happening?’ But I guess the people who run that venue, they’re doing something in the lobby before our set. So it’s going to be our regular show. I don’t know if they’re actually going to get married before the doors open and then they’re just pretending it’s a wedding reception, but it should be funny.”
You may wonder if they get a lot of people asking them to play their weddings.
“I’m not even kidding,” Finnerty says. “Every day, I get tweets and emails saying, ‘Will you please play our wedding? We don’t have any money, but there’ll be plenty of beer and plenty of babes.’ I’m like, ‘Let me drop everything. By all means.’ We have, like, a ‘scare away’ quote that says ‘I’ll do it if someone’s crazy enough to pay THIS.’ But it’s happened. We’ve done, like, actual legit weddings, probably five or six, I think? We only sing, like, three songs. But we’re doing another one next month here in New York. And Daniel Negreanu, the poker player, we just did his wedding last month in Los Angeles.”
Before they’d even done the wedding scene in “Old School,” the woman who used to book them every weekend in Los Angeles asked if they would play her wedding.
“And she had done so much for us, I was like, ‘Absolutely,'” he says. “And her grandmother sat in front. By the time we went on, everyone was wasted. But she was still sitting there with her hair all done up nice and a purse on her lap. Everyone was dancing and drunk, and she was looking right at me. So I kept looking at her, but I get nervous because it’s so inappropriate. And when I get nervous, I swear and grab my crotch. The more she was horrified, the more I grabbed my crotch. It was awful for both of us. We both looked at each other like, ‘How can we make this stop?’ It was a runaway train of sorrow and shame.”
That’s when he decided he wouldn’t do his act in front of people’s grandmas anymore.
“If there are grandmas, I say ‘No,'” he says. “Unless they pay. Then, I’m like ‘OK; send your grandma home,’ which is what a lot of people do.”
His daughter just turned 22. And Finnerty wouldn’t let her see the act until she was 21.
“Her friends would always be like, ‘Your dad’s cool. He lets you drink and smoke out and swears in front of you’,” he says, with a laugh. “And she’s like, ‘No, he’s like a sitcom dad from the ’50s.’ I didn’t swear in front of her. I didn’t let her swear. I didn’t let her see my show because I wouldn’t be able to do it with her in the audience.”
The Dan Band
When: 8 p.m. Friday, July 19.
Where: The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix.
Admission: $15-$25.
Details: 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.
Reach the reporter at [email protected] or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.
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